Perhaps I should award a red star each week for the posting whose author is most convinced that he or she is self-evidently right, and so does not need to actually argue a case.
This week's would go to Leigh d'Evans, who wrote (and do you know, he was one of the ones who thoughtfully reminded me of my own name. Look, Leigh, you don't need to, Leigh. I *still* haven't forgotten it, Leigh):
'Peter, your Cameron-bashing has become all a little bit pathetic and, more than that, beneath you.
For example, your latest suggestion (and saying you would not be remotely surprised were something to happen is logically equivalent of saying you imagine it did) that Cameron voted Labour in 1997/2001.
In 1997, he was a Conservative Parliamentary Candidate in Staffordshire and in 2001 a candidate for his current seat, Witney.
Your Cameron-centred attacks are becoming cheap, pathetic, remote from fact and representative of a man filled with hate.
I'm losing respect for you - rapidly.'
I am not sure what 'pathetic' or 'beneath you' mean in this context. Do they have any objective value or meaning at all? If not, they presumably mean that the writer disagrees with me. Let him do so. That is his right. But in return we are entitled to ask him to explain why. 'Pathetic' is a word of abuse I recall from the playgrounds of my increasingly distant boyhood. As for being 'beneath me', how is it 'beneath' a national newspaper columnist to criticise the Prime Minister? Nor do I specially mind about losing 'respect' from people who disagree with me. Did Mr d'Evans ever have any respect for me to lose in the first place? I'd be surprised.
David Cameron is , for good or ill, the most significant politician in the country, whose decisions and words can powerfully influence events (the British intervention in Libya, for instance, is almost entirely his personal responsibility). I have a particular interest as well. I have written a book about him. I have devoted much of my life to pointing out to Tory voters that he would betray their hopes, and he has duly done this and continues to do so. I should be glad to have said it once, and to have had it listened to, and to have moved on to other subjects. But alas, I know from long experience that important things must be said many, many times before they are properly heard and understood, and that people often will not believe the obvious until it walks up to them and personally strikes them upon the jaw.
On Sunday in Oxford I was approached by an attractive and articulate young woman, whom I had never met before, who wanted to tell me that I had been right about Mr Cameron, and that she regretted having ignored me and voted Conservative at the last election. I have received several other less direct communications of this sort, and I honestly cannot imagine how any sentient conservative can be satisfied by Mr Cameron's performance in office.
I am unsure how my attacks on Mr Cameron can be said to be 'remote from fact'. On the contrary, they are all based firmly upon recorded and undoubted acts or statements by this person, including legislation he has supported, and (most recently) the Bedford appearance in which he said that the country needed change in 1997. This astonishing remark deserves the widest possible currency, as it is hugely indicative of Mr Cameron's own true feelings.
By contrast, it is not actually true to say that: 'saying you would not be remotely surprised were something to happen is logically equivalent of saying you imagine it did'. That is why I used the words I used, rather than the ones the writer would like to misattribute to me.
The trouble is that certain words, designed above all to make people think, do not always have that effect. If people refuse to think, they become angry instead. And that is what I think has happened here. Mr 'd'Evans' is a loyalist, and does not want to hear his loyalty challenged or undermined. So rather than engage with the argument, he turns on the person who has made it.
People do sometimes want to lose conflicts, though they rarely say so openly. It might (for example) be argued that in France in 1940, the Communist Party wanted to lose to Germany, because Stalin was then in alliance with Hitler; and that French ultra-reactionaries, who loathed the Popular Front, also wanted to lose because they secretly believed (and some had been known to say) 'Hitler is better than Blum'. millions of others couldn't bear the prospect of France being bled white in another Verdun.
There are many technical and strategic explanations for France's defeat in 1940, despite her huge military strength on paper. But the speed of the collapse does seem to need a deeper explanation than poor radio communications or bad tank tactics. A nation morally ready to fight might have been badly shaken to begin with by such things, but might also have recovered the initial blow to fight back. But there was no stomach for it.
What about the Tory defeat in 1997? Quite a lot of Tories will - now - say more or less openly that they wish they had lost to Neil Kinnock in 1992, because he would then have had to deal with Black Friday and they would have been back in power in 1997, there would never have been the era of Blair, etc etc. I think this is hindsight. There was very little sign of this feeling at the time, is all I can say. the Tory establishment had committed a sort of matricide against Margaret Thatcher in 1990 almost entirely so that they could win, without her, in 1992. Chris Patten worked so hard for national victory that he lost his own seat in Bath.
But I have no doubt that some of the Labour establishment were quite pleased to lose in 1983, as that (amongst other things) allowed them to dump the party's opposition to European Union membership and to corner and exterminate the romantic old left as represented by Michael Foot - replacing him with the ruthless, devious new left which took over the party thereafter). I know for certain (because one of them told me so at length) that many Labour figures wanted to lose the Darlington by-Election of March 1983, in which the late Ossie O'Brien scored an unexpected triumph, largely thanks to the late collapse of the SDP candidate, a local TV personality who made a very poor showing at a televised debate. This gave the victory to the Tory candidate, Michael Fallon.
If it had gone the other way (as it did three months later at the General Election), I am told there would have been a putsch against Michael Foot and a move to install the far more dangerous Denis Healey as leader (I do not know if Healey was aware of this scheme). I think Mrs Thatcher would still have won in 1983, even against Mr Healey, but it would have been a far tougher contest and the SDP would have done far worse. But we all know what did happen. There was much gnashing of Labour teeth over poor Mr O'Brien's victory, though everyone had to pretend to be delighted. It reminds me of Conan Doyle's wonderful Brigadier Gerard story, 'How the Brigadier won his Medal' in which the stupid but courageous officer succeeds in a mission in which the Emperor Napoleon intends him (and expects him) to fail. (This is not to say that Mr O'Brien, a gentleman, was stupid. He wasn't. He was just unaware of the forces battling around him and unable to do much about them).
I remember, shortly before the 1997 election, doing a BBC 'Question Time' programme alongside a Tory Cabinet minister who made it plain in the Green Room that the whole thing was a terrible ordeal, that he had no pleasure in defending the government, and that he was exhausted, mentally and physically. While certainly not explicitly saying he hoped to lose, he implied that he would be in no way distressed.
What David Cameron felt personally in 1997 I cannot possibly say with certainty. I had never heard of him or met him or spoken to him at the time. His campaign in Stafford (as I showed in my Channel 4 programme) was conventionally Tory in almost every way, as it would have been if ( as I maintain) he had no particular principles. A less overwhelming Labour victory in 1997 would have put him in the Commons for that rather marginal, gritty seat, not necessarily a great advantage in a long political career, though there is a wonderful picture of him looking very cheesed off indeed when he lost. He is, as he no doubt now recognises, much better off where he is in Witney, a smiling region of prosperous golden-stoned houses and broad acres, where Tory votes are rounded up in flocks rather than counted.
Whatever personal result he may have hoped for, the interesting question is which national result he actually wanted.
If Mr 'd'Evans wants to pursue the actual issue of how he did vote, try adding these considerations: In either case his personal vote is unlikely to have made much difference. As we don't have Presidential voting in this country, the voter is free from any direct choice on such occasions, unless he knows himself to be in a very tight marginal contest indeed, and as far as I can discover ( and judging by his reaction when he didn't) Mr Cameron rather expected to win Stafford in 1997 and certainly knew he would win Witney in 2001.
But he now says he thought a 'change' ie a Labour victory, was 'needed' by the country in 1997. So Mr d'Evans, rather than quibbling about whether he did actually vote Labour, really ought to examine the huge implications of this statement. I can easily see why he doesn't want to, and prefers to make rude remarks about me (I have one hilarious Cameroon e-mail correspondent who bursts into print every few weeks with fishwife-style abuse of me for daring to criticise the great leader, and from time to time the gigantic, near spherical figure of Bruce Anderson looms out of the crowd at some party and lets me have it) , but it doesn't get him anywhere.
It may be that when he spoke in Bedford the other day, Mr Cameron was projecting backwards into 1997 feelings he has since developed, and did not have at the time. People have been known to change their views retroactively, like the millions who 'always knew' that Anthony Blair would be no good while voting for his party, or the millions who were against the Iraq war while telling pollsters, friends, family and colleagues that they were for it.
But if he did accept that Blair was bound to win - and felt that in fact he 'ought' to win, he would not have been alone in the Tory Party. I have many times contrasted the behaviour of John Major after his 1997 defeat (he went off to the cricket, with every air of being quite content) with Neil Kinnock's behaviour after one of his defeats, when he was so genuinely, indubitably angry that he made the best speech of his life, advising everyone not to be poor, or old, under the wicked Tories.
The truth is that the major political changes in this country are internal party putsches, rather than the elections which eventually confirm their message and purpose. The Blairite takeover of Labour, though in slow motion, replaced the remnants of a working-class trade union party with a metropolitan ultra-liberal faction. This was itself a by-product of a parallel Tory revolution, in which the Tory liberals destroyed Margaret Thatcher in 1990.
The Major-Heseltine government, which people often forget lasted almost seven years, was heavily pro-EU, egalitarian and as politically correct as it dared to be. It was in many ways New Labour Mark One. When William Hague attempted a counter-coup after 1997, he was constantly undermined by the Portillo faction (see the recent posting about the undermining of Ann Widdecombe), who at that stage were unable to unite around a credible leadership candidate, leaving the luckless IDS to step into the vacuum which resulted.
Much of what remained of Tory conservatism was extirpated in the Blackpool palace revolution against IDS, the appointment/coronation of Michael Howard (a liberal who was mistakenly thought of as 'right-wing' by ill-informed Tories and journalists) as caretaker and the ruthless centralisation of the party machine which followed. This prepared the way for the media-backed internal party coup which installed David Cameron, despite the apparent certainty, at the start of the leadership contest, that David Davies would win.(As he would have done, without media intervention. And just as the Tory Party would have collapsed under IDS without media intervention to save it, see my 'Cameron Delusion').
The general trend of British politics between 1990 and now has been towards greater integration with the EU, greater political correctness, greater devolution within the United Kingdom, higher taxation and spending, a stronger commitment to 'equality and diversity'. The Blair victory in 1997 was an important stage in pushing the Tory Party towards its current positions on marriage and drugs, on the EU, on immigration control, on Northern Ireland and on the NHS. Genuine conservatives have found it quite impossible to fight or reverse these trends inside the Tory Party. On the contrary, the Tory Party has forced these changes upon them.
The acceptance of an 'inevitable' Blair victory in the British establishment of 1997 was very widespread and was the consequence of the Long March Through the Institutions. This had placed 1968 cultural revolutionaries at the pinnacle of every institution except the government itself, and had resulted in the success of their ideas in formerly conservative bodies, including the Conservative Party itself (see my 'Abolition of Britain'). If you were of that generation, or influenced by it, the logical thing to do in 1997 and 2001 was to vote Labour whichever party you belonged to.
Now a note to Mr Embery, who says: 'Peter Hitchens, predictably, gets it completely wrong over the Colin Atkinson affair. He suggests that most union officials' commitment to "equality and diversity codes" would have led to their refusing to take on Mr Atkinson's case. Actually, the opposite is true. Religion was an embedded strand within the Equality Act 2010 - though why a belief system which one chooses to adopt should be considered worthy of the same protection as someone discriminated against on grounds of colour, age, etc is perplexing - and this has led to all unions being required to devise strategies for the new concept of defending the religious beliefs of members in the workplace. So that pesky "equality and diversity agenda" which Mr Hitchens constantly bemoans was probably the reason Terry Cunliffe came to Mr Atkinson's defence.'
First of all he misrepresents me (right under the passage which he subtly alters, why bother? ) in a way that has already caused some trouble elsewhere. He turns a general statement of 'many' into a particular, exact assertion,. 'most'. Will people please not do this? I did not use the word 'most', lacking the facts to justify this. I said :'Many unions are keen on ‘Equality and Diversity’ codes, and wouldn’t have taken the case.'
Next I believe him to be factually wrong. The defence of the private right to hold to a religion *in private*, as enshrined in 'Equality' rules and legislation, is entirely different ( and meant to be entirely different) from the previous position (which I know Mr Embery did not like) under which Christianity was the accepted dominant religion of this country. Mr Embery regards such a position as 'wrongful 'discrimination' against non-Christian religions. To make Christianity 'equal' with any other religion is consciously and deliberately to diminish it. I regard Christianity's formal supremacy here not as 'discrimination' but as an acknowledgement of the beliefs which undergird our freedom and our civilisation (freedom and civilisation which will not long survive our society;'s abandonment of the ideas from which they sprang).
Take the case of Caroline Petrie, a community nurse suspended without pay after offering to pray (in a Christian way) for a patient ( who was not offended by the offer). Her Primary Care Trust said she had failed to demonstrate a 'personal and professional commitment to equality and diversity' by offering her prayers. Note the totalitarian requirement positively to demonstrate a commitment, not merely negatively to refrain from undermining it. The patient did not complain. In an article on the case on 8th February 2009, the MoS quoted Mrs Petrie herself as saying that an RCN (Royal College of Nursing, her union) official told her: 'You're in breach of your code of conduct. If you don't stop it, the NHS won't give you any work. If you're not careful they'll have you under laws of religious harassment and you'll be struck off.'
The RCN did not deny this. As the story went on: 'The RCN says it provided "appropriate, professional advice".'
NHS employees are in fact contractually bound by codes of practice requiring them to observe 'equality and diversity', which - by considering all religions as equal, and relegating Christianity to the status of a private opinion rather than the basis of public policy - removes the formerly privileged position given to Christianity in public bodies. As far as I know, the NHS unions have accepted this, and it would therefore be difficult for them to defend an employee on such an issue without a major change of policy. Mrs Petrie was, I am glad to say, reinstated anyway, thanks to the MoS and Christian campaigners.
I believe Mr Embery's own union, which is itself rampantly politically correct, has failed to offer any criticisms of the imposed sex quotas which have led to the general lowering of physical standards for both sexes in the fire brigades (or fire service, as Mr Embery no doubt refers to it -let's not be 'militaristic'). Some might argue that these quotas increase the safety risks of the job quite markedly - a legitimate union concern.
I have myself written about this pursuit of dogma at length in the past, and may post the articles here if there is enough interest. But it was also the subject of a recent story in the 'Sunday Times' of 10th April, which said: 'Fire chiefs have downgraded strenuous "ladder lifting" tests for new recruits in a bid to allow more women, and less fit men, into the service.
'Whereas candidates once had to extend a 100kg (220 pound) ladder on their own in 20 seconds before they could become firefighters, they now only have to raise a bar weighing 30kg (66 pounds) above their head.
'Physically demanding runs, in which recruits completed increasingly faster sprints, have also been scrapped. Nor are they required to carry a 12-stone person 100 yards in less than a minute.'
Personally I think this a classic example of dogma trumping common sense. I have no objection to strong, fit women working in the fire brigades on merit, and am aware of several who meet these criteria. But I object strongly to general standards being reduced in pursuit of a fanciful and unattainable total equality between the sexes.
Mr Embery also asks :' Would Mr Hitchens and his friends defend the prominent placing of a crucifix (or let's say the star and crescent, or a Sikh dagger) on a fire appliance racing to a fire? '
As I believe this to be a Christian country, I would certainly defend the placing of a Cross (terminology is important here: a crucifix, that is to say, a Cross bearing a figure of the crucified Christ, would be a specifically Roman Catholic symbol rather than a generally Christian one) on any vehicle dedicated to mercy, rescue and the exercise of selfless courage, since it is the principles of the Sermon on the Mount that lie behind the existence of such vehicles and the services of which they form a part. I suspect that many such vehicles do bear such a symbol anyway, since many local authority coats of arms in this country contain a Cross in one form or another (that of Portsmouth, in a remarkable anomaly, bears the Muslim crescent for historical reasons I have forgotten) .
I am surprised that so many contributors here post as if there was still a dispute about the actual existence of the historical Jesus. I had thought that serious historians were now in agreement that He did indeed live in the place and at the time that the Gospels affirm. I do not think that this settles the question of the truth of Christianity (I have repeatedly said that this remains a matter of choice). What I suspect is that God-haters of various sorts wish to find a way of attempting to declare that belief is impossible and that there is no choice.
This is so as to free themselves of the need to explain why they choose chaos instead of order, pointlessness instead of purpose, and power instead of grace and love.
Now, it is true that Guevara's bloodstained behaviour is an extreme, or distilled, example of revolutionary utopian behaviour. But then so is dying willingly on a cross an extreme, or distilled example of Christian self-sacrifice. It is the contrast between these two distillations that I wished to make.
As for the bloody killings perpetrated by some Christians, there is no doubt that these took place (I pass the site of one of them each day, where Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer were burned to death in the heart of Oxford). But it is hard to see how those who conducted them could justify them through the words or example of Jesus of Nazareth, who - on the night of his betrayal - told his disciples to put up their swords and refrain from defending him with force.
Whereas any Communist executioner in any gore-speckled cellar could gain justification for his acts from the words (and actions) of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Guevara, and even from those of 'nice' Bolsheviks such as Nikolai Bukharin, whose role in the judicial murder of Social Revolutionaries presaged his own judicial murder at the hands of Stalin. See my book 'The Rage Against God'.