The Manchester Student Paper 'Mancunion' interviews PH
Some of you may be interested in this interview
http://mancunion.com/2016/02/29/peter-hitchens-living-breathing-corpse-country/
Some may not
Some of you may be interested in this interview
http://mancunion.com/2016/02/29/peter-hitchens-living-breathing-corpse-country/
Some may not
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
I’m sorry to break this to you but it looks as if we’ll have to endure not one but two EU referendum campaigns.
The second one, by the way, will definitely end in a vote to stay in.
The ‘exit’ campaign was last week cunningly taken over by Tories who don’t want to leave the Superstate and will use a vote to leave (if it happens) as the basis for yet another round of negotiations with Brussels.
Boris Johnson and Michael Howard are ancient liberal Europhiles, who have learned how to seduce the Tory Party with speeches that sound Right-wing but aren’t really. It is painful to see this cynical seduction technique at work, and watch the old ladies fall for it.
Neither is what he seems. Lord Howard led a Left-liberal putsch against the genuine EU opponent Iain Duncan Smith in 2003. Mr Johnson is an act, not a politician. He is a keen Europhile, and to conceal it from his fans he will do so many U-turns between now and referendum day that they will look like a series of S-bends.
Both men’s weird declarations of support for Brexit were cunningly hedged.
And the London Mayor was careful to state: ‘I will be advocating vote “leave”... because I want a better deal for the people of this country to save them money and to take back control.’
Read this carefully (as you always should) and you will realise there’s no clear declaration that he wants our national independence back. But there is a desire for a ‘deal’. Likewise his supposed reversal last Saturday wasn’t really as clear as it looked. Be assured. If there is a majority to leave there will be a second poll and a search for a new deal.
What sort of deal? Lord Howard was more specific. In an article which was lazily reported as a ‘blow for David Cameron’, he explicitly said that he saw a vote to leave as a way of restarting negotiations on how to stay in: ‘There is only one thing that just might shake Europe’s leaders out of their complacency: the shock of a vote by the British people to leave.’
He added: ‘We would be sorely missed. If the UK voted to leave, there would be a significant chance that they would ask us to think again. When Ireland and Denmark voted to reject EU proposals, the EU offered them more concessions and, second time round, got the result they wanted.’
Lord Howard went on to explain how happy he would be for Britain to be a semi-detached part of a two-tier EU – something very much on the cards as the EU moves into its next phase of integration, two or three years hence. ‘We – and others – could say to the integrationists, “We don’t want to stop you doing what you want to do as long as you don’t make us do what we don’t want to do.” ’
You read it first here. The EU is like the Hotel California. You can check out. But you can never leave.
This referendum, which was never supposed to happen at all, is a sham for which I refuse to fall.
What sort of hero condemns women to death?
The BBC’s new thriller The Night Manager must be one of the strangest things ever broadcast. Its apparent hero, played by Tom Hiddleston, is portrayed as a tower of moral purity. Yet the first thing he does is to betray a living, breathing woman (who trusted him with her life because of his honest British appearance) in pursuit of an abstract ideal. Apparently, he hates arms traders so much, this is the sort of thing he does.
Predictably, the woman, played by Aure Atika, is barbarously murdered (in the book, I’m sorry to say, her dog is murdered too, a detail the BBC spared us). The arms dealer, equally predictably, gets away with it.
This skewed moral system in which people claim to be virtuous by having severe, righteous views about foreign countries, seems horribly common among our cultural elite. Is this why our foreign policy keeps getting its head stuck up its own fundament?
Again and again, in pursuit of some supposedly noble goal, we plunge entire countries into lakes of fire and blood, and then stand about looking puzzled and claiming it wasn’t our fault.
Inscribed in stone, above the doors of all government buildings, should be William Blake’s bitterly true maxim: ‘He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars: general good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.’
Country dwellers are often mystified by the appearance of strange little dumps of used fertiliser pellets, which appear now all over the place by night. I can explain. These are left by the owners of urban cannabis farms (Britain’s most successful and profitable agricultural sector) who dare not use their own bins for fear that even the British police – among the most relaxed in the world on the dope question – might notice and take action against them.
Education that doesn't add up
The reports flood in, as they do almost weekly. The standards of mathematics teaching have plunged disastrously. The professions are dominated by private school products, two years ahead of their state school contemporaries.
Yet nobody ever reaches the obvious conclusion – that we should return to selection by ability in the state system and reopen the great private schools to the taxpayer-funded Direct Grant system which lifted so many poor children to success.
Why are our elite so prejudiced against this obvious remedy? Even on their own terms, their position makes no sense.
Every week I hear more alarming things about our prisons, especially the almost universal availability of mindbending drugs, whose users often become violent. These are now flown into cells, through broken windows, by drones. The authorities seem powerless to stop this.
No surprise there. As we make no effort to stop drugtaking outside prison, it is hardly surprising prisons themselves are even more lawless. Alongside these cases are alarming numbers of mentally ill people, cast out into the non-existent ‘community’ by the wicked decision to close most mental hospitals.
Older, experienced staff are quietly disappearing and turnover among new staff is unsurprisingly high. Huge jails are often left overnight in the charge of tiny numbers of officers.
I predict a major catastrophe soon. And it will be the direct result of decades of liberal penal policy, which uses prison only as a last resort and so ensures that a large number of inmates are hardened criminals, incapable of reform, before they ever get there.
If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down
Some readers may be interested in my appearance on this edition of The Daily Politics - topics covered include UKIP, Grammar Schools, Trident and the Labour Party
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0725m33/daily-politics-26022016
Some may not be.
Hoping against hope for some intelligent TV, I switched on the BBC’s new version of ‘The Night Manager’, David Cornwell’s early 1990s book about a wicked arms trader, and attempts by idealistic spooks to destroy him. I can say without equivocation that the credits were great. I’m not so sure about the rest. I’ll get back to that in a moment, but first, a necessary digression.
I have a pretty good memory of most of David Cornwell’s major books (I tire of calling him John Le Carre, his pretentious pen-name). In fact, I know ‘A Small Town in Germany’, his best book by far, almost by heart, having read it so many times. I’d say much the same of the equally brilliant but very different ‘Spy Who came in From the Cold’ and his ultimate self-explanation and political and moral credo, such as it is, ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’.
I think what he is saying (and he made me see history differently) is that the Cold War *is* (or was) a true struggle of good and evil in which Britain often stood for an old-fashioned chivalrous decency in a world that worshipped strength alone. But that those at the very heart of it, especially the all-seeing, all-knowing, morally compromised and lawless the spies, have become such steely, ruthless warriors, and have come to admire each other so much in a sort of mutual worship of each other’s cleverness, that surprisingly little separates them in morals or method, and in the end they are capable of almost becoming each other. But that by doing so, they become treacherous as individuals, dangerous to anyone close to them and generally miserable and too disullusioned to live as normal people.
I think that’s it. But I’d welcome other theories.
‘The Looking Glass War’ is also well worth several re-reads, an examination of the absurd way in which so much of official Britain has lived pathetically and disastrously in the past (really since 1939, though ever more so since 1945).
I have never been able to re-read ‘A Perfect Spy’, which seems to me to be pretty close to autobiography, though I enjoyed it greatly when I first read it. Perhaps it is because the central theme of it, if you know it at the beginning, spoils it for you if you start again at the beginning. I enjoy The Russia House, though it’s unsatisfactory, because of its Moscow and Peredelkino sections, which were obviously quite well-researched in the Russian capital when I lived there, and so provide nostalgic moments for me.
I also think its central premise, that the Soviet nuclear arsenal didn’t really work that well, may have been true. You can see why a lot of people wouldn’t want that to get out, and it duly doesn’t. But I think it’s also the first book in which his growing bitterness towards some aspects of the USA begins to show. I won’t call this anti-Americanism, because he must and does know better. But it sometimes looks a bit like it, in the form preferred by snobbish, affronted English clubmen.
I never could be bothered with ‘The Naïve and Sentimental Lover’. Cornwell writes about spying and spies, and should stick to it. He seems to be utterly baffled by women. And his post-Cold War books seem to me to have marked a long and unavoidable decline, which I wish he hadn’t allowed to happen. He should have stopped long ago. I can barely recall what the intervening books have been about, just that I was disappointed by their failure to keep up with changes in manners, language and culture, which have accelerated wildly since 1990.
So, back to ‘The Night Manager’ . Provoked by the BBC’s modernisation, I hunted out my own copy, which turns out to be an American airport paperback, vintage 1993. I’ve written nothing in it and there’s no dead boarding pass or railway ticket, which I often use as bookmarks, to indicate where or when I read it. It was a time of almost incessant flights and train rides up and down the USA, anywhere anything was happening that couldn’t possibly have happened in England (there are fewer such things now). I'm sure it got me through a couple of long, solitary flights, and changes of plane at Pittsburgh, my hub of choice.
I can recall the appealing descriptions of the great joys of solitude, something Cornwell plainly experiences but which most people either never undergo or won’t admit to. And there’s some annoyingly memorable stuff about a wig purchased by a member of the hotel staff. But beyond that, it’s almost completely gone.
I’d only note one thing. The BBC, for all its modernisation of the plot to incorporate the 'Arab Spring' and its sex-changes of a major character (this doesn’t, in my view, work with Burr, a bloke in the book, played by a pregnant Olivia Colman in the TV series) has stayed true to the heart of the story.
Which is this: That in the name of idealistic love for his fellow men, the supposed hero has *deliberately* betrayed a living, breathing woman, and caused first a savage beating of this person, and then her dreadful, punitive murder - results which seem to have surprised him.
Apart from being an allegory of modern British ‘ethical’ foreign policy (have you noticed that the USA is now bombing the people in Libya who we helped to overthrow Gaddafi?) , there could be no better illustration of William Blake’s great maxim: ‘He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars: general good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.’
I could easily have kept this to myself if I had wanted to – but I did not think that either Michael Gove or Al ‘Boris’ Johnson would support the campaign to leave the EU.
And, as the facts have changed, I must change my mind. But how to change it? Am I to assume that a cause I have embraced for years, to the yawns and giggles of almost everyone, has suddenly mysteriously become popular and is embraced at the highest levels of our national life?
Experience of the world tells me things aren’t likely to be that simple.
I don’t think Mr Johnson would trouble to deny or discourage the widespread belief that he is possibly motivated more by ambition than by principle. He has more sense than to moan. It would be, as Enoch Powell once said of politicians who complain about the press, like a sailor complaining about the sea. He is ambitious in the way that he is blond. It is just so. We cannot and should not hold it against him.
But Mr Gove is a very different character whom I have never been able to fathom fully. Let us take a look at both of them, and their possible motives.
I once, long years ago, spent hours trying to persuade Mr Gove that the key to leaving the EU was the open support of major, respected political figures for that policy. I said that, as long as they didn’t, the public would assume that the elite knew something they didn’t, and be scared of leaving. He didn’t seem moved.
As for Al ‘Boris’ Johnson, I am one of many who began by seeing him as an active ally in the struggle for independence, only to be seized by a growing apprehension that he didn’t really support that policy. Brilliantly, he gave the impression that he did. But Mr Johnson is, ultimately, too devoted to his plan to be ‘World King’ to hang such a political millstone round his neck. And anyway, he isn’t, despite the Wodehousian bluster, terribly British. He’s an outsider, as most who have lived and worked abroad are.
So the nagging voice of doubt continues to plague me. What did they really mean by what they said?
Both men have, after all, been prominent ornaments of a Tory Party which has for many years been dishonest and evasive on the National Independence question and which only last year, in the shape of the European Arrest Warrant, needlessly handed a great power and liberty to the EU which we could have kept for ourselves had we wished to do so.
It has perfected the ‘Eurosceptic’ position, of seeming hostile to the EU at election times, and then accepting its demands whenever they are made. Any member of it must therefore be asked ’Why, after all this time, are you suddenly so concerned about an issue which you have brushed to one side for decades?’
The answer, of course, is that the growth of UKIP (now a shrivelled memory) scared David Cameron into offering a referendum on the subject which he has, thanks to unforeseen circumstances, been forced to hold. Whoops Number One! And Tories who, hitherto, had been able to swivel about on the fence according to the needs of the times, can no longer do so. They have to say yes or no this time. Whoops Number Two!
Mr Gove’s declaration is the more trustworthy of the two, a standard Thatcherite Tory view of the EU, complete with clichés about an ‘unelected commission’ (of course it is unelected. It wouldn’t be any better if it were elected – look at the EU ‘Parliament’, which *is* elected, or the European Council, whose members are all heads of elected governments) . It also contains absurd claims about our allegedly dynamic’ economy (three fathoms deep in debt and balanced there on top of a great wobbling housing bubble) and the ‘best armed forces of any nation’, which I wish were true but is actually laughable, especially after the repeated cuts made by the government of which Mr Gove has been part since 2010.
As for our ‘soft power’ and global leadership, I suppose we can just be glad he didn’t mention the ‘special relationship’ or the ‘independent deterrent’. Anyone in serious politics who believes in such things is destined for the locked ward. The next thing you know, he’ll be babbling about the excellence of BBC Radio 4 Comedy, or the Great British Bake-off, whatever that is.
If he’s so worried about the terror threat to Europe, why has he been so supportive of the aggressive foreign policy of this country (not influenced by EU power in this case) towards Iraq, Libya and Syria, the policy which has created the swamp in which terror flourishes?
I’ve also seen no sign that he has distanced himself from the fact-free hostility of the political establishment towards Russia, a country whose enmity successive British governments have pointlessly sought for many years. After 1990, Britain had no reasons for conflict with Russia at all. It is only our EU and NATO involvement which brings us into conflict with Moscow, thanks to the EU’s continuation of German eastward expansion by other means.
Mr Gove’s explanation of his decision is also very understated about the question of immigration. Does Mr Gove , a declared Blairite, want to halt the mass immigration so essential to Blairite social and economic policies? I am unsure.
I can see two possible explanations for Mr Gove’s decision, which he certainly didn’t need to take and could have dodged if he had wanted to. One is that he is more ambitious than he likes to let on, is a bit bored by being Justice Secretary, and would like to climb higher than the second-echelon ministries he has been given by his friend David Cameron. If he can’t do that, then the delights of the post-politics world – in which he would certainly do very well in one shape or another - must beckon.
I know every major salary is now judged on the basis that ‘X is paid more than the Prime Minister’ but the truth is that the Prime Minister is not paid that much for a job of such status, and Cabinet Ministers are even less well-rewarded, especially when they compare their salaries with those of their friends in the law, the media or business.
Gordon Brown was a puritan and David Cameron is rich, and so both men kept Cabinet pay low, winning virtue points as they did so, while their less puritan or less wealthy cabinet colleagues silently ground their teeth, fearing to protest in case their careers are ended by accusations of greed.
A few years in a Cabinet job may be fun. But there’s a lot of slog and far too many boring meetings involved, which would sap the will of anyone with a voice and a pen and the willingness and talent to use them, such as Mr Gove has.
A lively mind such as Mr Gove’s will feel constrained by the Cabinet’s rules and burdened by its incessant red boxes and the tedious silence imposed by collective responsibility. I think, for him, the gamble works both ways. If we actually do vote to leave, Mr Gove will get preferment under whoever succeeds Mr Cameron.(Note: I do not necessarily assume that a vote to leave will be followed by an exit and nor should you – but it would definitely be followed by Mr Cameron’s resignation). How about Foreign Secretary? If not, there is the great world, beckoning with all its delights.
Al ‘Boris’ Johnson is another matter altogether. His statements on the European Union issue suggest to me that he seeks to stand amidst the ranks of the ‘Leave’ campaign largely to guide it towards an ultimate compromise later on. He said only a few weeks ago that he wasn’t an ‘outer’, and I myself still think he isn’t one.
In his carefully-arranged, yet apparently chaotic press conference outside his home (a typical Al Johnson touch, though note how much more serious the hair has become), he summed up his position thus :
'I will be advocating vote "leave" ...because I want a better deal for the people of this country to save them money and to take back control.'
That’s not actually incompatible with continued membership, especially if the EU goes for a ‘two-tier Europe’ a couple of years hence, which it almost certainly will.
It is remarkably like David Cameron’s position before his ‘negotiations’. It’s not really an absolute case for exit. There isn’t the concentration on the powerlessness of Britain within the EU spider’s web, which Michael Gove describes and complains about.
Then, look at the summary of Mr Johnson’s position in his own newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, today. This notes:
‘Unlike some of those backing a "Brexit", Mr Johnson raises the possibility that Britain may not ultimately leave the EU in the event of an Out vote. He calls for Britain to have a deep and cooperative relationship with the EU "on the lines originally proposed by Winston Churchill: interested, associated, but not absorbed; with Europe - but not comprised".’
The Telegraph also noted
something I haven’t seen much mentioned
‘Mr Johnson yesterday said he will not play a prominent role in the campaign and will not debate against Conservatives backing the “In” campaign.’
Really? That could be awkward to arrange for four whole months. But it means that Mr Johnson’s ability to woo Tories in a future leadership campaign will be at least partly protected from accusations of disloyalty or splitting.
Meanwhile I draw to your attention the poll (Survation talked to 1,004 people by telephone on Saturday) published in the Mail on Sunday yesterday. Taken after the Prime Minister’s trip to Brussels it showed that most people were not much influenced by events in the EU Capital
It showed 48% answering ‘No’ to the question ‘Should Britain Leave the EU’, and only 33% answering ‘Yes’. Another 19% didn’t know. If they don’t want to leave by now, what will make them? Al Johnson? Not everyone lives in London, not everyone is as beguiled by Mr Johnson as are the media, not everyone reads conservative newspapers. The ‘Leave’ campaign would do well to bear this in mind. An amazing 35% thought Mr Cameron did well in his talks, despite almost universal derision heaped on his head by the ‘Eurosceptic’ media. While the talks had made 18% more likely to vote to leave, it had made 15% more likely to vote to stay. Most were unmoved.
Most may well stay that way. In which case a decisive vote to leave is far from certain. Professionals such as Mr Gove and Mr Johnson will have known all this before they decided what to do. It is as well to bear that in mind when you wonder why they did it.
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
David Cameron is now paying the price for making a promise he thought he wouldn’t have to keep. Sure that he wouldn’t get a majority last May, and genuinely afraid of losing office, he promised a referendum to try to win back votes from Ukip.
It didn’t turn out like that. The cheque he dashed off for a bet he was sure he’d win has now been presented at the bank, and he lacks the money to pay for it.
And so the Prime Minister has been forced into mounting a ridiculous pretence of real negotiations.
David Cameron (pictured in Brussels on Friday) made promises to the electorate in order to win office that he simply cannot keep and has been forced into the ridiculous pretence of real negotiations on Europe
First, he tried to look as if he wanted something he doesn’t want. Now he has to look as if he has won concessions he hasn’t won.
Anyone who genuinely thinks that this is an important change in Britain’s relationship with the EU probably believes in flying saucers as well.
But I can understand how many people will pretend to be convinced, because they are afraid of the alternative.
It was fear of shrivelling into nothingness on the edge of Europe that got us into the European Union and I suspect fear of leaving will keep us there.
Quite how we will be able to keep up a fake debate about the subject till late June, I have no idea.
I long ago concluded that I would rather leave, whatever the economic and political cost. I think most of this country’s unique laws and liberty grew up after our break with the Continent under Henry VIII nearly 600 years ago. I think they are worth preserving at practically any cost and, given the chance, I can probably get quite tearful about it.
You cannot expect the Tories to do anything about this. They have never recovered from the day they destroyed us as a great nation by mounting their mad, futile attack on Egypt in 1956.
That was when they decided we couldn’t manage on our own any more, and started whimpering to be let into the then Common Market.
By far the best, wisest and most far-sighted warning against the European project came from Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell in October 1962, not long before his untimely death.
In a speech that still stands up well more than five decades later, he rightly said two things that should be carved in stone in the heart of our capital.
The first was: ‘Of course, the Tories have been indulging in their usual double-talk. When they go to Brussels they show the greatest enthusiasm for political union.
‘When they speak in the House of Commons they are most anxious to aver that there is no commitment whatever to any political union.’
And the second was: ‘We must be clear about this: it does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent European state. I make no apology for repeating it.
‘It means the end of a thousand years of history. You may say, “Let it end” but, my goodness, it is a decision that needs a little care and thought.’
For much of my life, I have watched his prophecy come true around me. And I have watched a heedless people accept a slow, salami-sliced subjugation they would never have borne if it had been imposed by force of arms.
Do we really, really have the guts to leave now?
A friend of mine who bravely goes to terrifying war zones, but has a lot of common sense even so, is amused by the Western media’s continued belief (encouraged by David Cameron) in ‘moderate’ Muslim groups supposedly fighting against Syria’s President Assad.
My friend asks: ‘If these journalists really believe these people are moderate, why do they not go into the zones they control and report from there?’
And he answers his own question with a wry smile: ‘Because they know perfectly well that within ten minutes of arriving, they’d be trussed up in a car boot and well on their way to the badlands of Syria or Iraq, never to be seen again.’
Communist East Germany was so mad and odd that I was always afraid that future generations would refuse to believe the truth about it – such as that its policies on education and women were almost identical to David Cameron’s.
That’s why I thought the Disney company should have bought the whole country and kept it going as a theme park – and as a lasting warning of what human beings can do, given the chance.
Alas, as the disappointing Channel 4 thriller Deutschland 83 has shown, even Germans are forgetting what it was like.
Despite featuring Maria Schrader as the best female villain since Cruella de Vil, the series simply failed to recreate the sheer hopeless, baggy dinginess of the German Democratic Republic – every curtain yellow, every wall and ceiling stained, nothing repainted since about 1942, even the air full of coal dust and rasping fumes.
And without that, it couldn’t really recreate the menace of it, either.
This matters. As we forget it, I begin to see much of it being resurrected all around us.
Even menacing Maria can’t shine a light on this mad, bad world.
Remember we were told that the great Kiev ‘spontaneous’ protests of two years ago were all about ending corruption? Well, corruption in chaotic Ukraine is now so bad that the economy minister, brought in from abroad to combat dishonesty, has just resigned in frustration. The International Monetary Fund is threatening to cut lending unless more is done to fight corruption. Fat chance. Ukraine is corrupt, much as the Atlantic Ocean is wet. The 2014 outbreak was a putsch and its real target Russia. Now it’s gone wrong, coverage in the West has virtually stopped.
Can nobody think any more? The word ‘addiction’ is plainly meaningless, as supposed ‘addicts’ so often give up the things they are said to be enslaved by, using willpower.
And it is surely obvious that when someone says he is a ‘gambling addict’, there is no possible chemical or biological explanation for his behaviour. He’s just looking for an excuse for his selfishness and greed. So what ninny decided it was a good use of our money to prescribe such people a pill – Naltrexone – which is normally given to drug abusers and heavy drinkers?
People who do bad things are not ill, and should not be treated.
They are wicked and should be punished.
As I travel home by train on Saturday evenings, my heart often sinks at a major junction when I hear the aggressive shouts of football fans. Imagine my surprise the other day when the shouts turned out to be coming from uniformed police officers, all got up with clubs and baseball caps, who seemed to be nerving themselves up for some sort of combat.
A discussion on Premier Christian Radio about my brother Christopher’s atheist positions:
http://www.premierchristianradio.com/Shows/Saturday/Unbelievable/Episodes/Unbelievable-Was-Christopher-Hitchens-right-about-religion-Peter-Hitchens-Ed-Turner-Peter-Harris-plus-Unbelievable-2016-announced
In the light of Tim Montgomerie's defection from the Tories, this item from the archives (January 2010) deserves an airing
http://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2010/01/peter-hitchens.html
Oddly, the “Fifteen reasons why even Peter Hitchens and Simon Heffer should vote Conservative” , to which this was a reply, don't come up when I click on the link . Pity.
Yet again my analysis of British politics has been vindicated elsewhere (though without attribution). The idea that the Tory Party has become the new vehicle of Blairism, and is now itself the engine of the cultural revolution, an idea first set forth here many years ago, is beginning to dawn on others.
Tim Montgomerie of ‘Conservative Home’ used his ‘Times’ column (which alas I cannot link to, it being behind a paywall) to announce that he is quitting the Tory Party.
It’s an interesting attack because it lists all the ways in which the Cameron government has failed and is failing (and will fail) , and it points out that the Tory Party is increasingly peopled by men and women indistinguishable from Liberal Democrats or Blairites. But it doesn’t make the connection between the two facts.
Well, well done, Tim, but why has it taken you so long? Why quit now, when the Tory Party sprawls across the political landscape, a great bloated toad of a thing, gorged with hedge-fund money and without any serious rival, attended by gargling choirs of media toadies and flatterers. Why didn’t you leave when you could have helped to prevent this?
You have noticed, at last, that the Tory Party is actually peopled with Liberal Democrats in all but name, and that it will soon be providing asylum for the Blairites driven from Labour by Jeremy Corbyn’s romantic attempt to return to socialism. This ‘radical transformation of the Tory Party’ of which you speak is not ‘under way’. It is virtually complete, having been under way at least since 2003.
This was all predictable well before 2009, and indeed was already taking place in the wooing and flattering of Blairites such as Alan Milburn by the Cameron machine. Likewise, Michael Gove’s admiration for Mr Blair himself was open and unconcealed. The signs were there. Why didn’t you read them? Come to that, why didn’t you spot the Tory front bench’s eagerness to offer more concessions to the Liberal Democrats than they had actually asked or hoped for, in coalition talks? Did you really believe David Cameron’s pretence that he was prevented from following conservative measures by Nick Clegg? On the contrary, Mr Cameron much preferred a coalition to a majority Tory government, and heartily wishes he didn’t have a majority now (if this were so, there’d be no pesky referendum to worry about).
Before 2010, when I was urging any serious conservative to aid me in destroying the Tory Party, you were among those who didn’t listen, who thought my view laughable, who placed absurd faith in David Cameron. I remember a conversation in the porch of some Brighton hotel, during which you told me that Mr Cameron was serious about supporting marriage (This ended up with his long-delayed, useless allowance claimed by almost nobody. Do you now still think he was serious?).
Before 2010, media and other desertions from the Tories, and a refusal to be fooled by Mr Cameron, could have led to a fourth decisive defeat in a row for the Tory Party, which would then have collapsed and split – and so would have opened the door to the formation of the ‘wholly new’ party which you now annoyingly suggest will emerge in the years ahead. If so, it will be too late, and will have a terrible struggle to find its place in our two-party system.
At the 2010 election, we would have had Blairite government whatever we had done. But we had it in our power to sack the Useless Tory Party as the opposition, a chance that will not come again in my lifetime or (quite possibly) in yours. Four successive election defeats are rare. In the five wasted years of the coalition, we could have created a new opposition, morally, culturally and socially conservative, dedicated to national independence, and capable of sweeping New Labour out of office for many years.
Instead, we had a Blairite government headed by a nominal conservative, the unthinking tribal Tory vote clung to Mr Cameron, and what might have been the greatest change in British politics since Labour superseded the Liberals was frittered away on the rise and fall of UKIP, a Dad’s Army rebel movement. So, while I’m glad you’ve quit the Useless Tories at last, I’m furious that you have left it too late to be of any use.
Recently I’ve become frustrated by the uneven scantiness of my memory about the late 1960s, a period of my life about which I can remember only very patchily (though I was there, undrugged and sober and – for a teenager –probably more conscious of current events than most). Originally I was interested in it because I thought I might try to construct a novel around this time, but I now know I can’t and won’t do this. I cannot write good fiction. Since then I have kept up the interest for its own sake.
Looking for keys to open up and trigger memory, I have deliberately seen films and read books which I saw or read in that era, and even walked down roads I hadn’t visited for years, to see if anything happened and if anything came back. Nothing much has resulted. These things come by accident, I suspect, if they happen at all.
My most ambitious experiment along these lines has been to re-read Jean-Paul Sartre’s trilogy ‘Roads to Freedom’, which somebody gave me, or which I gave myself, on my 17th birthday in October 1968. My spidery teenage handwriting on the fly-leaves gives the date. It is the Penguin edition of the time, five shillings for each pre-decimalisation volume (using the 5/- form, which most people born since 1965 will not even recognise as indicating a sum of money). The covers, redolent of the sunny relaxed mood of the Sixties, are Picasso paintings (‘Guernica’ for 'The Age of Reason, ‘Peace’ for 'The Reprieve’ and ‘War’ for ‘Iron in the Soul’. There were supposed to be four books, but Sartre abandoned the fourth (‘The Last Chance’) after the third one was given very bad reviews.
Astonishing as it is to recall, 48 years later, the era described in the books was only 30 years in the past when I read them. I can see now why they were so much read in the late 1960s, and why they were made into an (infuriatingly unavailable) BBC2 serial in 1970, much of which I watched.
For in many ways the Paris of 1938, in which the book opens prefigures the English 1960s. I recall the late 1960s as almost wholly warm, sunny and hectic, which is not a mistake I make about any other period. The first volume revolves entirely around the efforts of Mathieu Delarue, pretty plainly a semi-autobiographical version Sartre, to procure an abortion for his pregnant mistress. When I first read it I (along with every other selfish and irresponsible young male of the age) most certainly sympathised with his quest, first for a reliable abortionist and then for the money to pay him. Abortion on demand (as opposed to the previous much more restrictive law based on the Aleck Bourne judgement of 1938) had just become legal in 1967, and was still tentative. Like much of the cultural revolution, it appeared fragile and reversible to those who supported it, though in fact it wasn’t really so.
I read the book with my tattered 1970s Taride Paris A to Z to hand, to trace Mathieu’s wanderings ( and those of his other characters) across Paris, from nightclub to bar to café to more-or-less squalid habitation. Given that he has very little money, it is amazing how often he uses taxis, and how seldom (if at all) he travels by Metro. Actually, I can think of a lot of left-wing metropolitans who, pleading poverty, even so spend huge parts of their income on cabs, and abominate public transport. It’s odd. The Spanish Civil War is always present in the background, along with Sartre’s unfulfilled semi-wish to fight in it (he could have done if he had really wanted to) . So is the coming murder of Europe’s Jews, which Sartre know of at the time he wrote the book, but not at the time it is set. Also featuring prominently in the plot are a fading nightclub singer, who takes cocaine with consequences I won’t reveal in case any of you read the book, and a homosexual character, whose role is crucial and in a sort of way, heroic. Religion is disparaged. Communism is not. Mathieu is urged by the austere fanatic Brunet (whose Christian name I think we never find out) to join the Communist Party. He declines, but this is plainly a struggle for him. he is also tempted by the Party's discipline and dedication.
I don’t know if this book has been re-edited since, but the translation, struggling to be colloquial, is pleasingly archaic, with ancient English slang expressions such ‘being ploughed’ for failing an examination. We are in the past, but also, as it turned out, the future. I found I recalled only very small parts of what I read. And yet, it was clear from my patchy recollection that I had in fact read the whole book, not skimmed it.
The second volume, ‘The Reprieve’, concerns the brief hot, humid days during which France and Britain abandoned Czechoslovakia at Munich. At this time I still accepted the generally-approved myth about this episode, and so does Sartre. It’s a very hard book to read as he switches from character to character incessantly and without warning ( and often just where you wish he would not switch) , so that the story unfolds more like a dream than anything else. I suspect I skipped large chunks, which I didn’t do this time. Parts of it are very powerful, especially when Daladier pours himself a drink in his office and ponders the vast holiday from responsibility which a war would be, and the scenes where a Czech family helplessly await the mob as the Germans take over in their small town. I remember those bits very well.
I think this opportunity for irresponsibility is why some people like wars. They long to be carried along in the great stream of events, as bold swimmers are I ( I never quite found the nerve) in the fast-flowing green river Aar that runs through Bern in Switzerland. In Bern they need to be on the alert to grab at the rails to get out before they are swept to disaster. In war, you just let go from the start, and wait to see if you are washed up, and where.
But for me the elusive atmosphere of autumn 1938 is better summed up elsewhere. That year and time seemed very close in those days, especially in Oxford. One teacher at the Oxford College of Further Education, where I was doing A levels, had taken part in the great October 1938 Oxford by-election, in which ( I think uniquely) a ‘Popular Front’ candidate sought to defeat the Tory, Quintin Hogg, the future Lord Hailsham (twice over).
The united left’s champion (whose sole cause was opposition to the Munich Agreement) was Alexander ‘Sandy’ Lindsay, the philosopher and Master of Balliol College. My teacher at the CFE remembered merrily chanting ‘Hitler wants Hogg!’ at public meetings as a teenage girl. It also turned out that Oxford wanted Hogg, as Lindsay lost, by about 3,000 votes. It was rather thrilling to have such a direct memento of actual history. But Oxford is like that, very often.
And I have always found Louis MacNeice’s ‘Autumn Journal’ much more evocative of the Munich days than Sartre, my favourite bit being the personal reprieve MacNeice records, amid the national relief, a mistaken feeling that all is back to normal after all. MacNeice had in fact campaigned for Lindsay in the Oxford by-election.
After the lines:
‘Hitler yells on the wireless,
The night is damp and still
And I hear dull blows on wood outside my window;
They are cutting down the trees on Primrose Hill.
The wood is white like the roast flesh of chicken,
Each tree falling like a closing fan;
No more looking at the view from seats beneath the branches,
Everything is going to plan.
They want the crest of this hill for anti-aircraft,
The guns will take the view’
As they did. Funnily enough, I didn’t know Primrose Hill at all when I first read these words, but a picture of it formed in my mind that later turned out to be exactly right. And then , in the midst of European catastrophe and preparations for war, MacNeice suffered a personal blow when he lost his dog….
‘But found the police had got her at St. John’s Wood station
And fetched her in the rain and went for a cup
Of coffee to an all-night shelter and heard a taxi-driver
Say ‘It turns me up
When I see these soldiers in lorries’ –– rumble of tumbrils
Drums in the trees
Breaking the eardrums of the ravished dryads ––
It turns me up; a coffee, please.’
Sartre’s final volume deals with the coming of war. Once again, I remember in great detail a passage in which Mathieu Delarue decides he must fight the Germans, even after it is futile to do so, and joins a group of diehard soldiers atop a church tower until a Schnellfeuerkanon (a word I remembered precisely) brought up by the enemy to kill him and his comrades. It duly does so.
In Paris, the homosexual character is having a sort of ecstasy of masochistic joy as he, after a life as an outsider, welcomes the arrival of immoral evil as the new ruler of Paris. These disturbing passages in a cemetery-like, deserted French capital in which the Germans slowly appear on the streets, are horribly well imagined
Finally, the Communist Brunet reappears, a prisoner of war , starved, herded, helpless, forced ( in a moment of symbolism well understood by all involved) to adopt German instead of French time. I don’t recall reading these crucial passages at all. Perhaps I gave up after the death of Mathieu. At one point Brunet watches in Marxist despair as a clever priest tells the defeated rabble – who lap up the message willingly - that their defeat is the result of France’s turning away from faith and self-discipline. I am sure this scene was witnessed by Sartre himself who (unlike his fictional alter ego Mathieu Delarue) did not fight to the last atop a Church tower but was captured, as an army meteorologist, and transported to Trier in Germany.
The book ends as the captives are trundled eastwards in cattle trucks, along a route that would soon bear a more sinister and more doomed cargo in similar vehicles. One of those aboard knows the track well, and understands their approaching fate as the train heaves itself over a certain set of points.
What all this has to do with freedom I have no real idea. Sartre’s philosophy has always been a mystery to me, and dribbles out of my head within a few minutes of being explained (so please don’t try). But as an evocation of an era that ended in shame and failure, and as a prefiguring of a moral revolution which appeared exciting in 1968 (which had begun with the thrilling May ‘events’ in Paris which I yearned to be part of, without having a clue as to why) but came to seem first commonplace and then mistaken, it’s a powerful read. I still wish I could see the BBC2 version, starring the excellent Michael Bryant as Mathieu, once again. I’d understand it properly, this time.