Upon Examination

Since when was it the job of the Government to direct how many people should be awarded which exam grades?

In the blue corner, there is an alliance of those who abominate above all else the very thought of the schools attended by 94 per cent of the population, and those who will never be satisfied with anything short of confirmation that they had been cheated of the glittering lives to which their obvious genius ought to have entitled them.

And over in the shocking (not pale) pink corner, there are those by whom working-class pupils are twice as likely to be predicted an E grade, and by whom black pupils' grades are staggeringly under-predicted, with only 39 per cent of predictions turning out to have been correct, while boys are also endemically ill-served.

Away with the pair of them. 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 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.