This Is For The Best

Since when was it shocking to question a Prime Minister's integrity? Of the seven living former Prime Ministers, three are Tony Blair, David Cameron and Boris Johnson. Liz Truss is in the odd position that while what she was doing was barking mad and duly catastrophic, she did really believe in it. But only John Major, Gordon Brown and Theresa May have been, if largely wrong, nevertheless basically decent, and of those, only Major ever won an overall majority at a General Election.

When it comes to overall majorities won by Leaders who are still alive, then Labour and the Conservatives stand at three each. Of those who have managed it for the Conservatives, one is 80 years old, and another can no longer be mentioned in polite society, if he ever could have been. Conveniently, though, the boundary changes have switched the focus back to the people, mostly in the South, who won the Conservatives the 2015 Election by switching to Cameron from his own Coalition partners: pro-austerity at least for other people, socially liberal at least for themselves, ferociously pro-EU, and on all of those grounds more than averagely pro-war. So here we are.

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 Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir 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.