Very Tempted?

Zac Goldsmith and the Labour Party are making eyes at each other, doubtless with the promise that it would give him the Ministerial portfolio of his dreams. When he suggests that he might, "throw my weight behind that party and support them in any way I could," then he is talking about serious money.

But has Goldsmith changed his mind politically? Has anyone asked? At best, he would no doubt tell us that, "My party has left me." That never, ever leads to the follow-up question, "Yes, that may have been why you left your old party, but why have you joined this one?" Five Conservative MPs got away with that as they defected to Labour in the Blair years, in the case of Quentin Davies the night before Gordon Brown became Prime Minister.

It has been 46 years since a Labour MP last joined the Conservative Party, and that was only the third time that it had ever happened. Both earlier cases had been in 1948, and both had been over the nationalisation of steel. Yet six Conservative MPs have joined the Labour Party in the last 28 years alone, an average of one every four and a half years, always without having recanted any part of their previous records.

Elected to this Parliament as a Conservative, Christian Wakeford is now a Labour Whip. Peter Temple-Morris was ennobled. Shaun Woodward was put in the Cabinet. Like Alan Howarth before him, Davies was made a Minister and then a Peer; Brown rapidly made him a Minister for the first time in his life, but he had been elected as a Conservative MP at all five of the 1987, 1992, 1997, 2001 and 2005 General Elections, and he had served in the Shadow Cabinets of Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard. The party had taken an awfully long time to leave him. On defecting from Howard's party to a warmly welcoming Tony Blair's, Robert Jackson stated that he wanted to be in a party that was led by a Christian. Did someone say something about anti-Semitism?

In a roundabout way, that brings us back to Goldsmith. As recently as 30th June, he was sacked as a Minister for refusing to apologise for having called the kangaroo court into Boris Johnson a kangaroo court. Johnson was the Prime Minister of Net Zero. He and Goldsmith remain very close. Could the process really be beginning that ended in Johnson's endorsement of Keir Starmer? Stranger things happen all the time these days, and Johnson, the last Leader to win an overall majority at a General Election, hates Rishi Sunak more than enough.

Goldsmith's Greenery is a disappointing devolution from the views of his robustly pro-industrial and pro-coal father, but that paternity does give me a certain affection for him. In September or October 1996, in one order or the other but I cannot remember which, I received out of the blue a letter addressed to "Dr David Lindsay" from Jimmy Goldsmith, and a letter addressed to "The Reverend Dr David Lindsay" from a Reverend Doctor who, at almost exactly the same time, admitted me as an undergraduate for the next year at the Durham college of which he was Principal.

I must still have the signed copy of his book that he enclosed even though I had no idea how he had ever ever heard of me, but Sir James was corrected, although he continued the correspondence even once he knew that I was a 19-year-old barman. My other correspondent left both his position and this country very soon afterwards. To this day, I have never met him, so I can only assume that he thought that there were two David Lindsays at this address, presumably a father and son.

Sir James is the only person without a doctorate ever to have assumed me to have held one, but people with their own have done it with remarkable frequency. I have no idea why, but academically distinguished people read my work and just assume me to be a PhD. Of course, I always correct it. But I thoroughly enjoy the fact that it drives certain people up the wall. No one has ever made that mistake after having read their effusions. Nor ever will.

As to the prospect of a Starmer Government with the younger Goldsmith in it, 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 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.