To Tackle The Tumour

I tried to tell you about Boris Johnson. Not that you needed me to. You had not been born yesterday, so you already knew about men who cultivated that sort of persona. The hardest core of his supporters did not like him because they found him funny. They liked him because they could tell that he was as callous as they were.

Still, between the Covid-19 Inquiry, and the famous victory of the campaign to save railway ticket offices, today is a bad day for those who define themselves by their spite towards the old, the poor, the disabled, the chronically ill, the very young, and so on; the people who screamed like toddlers because the pubs were shut even though, in the case of newspaper columnists, they had already been working from home for years. There was a form of something similar on the other side, an assumption that people like delivery drivers still had to go to work while those to whom they were delivering did not. But even so.

That latter attitude has survived the lockdowns, and it has become quite entrenched. No one could more perfectly embody both mentalities, or the single mentality of which they were both manifestations, than Keir Starmer and his entourage. Again, at their core, they are callous. The Kid Starver of Gaza is the Kid Starver of Gospel Oak, even if he has not yet advocated the dropping on the poor parts of Britain of 12,000 tonnes of explosives, barely less than the 13,000 to 15,000 tonnes that were dropped on Hiroshima, and already enough to have killed in three weeks more children than had died in every other armed conflict annually since 2019. The number of children killed in Gaza this month is greater than the number of people killed in the 30 years of the Northern Irish Troubles.

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 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.