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More than £100 million. So much for there being no money. Would that anyone could be remotely surprised at the latest revelations about the Post Office. As long ago as 2011, it had to be hived off from the Royal Mail because the whole City knew about Horizon and would have refused to have bought the Royal Mail in its complete form, or to have handled the sale. Now look up the shareholder base of the Royal Mail, which is not unlike that of the water companies.

But hey, ho. At least the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator have been saved for the nation, and that is what matters. The people who are crowing about having seen off Sheikh Mansour have turned their venom on Paul Marshall, so who do they want? It must be someone. When Reform UK, which exists only in the Telegraph and on GB News, had not won the Blackpool South by-election, then that might be the signal to make the move on the Telegraph by whoever it was that had been lined up.

That said, you can defect straight from being the Conservative to being the Reform candidate for Mayor of Greater Manchester without any selection process whatever, the way you can defect straight from being the Conservative MP for Bury South to being the Labour MP and candidate for Bury South without any selection process whatever, so Reform is clearly in the club. Based on who is or is not invited to sign letters calling for an end to arms sales to Israel, the only MP who is not in the club is George Galloway. Who refused to sign if he had been copied into the email? What has any of them ever done for Gaza? And what were their precise grounds for drawing the line at George?

The Crown Prosecution Service has been ordered to pay compensation to Claudia Webbe for its false allegation that she had threatened an acid attack, but it remains highly secretive about the fact that in 2011, Keir Starmer blocked the arrest of Tzipi Livni. What might he have to hide? There may be, and there may need to be, a policy of not prosecuting dual nationals who had been conscripted, but even that is not the law. Any British citizen is committing a criminal offence by joining the armed forces of any foreign state, so when are the holders of only British nationality going to prosecuted for having joined the IDF? The revocation of their citizenship, which like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Peter Hitchens I oppose in the case of Shamima Begum, would be more than consistent on the Government's part, since Begum was trafficked to the side that Britain was backing in Syria, as Israel still is.

Likewise, Ukraine has been bringing in IS fighters from Syria for nearly two years, so there is no reason to assume that they could not jointly have bombed the Crocus City Hall, aided and abetted by the intelligence agencies and the special forces of countries that had assisted IS in the past, even if ridiculously only on one side of the Sykes-Picot line while bombing it on the other, and which more or less openly professed to be at war with Russia, proudly supplying Ukraine while being casually observed to have boots on the ground. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a statement of the obvious.

If it is conspiracy theories that you want, then try the suggestion that Russia, China and Iran had been behind the lies peddled against the Princess of Wales by the very media outlets that were now trying to pin the blame on Russia, China and Iran. Or that China hacked the British electoral register to some undefined purpose or effect. Or that TikTok is this, that or the other. In fact, of course, the problem with TikTok is that does not sufficiently censor pro-Palestinian content. Hence the ruse to hand it over to Steven Mnuchin on behalf of Israel and Saudi Arabia. Yet the Emiratis were unfit to own two small circulation newspapers and a tiny circulation magazine, apparently. Oh, well, they'll live. They are in BRICS now, and Senegal has just joined Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger is throwing off Emmanuel Macron and Joe Biden for where the action is this century whether anyone likes it or not, and there is plenty to dislike.

Until the General Election, then the only British MP who understood these things will be the one to whom none of the others was allowed to speak, or else. 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.

I have no plan to join the Workers Party of Britain, although nor would I expect to stand against it. If, however, it did not contest North Durham, then I would. 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. We have made a start.