Immediate and Durable

And now, the French. Catherine Colonna has even gone to Tel Aviv to say it. You can control both Wall Street and Hollywood, which can put you in every Biblical epic and in every Holocaust epic, even though you are not the only people of the Bible and you were not the only victims of the Holocaust. But your conduct can no more be permitted to lead to an obstruction of the Suez Canal than it could be permitted to lead to an obstruction of the Panama Canal. You are not that big. No one is.

For 18 years and counting, the sacred "centre ground" of British politics has been defined as whatever David Cameron happened to think. That is now the public school cult of T.E. Lawrence and of Glubb Pasha, the inventor of the black and white chequered keffiyeh. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, indeed. But where does that leave the Labour Party, from which such a position, now common to Britain, to Germany, and to Emmanuel Macron's France, and therefore inconceivably not authorised by the United States, would be expulsionable?

Where, indeed? 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.