Rosa Concordia Signum?

As the favourite "colourful" uncles of broadcasters who were in public school uniforms less than a decade ago, Reform UK are proclaimed "the real winners" simply for having turned up. They make such good television that they have a station almost to themselves. But they are all over the others as well. It is not hard to see why.

Yet Reform's candidate at Kingswood managed only 77 more votes than Labour's margin of victory, while its much higher profile candidate at Wellingborough, its Deputy Leader and a mainstay of its channel, did not even manage that, with Labour winning by 2,517 more votes than Reform had received. There used to be Buy the Daily Sport candidates at byelections, and the perennial Watch GB News candidates should be treated in the same way.

Where, exactly, might Reform be the First Past the Post? But it openly does not want to win seats. It wants only to deprive the Conservatives of them, so that Nigel Farage could be their Leader by the time of the General Election of 2029. If any Reform MP were accidentally to be returned, then he would function as a Conservative for most or all purposes in the division lobbies.

Little may be gleaned from the Wellingborough result unless any other MP is going to be forced to stand down because he had been found to have displayed his genitals to a member of his staff, and is then going to put up his partner as his party's candidate to succeed him.

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.