Comply With A Direction

If "Tommy Robinson" wants to go on your march, then maybe it's you? This is a march to end a ceasefire and to resume a genocidal war. It is an obscenity that would not be tolerated if anyone else tried to hold it. This whole issue divides the politically from the performatively working-class, in the way that it broadly divides proper toffs from jumped up oiks; David Cameron, Andrew Mitchell, and at least by extension the Rishi Sunak who has appointed them, from Keir Starmer.

Accent or no accent, William Hague, who arranged to hand over his seat to Sunak, who brokered the Cameron comeback, and whose rent to live in the profoundly Arabist Alan Duncan's house was once a case of champagne per month, belongs to the realm of those who do at least make the effort, as Alan Clark once said through gritted teeth of Michael Heseltine, and as a Tory supertoff who shall remain forever nameless once said very approvingly of me to my face.

Of course the latest Lord Soames is one of us, darling, as surely as Mick Lynch is. Likewise, of course Starmer is not one of us, darling. Not one of us at all. 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.