Don't Mone, Organise

The Police gave Michelle Mone a week's notice to clear out of Britain before they acted against her. Give that a moment to sink in. Unsurprisingly, then, there has no more been an application to extradite her than there has been an application for an Unexplained Wealth Order against her. I do not agree with UWOs without a conviction, but they are law.

In August, she was back in London, getting her face in the papers for having patronised a swanky restaurant. While owing the rest of us the £232 million that we paid to a company that was less than three weeks old, that employed no one, that had no contract or premises, that had never made any transaction, that had all of £100 in the bank, and that duly delivered absolutely nothing. Then she left the country again.

And now, she has confessed. Yet she has still not been arrested. Well, it is not as if she desperately stole a bottle of milk formula, is it? Nor had she been falsely accused of dodging her bus fare while black. But the Michelle Mone story was exactly the sort of corruption that happened all the time under the Blair Government, the old hands from which are all over the Starmer Leadership. That was truly scandalous, and so is this. This is truly scandalous, and so was that.

So once again, the Opposition has nothing to say, any more than it has on Rishi Sunak's endless transfers of public money to the interests of his wife's family. Keir Starmer inherited a solvent party that raised money from its huge membership and from trade unions with which it was not ashamed to be associated. He has intentionally brought it to the perpetual brink of bankruptcy so that it can keep being bailed out by the beneficiaries of a corruption that is completely out of control. He will have his cut. Even HMRC rents its offices from a company that is registered in a tax haven, from which it makes political donations in Britain. Starmer has no plan to change any of this. Well, of course not.

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.