Dave's stage rage - and why he needs this Court of Human Wrongs

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

I don’t for a second believe in David Cameron’s claims to be angry about human rights law. I laughed when he said he felt ‘physically sick’ at the prospect of giving votes to prisoners. What absurd, exaggerated language.

His noisy stage rage over the latest decision by the so-called ‘Supreme Court’, concerning the treatment of sex offenders, is just as incredible.

Apart from anything else, the ‘Supreme Court’ (which is actually nothing of the sort) is right about this. English law, stretching back to Magna Carta, believes in limited punishment of bad deeds, not the lifetime totalitarian supervision of criminals. As it is, we get no punishment and a lot of bureaucracy and useless ‘supervision’.

I have seen nothing in Mr Cameron’s bearing, conversation, background or nature to suggest that he cares even slightly about crime and punishment. Bullingdon Club graduates, and people who won’t come clean about whether they have used illegal drugs in the past, are pretty relaxed about law and order, as well they might be. For them, the pain and loss of modern Britain are things that happen to somebody else, far, far away.

What’s more, we should remember that Mr Cameron is not some powerless red-faced major in a decayed spa town, fizzing with frustrated anger over his fourth brandy and ginger ale.

He is the Prime Minister. He writes the Queen’s Speech. He commands the whips, who drive our pathetic, obedient MPs this way and that into the voting lobbies.

If he were ‘physically sick’ about something, then he could act upon it or resign in the attempt. Actually, as we now know for certain from leaked state documents, the Strasbourg Court of Human Wrongs is a cardboard monster, long used as an excuse by Whitehall and Westminster liberals for implementing policies they secretly desire, but daren’t put before the voters. If we defy it, it has no powers to enforce its will.

This is a phoney war. It is a tactic called ‘triangulation’ perfected for that five-star cynic Bill Clinton by the squalid political fixer Dick Morris – and originally introduced to this country by the Blair machine whose every method has been slavishly copied by Mr Cameron.

What you do is ‘define yourself’ by attacking things that are unpopular with the voters you wish to woo. It commits you to no course of action, but fools them into continuing to support you. It doesn’t work if people are smart enough to see through it.

Warm-hearted people power? Try telling that to Lara Logan

Why did it take so long for us to find out about the brutal and obscene treatment of American TV reporter Lara Logan by men in the Cairo crowd? Why do most of the reports of the event leave out the grim fact that her attackers shouted ‘Jew! Jew! Jew!’ at her?

The world’s media have decided that the removal of Egypt’s government is a good thing. This is odd. What is in effect mob rule, with all the horrible dangers involved, is dignified instead as ‘people power’, which sounds so much nicer. The violent sexual assault on a Western woman, tinged with Judophobia, doesn’t fit this picture.

So it leaks out only many days later.

Anyone who has spent time talking to Egyptians (or Arabs in general) knows that a disgraceful and shaming Judophobia is common in that part of the world, even among educated and otherwise civilised people. Only a very few reports of the Cairo revolt showed posters of the deposed President Mubarak defaced with crude Stars of David reminiscent of Nazi graffiti.

I suspect the men involved also regarded Ms Logan’s perfectly normal Western dress as improper and sluttish, another aspect of this ‘lovely, warm-hearted’ crowd that the media preferred not to mention.

I have in the past encountered the rough edge of the Egyptian security state – my photographer colleague Philip Ide was roughly seized and stripped of his equipment, and people who had been talking to me about the Iraq War arrested.

I do not wish to defend it, though I wonder if the new Egyptian regime will abandon the thuggery and torture or use them for its own ends.

But I am suspicious of this eyes-wide-shut admiration of a supposed liberation movement. Whose interests does it serve? If some future WikiLeaks discovers that it was all financed and co-ordinated by Iran (as is quite possible), will we all have to change our views about how wonderful it was?

BBC must free Paxman the Leftie

The fatuous fantasy of BBC ‘impartiality’ was on display again last week. The Corporation pretended to be cross with Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman for writing an opinionated article for (you’ve guessed it) the Guardian. I believe they confiscated his Gameboy for two whole weeks.

Mr Paxman expressed the bog-standard view of the London Left about the Iraq War (and for once they were right) that the country had been taken to war thanks to lies told by Mr Blair. And he made some rude remarks about the tightness of Mr Blair’s trousers.

There is nothing remotely surprising about this. Who can doubt that Mr Paxman has opinions? Who would be surprised to know that they are quite like those of the Guardian?

But we are supposed to pretend that he miraculously forgets these views while working for the BBC, that they never influence his tone, his priorities, his line of questioning or his attitude to his interviewees.

What tripe. I say Free Jeremy Paxman. Let Paxman be Paxman, and let all the other BBC presenters also openly admit that they have views, and tell us what they are.
Because when that happens, we will find that almost every single one of them is on the Left, and the BBC will be compelled to hire some presenters who are not.

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A distinguished Tory activist, Stephen Parker, has written to me because he can’t get a reply out of any of the Conservative grandees he has contacted. He says the party, which once had more than two million members, is now shrinking alarmingly. It had 258,239 members when David Cameron took over, but is now down to 177,000.

He says: ‘Forty per cent of the members who participated in the election of David Cameron are no longer members. Why? Because the voluntary party is treated with contempt.’

Soon after this letter reached me, it was announced that a character called Andrew Cooper is to be Downing Street’s new ‘strategy chief’. According to Tim Montgomerie, a well-informed Tory and a man of impeccable honesty, Mr Cooper once told him the Tory grassroots were ‘vile’. Mr Cooper denies this, as well as having once said the Tories should support euro membership – but then he would, wouldn’t he?

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Inflation threatens. Youth unemployment rises. Are these temporary problems? Or are they, as I fear, signs of a permanent national decline in which we must all learn to accept the lower standard of living – poorer, harsher and more crowded – that goes with the loss of our old status as a great power and major wealth producer?

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The voting system is fine. It is the dead elite parties that sit on top of it, kept alive only by state funding and dodgy billionaires, that need fixing. Vote ‘no’ to AV.

Condoms, pills...but how about restraint?

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

What would you think of a circus where the tight-rope walker wore a stout safety harness hitched to the roof-beam? And where there were two, perhaps three, nets stretched beneath him?

It wouldn’t be very thrilling. But, more importantly, he would probably fall into the nets quite
a lot. After all, with so many devices to stop him hurting himself, why should he develop the skills and self-discipline to walk all the way across?

And so it is with our country’s policy on contraception. It devalues the sex act. This ought to be an immensely private and intimate thing. It should be reserved for people wholly committed to each other and prepared to become parents.

Separated by ‘safety’ devices from its true purpose, it turns into a casual, often impersonal recreation, rather less serious than tennis – which is at least played according to fairly strict rules.

And by promising that there will always be an escape from pregnancy, the state invites everyone who has the physical equipment to play the sex game as casually as possible. The more precautions the authorities provide, the more unwanted pregnancies there are.

Here’s a free condom. If you won’t use that, then here’s a pill for your girl. If she won’t use that, here’s another pill, originally developed to protect pedigree bitches from becoming pregnant by mongrels. Just to show how matey and relaxed they are, they’ll call it the ‘morning-after pill’ and you can get it at school by sending a text message.

Can’t be bothered with all that palaver?

Well, in that case they’re happy to spend taxpayers’ money ripping any unborn babies from your womb, in a non-judgmental way. And they’ll do that again and again and again for the same person, rather than utter a whisper of disapproval. In fact, they’ll turn with savage rage on anyone who does dare to disapprove.

They back all this up with sex education that licenses teachers to groom children for under-age sex, and tells them everything is normal and nothing is wrong. And they’ll allow TV advertisements for abortion and contraception.

They’ll pretend (without any evidence) that this is to fight against ignorance – though how anyone in this society can be ignorant of sex by now, I cannot imagine. What they really want is to stamp out the last traces of Christian sexual morality which required us to restrain ourselves, the one thing the rock-and-roll generation wouldn’t dream of doing.

That is why a policy dishonestly sold to us as an effort
to reduce unwanted pregnancies has delivered a steady increase in unwanted pregnancies.

Our new rulers, the Sixties radicals in all three parties, see the resulting misery, squalor and mass murder of innocents as a price well worth paying for their own sexual liberation.

Their corruption is not just a matter of fiddled expenses, organised lying, national betrayal and surrender to crime. They are rotten to the very bones, and if we do not get rid of them soon, then our country, too, will rot away.

McQueen, the grating escaper

I was pleased to see survivors of the real Great Escape last week booing the silly scenes in
the film of that name, in which an invented American roars around absurdly on a Sixties motorbike.

I too find the Steve McQueen episodes almost unbearable. Escaping from German PoW camps was a specially British form of warfare, ingenious, mischievous and often very humorous – while at the same time immensely brave.

And it was taken seriously by the Germans, as they showed by murdering so many of the escapers.

So many perfectly good movies are needlessly made again. But a motorbike-free version of The Great Escape is badly needed.

Another twist in the riddle of the missing tailcoat

Mystery deepens over the story of the doctored Bullingdon Club picture, which I featured here last autumn.

Some of you may remember the weird, misplaced limbs and items of clothing in this study of gilded youth in David Cameron and George Osborne’s drinking fraternity at Oxford.

My view is that someone has been clumsily cut out of it. But who? And why?

One of those in the messed-about picture agreed to talk to me. I will keep his identity secret, in case his tailcoated comrades cut out his tongue and bury him up to his neck on a beach.

Yes, he said, he had a copy of the original picture and I was welcome to come and see it. Why not, old chap, nothing strange about it.

But when I tried to fix an appointment for the viewing, he abruptly changed his mind and
sent me a midnight text message to say: 'Very sorry to mess you around but I think, on reflection, better not to say anything.’

Better for whom?

Try a trip on the night bus, Tanya

On so many fronts, our new masters are trying to stop us saying, or even thinking, things they don’t like.

In just one week we have seen three creepy assaults on freedom of speech and thought. The first was aimed at a Hampshire couple who public-spiritedly responded to a consultation on traveller camps, raising reasonable objections in temperate language.

Their reward was to be told by some jack-in-office that their views were ‘racist’ and would therefore be ignored. Lucky they weren’t reported for prosecution – though next time, who knows?

Sadly, they went for help to their Useless Tory MP David Willetts, a man who is by no means hostile to political correctness himself, as they will find if voters are foolish enough to put this fraudulent party in government.

The second was extruded by an all-purpose ‘expert’ called Tanya Byron, who wears leather jackets and for reasons that escape me (perhaps because she is on TV a lot) is taken seriously on the subject of ‘young people’. Professor Tanya this week invented ‘ephebiphobia’. This is supposedly an irrational fear of ‘young people’, who really just want our love and respect.

The idea is that if you suffer from this fear, there is something wrong with you, rather than with modern Britain.

I suspect Prof Tanya doesn’t do much late-night travelling on public transport. If she did, she might discover that a fear of the young is not just rational, but wise and sometimes an essential survival aid. But like all her kind she is insulated by money from the horrible world her silly ideas have helped to create.

Finally there was Ed Miliband, the Prince William lookalike and ‘Secretary of State for Climate Change’, who pronounced: ‘The Government needs to be saying, “It is socially unacceptable to be against wind turbines in your area – like not wearing your seatbelt or driving past a zebra crossing.”’

Both these actions are not just socially unacceptable. They are illegal. Does Mr Miliband want opponents of stupid, costly, ugly, useless windmills, which could never produce enough timely power, arrested? Probably. The zealots of the man-made global warming movement are a Green Taliban, as intolerant and fanatical as any Kandahar Mullah.

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When politicians say they want to ‘reform’ the Monarchy, you may be sure that what they really intend to do is attack it. If these people tried to reform an allotment they would blight it. Leave the throne alone.

Who doctored the toffs?

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

I bring you the Mystery of the Missing Toff. Who is doctoring pictures of the Bullingdon Club?

And why?

By a mysterious process, almost all photographs of this unlovely society for rich, young drunkards have now been suppressed, which suits David Cameron very well, since he is in so many of them, looking so very rich and arrogant. I have seen them.

But last week a new study of the lads appeared, featuring George Osborne and his (now former) friend Nat Rothschild.

To the left of the middle, there’s a mysterious gap where somebody ought to be standing but isn’t. Odder still, there’s a patch of shirt-front and waistcoat there, with no person attached.

Odder yet, Mr Rothschild’s right trouser leg has a white lapel, not usual even under the bizarre dress code of the Bullingdon.

On close examination, the three seated figures at the front appear to have been stuck in place after being moved from somewhere else.

If you know what’s going on, please let me know.

Jolly voting weather, Eton, chains and furlongs, David Kelly and other correspondence

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

Here are a few answers to contributors, as well as some general comments on what people have said. Margaret Harrison-Marks says people should stop 'blaming ' David Cameron for his parents' decision to send him to Eton. This was in response to an item about the picture of Mr Cameron is his Bullingdon Club finery (apparel which I recently struggled into myself for a Channel Four publicity photograph about my forthcoming TV programme on Mr Cameron. And yes, I did tie my own bow tie).

To Margaret Harrison-Marks I reply, who did criticise him for this? What I was discussing here was his membership of the Bullingdon club, after he left Eton. You don't have to join the Bullingdon club if you've been at Eton. It's voluntary, and you have to get invited. I know several Etonians who never had anything to do with it. And a man's education is important - not because he chose it, because he usually didn't, but because it may have influenced his view of the world. People also mention Mr Cameron's Etonian background because it seems to have influenced him. He might not have given his lofty dismissal of the idea of restoring grammar schools, for instance, had he himself any experience of the modern state school system, or if his family contained anyone who'd been to a grammar school.

'Grant' complains that I am promoting a conspiracy theory about the Bullingdon photo (am I? I am merely pointing to an anomaly, of a business turning down plentiful income, by withdrawing a politically sensitive picture from circulation. You may draw your own conclusions, or none at all). My interest may be silly, but I don't think it's pointless, and nor do the numerous newspapers that have followed it up. He then accuses me of ignoring the case of Dr David Kelly. Please don't make such claims without checking. I have written at great length about the Kelly case and the Hutton inquiry in the Mail on Sunday. You can be excused for not knowing that, but it's just wrong to claim, on the basis of no knowledge at all, that I haven't done so. Please stick to attacking me for what I have done (or left undone), if you don't mind.

By the way, I'm always baffled by suggestions that Dr Kelly was murdered. It was the fact that he wasn't murdered, that he had killed himself after the dreadful treatment he received that made Anthony Blair go grey in the face when he heard the news of his death. The government would have had no reason to want him dead. I am sure everyone involved sincerely wishes he was still alive. So do I. I also think what David Thomas has written about this conscientious and decent man is deeply unkind and unfair. Mr Kelly is not here to defend himself, and he was never a man of power who trampled on others. He does not remotely deserve this. I think it would be a good thing if Mr Thomas withdrew what he has said.

Quite a lot of people wrote angrily about the decimal-duodecimal, metric-customary controversy, attacking me for writing about such trivial

matters. Odd, then, isn't it, that this item attracted far more interest than the more obviously 'important' article about marriage, civilisation and prison. The issue of compulsory metrication, as Napoleon observed two centuries ago, has a great and surprising power to move people. I was shocked by the strong feelings it produced in me (much as one is sometimes choked quite unexpectedly by a line of verse, which at first sight seems commonplace).

I set out to find out what it was this apparently trivial thing went so deep. I went and watched the ludicrous and yet sinister trial of Steve Thoburn, and gazed in wonder at this harmless, honest man sitting in a dock designed to hold violent louts. I watched as my local covered market was frightened into submission by the law and other honest men shamefacedly told me that they could no longer sell me two pounds of apples, or half a pound of tea.

I wondered why it lifted my heart so much to see large official signs everywhere in the USA, using customary measures. And I concluded that it really was all about liberty, about a uniquely old and settled and beloved way of life that had grown like a forest, not been built like a city, and I remembered Chesterton's 'Rolling English Road' and thought what he would have to say about this.

And I came to the conclusion that, actually it was very important, and that it was necessary to say so - and that those who denied its importance were often precisely the people who sought to use oppressive laws to enforce their views on the subject. Yet nobody asked them why they thought it was so important, or called them obsessed.

It also passes the test of any important and pressing issue - if you write honestly about it, your opponents will misrepresent what you say, rather than answering your case.

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Newsnight and the Cameron picture

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

 

 

I am now in a rather privileged position. I have seen a picture of David Cameron which you can never see. The photograph is on a private staircase somewhere in Oxford. Like the one which was briefly allowed to be published, it shows him in the brass-buttoned tailcoat of the Bullingdon Club. But in this study, taken a year later, Mr Cameron is smiling and looks entirely different. Some of his companions look a bit raffish, too.

Not important, I'm sure. The important thing is that you can't see it because of the strange decision by the Oxford photographic firm, Gillman and Soame, to withdraw all such pictures from media use. When I first spoke to them, they said they didn't like the coverage. Later they said they would issue no more pictures to the media, at all. Everyone denies that there has been any pressure from the Tory Party for the picture to be suppressed.

The company has a wonderful library of pictures of the nation's upper crust, taken during their time at Oxford when they may have thought they would be famous one day, but nobody else did. It is making a heroic sacrifice, probably worth many tens of thousands of pounds, by taking them all off the market.

I revealed this decision in my Mail on Sunday column on February 25, and was delighted when Michael Crick, of BBC-2's Newsnight, got in touch with me about it. Some of you may have seen the short film that resulted, including another picture, even more embarrassing than the Bullingdon Club portraits are to Mr Cameron, of the man who currently poses as our Prime Minister. He is making a coarse gesture. Now, if that picture had been published in full in the mid-1990s, I wonder if Mr Blair would now be Prime Minister.

And I suppose that's why it worries me that one Cameron Bullingdon picture has been withdrawn, and another will never be in the papers. Some will say - do say - that people get up to silly things at university and who cares? Others will say that some of those things are sillier than others, and that those who seek to govern us should expect to be scrutinised more than others, and judged by higher standards.

My own view is that the Bullingdon pictures say something quite important about David Cameron that he would prefer not to be said - that he is in fact far grander, far less ordinary, than he likes to let on. Look out for the TV programme that I am making about Mr Cameron, which is expected to air on Channel Four in the next few weeks. I'm not - as I have said before - prepared to post details of my broadcasting appearances in advance, as these things are not always wholly predictable. My experience is that these days, even if you miss them, you can find them on the web.

 

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