The Referendum Mirage

I sometimes wonder if political ‘experts’ in the media ever think at all about what they are saying. Why is there such a fuss about a referendum on British, sorry, I mean Ukay,  membership of the European Union? Has Parliament been abolished? Has a constitution been quietly introduced, which demands that such issues are decided by plebiscite, and makes the result of such plebiscites binding on Parliament?

 

I’ve heard no such proposal, and can’t see how it could be so, given the cowardly, ignorant or plain stupid attitudes of most MPs to this question.

 

It’s certainly understood, by constitutional lawyers, that such an obligation is important fro any serious plebiscite, and its presence or absence in any legislation will be crucial. I suspect it will be absent.

 

As it happens, we have an example. Article 1, part (iv) of the final section (on page 28) of the 1998 Belfast Agreement (the British government’s Instrument of Surrender after its humiliating defeat by the Provisional IRA and the USA) does make such an obligation binding on both the Dublin and London governments (not that this is a particularly heavy burden for Dublin to bear).

 

The nature of that vote is prescribed (on page 3) in Annex A, sections 1 and 2, as further detailed by Schedule 1, which allows the Northern Ireland Secretary to order a referendum (as it seems to me, in Northern Ireland alone, the desire of the Republic’s people for unity being repeatedly taken as given and settled in the text of the agreement)  if *at any time* it ‘seems’ to him that a majority might vote for incorporation of Northern Ireland into the Republic. He can then do it again every seven years. (NB: The Text to which I refer is the pretty propaganda version distributed in Northern Ireland during the shamelessly unfair campaign for votes in the original referendum on the Surrender Agreement itself, with the silhouette of a young family , their hair blown in the wind, as they watch the sun rise – or perhaps set – over the seashore).

 

If there is no such binding clause, the issue is what it has always been. Is a political party prepared to stand for election on a platform of withdrawal from the EU? If not, the only result of a vote to leave could well be yet another round of ‘negotiations’ and flammed-up ‘concessions’, after which our political leaders would declare that the problems were solved and we could remain within the EU.

 

In any case, hasn’t anyone noticed the following fact? No significant newspaper favours withdrawal from the EU (as was the case in 1975). The BBC is plainly opposed to withdrawal with every fibre of its being, and incapable of concealing its feelings.  Prepare yourselves for an orgy of scaremongering and needless caution. How, under those circumstances, do you imagine that you could get a vote to leave?

 

Why is so much fuss being devoted to this transparent pantomime?  The question is not whether Minister X or MP Y says he will vote to leave in a rigged referendum, which will quite possibly never happen anyway.  The question is whether a political party is prepared to go into an election pledged unequivocally to repeal the 1972 European Communities Act and all that is based upon it, so showing some actual leadership on the matter, instead of hiding behind whatever crowd it can find.

 

It seems plain to me that the mirage of a referendum is being used to try to fool UKIP voters back into mainstream politics, where they can once again be safely ignored. The question is not what conditions we can get for agreeing to accept our servitude. The question is whether we should endure servitude at all.

 

 

Flags, Drugs and Same-Sex Marriage

The Irish problem is one of those, like the Middle East, or rape, or immigration, where any unconventional expression of opinion is dangerous. You will immediately be accused of saying or thinking things that you have not said or thought. Here I seem to have been accused of endorsing ‘Loyalist’ terror and violence, or in some way of lacking sufficient sympathy with the cause of Irish nationalism.

 

Well, I loathe the ‘Loyalist’ murder gangs just as much as I loathe the ‘Republican’ ones, and have always said so. I was particularly rude about Marjorie Mowlam’s disgraceful meeting with the leaders of these squalid organisations. And I see a lot of merit in, and largely sympathise with,  Irish patriotism.

 

When introduced to a collection of ‘Loyalist’ chieftains in Washington DC , I refused to shake their hands ( as I had refused to shake those of the ‘Republican’ apologists).  I last week specifically condemned the violent scenes outside Belfast City Hall. I doubt whether any of those responsible had read or heard my opinions. I doubt that many of them can even read.  I grow tired of the (frankly stupid, and utterly illogical) assumption that one cannot be against the IRA without being in favour of the ‘Loyalist’ terrorists. Many Irish nationalists loathe and fear the IRA, and have been disenfranchised by the Belfast Agreement, which has rewarded and enhanced the violent Republicans, and marginalised the constitutional nationalists. It’s had a similar but exactly parallel effect on Unionists, destroying the UUP and creating  strange process where the Unionist Movement finds a new part every few years, as the existing one turns into a collaborator with Sinn Fein.  There’s no escape from this process, as, to be in power-sharing is necessarily to co-operate in the slow doom of the Unionist cause. Once Britain washed its hands of that cause in 1998, it was only a matter of time.

 

I have a lot of sympathy with Irish Nationalism. I am deeply sorry that it took the violence of 1916 and afterwards to persuade the British governing classes to come up with some sort of Home Rule. It is plain that the unification of the two Parliaments ad never truly worked, and that Ireland, by character and above all by religion, was not the same as the rest of these islands. I also think that the execution of the leaders of the Easter Rising was a dreadful tragedy and an appalling mistake, and was one of the many baleful consequences of Britain’s entry into the First World War. Some say that the war avoided a violent confrontation earlier than 1916. I don’t necessarily dispute that, but I think the intervention of the German Empire in our quarrel made it much, much worse, and a sort of fury that we had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by the Easter Rising of 1916 lay behind the needlessly brutal putting down of an event that was not – until after those cruel counter-measures  – widely supported by ordinary Irishmen and Irishwomen.

 

That episode lies as an uncrossable divide between sensible, civilised, gentle Irish people (the sort who would be broadly conservative in sentiment were they on this side of the Irish sea) and Britain, though I think the recent visit of Queen Elizabeth II to Dublin may have undone some of that very deep damage. I do very much hope so.

 

 I am equally sorry that it took threats of violence to persuade many Irish Nationalists that the Protestants, Ulster-Scots or whatever you want to call them, wanted to remain British. Just as my sympathy for Irish nationalism arises directly out of my own English and British love of country, surely any thoughtful Irish nationalist can see that the Ulster Protestants are a people and need a place in which they can live? Ethnic cleansing and its inevitable horrors were discussed here recently (the post called ‘Orderly and Humane’, about the mass –expulsions of Germans after 1945) . They’re not to be contemplated by any civilised person.

 

As discussed here earlier, my solution to this would never have been a ‘Protestant state for a Protestant People’, which wasn’t economically or politically sustainable, and was bound to include severe discrimination against the Roman Catholic minority there, but the full integration of part of the North of Ireland into Great Britain.  I still think that the experience of direct rule confirms that this arrangement was workable.

 

I am told that the endorsement of the Belfast Agreement in Northern Ireland was ‘democratic’ ( as if that necessarily commends itself to me, a sceptic when it comes to the virtues of universal suffrage democracy) .

Well, yes, it was. But I think the referendum was manipulated and improperly influenced, not least by the leaders of all major British political parties, not to mention the President of the United States (claiming to be an Irish Protestant) ,  campaigning for it in person, with plenty of sickly mentions of his daughter,  plus plenty of broadcasting bias.  I might add the hastily-arranged concert by ‘U2’ at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast, (2,000 free tickets to this were handed out to school sixth-formers). Why was it hastily arranged? Could it have had something to do with a poll in Belfast newspapers which had just shown that Protestants in the 18 to 30 age group were opposed to the agreement by a margin of 40% to 25%, with many undecided?

 

The Agreement itself, by the way, though distributed in the Six Counties in a soppy cover showing a young family outlined against the sunset on a windy beach, a lovely piece of intangible persuasion almost worthy of the BBC, was never signed by its principal beneficiaries. Thus dozens of media reports of it having been ‘signed’ by all involved were untrue. I discovered this  by the simple procedure of ringing up the Northern Ireland Office and asking. My fellow-reporters didn’t. Yet they breezily and repeatedly said it had been signed.  Even today I can win bets by asking people who signed it.  This typifies the gullible coverage of the matter in the British press. I asked, because I had good reason to suspect that this would be so, knowing some Irish history. (By the way,  having read the text again, I think the agreement highly ambiguous on whether a vote is needed in the Irish Republic to confirm a vote in the Six Counties for a united Ireland. You could easily read the Irish vote of May 1998 as implicitly endorsing unity. In any case, it’s unlikely to the point of absurdity that voters in the Republic would vote against union with the North. I am happy to discuss these details if anyone wants to).

 

I would also draw readers’ attention to Anthony Blair’s famous ‘five-point hand-written pledge’ of 20^th May 1998, plainly designed to influence a vote that had begun to look doubtful.  I have it here in front of me, as I always thought it would be one to keep. Two of these pledges, which I reproduce without comment,  were ‘Those who use or threaten violence excluded from government’ and ‘prisoners kept in jail unless violence is given up for good’.  

 

I am taken to task for my attack on Bill Clinton’s cynicism, by ‘Bob, Son of Bob’ . he seems to be saying ‘Tough,, that’s democracy’. Well, it may well be so, and in that case it merely adds to my dislike if universal suffrage democracy, a system of manipulation and bribery which is fast bringing the Free World to its knees.

 

But in general, he misses the point. First, it’s my view that any country which intervenes in our internal affairs should be opposed. Any country which does not maintain its sovereignty against threats will soon cease to be a country. No nation which intervenes in this way can possibly be a ‘friend’, though it might on some future occasion be an *ally* of convenience, or have been one in the past. Allies are seldom friends, and often enemies. It was up to su to determine the outcome of the IRA’s long campaign of criminal violence.

 

Second, he misses the point, which si the utter cynicism of the engagement.  Clinton had no concern for Ireland. He discovered the issue in search of votes and money in 1992.  It was purely cynical. He wasn’t a Roman Catholic. He was in favour of abortion. He knew his party had lost many Roman Catholic working class votes through its support of abortion. He had no intention of changing his view on that. So he decided to win some of them back, in several key electoral college states, by courting the ghastly sentimental, ignorant Irish feeling which, alas,  flourishes among perfectly kind, pleasant people in the USA. He also sought money for his very expensive style of campaigning (see below). By 1994, after his bad failure in the mid-terms, his Irish-American money backers   saw their chance to make him care. They came to him and said it was time he delivered.  This coincided with John Hume’s campaign for ‘The Irish Dimension’, and an Irish intellectual fashion for Sinn Feinery (see if you can find Edna O’Brien’s astonishing article about Gerry Adams, penned for the ‘New York Times’ during this era. It’s a treat.

 

Clinton, staring the possibility of defeat in the 1996 election in the face, acceded. The price was a visa for Gerry Adams. The whole process is brilliantly described in a book by my good friend Conor O’Clery , ‘The Greening of the White House’, which ranks alongside ‘Pressure Group Politics’ by H.H.Wilson (a study of the lobby for commercial TV in Britain) as a textbook of how politics actually work.

 

Mr ‘BSOB’ argues ; ‘Peter Hitchens could have gone for a much simpler explanation for USA support of the GFA - that politicians who need votes in the USA were listening to a vocal group within their own electorate that is certainly no ally of Britain – the Irish-Americans’

 

Well, yes, I could have. But it would have been so simple, that it would have been wrong, and far less interesting than the more complex truth. Irish America has always had a big vote.   JFK benefited greatly from it (but never backed the IRA) Ronald Reagan was undoubtedly influenced by it, but never backed the IRA. It probably saved Eamon de Valera’s life at one point. But never before the Clinton Presidency did it compel the White House to back the IRA against the British government.

 

 

Then he misses another point. He says ‘the bit about Serbia implies that Americans are scornful of us in the way that, say, the French are, and he draws this conclusion because he finds a policy in which Britain and the USA are not united. But as British MPs are themselves not united on this issue, we cannot expect USA to be united with us – should they unite with the pro or anti GFA British MPs?’

 

No, I simply point out that this very senior official (closely linked in fact to Teddy Kennedy, though not herself Irish) had the view that she had. It is quite different from the French view, which is an intimate rivalry going back for centuries (see that fine book ‘That Sweet Enemy’ by Mr and Mrs Tombs, he English, she French) . It is based on the view (shared by my late brother in his post-2001 years) that the USA is a post-revolutionary Utopia and the rest of the planet a fit place for it to impose its will by force, for the good of the inhabitants. At the time of the conversation there was no ‘GFA’ for anyone to be in favour of . the ‘GFA’ came five years later, after Britain had been compelled first to treat with, then to give in to the IRA – a process much aided by absurd propaganda attempts to claim that the IRA has disarmed, for which thre has never been any independent evidence.

 

He asks :’ Does Peter Hitchens argue that alliances can only exist in cases where both parties in the alliance agree fully on all issues?’. No, he doesn’t.  Where has he ever said any such thing? But I am not sure in what we are allied with the USA, and against what common enemy? The USA not only actively favours our absorption into the EU, the single greatest threat to our existence as a nation. It has compelled us to capitulate to a criminal terrorist gang. In what way is it helping us? We have sent troops to fight and die, quite against our national interest, in Iraq and Afghanistan , to aid American ends and make the Iraq operation(in particular ) look less like the unilateral irruption it was.  Now we are being dragooned into boosting Saudi Arabia’s interests in the Middle East. This is not just one way. It is absurd.

 

Finally, he says :’ America is one of the few countries where anyone from England can emigrate to and both a) already know the language and culture b) not feel a hostility directed towards him for being English.’

 

Well, up to appoint. In increasingly large and important areas of the USA the dominant language is Spanish. This is becoming more common, not less, and will continue to do so.  And if Mr ‘BSOB’ has never experienced American hostility to the British, then I am glad. I have, and friends of mine have, and I would add that Hollywood (especially in such films as ‘The Patriot’, but also in many others where English actors end up playing supercilious, cold villains) often reinforces the lingering resentment of Britain to be found in a certain type of American.  

 

Many,  it is true (perhaps even most), barely know who or where we are and make no connection between the phrase ‘English language’ and ‘England.

 

The Home Affairs Committee Report on drugs is remarkably dull, and seems to have been something of a damp squid, barely mentioned by many newspapers this morning.  It is interesting that the committee chose to visit Portugal, which, as I have mentioned here before, is not perhaps the poster-boy for decriminalisation that the Cato Institute, itself far from neutral,  has claimed (there are varying accounts of this episode, and I would say the jury was still out).

 

But they did not visit Sweden, one of the few advanced countries which has not followed the fashion for going soft on cannabis, or Greece (which one correspondent tells me has been conducting a fairly stringent campaign to clamp down on drugs. I am looking into this) .

 

They have entirely accepted several ideas which seem to me to be still in dispute – they believe that attempts to interdict demand by punishing possession are doomed, they are sure that ‘harm reduction’ works, and if they are even aware that cannabis might have some mental health dangers, I could find no sign of it in the electronic report I have been sent.  

 

The government which has quietly decriminalised drug possession anyway, without frightening the voters by actually admitting to this policy, can use the report as a chance to triangulate itself against the wild men, and look responsible. I doubt whether the call for a Royal Commission (takes minutes, lasts years) will be heeded.

 

I decided some months ago to withdraw from the battle, or whatever it is , over Homosexual Marriage. It is a trap for conservatives, entirely aimed at winding them up and tempting them into arguments where they can be falsely portrayed as cruel bigots. It is a total diversion from the real battle, over the future of marriage as such.

 

But I would make this point. Those in the Tory Party who regard themselves as social and moral conservatives have often reposed some sort of faith in Al (‘Boris’) Johnson and in Michael Gove as hopes for the future. Well, both of these gentlemen have come out strongly in favour of same-sex marriage. This is no surprise to me. There is no hope in the Tory Party. Please believe me.

 

 

We Had it So Good

Everyone (well, maybe not everyone, but almost everyone) has heard of Harold Macmillan’s 1957 boast (or perhaps warning) that ‘Most of our people have never had it so good’.  It must be part of the inspiration for the title of Linda Grant’s latest novel ‘We Had it So Good’ which I have just finished. (This is not to be confused with Dominic Sandbrook’s popular history epic with a  similar title). It is of course about that lucky, selfish generation that went to co college in the 1960s and now rules the world. It is at least an attempt to write about a major, serious subject of our times.

Ms Grant is not my ideal modern novelist.  If I had to say what I liked most, I’d go for Philip Roth’s trilogy (not his other books), William Boyd, Alan Judd (a recent, welcome discovery – why doesn’t he get more attention?) and – to my surprise – A.S. Byatt.  But she is interesting, especially to me. I now know that Ms Grant must have been at the University of York round about the time I was there in the early 1970s – as were Greg Dyke, former BBC Director General, Harriet Harman, queen of PC, Helen Dunmore (whose novel about the Siege of Leningrad is extraordinarily good). I can’t recall any of them, except for Greg Dyke, and Harriet Harman says she can’t remember me either, though it was in those days a very small university and I was quite noisy, not always in a good way.

Greg Dyke keeps telling a story about me turning up late for some tutorial saying I’d been busy starting the revolution. I think I know, the (boring, obscure) origin of this fable, namely a lame excuse I offered for being late with an essay after a weekend spent servicing a Bolshevik cell of trade unionists in Scarborough. I wouldn’t have used such a phrase, though – and I am more or less certain that Mr Dyke and I never shared a tutorial group (in those days York University still aspired to this Oxbridge way of teaching). I’ve tried a few times to correct it on ‘Wikipedia’, but someone seems so anxious to have it there that I can’t be bothered any more, and if it makes Greg happy, now he is Chancellor of the University, who am I to mind? I mainly remember him being unfashionably attached to the Labour Party, a body which all true leftists despised by the end of the 1960s, and looking pretty furry.

Who could have thought, as we lazed on the subsidised lawns and strolled round the subsidised lake, that we would all end up as we have?

This is why I was interested in Linda Grant’s book, as it takes as its theme a 1960s student couple who emerge in our era well-off, still married and yet deeply discontented, unfulfilled, baffled by their children and quite lonely. It doesn’t, I might add,  parallel my life, as by the time I got to York I was a puritan Trotskyist, sometimes jeered at as the only person on the campus who didn’t smoke dope, and resolved – having ceased to be a teenager – to stop listening to the popular music that I then thought would fade as my generation grew up. I was already too serious for my own good, and was destined to get even more so.

Of course, they didn’t grow up. Most of them still haven’t, which is why so many of them  hang out at Glastonbury, or in Hyde Park late at night, listening to the screech of tortured metal which they refer to as ‘music’ (I won’t risk any exact categories, as people seem to care so much about this. But it’s not J.S. Bach) .  I was lucky in a way, though it was quite hard-bought luck. I’d had my teenage revolt and found it led quickly to squalor and worse.  I’d done what teenagers were expected to do and been dissatisfied.  I’d worked for a living for a bit, done my own laundry and and paid my own rent.  I’d been more or less compelled (thanks to my own earlier folly) to study hard and unsupervised to get the A-levels I needed to make it to university. I had been, at 17, the cause of a serious road accident in which I was also (thank Heaven) the only serious victim. So I had an unusual experience of pain and fear. And I had always known that the moment the University days ended, I would have to earn a living. I could expect no inheritance and very little help.

Now, one of the things that made me read Ms Grant’s book was that I had been astonished by an earlier novel of hers ‘When I lived in Modern Times’. Though she couldn’t possibly have remembered it herself, she seemed to have found out or understood  something about British colonial life in the Mediterranean in the 1940s that I had also absorbed. It’s very hard to communicate , but there’s an effect of the light, of the architecture and the smell in the air which I always get when I’m in Jerusalem, or Nicosia or Gibraltar or – even more so – Malta. I expect I’d find it in Alexandria if I ever managed to get there. It’s a feeling of a time which, as her title suggests, seemed very modern and urgent to those living through it, which was still very much in the age of concrete and motor cars and radios. But, thanks to the abrupt collapse of the British Empire it is now as remote from us as any other archaeological remains. They were modern times, but modern in an old-fashioned, archaic way – an old-fashioned future like the one envisaged at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Perhaps if the Empire had survived, it would have been the future we actually got.

I suspect I inherited this sensation. I was in Malta for less than a year after my birth, and can’t possibly have any direct memory of the place , though when I go back it seems curiously familiar .

My parents probably had the best years of their lives in Malta, then the headquarters of the British Mediterranean Fleet where my father was stationed from 1949 to 1952. They were spared the privations of rationed Britain. They lived on the nice allowances which officers in HM forces tended to get only when abroad. I assume there were servants.  I know there were pleasant clubs to which they belonged. The luxuries of life were duty free, and the never-resting sea lay at the end of every vista.

I am dimly aware of this in some way that resembled memory, but it isn’t. In the same way, I was once jolted to my core when, during a weekend spent in a warship, I half-woke from sleep to hear a particular phrase in a call on the ship’s public address system, and knew that I *had heard that precise form of words before at some point in my life*.  Yet I also know, with utter certainty, that I hadn’t ever heard it before. The same was so with some of the Naval slang I later heard on board.  I think we do inherit some memories from our parents.

Anyway, this is a cumbersome way of saying that Ms Grant had imagined Tel Aviv in the last days of British Palestine in a way which I found utterly arresting and believable. She had also (in a way I’ve only ever seen matched by John le Carre in his better books, and now by Alan Judd – see above) caught the language and the attitude to life of the British military classes, what they knew, what they didn’t, what they thought of certain types of people and certain ways of thinking. How she did it, I don’t know. 

Some of her dialogue in ‘They had it so good’ is by contrast , unbelievably clunky. There’s a conversation between Oxford undergraduates that makes me wince, so stilted is it.

But by no means all of it is like this.  One passage, in which she describes a child witnessing and slowly understanding the disastrous failure of her parents’ genteel dress-for-dinner holiday hotel, thanks to the British middle class’s cultural revolution in taste,  is so bitterly realistic that it sounds is if it comes from personal experience, though it surely cannot.

She was also writing about Oxford in the years when Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar there – an Oxford I personally remember as a fascinated townie rather than as a university insider. And she has some of it pretty right.

What is in a way most striking about the book is that the central characters assume that taking (and in one case manufacturing) illegal drugs is perfectly normal. They continue to assume this from their student years until their maturity. There is precious little evidence of a stern authoritarian war on drugs in these people’s lives, and their attitude to the subject is such that you’d expect them to be amazed if anyone came between them and their pleasure.

I think this true of modern Britain, and is a large part of what I have been arguing here for years.

Harold Wilson Day passes unnoticed again

For me, the 15^th October is always a date to be remembered. Not to be recalled with any special pleasure, rather the opposite. But definitely one to be marked. The more I examine the recent history of our country, the more the 15^th October 1964 seems to me to be a dividing line between one sort of Britain and another.

For it was on that day that Labour won the 1964 election by an eighth of an inch, and so we entered the age of Harold Wilson, the most underestimated Prime Minister of modern times. By underestimated I don’t mean that people are wrong, if they recall him at all, to think of him as a rather shallow chancer without many redeeming qualities. By the standards of his time he was a pretty unscrupulous creature, especially when set against his rival, Alec Douglas-Home, a gentleman if ever there was one.

I once served under a political editor of the Daily Express, in the days when it still sold two million copies a day and had some standing, who was a man of great experience and wisdom and on first-name terms with most of the leading politicians of the day.

‘All Prime Ministers go mad’, he would say. ‘It would be kinder to take them out and shoot them when they retire, like injured horses’. He had two exceptions to this rule. One was Alec Douglas-Home, who remained level-headed and sane till the day he died; and the other was James Callaghan, a premier for whom I find I have more and more time the more I know about him.

Maybe if Callaghan, rather than Roy Jenkins,  had been Home Secretary in the middle years of the Wilson Government, the great permissive society revolution of 1964-70 would not have happened, or would have been far more restrained. He only took over this post after the early reforming frenzy was over.  He certainly is the only major Labour politician to have spoken explicitly against the permissive society, while resisting (alas unsuccessfully) the Wootton Report on Cannabis in January 1969. He was also genuinely concerned about the decay of state education, being permanently embittered by his own failure to get to university, entirely because his family were too poor.

For it was Jenkins, in alliance with a  crew of socially and culturally liberal Tories, who revolutionised the country. Incidentally, it was that same cross-party alliance –which has now taken over all three parties – that ditched the laws against pornography and got us into what was then the Common Market. Roy Jenkins is the father not only of the SDP, and of New Labour, but also of the ‘modernised’ Tory Party which now sits so happily in coalition with Jenkins’s own party.

The thing was that the Jenkins revolution happened just as the fabric of the country was changing too. Tower blocks and motorways were being built. Ocean liners were being scrapped. Jet planes were beginning to be common.  Steam engines and railway branch lines were disappearing. Bus-conductors were being abolished. Public phone boxes were being modernised and direct dialling introduced; primary schools were chucking out their stern old rows of desks;  people were starting to buy imported cars in large numbers; colour TV began.  As I look back now on my own childhood, 1964 offers a clear dividing line between one sort of country – in which I had been brought up much as a child might have been brought up in the 1930s , and the utterly transformed place in which I would experience adolescence.

It smelt, felt and looked quite different. And, as I often say, it is my great good fortune to have seen personally the world that existed before, so that nobody can lie to me about it – and also so that I know what was wrong with it, and don’t idealise it. I did actually see small boys, the same age as me, diving for big old copper pennies in the mud of Portsmouth Harbour near the Gosport Ferry. And I mean diving, they went head first into the slime and came up coated in it.  What is most striking about this memory is that they looked perfectly happy in their disgusting occupation, and that passers-by, as they chucked their pennies into the mud, thought it all perfectly normal.

Like the whiff of coal-smoke, or the occasional sight of a mainline express steam excursion, or the glowing window of a proper old-fashioned toyshop on a late winter’s afternoon, walking up the ramp of the old Gosport Ferry ( as I did quite recently) and hearing the whoop of its hooter can trigger that extraordinary mixture of memories, including the disgusting food we used to eat (or in my case not eat), the unsatisfactory washing arrangements, the brutal dentistry  and the perpetual stink of tobacco, or the gusts perfumed with stale beer that came out of the dark and faintly sinister pubs around Portsmouth Hard ( whatever happened to Brickwood’s Brilliant Ales?).

And oddly enough I can remember the dark early morning of 16^th October 1964, in a chilly prep-school dormitory on the edge of Dartmoor, when the result of the Wilson election still wasn’t clear, and hearing the burble of the radio from one of the masters’ rooms, and knowing that something momentous was going on, and being excited by it. I was right to be excited. But I might also have been a bit more worried than I was.

Would it all have happened anyway? Would the Tories, had they won, have wrecked the grammar schools and launched the permissive society? Quite possibly. But then again, quite possibly not, or not as quickly. But the railways would have been ripped up, and the concrete blocks built (that had already begun), and I expect someone would have banned the Portsmouth Mudlarks too. But my life, and a lot of other lives, might have been very different. Labour governments in this country generally *make* radical changes. Tory governments *accept* those changes, but only rarely do they embark on destructive urges of their own. If we had had a Japanese-style permanent rule by one dominant party,  we might be a bit better off. Not much, but a bit.

 

Some Conversation

I’m sticking with Amnesty for a while longer, because it still fulfils an important purpose – the Libya report being an example of that – which nobody else can or will do. Of course I recognise its severe imperfections and actual wrong doing, by my own standard. But I haven’t time to mount an internal political challenge to these policies, and I’m not sure that if I did have the time I’d much care to use it that way. The good that they do outweighs the harm. I am free to criticise them while being a member. It is all part of the age-old problem of how one can engage with the world. Either you are too pure to act at all; or you are so involved in the wickedness world that you become part of it. Somewhere between these two poles lies the narrow pathway we ought to tread.

I feel for Mr Doyle in his argument with Mr ‘Bunker’. I will refrain from taking sides in their dispute (Mr Doyle does seem to me to be more scientifically informed than most contributors here, but maybe that is because he has not met his match on the evolutionist side. I’m not qualified to say. And, by the way, I’m still waiting for the reply from Mr ‘Crosland’ to my childlike questions on the subject, submitted to him in August).

But Mr ‘Bunker’ has an absolutely infuriating style of debate, made all the worse by the self-congratulatory tone of it (and the self-congratulatory character of his pseudonym, fortunately undermined by the demonstrable  fact that if anyone debunks him he doesn’t notice it has happened). He simply will not stick to defined terms, and at the slightest whiff of any attempt to pin him down, he will squirt ink into the water like a nervous octopus.  I would say to Mr ‘Bunker’ that his contributions would be a lot more interesting to other readers, and a lot more educational for him, if he would try to correct these faults. I personally would rather eat a plate of congealed tapioca than engage with him again.

Mr Cunningham asks ‘Cannot Peter Hitchens understand the consequences of turning a blind eye to politicians who behave inappropriately in either private life or public life (and the two are always linked in some way). No matter how ’trivial’ Mr Hitchens may think Liam Fox’s transgressions are, to ignore them, or worse, to actively discourage the press from investigating them, would embolden (some of) our politicians to engage in corruption far worse than anything hinted at in the Dr Fox case.’

Well, yes, Peter Hitchens can, I can’t see where I’ve said I’m against the press in general pursuing these things. I’m just expressing a personal regret that I was diverted by such stuff in the Clinton years. Morality, as I say sometimes, is for me.  My only wider moral purpose is to help create the conditions in which other people can make the right moral choices, or at least aren’t pressured to take the wrong ones.  I’m talking about what I think I shouldn’t have done, not what other people should or shouldn’t do. In fact I can make an argument (and have done) for such exposures. And I am sure there will be people who are happy to pursue them.  Newspaper offices contain many different kinds of people.

On the Clinton matter, people who ought to have been pursuing more serious matters got obsessed with Mr Clinton’s trousers. One result of this was that they thought they could destroy a bad liberal Presidency through scandal. And, when they failed, they had prepared no other weapons. They should have been developing a proper conservative alternative, not hoping for a mixture of reheated Reaganism and patriotic waffle to do the trick. Similar, but not identical criticisms should be levelled at the conservative media in Britain during the Blair period, constantly chasing after individual scandal, never grasping what New Labour was really about, and shrivelling in the end into a pathetic and hysterical personal attack on Gordon Brown, who for all this thousand faults, was the man who saved the Pound Sterling, along with the equally maligned Ed Balls.

Mr Cunningham also says on the Fox matter : ‘I wonder if Mr Hitchens’ lack of interest in exposing the transgressions of Liam Fox has something to do with the fact he (Dr Fox) is on the Right of the Conservative Party and is also strongly sympathetic to the Zionist cause.’

No it doesn’t. I don’t care who’s in the cabinet of a government I despise. And I long for the collapse of the Conservative Party. I suspect Mr Cunningham is new here. Dr Fox’s idea of ‘right wing’ and mine are quite different. I am not, as Dr Fox is, a Thatcherite economic liberal. Indeed, I’m not a Thatcherite at all and have no plans to invite her to my birthday party (this is a joke, by the way. She wouldn’t come if I did. Apart from anything else, she knows I once had a beard, and gave me a steely disapproving look when I tried to escape from one of her interminable harangues on board her personal plane back in the 1980s. I thought she’d finished. She had in fact just paused for breath. I half-rose from my cramped seat, bottom in the air as I got ready to be the first out. She glared at me so ferociously I thought my trousers would catch fire, and so I meekly sat down again and endured another half hour).

I hadn’t even realised Mr Fox had Zionist sympathies until the recent revelations. And it doesn’t make any difference now I do know. The British government definitely doesn’t have any such sympathies, whatever any individual minister may think,  and it won’t unless and until Israel discovers a lot, and I mean a lot, of oil. Mind you, the recent gas discoveries off Haifa may test that proposition, eventually.

I wish to record my gratitude to Mr Stephenson for doing the spadework and responding devastatingly to silly allegations made against Sir Winston Churchill. I am myself critical of Churchill, as I think anyone has to be in hindsight, but the idea that his mind, tongue and pen were for sale is absurd.

A small piece of good news: Those of you who like to do your own research may be pleased to know that if you put the words ‘Millbank Systems’ into any good search engine, you will arrive at a wonderful new online version of Hansard, which puts many decades of important debates at your fingertips.

 

Oh, all right then, I’ll write about Liam Fox, well, almost…

I’m generally uninterested in political scandals. They are a substitute for proper politics, which I think are enjoyed by political reporters far more than they are by voters. To this day, I do not understand the Westland Affair which led to the resignation of Michael Heseltine, and I was working at the House of Commons at the time, surrounded by gossip on the subject. I think my brain just glazes over as soon as I hear the words ‘Ministerial Code’.

I have tried, for some years now, to point out that the MPs’ expenses scandal was wholly selective in its victims. I don’t know if all those who had actually committed criminal offences were prosecuted ( I suspect not). But it wasn’t what was illegal that mattered. It was what was legal. If you look at the much wider question, of naked greed, lawfully pursued, some MPs were utterly destroyed and others sailed through the storm unruffled and not even damp.

Some of you will recall the account I gave of David Cameron’s meeting with his Witney constituents about his expenses claim, here. I still think it astonishing that this event was attended by only three national newspaper journalists (me, Stephen Glover of the Daily Mail and Ann Treneman of ‘The Times’) given the scale of the story, and the fact that Mr Cameron was widely expected to be our next Prime Minister at the time. No national broadcaster had its own equipment or staff there (Witney is 70 miles from London). I only knew about the meeting because it had been mentioned in the local newspaper, the Oxford Mail and I live just outside Mr Cameron’s constituency. I had then mentioned it to Stephen Glover one day in the lift at Associated Newspapers, who also lives in Oxford. At that time I had assumed that it was already widely known in Fleet Street. It wasn’t.  I believe Ms Treneman had been alerted at the last minute by her newsdesk, who had been called by a Witney taxpayer to let them know. 

When I tell normal people (i.e. those not obsessed with the news) the story of Mr Cameron’s generous (to himself) housing claims, they are amazed by the information. They know about the wisteria and the chimney (giggle, giggle, how trivial and silly!) but they are completely unaware of the scale of his claims for mortgage interest, among the highest made by any Member of Parliament. If the media flock had seized on this and run with it (Millionaire MP gets you to pay his Mortgage Interest’ ‘Millionaire MP’s taxpayer-subsidised country home’ etc) I don’t think Mr Cameron would now be Prime Minister.

Why didn’t this story ever take off? Well, you will have to guess, but regular readers here, and readers of my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ will know my views on the flock mentality of the bulk of British political journalists (from this I very much except my excellent colleagues on the Mail on Sunday, who diligently pursue their own stories and are not part of any flock).  Sometimes they bleat wildly and charge around the field like mad. At other times they gaze soulfully at you as they chomp their jaws,  and refuse to get excited. Peter Oborne, another non-flock journalist,  has also written very interestingly about this, and recently accurately described most political journalists as ‘courtiers’.

So scandals can be, and are, selective. And the increasingly tight rules applied to MPs and Ministers are designed to treat them as employees (of whom, exactly? This is one of the most interesting questions in our constitution) rather than independent men and women.

It’s a cliché to say that Winston Churchill or David Lloyd George could never have survived the sort of scrutiny politicians now face. But it’s a cliché because it is true. And people really should work out the implications of that.  Which would we rather – that politicians had faintly dodgy friends who bankrolled them through periods in the wilderness, or that they were meek, pliable employees of the executive who never dared to speak an independent word?

And if they keep their private lives private, and treat their fellow creatures decently and kindly, is it in our interests to destroy them? I’ve grown increasingly tired of the scandal approach to politics, not least because I’ve been involved in it in the past.

When I was a reporter in Washington DC, I got marginally involved in the ‘Troopergate’ affair, in which Bill Clinton was accused by a rather sweet young lady called Paula Jones of, well, pursuing her round a Little Rock hotel room with his underpants off.  I spent a long time on the phone with Miss Jones, much of it almost doubled up with laughter at her entirely believable descriptions of the then Governor of Arkansas in his semi-naked state. I was never after able to watch a State of the Union address in the same way.

My then newspaper was quite interested in this stuff.  My hopes of concentrating entirely on higher things during my Washington DC posting had been shattered when I found myself living in a rather basic motel in the pleasant town of Manassas, Virginia (scene of two major Civil War battles), covering the appallingly explicit trial of Mrs Lorena Bobbitt , who had removed her husband’s manhood with a kitchen knife. This event was obviously interesting, though I think a few years ago we would have hesitated to report it.  Newspapers, as I so often say, stay independent by being commercially successful. They have to follow public taste to some extent. Had I been at home, I’d never have reported on any such thing, as the newsdesk would reasonably and rightly have assumed I was the wrong person for such a job,  but a foreign-based reporter has to do everything that turns up (I once found myself pursuing Princess Diana around the District of Columbia too. She was escorted by a car prominently marked with the words ‘Secret Service’, a thing that has always made me smile).

And sexual scandal – of the type involving Mr Clinton - is interesting, much more interesting than financial scandal, or conflict-of-interest scandal.  But I have since reflected that Bill Clinton may have invaded the, er, privacy of quite a lot of women, some more willing than others – but he never invaded Iraq.  And which is more important?

Likewise, many of Anthony Blair’s Cabinet fell to the scythe of scandal – David Blunkett, Peter Mandelson, and others I now forget. But the really scandalous members of that government, Mr Blair and Mr Brown themselves, remained in office throughout.

What about Liam Fox? I’m not a Thatcherite and find his brand of conservatism unappealing and sterile. I think his review of our defences has been mismanaged and wrongly directed, even on the assumption that most of these cuts were really needed. I don’t like his taste in birthday-party shirts.  I’ve had two conversations with him in my life, the latter a couple of weeks ago when he chatted to me about a recent flight he’d had in an RAF Typhoon jet.  I’ve heard gossip and rumours about him as I have about many politicians, but I wouldn’t pass it on because I have no idea if it’s true, or just the usual mildly malicious tittle-tattle that requires no evidence and may easily be wholly false.

What’s important is the government of the country. Scandal, in which the occasional minister is forced to resign, is a substitute for our lost power to remove a government and replace it with a different one. If we remove a government now, we get the same one with different faces stuck on it.