A Strong Case For Close Scrutiny

For having delivered a ceasefire, and for having negotiated with Hamas, Benjamin Netanyahu is now ineligible for membership of Keir Starmer's Labour Party. He never was before. But he is now.

It is the Autumn Statement, but Rachel Reeves has nothing to say unless it has been written by someone else, so Labour has sent out Darren Jones to face the media. Unfortunately for him, Jeremy Hunt is not the only newsmaker in the world today.

On 14th November, Jones told Kay Burley that a ceasefire would be "performative", "symbolism", and "[would not] achieve anything". Yet today, he told Good Morning Britain that, "The Labour Party didn't say that it didn't want a ceasefire." That was a barefaced lie, but ITV's giant corporate advertisers want a Starmer Government so badly that he was not pulled up on it. Still, everyone remembers that only last Wednesday, 10 Labour frontbenchers had to resign in order to vote for a ceasefire. One week later, here it is.

Jess Phillips looks very silly for her attempts at backpedalling, when she joined most of her party in its characteristic condemnation of political participation by the beastly little common people. But those whom she left behind on the frontbench look absolutely ridiculous, and quite beneath contempt. Mind you, to some of us, they always did.

David Cameron has appointed as one of his Special Advisers his old Downing Street Head of Operations, Baroness Sugg, three years, almost to the day, after she resigned as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Overseas Territories and Sustainable Development because the overseas aid budget had been cut by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak.

As with the fact that Andrew Mitchell is the Minister of State who attends Cabinet so that he can answer for Cameron in the House of Commons, the Foreign Office's supposed takeover of the Department for International Development is starting look like the reverse. DFID had serious problems of its own, but in general that is a good thing in many ways, and not least for the Palestinians. Next, how about roles for Sir Alan Duncan and for the far from liberal Sir Desmond Swayne?

Laugh all you like at the octopus business, since this time it is at least not directly about the company that Oliver Kamm keeps, but it is no more absurd than anything that was thrown at Jeremy Corbyn, and it is being thrown by the same individuals. The answer to Hunt's "Two Jeremies" is that, in between Boris "Let The Bodies Pile High" Johnson and Rishi "Just Let People Die" Sunak, there was a Prime Minister who really did crash the economy. When is the whip going to be withdrawn from Liz Truss, thereby precluding her from being a Conservative candidate at the next General Election? She and Patrick Minford ought to be made to tour South West Norfolk, explaining on the stump why, as he contended, Britain ought to have no agriculture. But why should she be permitted to do so as a representative of the Conservative Party?

Who knows how different history might have been if Telegraph Blogs had published my last copy, which was based on a charming telephone interview with Sir Jeremy Bagge, 7th Baronet, and Mullah Omar of the Turnip Taliban? Today, broadly the people who made Truss Prime Minister, not least through the pages of the Daily Telegraph, are having camel calves at the prospect of the Telegraph Group's acquisition by the far from spotless Emiratis, generous patrons of the new Foreign Secretary.

The thing is that they cannot rally the troops or rouse the rabble, because for that, they would need the Telegraph. In any case, like it, they have no objection to the ownership of Britain's utilities, ports, airports, rail services, communication networks, steel production, and numerous other pieces of vital infrastructure, by foreign interests, including foreign states, and including Arab royal families. Anything but public ownership by the public in question.

So much for national security there. So much for national sovereignty. So much for democracy, since public opinion overwhelming favours such ownership, just as 76 per cent of people in this, the country whose bases in Cyprus are being used by the Israelis and whose SAS is in Gaza with a view to installing Tony Blair as Viceroy of its gas field, have favoured a ceasefire since this war began. The opponents of public ownership and of a ceasefire either may as well be in the Labour Party, or they are the Labour Party.

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 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.