Do Presume To Go Out

Of course Aubrey Allegretti is moving from Senior Political Correspondent of The Guardian to Chief Political Correspondent of The Times. He will be Editor of the Daily Telegraph next. If it is still there. If it is, then why not? In my direct personal experience, distinguished journalists from other English-speaking countries cannot tell the London broadsheets apart in blind tests.

People who thought that they were the better sort of unpopulists no longer need to be boiled like frogs by eccentrist commentators. They are ready to be served up. Fine by us. The eccentrists, the three per cent who voted for Change UK, and the unpopulists, the six per cent who vote for Reform UK where it stands, will carry on doing what they do.

Take the spat between Chris Bryant and Nadine Dorries. Everyone who has ever been politically active knows that it is shot through with male-on-male groping (Alan Duncan's accounts of trying to evade the aged Ted Heath are hilarious, and altogether typical), and I carry no candle for Bryant, but there is no defending Dorries. With well over a year of this Parliament to go, she has not turned up in over a year, and she no longer has either a home or an office in her constituency. Yet she is still being paid. Where is your fiscal conservatism, Dorries defenders?

Sinn Féin, you say? They were elected to abstain. And they only do not go into the chamber. They maintain an office inside the Palace of Westminster, and they always have done. They do some work. I would never vote for an abstentionist, but their constituents did. Dorries's did not, and she is just an absentee. A skiver. She was not one of the handful of rebels against the Windsor Framework, or anything like that. What does she do for the Right? Yet it loves her.

Let them get on with it, and let the Bryant Brigade do likewise. I for one will continue to work to create a thinktank, a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually a fortnightly satirical magazine, all in the service of the other 91 per cent. In good, old-fashioned print, so that no one would be able to press a button and delete them. The thinktank and the weekly magazine need to be up and running at the start of the forthcoming General Election year.

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.