With The Balls

The only thing to know about Ed Balls is that he lost his seat to Andrea Jenkyns. The author of this was an Education Minister.

Esther McVey will presumably hand over her GB News gig to Suella Braverman, who will not, however, be interviewing any Cabinet Ministers. The return of David Cameron makes it clear that the attention is on the voters whom he managed to win against his own Coalition partners in 2015: 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.

Even Braverman will have worked out that the Cameron deal could not have been a mere 24 or even 48 hours in the making. Next, although he does not have quite the private means that enable Cameron to make do on a Cabinet Minister's salary, expect that some role is being devised for George Osborne. Bringing us back to Balls, whose wife would be a very senior figure in a Starmer Government.

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.