Lines of Enquiry

If, Suella Braverman, no crime is too small, then in December 2021, cocaine was found in 11 out of 12 powder rooms in the Palace of Westminster on the same randomly chosen evening. Mr Speaker Hoyle promised "full and effective action". Then nothing happened. Drugs-based blackmail is fundamental to political power in this country.

Last May, Michael Gove was described in edited Fleet Street copy as having been on "a cocaine binge". He and Boris Johnson, who is no longer an American citizen, have lied on their United States visa applications, as has Prince Harry. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng was obviously off his face at the funeral of the late Queen. The Truss Government was so awash with cocaine that it scandalised the servants.

On none of his frequent returns to these shores is Prince Harry ever arrested for his Class A drug offences. Nor has his fraudulently obtained United States visa been revoked. When he was so out of it that he thought that he was having conversations with a pedal bin, then he was surrounded by some of the most carefully vetted Police Officers in the world. They often are.

Braverman might also turn her attention to Michelle Mone. Or to Rishi Sunak, with his habitual channelling of public money to his wife's family's company, and with his £110 sale to party donors of the Teesside freeport that was worth more than £100 million. Or to herself, with her payment of £400 million per year to rent a barge that it would cost only £50 million to buy, and with her three new detention centres for a total of one thousand people at a cost of £306 million for "up to" six years, 30 times the cost of the hotels. By the way, since the announcement of the Rwanda Plan, Britain has granted asylum to 14 people from Rwanda.

But 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 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.