The Bare Minimum

For all that the headline increase in the minimum wage will be a real terms cut, it is still higher than the £10 per hour proposed by the Labour Party, a straight cut that everyone can see at first glance. Vote Labour for a much lower minimum wage even than this. The last Labour Government effected the biggest upward redistribution of wealth in British history, and here we go again.

Labour is now the greater evil, worse than the Tories. The best for which we could hope from it would be that, after last week's non-revelation that Keir Starmer's class paid its members 12 per cent more than it paid us for the same jobs, he might reduce by about one eighth the salaries of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Foreign Secretary, the Home Secretary, and so on, when he replaced Jeremy Hunt with Rachel Reeves, David Cameron with David Lammy, James Cleverly with Yvette Cooper, and so forth. Of course, once his carefully contrived 2024 intake had been there a few years, then the pay would have to go up again as he appointed the people whom he had really always wanted. State educated parliamentary candidates sincerely bewilder me if they are either Labour or Conservative. Even for 87 grand a year, why would you want to be a chambermaid?

Boris Johnson was Prime Minister, but we never could have been, and that is the tense for those of us who are older than Rishi Sunak. No one from a state school has won an overall majority at a General Election in 31 years, and he was a Conservative. No male product of a mixed secondary school has ever become Prime Minister by any route. Sir Chris Whitty's evidence to the Covid-19 Inquiry has directly contradicted Johnson's sworn statement, and we all know who is the perjurer. But it will not make any difference. I have already done time with boys who had done far less than conspire with an old lag to have a man beaten up, a conversation a recording of which was in the public domain long before Johnson entered Downing Street.

But like Johnson, Darius Guppy is a member of the Bullingdon Club, which exists specifically in order to commit criminal damage and other offences, even including assault, just so that its members can prove their ability to pick up the bill. Imagine that a group of youths the same age, but on a council estate, were to organise themselves into a club, complete with a membership list, officers, some sort of uniform, the works, all for the express purpose of smashing up pubs. They would rightly go to prison, and I do not say that lightly. To gain admission to the Bullingdon Club, Johnson, Cameron and George Osborne have each burned a £50 note in front of a homeless person, and all three of them did it back when 50 quid really was 50 quid.

As for Sunak, his coronation had been planned for decades. Over last summer, the disappearance of Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl from BBC iPlayer was a track-covering confirmation that, since it was broadcast when he was not quite 21, Sunak must have been handpicked as the generational voice of the haute bourgeoisie when he was still in his teens. The tribal elders of the Tory Deep State had been out in force at his campaign launch. A few hours later, needing 20 votes to stay in the race, he was 20 votes ahead of his nearest rival.

It has ever been thus. No one becomes Prime Minister in his early forties by any means than this. There are still those who keep up the pretence that Tony Blair was politically "a late developer", but it is quite some late developer who becomes an MP at 30 and Prime Minister at 43, the age at which Cameron also attained the Premiership, in his case after a mere nine years in the House of Commons. Sunak beat all of that, though. An MP of only seven years' standing, he was all of 42 years old. So yes. Planned for decades.

Unlike Whitty, Simon Case was apparently unable to testify against Johnson, as everyone knows would have been effectively what he would have been doing. Does he not have Zoom? Did he produce what Jeremy Hunt charmingly calls "a fit note", putting Hunt in the same category as the people use used to say "Spare Room Subsidy", and before that "Community Charge"? Even before yesterday's Autumn Statement, would Case have been let off a Work Capability Assessment such as the last Labour Government introduced but the present Labour Party agrees did not kill anything like enough people?

We should no more want Labour 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. 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.