Swings and Roundabouts

The new MP for Wellingborough, Gen Kitchen, is 28. Therefore, she was 19 in 2015, the year that Jeremy Corbyn became Leader of the Labour Party. Did she support a two-child benefit cap then? Complete with no cap on bankers' bonuses? As with Keir Mather of Selby and Ainsty, who was photographed with George Aylett alongside Corbyn back in the day, the few of that generation who are still in the Labour Party are finding that advancement comes easily when there is no competition. They are pure, unadulterated careerists.

Kitchen does not even have Mather's excuse of having contracted an enthusiasm for NHS privatisation venereally from Wes Streeting. At least two more of those thus infected are to stand as Labour candidates this year. Thankfully, we have Leanne Mohamad to deprive Streeting of his own seat. Kitchen's seat on Newham Council has already been filled, although what a pity that she learned nothing as a wardmate of the estimable Councillor Mehmood Mirza.

In general, Kitchen's CV resembles that of Sarah Edwards of Tamworth in being that of the more Whiggish or Fabian sort of lady of leisure, who had never needed a job in the ordinary sense of the word, but whose good works every day merited her good parties every evening. No such thing can be said in favour of the new MP for Kingswood, Damien Egan, whose manner of life despite his thin record of formal employment may be explained by the fact that his husband, Yossi Felberbaum, is a recruiter for the IDF's Unit 8200, an infamous collector of intelligence for blackmail and for secret evidence. Will this person be issued with a parliamentary pass?

Still, at Wellingborough, Labour added only 107 votes to its total in 2019, and it was 4275 votes behind its total in 2017. At Kingswood, which it held from 1992 to 2010, it managed its lowest vote ever, since the creation of the seat in February 1974. It was 5316 behind 2019, 8078 behind 2017, 3070 behind 2015, 5741 behind 2010, and so on back. If people are voting Labour who have never done so before, then they are the only people who are voting Labour at all.

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.