So, it turned out to be a coronation after all. Arise King Rishi!  His crown will be a crown of thorns, but it's the country which will be crucified - thanks to the policies he either formulated or enthusiastically endorsed. 

First, there is the pointless but financially ruinous lockdowns, which have all-but bankrupted the country.

Then the pointless, irrational and ruinously expensive commitment to net-zero by 2050. This condemns us to shiver in the dark this winter. It also constitutes the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in my lifetime.

Next, not satisfied with presiding over the UK's highest tax burden since Attlee's Labour Government in 1950, Rishi wants to increase it still further. Jeremy Hunt has revived Rishi's hike in Corporation Tax from 19% to 25%, directly impacting 5.6 million small businesses which are the life-blood of our economy.  Truss's 1p cut in income tax is scrapped and he threatens another £40 billion in tax increases in a few months time. Just as we tip into economic recession!

Then there's the migration crisis - entirely of the Tory Government's own making. They do nothing whatsoever to curb armadas of illegal migrants daily plying across the Channel. Instead of being carted back to France, they are settled in hotels and given mobile phones by the laughably-named Border Force. 

Numerically much greater, the Government positively welcomes a massive increase in legal immigration - a record 1.1 million residence visas were granted to non-UK nationals in the year to mid-2022. The Tories have added 4 million to the UK population through migration alone since 2010 (and those are just the ones we know about).

And then there's the crisis over freedom of speech and the cancel culture, largely stemming from the Equality Act 2010, Harriet Harperson's last gasp as a Minister. The Tories have done absolutely nothing to amend this and combat the Reign of Terror unleashed in the name of 'wokeness'. Whether it's destroying people's lives and livelihoods for lawfully expressing their opinions or destroying statues and other vestiges of our history, the Tories have been too timid to stand up for freedom of speech and diversity of opinion which lie at the heart of a free Society.

I could go on and on but this litany of betrayal by successive Tory governments is already making me clinically depressed. 

Sunak just offers more of the same. He is the continuity globalist candidate. Inevitably, he used to work for Goldman Sachs and is perfectly at home amongst the Davos jet-set. 

The tragedy of the latest Tory leadership election was that no candidate stood for anything remotely Tory. In the previous election, at least Badenoch and Braverman pointed in a different direction. This time, they backed Sunak. It will be Business As Usual under the latest in an apostolic succession of globalist dupes - Major, Cameron, May, Johnson. 

There must be a better way and there is. UKIP made Brexit possible, even though the Tories have done nothing with it. Nothing will change under The Old Gang. We need to clear them all out. The last thing we need is another globalist puppet like Sunak.

Neil Hamilton

Leader - UK Independence Party