A Red Rag To The Bull

Pitiful though it is that we are going to have a General Election about £1.7 billion, the imposition of VAT on private school fees, which is Keir Starmer's only policy difference with the Government, does not seem to dissuade Shire Tories from voting for him.

Or products of that system from standing for him. Sarah Edwards pointedly does not say where she went to school, but Alistair Strathern is an out and proud public schoolboy, like Keir Mather. Edwards's CV is lady of leisure stuff. I have been an NHS governor, and it is not a job. Of course it appears on my CV as voluntary work, but she is trying to palm it off as employment for want of anything else. Likewise, what, exactly, did she do at Oxfam? Strathern is the Bank of England's "climate lead on insurance" while cohabiting with a full-time Greenpeace activist whose demonstrations he attends regularly. The Starmer Government is taking shape, and in Strathern's case the shape of the Sunak Government is made clear.

We know that Starmer can win seats that the Conservatives held in 2019, but we do not know that he can win back seats that Labour lost to them. That happened at Wakefield in such a bizarre situation as to suggest nothing at all about anywhere else. But after having managed to lose Hartlepool, which Jeremy Corbyn never did, then Starmer failed to take Uxbridge and South Ruislip, meaning that even only one type of pre-2019 Conservative seat is susceptible to his charms.

The rolling English shires are voting for Starmer because they agree with him. The Mail and, especially, the Telegraph do their job brilliantly: holding the uniparty line on economic and foreign policy, just like The Times, while boiling their readers at an imperceptible pace from the views that their writers initially affected to hold on social policy, to the views that they always really did hold, as anyone who had ever met them had seen first hand. Those readers have also always held those views, but they look to their paper to give them permission to say so, in the way that while that subculture likes to think that it is Theresa May, far more of it is truly personified by the financial fiddles and the adulterous affairs of its therefore beloved Boris Johnson.

The Guardian has the same role in relation to economic and foreign policy, and it is just as good at it. But neither The Guardian, nor the Daily Telegraph, nor The Times, is read all that much in Hartlepool, which did not vote for Starmer, having voted twice for Corbyn. Or in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, which also did not vote for Starmer. Wakefield did vote for him, but only under the most extreme circumstances, which will not apply next year. Yet Selby and Ainsty did. Tamworth did. Mid Bedfordshire did. Well, of course they did. And her local Conservative Association came within a whisker of deselecting Suella Braverman. Well, of course it did.

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 (as well as five days earlier, according to my Facebook Memories today), 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.