Unsure End

Keir Mather was at Hymers College. The senior school fees there are £14,205 a year. The full 11-year experience costs £138,025. No one is scrimping and saving to find that. You either have it, or you do not. It shouldn't matter, of course. But it does. Of course.

From there, via Oxford, Wes Streeting and the CBI, a boy who told his grandmother when he was six years old that he was going to be Prime Minister is defending the two-child cap on benefits, and no doubt also the decision in recent hours that a Labour Government would not reverse the cuts to Sure Start.

Now, that really is quite something. Sure Start has always been their retort to everything, even Iraq. You could not now be a first time Labour parliamentary candidate, at least, if your pitch were any of the three manifestos of Tony Blair.

It is news even to me that there was an upper-middle-class fashion, beginning no later than 1962 and ending no earlier than 1998 if ever, for naming boys after Keir Hardie. It was preferable to sending them to state schools, I suppose. Or to paying tax.

The problem is not Mather's youth. By 25, most working-class people have worked for nine or 10 years, and most middle-class people have done more than keep Streeting well-serviced before handling public relations for a scandal-ridden cesspit. At that age, and also politically active, I was paid a lot less than Mather to be a lot better-dressed. I was also a lot more compassionate. At 45, I am still not as cruel or as cynical as he already is, and I hope to God that I never shall be.

Mather does show signs of appreciating that 21,700 Conservative voters in his constituency did not die between the 2019 General Election and last Thursday. He grasps that, without another byelection victory somewhere else, he is going to be sitting out the 2024 Parliament, forcing him to begin his parliamentary career in earnest at the grand old age of 31.

The real stories were the Liberal Democrats' resurgence in the West Country, where they denied the Conservatives an overall majority in 2010, and the toxicity of ULEZ to Labour in Outer London, where it has to win if it wanted to win outright.

And when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.