Base Lines

100,000 military age males had not been murdered in Kosovo. The attacks of 11th September 2001 had not come from Afghanistan; the suggestion that they had done so is the only 9/11 conspiracy theory that has ever done any active harm. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Therefore, those weapons were not capable of deployment within 45 minutes. Saddam Hussein had not been feeding people into a giant paper shredder. He had not been attempting to obtain uranium from Niger.

A genocide had not been imminent in Benghazi. Gaddafi had not been feeding Viagra to his soldiers in order to encourage mass rape. He had not intended to flee to Venezuela. It was not an undisputed fact that Assad had gassed Ghouta. Sergei and Yulia Skripal were not dead, as announced on the front page of The Times on 12th March 2018. And 40 people in Salisbury had not required treatment for nerve agent poisoning, as claimed by The Times on 14th March 2018.

Likewise, there were not 1400 dead Israelis on 7th October, although seen from most of the world, even that would not have been awfully many, and certainly not enough to have justified subsequent and ongoing events. There was no more than one dead baby, who had been neither decapitated nor incinerated; most of the dead were military personnel. No one was raped, nor is there any evidence that any hostage has been raped since. And as most of the world simply takes as a given, it was the Israelis who bombed the Al-Ahli Arabi Hospital, while they have now bombed every other hospital in Gaza as a matter of policy, on the grounds that there are Hamas bases underneath them.

But just as there was no pornography in Osama bin Laden's den, so there was no Arabic translation of Mein Kampf under the bed of a murdered child in Gaza, and so there are no Hamas bases under the hospitals there. Look who is telling you that there are, and then consider their record. "From the River to the Sea" is the constitutional position of Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, and it has been forcefully articulated by Tzipi Hotovely. It was certainly not an illegal thing to say on Saturday, nor could it be made so retrospectively.

Through William Hague, David Cameron was tapped a week ago to become Foreign Secretary when Rishi Sunak moved James Cleverly to the Home Office in place of Suella Braverman. But that was supposed to have been after the Rwanda ruling. It was brought forward because on Saturday, while a million people marched peacefully for the position of 76 per cent of the population, perhaps a thousand rioted at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day, injuring nine Police Officers, having turned out at all only because Braverman had called on them to do so against a march that Keir Starmer had also delegitimised.

Whereas the worst that the other side brought was one man in a million's tin of red paint, Braverman's Boys were not only tanked up and coked up, but also tooled up. With what, exactly? One does not bring a knife to a gun fight. They had not gone equipped to shoot back, or to shoot first, at Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. They had gone equipped to stab the Police. As incited by the then Home Secretary. Braverman needs to go to prison, and Starmer also has questions to answer.

But we now have a Foreign Secretary who as Prime Minister called Gaza "a prison camp", and a Prime Minister who, free of Braverman, can state that the Israelis, "must act within international law. They must take all possible measures to protect innocent civilians, including at hospitals, stop extremist violence in the West Bank and allow more aid into Gaza. Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, described to me the terrible suffering of the Palestinian people. Too many civilians are losing their lives. That's why I’ve doubled our aid to Gaza and why we continue to press – both at the UN and directly with Israel – for unhindered humanitarian access and urgent and substantive humanitarian pauses. We want aid coming in by land, air and sea – and we're ready to use our bases in Cyprus as a staging post. Alleviating the suffering is our foremost priority."

A Labour MP would lose the whip for that, and an ordinary member would be expelled. 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.