Don't Mone, Organise

Michelle Mone and Doug Barrowman are selling off £80 million of assets including luxury houses, a private jet, and a superyacht. They bought these things with money that they had nicked off the rest of us, so their profit from the sales should be divided equally among every household in the United Kingdom.

Elsewhere in crookery, as Minister for Postal Affairs, Ed Davey refused even to meet Alan Bates. The Liberal Democrats need to be hammered very hard both on this and on the larcenous privatisation of the Royal Mail, for which the Secretary of State responsible was Vince Cable. For nine years, they have been allowed to pretend that they were never in the Coalition of austerity at home and of the war in Libya abroad.

The Blair Government would have approached Covid-19 exactly as Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak did, Mone was Labour in those days as such people were (she was still in the party long after it had set me free), and Peter Mandelson is back running a Labour Party that is far more pro-austerity and pro-war than the Conservatives.

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 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.