Mail Heir

Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah is dead. He was 86, and he has been succeeded by his 83-year-old brother, Mishal Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah. As a major shareholder in the Royal Mail, it is to the Emir of Kuwait that the word "Royal" now refers. It is his image and other symbols that should appear on the stamps and the post boxes.

28 per cent of your exorbitant water bill is to service the debts that have somehow been run up by the vastly profitable water companies while they pumped raw sewage into the rivers and the sea. The energy price cap is also to go up, rendering it effectively pointless.

Yet what are we offered instead? Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting, who openly wish to extend this model to the National Health Service. 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.

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.