Safety, Security and Stability

As his Shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague described the 2006 bombardment of Lebanon as "disproportionate". Days into being Prime Minister, and with Hague as Foreign Secretary, he himself called the Gaza flotilla raid "unacceptable". As Prime Minister in 2010, he called Gaza "a prison camp"; still in office in 2016, he described the West Bank settlements as "illegal". And now, David Cameron is back.

Cameron has been made Foreign Secretary thanks to Hague, who himself arranged to pass on his own parliamentary seat to Rishi Sunak, and Cameron's Minister of State, who attends Cabinet with him so as to answer for him in the elected House, is Andrew Mitchell, who has displayed the spirit of his old Department for International Development by endorsing the position of Robert Mardini, the director-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, against the targeting of Gaza's hospitals under any circumstances. Sunak's speech to last Monday's Lord Mayor's Banquet was quite something. Anyone who said anything like that would be expelled from the Labour Party.

Anyone who said what Cameron has just told the BBC would be expelled from the Labour Party, and would be most unwelcome at Sunday's march against a ceasefire that, although the Israelis broke it within an hour, is now in place. That march is an imitation of one that was led by Marine Le Pen. It is an expression of fellow feeling with Geert Wilders. It is a continuation of Armistice Day's planned riot at the Cenotaph, at which nine Police Officers were injured. It is essentially a single act with the Dublin riots. Only "Tommy Robinson" wants to go on it, since he has oddly not been arrested for his flagrant breach of his licence 13 days ago. Along with cutting the minimum wage to a £10 figure round enough for even Rachel Reeves to be able to copy it off the person sitting next to her, this is Keir Starmer's side.

Labour is now the greater evil, worse than the Tories. We should no more want it to win the next General Election than most of its MPs wanted it to win the last two, or than any of its staff wanted it to win the last four. There are all sorts of reasons not to want this Government to continue, either, and not the least of them is that it now includes a man who was, overall, a truly atrocious Prime Minister.

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.