Ides of March

The only time that the Police have ever accepted the organisers' attendance figures for a protest has been the Countryside March (to which I was sympathetic, by the way), and they would not do that now. An official figure of 300,000 today sounds like a joke, but you have to triple the Police number to get a low estimate, making it about right.

There may have been a million, there probably were, and there certainly would have been if numerous coach bookings had not been cancelled, mostly yesterday, under threat from the Police. You backed the wrong side there, lads. Suella Braverman has incited a riot against you. At the Cenotaph. On Armistice Day. Arrest her.

Prepare yourselves for a violent, but extremely small, expression of objection, from which "Tommy Robinson" would flee by taxi, and which Douglas Murray would not even attend. But arrest Braverman. She will be at the Cenotaph tomorrow, when the Officers who had been assaulted there today could do the honours.

Drunk by 10 o'clock in the morning, and coked off their faces, how did those assailants think that they would have fared against Hamas as portly gentlemen of a certain age? I write as a portly gentleman of a certain age. We may count ourselves lucky that they obviously did not believe that Hamas was going to be present, or else they would have turned up with guns. Again, would they have thought that they would have been better than Hamas at using them? But clearly, they laboured under no such delusion. There is that.

Spare me your snobbery, though. Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks for selling the same eccentric and unpopular economic and foreign policies to different audiences, and that has been made clearer today than at any time since the Iraq War, when anyone sending for a review copy of either Murray's or Oliver Kamm's book was sent the other one as well. This I know, because it happened to me. I cannot remember which one I had initially requested, but I was sent them both. Likewise, Rishi Sunak has not sacked Braverman, so he has lined up with her and with Keir Starmer, who gave her permission to authorise today's violence against the Police.

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.