No Quiet Mutiny

The superb Mr Bates vs The Post Office is an important reminder not necessarily to trust even guilty pleas, much less convictions. Believe in someone's guilt only if they have told you of it in a situation of absolute trust, such as while sharing a cell, or if you yourself know it for a fact, as I do about the people against whom I shall be avenged this year.

ITV can do it when it wants to. It also broadcast 61 films by John Pilger. His obituaries are as one would expect. Hypocrisy beyond words in what The Guardian has become. A gentle skewering in a Daily Telegraph that might have ended up publishing his weekly column once it had passed into Arab, BRICS ownership.

And a deranged attempt at a hatchet job in The Times, which forces itself to pretend to admire Auberon Waugh, who was as anti-war as Pilger, and who would have laughed himself silly while throwing up at the suggestion, either that The Times thought that he was in Pilger's league, or that either of them should have cared what it thought.

A full-length documentary tribute to Pilger on ITV would be fitting. Alas, someone else will now have to make the one about how Tony Blair went to Israel to discuss what was to have been his lavishly remunerated oversight of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, but the country's most watched commercial television channel broke the story, so the fable has had to be constructed that he had been discussing the price of hummus or something. See what a Starmer Government would look like, led by one of the principal persecutors of Julian Assange. How we shall miss Pilger in this year's campaign to unseat Keir Starmer. I am told that that is coming along nicely.

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 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.