Is this war?

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

After the 'Toff at the Top' programme, I thought I should offer a few further thoughts on why proper conservatives should oppose David Cameron, even if he appears to be successful. One very good reason is that some people would much prefer it if these criticisms were not made anywhere, ever.

A friend has been censored by a certain newspaper (I may return to this elsewhere) for writing criticisms of Mr Cameron. She is not the first, but I won't go into that here. As we discussed her treatment, she mused that the pro-Cameron forces regard the current state of affairs as a war in which normal rules don't apply.

That means they may think it actually wrong, on occasions, to tell the truth. Also that they may regard critics not as opponents, more even as enemies, and as little better than traitors to the sacred cause.

How on earth do I answer this accusation? I am increasingly accused, by Tory supporters, of actively hoping for a Gordon Brown victory at the next election. Dark references are made to my Trotskyist past, as if I have secretly been maintaining my membership of a Bolshevik coven for the past quarter-century, whilst posing first as a disillusioned socialist, then as a homeless ex-social democrat forced into deep thought by close engagement with the Communist countries, then as a Cold Warrior and foe of IRA terrorism, then as a Tory and finally emerging again in my true colours - as an enthusiast for the boring, dismal Marxoid Gordon.

Well, it seems an awfully long time to have gone underground for such a dreary final aim, but I suppose it's possible that I have been working for the other side all the time. Those of us who enjoy spy stories know of stranger tales than this. But may I suggest that it's not the only possible explanation of my behaviour?

Actually, others have suggested some, mainly that I am in fact a mad Nazi. This has long been the view on the Left, and it is interesting to see it emerging on the supposed right as well. Hours before my critical programme on David Cameron was due to be shown on Channel Four last night , there was a vigorous discussion of it on the website 'Conservative Home'. The rage of the affronted Cameroons was on full display, and heaven knows what it would have been like if any of them had actually seen the film.

The jibes were unimprovably witty and trenchant. What a nasty little man I am, and why don't I just *** off and join the BNP?, asked one. The answer to that's simple. I disdain the BNP's racial bigotry and don't agree with their policies. However, why should that stand in the way of this cogent critic? As for being nasty and little, I can confirm that my height is 5' 9" and that not everyone loves me, but would only ask if that automatically makes my opinions invalid.

"Peter Hitchens is rapidly descending into raving insanity", said another. I am unceasingly amazed at the numbers of qualified psychiatrists who emerge during these debates. I'm also accused of anti-Americanism, which, as someone who chose to live in America, loved it and would cheerfully return, I always find amusing. I'm also accused of still resenting my failure to be selected as Tory candidate for Kensington and Chelsea in 1999. Obviously. Except that I don't resent it. Can I ever begin to explain how horrified and amazed I would have been had I been selected? I have often explained this, and the circumstantial evidence runs strongly in my favour too, but the slur is brought up against me again and again, even so.

I'm glad to say that quite a lot of correspondents also came to my defence, though there was an underlying feeling that principle and practical politics cannot go together, which I believe to be mistaken. As for the abuse, I expect there will be quite a lot more of this kind of thing now. At this point in British political history, criticising David Cameron from a conservative point of view is just not done.

I don't take this view because, while I agree there's a war on which we must take sides, and whose outcome is critical for the future of our civilisation, I think the front is elsewhere.

I do not think the front lies between the Labour and Tory front benches, where men of broadly similar education and views churn endlessly in the narrow strip of cratered mud they christen the centre ground - each claiming to be better than the other at running hospitals and schools. In fact, none of them is the slightest good at either of these tasks, since - as all proper conservatives know - governments cannot run such things anyway.

No, the front is in the great war for civilisation which is being comprehensively lost at the moment. Mainly, that war is about behaviour. How are we to bring up our children? What ideas should guide their upbringing? What moral system should guide their behaviour?What should be the purpose of their education(This is something governments can influence while then leaving teachers and schools to get on with pursuing it).

The frontier is in the housing estates where the old, weak and female don't feel safe, and often aren't safe. On the dark streets where respectable citizens cross the road to avoid encounters with hooded figures, in the modest homes where the honest poor - after a lifetime of hard and dutiful work and parenthood - crouch in fear of mockery, cruelty, theft or assault.

The frontier is in our armed forces, the last great British institution as yet undestroyed by Labour hatred and Tory feebleness - where those who seek to maintain some standards of discipline and effectiveness are menaced by the ideology of political correctness and by the constant demand of the Treasury to transfer money to the gargantuan welfare state.

The frontier is in the family, which cannot be defended by vague warm statements but only by determined action restoring the unique privileges and status of marriage, and the right of parents to raise their own children. the frontier is in classrooms where teachers and parents are forced to accept the feeding of sexually radical propaganda to their impressionable young.

And the frontier is over national independence, without which none of these battles can be fought and which is an absolute thing, requiring the right to make our own laws and decide who can cross our own borders - neither of which we now possess.

In that war, the Tory Party is an active threat to the good side. It lures voters with false promises of action, especially near election times. If it wins, it then does the work of the enemy. Who is the traitor, the Lord Haw-Haw?Me, or the people who repeatedly lie to the British people that they will 'reform' the EU (you might as well try to 'reform' the Alps or the Atlantic Ocean)? Me, or the people who flatly refuse to consider the only measure that would put rigour, discipline and quality back into British state education - selection? Me, or the people who have always been, and continue to be, soft on narcotic drugs? me or the people who are happy to see more mass immigration? Me, or the people who refuse to see the importance of punishment and preventive patrolling in the battle to restore order, because they are blinded to the obvious by political correctness?

As it happens, I don't regard these people with the same hostility they direct at me. I regard some of them as not being beyond rescue. I am happy to debate with them and to defend my case against them, Very few of them will do me the same favour. I expect this now to worsen, to find myself more frequently personally attacked and deliberately misrepresented. Well, too bad. New Labour have been doing the same for years, and the continuity between the two suggests I am on the right track. I do wish more people would realise just how much the Blairites long for David Cameron to win, and worked out what this meant.

Some retorts to contributors

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

A brief selection of points from last week...

Tim Lemon popped in again from the parallel universe he appears to inhabit, asking for the 'evidence' of the dangers of cannabis. I am perplexed by this poor soul, who seems upset that, on this blog, people are given to attacking social liberals.

That is what it is like here. I believe there are other places where social liberalism is still generally thought to be a good idea. But not here. Mr Lemon, I think you should go and take a look at the Independent on Sunday, which has been devoting pages to this very evidence. I understand that you may not wish to take it from me, even though I got there first, but the whole point is that the once-pro-cannabis liberal IoS has now changed its mind about the dangers of the drug, on the basis of evidence.

A number of correspondents attacked the supposed 'severity' of my proposed cannabis law - which was, you may recall, a caution without a criminal record for a first offence of possession, and a year's hard labour for a second. Were they paying attention?

Anyone with a first offence would have been more than adequately warned not to do it again. If they were 'curious' enough to use cannabis again, knowing that it would net them a year breaking rocks, then they would have to be very curious people indeed, in both senses of the word, to risk such a fate by doing it again. The point about effective punishment is that it actively deters.

I expect a defiant few might actually have to be carted off to jail, to make it plain the system is serious, but after that I think this unpleasant drug would rapidly cease to be fashionable among everybody except the very stupid indeed. So you wouldn't need to empty the jails to make way for millions of cannabis convicts.

On the contrary, the diminished use of this drug, now involved in increasing numbers of violent crimes, and in many others as well, might well help empty the jails. Iain Campbell also urges yet another attempt at the futile, failed policy (which has most definitely been tried) of attacking the drug dealers.

People will deal in drugs when there is a market for them. The price will adjust to the risks and the levels of supply. But if nobody will buy, where will the dealers be? And why is the dealer of the substance viewed as dreadfully evil, whereas the user is regarded as some sort of pitiable victim in need of 'treatment' ? It is ineffective and wholly illogical - and ineffective because it is illogical. What has not been tried is what I suggest. It would work - but it would need guts.

On the subject of marriage, Simon writes to say that he thinks my statements imply that I do not think that people with living spouses should be allowed to marry. Well, he is partly right. I do think we should aim at a society where marriage is difficult to contract, preceded by long engagement, and is then expected to last until death.

But I recognise that such a society is a long way off at the moment. If we offered people the opportunity to volunteer for a type of marriage that was harder to dissolve, and gave them more privileges and status as a result, that might allow us to re-examine the issue. I think some states in the US have examined this idea, calling it 'Covenant Marriage'.

I am not interested in compelling people to stay together against their will under the current laws, for most now marry with at least the fear of possible divorce already in their minds, and the certainty that no-fault unilateral divorce is readily available. To announce now that they had to face lifelong wedlock would be to change the rules retrospectively, always a bad thing.

There are two central questions here. There's a specific one about Charles, who has a special position as Supreme Governor of the Church and an active supporter of the doctrine of the I662 Prayer Book (now so rarely used as to be little more than a small conservative faction within the Anglican church).

My view is that he cannot say one thing and do another, and also that, since his claim to the throne relies on unalterable law and the sanction of the Church, he cannot ignore these things in any other areas of his life. The other is whether society has made a major advance by introducing first civil marriage, and then easier and easier divorce. Or whether it has gone backwards by doing so.

The divorce faction has had all the best tunes for a century. The argument for divorce can always be made to sound humane - the sighing of the trapped spouse in a loveless, even violent marriage, the rows, etc. And these things undoubtedly happen and are much to be regretted.

Two answers come to mind. One, that even a lifelong marriage cannot compel an unwilling party to stay in the home of he or she does not want to. Separation has been permitted by most churches. The issue is not whether you may leave, but whether you may then marry again.

The second is that it is the care of the children that is the most important task, and that if divorce becomes common, or general (as it has) and serial marriage and step-parents common, huge numbers of children suffer all kinds of appalling unhappiness, and are themselves deprived of examples of constancy and fidelity, so that the ability of society to found and sustain stable marriages first diminishes, then disappears.

Stable marriages become rare, and rarer. Social pressure to remain, or get married, diminishes and then fails altogether. Marriages which might once have stayed together through a bad patch, break up at the first sign of trouble. Neither arrangement is perfect. Both will subject some individuals to pain and unhappiness.

The question is which is in the end preferable and best for society in general. I do not think the case for lifelong marriage is nowadays even considered by most people, and I think that is one of the unintended effects of easing divorce - a reform originally intended for a small minority. I think we should be prepared to consider it again, in the light of the grave social damage done by mass marriage break-up.

There is an even wider issue here, that of private life and independence from the state. A country in which marriage is not respected, breaks up frequently and is weak, is a country in which the state will have to be strong, and will be strong, and in which private life will be weakened and threatened. Sound familiar?

'Toff at the Top'

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

For the past few weeks I've been making a programme about David Cameron, without his help. The result will be shown on Channel Four on Monday evening (March 26th) at 8pm. under the title 'Toff at the Top'. I make no pretence of being an unbiased observer, and make it clear in the programme that I am not ( as I wish more broadcasters would do - the pretence of impartiality is increasingly absurd).

But I think many supporters of Mr Cameron will be struck by the conclusions of our interviewees about what his approach to politics is. I trust they will also be interested in Michael Gove's defence of his leader ( Michael, an old friend, generously agreed to put the Cameron case when he didn't have to). I hope to discuss the whole thing at greater length here next week - but I make one small point. Isn't it interesting that Channel Four came to me, a disaffected conservative, rather than - as you might have expected - a left-wing journalist, to make a programme critical of the new Tory leader? This is a sign of how the political categories are shifting, in a way the opinion polls continue to hide. Some of the most passionate supporters of Mr Cameron are now to be found amongst the ranks of the now leaderless Blairites.

Some responses

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

Jeff Pollitt writes to say that he cannot go along with 'hereditary power'. Well, first, he does already go along with it because as he rightly points out, in the USA (which he appears to admire as a pure democracy) and also Britain (despite heavy socialistic taxes) people are allowed to inherit from their parents, which is the foundation of private property, which is the foundation of freedom.  If there were no inheritance, and no private property, everything would be subject to the state.

Wealth, private or commercial, is one of the main sources of power in any society, especially free ones. If it can be inherited, then so can power. So I cannot really see his principled objection. If he objects to unelected people exercising power, what about the USA's unelected but immensely potent Supreme Court? And why is it so wonderful to have an elected President as head of state? When Richard Nixon was in office, and asking his subordinates to do illegal acts, they had no recourse except to quit, and decided that was more than their jobs were worth. In Britain, where an unelected Monarch is the head of state, and we have a neutral civil service and armed forces, officials, judges, soldiers and policemen are all obliged to refuse unlawful orders from ministers or anyone else. Mixing up party politics with the headship of state is a definite disadvantage. You'll have to do better than this, Mr Pollitt. It's no good just saying "I don't like it because I don't like it".

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Simon writes to object to my point that Charles, as Supreme Governor of the Church of England and a vocal supporter of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, cannot marry a person whose husband is still alive. He says he too has a living ex-wife, who deserted him after breaking her vows. Shouldn't he be able to marry again?   Well, as it happens, he can do so -provided he gets a divorce. Civil marriage, which can be easily dissolved and is not lifelong, has pretty much supplanted lifelong religious marriage as ordained by the Prayer Book.  But in my view he shouldn't be able to marry in Church, under the 1662 marriage service which clearly requires that both parties have no living spouse, and also demands a clear, unequivocal pledge to remain married for life. It's simply a matter of saying what you mean, and meaning what you say.  Civil marriage has for many years now been understood as a temporary pact.

Charles can only succeed to the throne because of unalterable law, based upon the Christian religion which is the foundation of our constitution and of the monarchy itself.  If he chooses to disregard the equally unalterable laws of the Church (of which he is supreme governor, though not the head) he is in rather a different position from Jeff. If the one can be ignored, then so can be the other, and then, before he knows where he is, he’s just plain Mr Charles Windsor of Highgrove, isn't he?  As it happens, I think the Divorce Act of 1968, which made it possible for one party to a marriage to destroy it whatever the other party thought or wanted, a deeply damaging piece of legislation. And I deplore the long series of court rulings which have made the conduct of spouses irrelevant to the property and custody settlements following divorce. (See the relevant chapter in 'Abolition of Britain'). So you can behave very badly and still walk off with the house, the children and a lot of money. The effect of these measures is a gruesome intervention by the state in private life. It means that a husband or wife, with no desire to end his or her marriage, can be dragged from his or her own home and his or her children, under threat of imprisonment. It's usually the husband, but that's just the way things work out.  As an illustration of the huge power of the state, and the feeble legal defences of private life and the wedded state, it is pretty frightening.

Some American commentators have suggested that the law should recognise a form of marriage known as 'covenant marriage' in which the barriers to divorce are set much higher, and husband and wife agree from the start that they should be. I believe some states have considered this idea and one or two have even enacted it. I think there is something in this, and that in general marriage should be harder to get into and harder to get out of - and possess many more unique privileges and unique higher status. Charles is an (admittedly involuntary) public figure who must surely be asked to live by the law. tradition and religion that together will one day make him King, and by the rules he himself recommends to others. We're all stuck with that.

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Geoff posts a confused comment on my remarks about Channel 4, seeming to suggest that it is impossible to laud some of its programmes and attack others. Why?  I praise Channel Four for the good things it does, and criticise it for the bad ones (uninfluenced, I hope, by the fact that Channel 4 has commissioned my forthcoming programme about David Cameron). Must I condemn the good programmes because the same station has made bad ones? What an odd idea. The same person also tells me to 'get a grip' because I think marriage is for life. A grip on what? Disagreeing with people, Geoff, is often about having a different idea from them about what is important and what is not. I think the assault on lifelong marriage by our culture has been - and continues to be - a grave danger to millions of children. I think the behaviour of prominent people influences this matter. You may disagree. But at least consider the possibility that I may have a point.

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Grant criticises me for being 'hopelessly optimistic'. This is a new experience for me, and I have had to go and lie down in a darkened room to recover.

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Valentine Hayes, now safely back in Toronto, asks me about the first-past-the -post system. I favour it for several reasons. First because it forces coalitions to form openly before elections, in the form of recognisable political parties with known programmes, so that the voters can know in advance what they' re getting. Proportional Representation, where the coalitions tend to get fixed up after the polls have closed, can and does produce some very odd combinations - see its alarming effect in New Zealand recently. I also favour it because it allows a reasonably long period of strong, decisive government, but also permits the electorate to turn such a government out, completely and mercilessly, if it objects to its measures and methods - again within a reasonable time. Finally, I prefer it because it sustains an adversarial parliament - or it does when there are proper parties in competition. This means all government actions are rigorously tested in strong debate and frequent votes where the government must persuade its supporters to back it openly and publicly. I admit that this breaks down when all major parties crawl into the muddy no-man's land of consensus policies, but - as you must surely all know by now - I have a simple proposal for altering that.

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I think Jack is wrong about the title 'Defender of the Faith' which he says was altered by Elizabeth I to 'Defender of Faith'.  Pope Paul III revoked the title given to Henry VIII. The English Parliament then mischievously awarded the same title to Henry's zealously Protestant son Edward VI. A previous Pope, Leo X had indeed originally given the title, to Henry VIIII for his attack on Luther. But the title was originally in Latin in both its versions (‘Fidei Defensor’) and appears even today on our coins as 'F.D' - though those who remember our older coinage will recall the full inscription as something like (I'm working from memory) "D.G. R. Omn. Mag. Brit.,  Fid. Def." and, on the older ones. "Ind Imp" as well. There is no definite article in Latin. It was Charles who mused in 1994 that he might wish to become 'Defender of Faith’ as a whole, so including Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Zoroastrians, Baha'is and all faiths under his Crown, a suggestion I think he has now gone rather quiet about and which would be legally difficult to implement. His mother, interestingly, is 'Defender of the Faith'  and 'Defenseur de la Foi' in Canada, which has no established Church but at the time of her Coronation was largely divided between English-speaking Protestants and French-speaking Roman Catholics.

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I agree with the contributors who were pleased to see a 'Question Time' audience more open than they were a few months ago to the idea that the argument about what causes climate change is still open. I think the Channel 4 programme has changed the atmosphere - and by the way, while there have been several attacks on that programme, they do not by any means address or nullify all the many points it made, you really should try to see it before condemning it.  A full-scale televised debate would be worth having.

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One pro-Cannabis campaigner recants, a bit. A million or so still haven't

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

My first impulse when I heard that the Independent on Sunday had abandoned its wicked campaign to legalise dope was to rejoice. Then I read the paper, and rejoiced less. Then I thought about it, and rejoiced even less than that.
   

Yet we must still be generous. Those of us who endured being called 'bonkers' for saying correctly that cannabis is a dangerous poison must welcome any convert, however reluctant and tardy.  This is one of those subjects where defiance of conventional wisdom earns you pure hatred. I can remember feeling the waves of loathing surging towards me in various broadcasting studios where, allowed my couple of minutes to warn against legal dope, I was obviously giving personal grief to several of the journalists and others present.
    

I must except from this my old friend and adversary Rosie Boycott, who as editor of the Independent on Sunday launched its wrong-headed campaign to decriminalise this disgusting drug. By a series of reversals and upsets that no man could have predicted, Rosie later became my editor on another newspaper, and behaved throughout with perfect tolerance and good manners, worthy of the best traditions of British fair play.
                           

When I eventually departed, she gave me a hug, declaring rather movingly, but without Voltaire's elegance of language "Everything you write is complete ****, but I like you". So there, you see, people can disagree profoundly about practically everything, and still retain their essential humanity.
                            

The Independent on Sunday pretends that the links between cannabis and mental illness were not known when it launched its campaign. This isn't true, though there is no doubt that there is now far more evidence than there was then. Actually, it's logical to link any mind-altering drug with mental illness, since by its nature it messes around with the delicate and little-understood functions of the brain, and must therefore be risky at the very least.
                            

It also says that the ultra-strong Skunk, which is not very convincingly blamed for this mental illness surge, was not well known then. I think this is also mistaken. And I'm by no means convinced that 'weaker' versions of the weed are that safe. 
                              

Sometimes I wonder if the cannabis lobby didn't at some stage hire a very skilful spin-doctor. A greasy, messy drug, known until recently as the slothful solace of the desperate and dispossessed poor of the third world, has managed an amazing image transformation. It has somehow managed to portray itself as a sort of herbal cure for modern life, organic, free-range, environmentally sound and hip as well. Various rubbish about its (highly dubious) medicinal properties is widely believed by otherwise intelligent people. Why, if it were legalised, you'd probably find it on sale in health food shops.
          

It's certainly true that the middle classes of most western countries have become demoralised on this subject, largely thanks to the very widespread use of cannabis in British universities, attended by almost all significant opinion formers, from the late 1960s onwards. This is my exact generation and educational cohort, and the one in which I have the fewest supporters and sympathisers. Most of the people who share some or all of my views are either older or quite a lot younger than I am, or never went near a university.
                              

People who used dope themselves are always ready to bore on about how it never did them any harm, though how they're in a position to know, I've no idea.  Perhaps the general softening of the brains of the educated classes, which enabled them to welcome Anthony Blair as a saviour ten years ago - without anyone laughing - is a sign that, in fact, all that 'mild' dope did do them severe harm.
                                  

What the Independent on Sunday definitely doesn't do is to take the next logical step, which is to call for a strictly enforced law against the possession of cannabis. It complacently says that the current feeble law is more or less all right.
   

Those, like me, who advocate strict enforcement do not do so because we want to fill the jails with unharmful vegetarian students. Personally I'd favour one warning, with no criminal record, for a first offender - followed by an automatic one-year jail sentence with hard labour and a criminal record, for a second offence. We do it because we want to save thousands of gullible, weak-willed teenagers from taking this dangerous muck and wrecking their brains for life, simply because it is fashionable to do so.
    

The existence of strict legal penalties, strictly enforced, would give them all an argument against the pressure of their friends and classmates. It hasn't been tried. It should be. It might save someone known to you from a life on the locked ward.

 

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Fake caring about Zimbabwe

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

Do I care about Zimbabwe? Should you? Every few months, the British media, together with a certain number of politicians, make a fuss about the misery now afflicting that sad country. They sympathise with its ill-fed, oppressed people and with the leaders of its opposition movements. Pictures and reports are published of the horrible beatings given to those who dare to oppose the country's tyrant,  Robert Mugabe. The BBC makes a great to-do about how it is banned from Zimbabwe but still manages to get information out.
                                 

Nobody can read these accounts without a feeling of outrage and a desire to do or say something. But in my view this is in fact a selfish impulse, unless you are prepared to act personally in some way that will improve matters. We become inflamed with righteous anger about these things, only to prove to ourselves that we are nice, civilised people. In truth, we have absolutely no intention of doing anything about it.
   

And if we did, it would probably fail.  I don't know how many of those who call for intervention in Zimbabwe could find it on a map, but the fact that the country has no coastline could present a small problem to anyone who wanted to invade it. In any case, this is all futile stuff.
                                  

The disastrous and irreparable defeat of British arms by the Japanese in Singapore in 1942 finished the British empire for all time, though it would take a little while for this truth to become obvious. India went first, and, after a pause ended by the Suez fiasco, the rest followed soon afterwards. Not only could we not afford the empire any more. Our reputation for invincibility had been smashed by Japan, and we had lost the psychological advantage we had gained in the 18th century and had reinforced by our merciless crushing of the Indian mutiny in 1857.
                                    

All over Asia, the Japanese had been careful to see that captured British officers and soldiers were visible to their former colonial subjects, reduced to the status of humiliated, suppliant slaves. The effects of this were enormous and permanent in Asia, and word spread to Africa quite quickly.
                                     

Britain, which during the war against Hitler was understandably paying less attention to the Empire than it would otherwise have done, was slow to realise how much things had changed. But by the end of the 1950s, its leaders decided it could not afford an African colonial empire.
                                       

Its influence in the area has been in decline ever since, replaced by the USA, China, Cuba and - to a surprisingly small extent - Russia. The problem with Zimbabwe, formerly Southern Rhodesia, was that it was already semi-independent and self-governing in any case, with a white minority that did not wish to lose its privileged way of life because of Britain's decline. It was very difficult for a British government, trying to soothe the feelings of the United Nations and to scrub away all traces of unfashionable colonial supremacy, to force the Southern Rhodesians into giving up their power. They had good reason to suspect that, when they did, they would swiftly lose their pampered way of life.
         

So London devoted much of the late 1960s and all the 1970s to trying to force a settlement there that would enable the British government to avoid all future responsibility and appear in tune with modern thinking.  This ended in 1979, under the Thatcher government but endorsed by the whole British establishment, with the Lancaster House agreement.
                              

This handed Zimbabwe to the sinister Robert Mugabe -  mainly because he was too politically and militarily strong to be denied. There were better men available, but they were not strong enough, and the rigged elections which followed confirmed the Lancaster House settlement
                                     

The history of that process is long, complicated and not specially honourable on any side. It involves, as so often, the curious paradox that the campaigners for 'freedom' turned out to be tyrants themselves once they had power, and that life under the 'colonial oppressors' was in many ways more prosperous and peaceful than it was to become later. You do not have to be a sympathiser of Ian Smith, the leader of the Rhodesian Front and the chief opponent of majority rule, to recognise that Robert Mugabe has done terrible damage to the country and its people. You do not have to be a partisan of Robert Mugabe to recognise that Smith's Southern Rhodesia was a state based on racial discrimination, that could not survive and should not have survived as it was. Was this unavoidable? Possibly.
                  

Intelligent British politicians and diplomats knew, or at least suspected back in the 1950s and 1960s that the end of empire might well mean severe suffering for the people involved.  Most of them probably privately admitted that - as in India in 1947 - this country simply no longer had the strength to rule, and that it must make the best of a very bad bargain by trying to leave behind as much democracy, law and freedom, and as strong an economy, as it could manage.
                                          

Many of the British colonial administrators, in Africa and Asia, were genuinely devoted men who had worked very hard to bring incorruptible justice, education and prosperity.  Such men did all that they could to leave good things behind - and I am always greatly moved by two legacies that seem to have lasted specially well. 
                                          

Even where elections are rigged and parliaments fail, and civil servants are corrupt, it is amazing how often African judges defy the new tyrants of Africa, releasing political prisoners and halting torture. And it is equally amazing how often African journalists continue to print the truth, despite the very real danger of torture and death, or the smashing of their presses. Free speech and law, interestingly enough, may be more important and enduring than democracy in securing justice and liberty.
               

What practical conclusions can we draw from this? First, that our power in these parts of the world is gone for good, and it is just posturing to imagine that a protest in London will make any difference there. Comrade Mugabe's response that his critics could 'go hang' is rude and brusque, but also an accurate estimate of how things stand. He doesn't care what we think, and what's more he doesn't even pretend to care.
                

That's embarrassing of him.  We would much prefer an expression of concern, some sign that we matter, even if don't. In fact, his taunting of us for our powerlessness may be his greatest offence against those interventionist liberals who like to imagine that a tough leading article in the Guardian will make Harare tremble.
                                       

Second, that the worst crimes of empires often come at the finish of them.  Having persuaded people to rely on our power and our ability to protect them,  we abruptly change our minds and disappear over the horizon, leaving them with a parliament building, a flag, an anthem, several unresolved territorial disputes and (quite often) a Mugabe figure who, if not very pleasant, is at least strong enough to take over the state.
                                          

This is, so far as I have been able to work out, the most powerful argument against empire - which in its British form was often highly benevolent so long as it existed.  It has to end, and when it does, there is almost always tragedy. People often say, without thinking, that the winding up of the British empire was a civilised and creditable episode. I completely disagree. the scuttle from India, 60 years ago this year, and the smaller but more poisonous scuttle from Palestine soon afterwards, are among the most shameful episodes in British history. Our departure from Africa was not much better. The USA, and its ring of loyal client states in the former Soviet Union, from the Caucasus to the Baltic, should beware of a comparable bout of shameful departures, probably in the next 30 years, when Washington loses interest in this part of the world and Moscow reasserts its ancient dominance.
                     

Third, that other countries do not exist to provide broad open spaces in which we can exercise our constipated, under-used consciences. It is incredibly easy, and rather enjoyable, to rail against tyrants and injustice a long way away. The tyrants cannot get at you, and if you travel to these places on a Western passport, the worst you are likely to face is expulsion. But it is so much harder, and less glamorous, to challenge the power-grabbers and would-tyrants, and petty but persistent injustices, in your own home country - where your targets can take revenge.
            

Fourth, that intervention cannot permanently alter the balance of power in foreign lands. Unless you are prepared to stay forever, the 'improvements' you achieve will not survive your departure by more than a few years. Worse, people who trusted you and relied on you will be left to dreadful fates.
                                              

Caring about a foreign injustice is futile unless you have the means to express your concern through effective, sustained action. It is an impulse designed to make the carer feel good to himself, and look good in the eyes of others, rather than to do good. So the honest answer, for most of us, is that we do not really care. But who dares say so? To say in a public place that you do not think Britain should intervene in Zimbabwe is to court shocked disapproval. Yet those who say they think we should intervene are applauded - even if they have no intention of doing anything.

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Monarchy in the age of New Labour

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

I'll start this entry with a declaration of non-interest, since anyone who writes anything nice about the monarchy is immediately accused of grubbing after honours or some other sort of favour. Well, while I'd be very happy to be offered a hereditary Viscountcy with a large grant of acres and the Thanks of Parliament, for my role in destroying the Tory Party, replacing it with a truly pro-British party and so helping to rescue and preserve national independence and liberty, I think I can be pretty sure that - even if I succeed in my campaign - there'll be no peerage in it. I'll have to just accept that I'm doing it for its own sake, and so will you.

I am not in any way in the pocket of the Prince of Wales, nor do I seek to be. On the contrary, I have always condemned his decision to marry Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles, from the moment he began his public relations campaign to be allowed to do so. Mrs Parker Bowles has a living husband and therefore, according to the Book of Common Prayer which Charles so often endorses, cannot marry anyone else. Some people can decide they don't care about such niceties. But heirs to the throne, whose whole future depends on the continued observance by others of ancient, unalterable rules, are stuck.

I might add that I am told by the historian Tristram Hunt that Charles was at one stage quite keen to discuss my book 'The Abolition of Britain' with me - but was persuaded by his advisers that it would be a grave mistake to have anything to do with such a wild, extremist person. So I was not asked to tea at Highgrove, and am not likely to be.

Even so, I think that Charles is, on the whole, a Good Thing, and think he should be defended against the kind of attack made on him in a TV programme this week (on Channel 4, which seems to have become the main forum for political TV lately). This is no reflection on his private life, which I wish I knew less about. And I am sorry that he seems to have been got at by the 'human activity causes global warming' fanatics. But I think that his general view of life is actually quite close to the rather attractive position known in the USA as 'crunchy conservatism', for which I have a lot of time.

This involves being genuinely conservative about institutions, religion, architecture, landscape, language and art - while accepting that a lot of the things that the post-1960s generation enthuse about have a point. Bicycles are a good way of getting around crowded cities. Organic farming - for example - may not produce healthier food. I don't know. But there is no doubt that it is hugely beneficial to the countryside and the creatures and plants that used to flourish in it.

Before it was kidnapped by the zealots, the environmental cause involved small, reasonable moral actions taken by individuals for their own benefit and the benefit of others, rather than highly-publicised gestures designed to look correct without actually achieving anything. (A good word should be put in here for a critic and opponent of mine, George Monbiot, who in a TV programme a week ago pointed out with some force that much government and corporate 'action' on global warming is in fact empty posing.) I think Charles was an early advocate of such measures.

I think his charitable work is thoughtful and often effective. I think his management of the Duchy of Cornwall is generally benevolent. I think his attack on crass modern architecture was entirely justified. I think Poundbury is a reproach to much modern housebuilding. And I think that his instinctive feeling that he can act as the champion for people disenfranchised by Blairism is also right and justified. More, I think that his mother, the Queen, has on several occasions failed to be as tough as she could and should have been when her governments have gone beyond the constitution. I think she should have been more resistant to the European project and to the attacks on civil service neutrality by both Mrs Thatcher and Mr Blair. And she has also, quite wrongly, endorsed actions or polices of Blairism which she should at least have kept quiet about, or even opposed. I am thinking of her public approval of the 1998 surrender to the IRA, and her Christmas broadcast in which she praised multiculturalism.

Anyone who tries to discuss the political role of the monarchy is immediately banged over the head by tedious quotations from Walter Bagehot (it helps a lot if you know this is pronounced Badjot), who for some reason is believed to be the last word on the subject, thanks to some 19th-century scribblings that have become famous. He limited the functions of the monarch to muttering hesitant advice, and perhaps warnings, into the ears of ministers. This is taken as a sort of gospel on the subject.

And this might have worked in the dead era when the British establishment was run by gentlemen. Though don't be so sure. George V exerted all his influence to obtain a peaceful settlement in Ireland in 1921, which few can object to, but was he entitled to do so? He may well have gone beyond his powers in helping set up the National Government of 1931. Edward VIII came close to causing complete constitutional catastrophe. George VI utterly disgraced himself when he publicly lauded Neville Chamberlain's catastrophic surrender at Munich in 1938, an error he atoned for later but which oughtn't to be overlooked, ever. It is not often enough remembered that George VI and his Queen (the future Queen Mother) invited Chamberlain on to the balcony of Buckingham Palace to bathe in the cheers and admiration of a gigantic, deluded crowd, the whole embarrassing scene illuminated by the only anti-aircraft searchlights then available in London.

There are a couple of interesting fictional reflections on this that are worth looking at. George Macdonald Fraser's 'Mr American', one of his few non-Flashman books, contains an well-observed and historically well-informed depiction of Edward VII and examines the cunning and shrewdness that monarch used to keep pre-1914 Britain from flying apart. Constantine Fitz Gibbon's enjoyable and bitter Cold War thriller 'When the Kissing Had to Stop’ has some cunningly-described scenes as various highly responsible and senior persons try to use the traditional safeguards of the British constitution to prevent a pretty obvious coup d'etat. In an entirely believable way, they all persuade themselves that they are powerless to act until it is too late, and the putsch, with all its terrible consequences, succeeds.

Why does this matter? I think our obsession with 'democracy' as the only thing that makes government legitimate tends to blind us to the importance of other things. Why do we make such a fetish out of universal suffrage? If you had a choice between liberty and democracy - which are by no means the same thing, which would you pick? If you had a choice between the rule of public opinion and the rule of law, which would you pick? Are we safer with both Houses of Parliament 'elected' by party machines, or with at least one House whose members are immune from 'democratic' party pressure?

Actually, pure democracy would be unbearable, since every politician, to survive or prosper, would have to be a crowd-pleasing Blair type (actually, this now seems to be more and more what we have got).

Even assuming that we could reconstruct something like a decent education system, it is hard to see how a state governed purely by the popular will could be anything other than a corrupt anarchy, or a demagogic dictatorship. The purest product of mass democracy since it came into being was Adolf Hitler - whose National Socialists would have won an absolute majority in the Reichstag under our first-past-the post system, by the way. This isn't an argument against that system( which I favour) just a warning against being complacent.

Mass opinion can prevent good actions, as well as stimulating bad ones. It was American democracy, and the fervent campaigns of the America Firsters, that prevented Franklin Roosevelt from aiding Britain against Hitler. US public opinion was dead against involvement in a European war, and it's still not clear what would have happened if Hitler hadn't declared war on the USA after Pearl Harbor.

So most serious wielders of power in democratic states devise ways of frustrating, or getting round the 'people's will' which they praise in public. Mostly, these days, these anti-democrats are of the left. In the US, a largely liberal elite has for decades been using the unelected third chamber of Congress - the Supreme Court - to pass radical social legislation. In Canada, left-wingers who could never get anywhere in parliamentary politics have exploited the 'Charter of Rights and Freedoms' to do the same sort of thing.

And the European Convention on Human Rights gives liberal judges and the lawyers the same power to intervene here. The balance of our mixed constitution, partly as a result of this, has tipped heavily towards the Left. Parliament, especially the House of Commons, is now the servant of a left-wing governing party, not at all its master. So who or what can speak for tradition, for conservative opinions, for private life and family, for inheritance and continuity? Certainly not the Tory Party, which flatly refused to defend the hereditary principle against the attacks of Baroness Jay (who just happened to be the daughter of Jim Callaghan, and had no other visible qualification for her grand post as Leader of the Lords, in one of the best jokes of the 1990s).

That Tory failure to defend heredity was a warning to the British people and the monarchy that worse was to come. We all actually value inheritance - we expect to leave, or be left our goods and wealth in legally enforceable wills. We all know that we inherit important characteristics and gifts from our parents, and hope to pass such things on. Our state, with its memory and experience stretching back a thousand years, inherits each generation the principles of law and justice and liberty wrought by centuries of experience and combat. So what is wrong with a Head of State who embodies this idea?

Nothing, except that he or she gets in the way of the Left's desire for total control over the state, especially over the things previously regarded as politically neutral and so loyal to the crown - the civil service, the armed forces and the police. All these bodies are now increasingly politicised. I think that the moment is approaching when the monarchy has either to assert itself or be abolished. The danger is that, in asserting itself, it may get abolished as a punishment, while being slandered as unrepresentative, elitist etc. It will be a very difficult and risky moment.

And that is Prince Charles's problem. He has to choose the issues on which he challenges his ministers. He has to prove - now - that he has the knowledge and interest and qualifications to be an interventionist monarch. He also has to show that there is nothing partisan about his attitudes - his loyalty is not to any party, but to a valued idea of what the nation should be like, and to its constitution.

Unobservant people often claim we have no written constitution, when of course we do, written down in several different places. The Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus Act all form parts of it. So does the great Coronation Service, in which the Archbishop hands the Sword of State to the monarch with these words " With this sword do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the holy Church of God, help and defend widows and orphans, restore the things that are gone to decay, maintain the things that are restored, punish and reform what is amiss and confirm what is in good order."

I suspect that Charles has read this carefully, and has a shrewd suspicion of what it means, particularly about restoring the things that are gone to decay. . It is, in some ways, the very heart of our constitution. It has the power to cause considerable trouble. Once, I would have hoped it wouldn't. Now, I think it may be necessary. The subversion of our free and ordered society by demagogues and dogmatists, the usurpation of our independence by foreign bodies and courts, has now reached a point where some sort of constitutional conflict is probably unavoidable.

The only way out of this would be the reform of our major political parties, and the replacement of both Labour and Tories by formations which more accurately and truly represented the divisions in our society, and the causes which matter to the people. This is still possible, but remains difficult and by no means certain. If it does not happen, then the imbalance will sort itself out another way. Things cannot remain as they are.

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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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Why did Patrick Mercer go so readily? Why did the story die so quickly?

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

Two things remain to be said about the Stalinist purge of the Tory MP Patrick Mercer by the Cameron machine, which I discussed at length in my Mail on Sunday column.

One is to ask why Mr Mercer, who now has nothing to expect from the Tory leadership but a lifetime of blighted ambition on the backbenches, so willingly accepted his banishment and repudiation. It seems to me he has nothing to lose by defending himself and attacking the leader who so cravenly dumped him rather than defend freedom of speech. All the obligations he had to that leader ended when he was treated as he was.

Party loyalty has always struck me as an odd thing. Why should one be loyal to an organisation founded on cynical compromise and held together by ambition? It is not a beloved old school, or a family, or a regiment or even a club - just a temporary alliance of convenience designed to seek office.

Mr Mercer was stamped on for being inconvenient, not for being wrong or wicked. This brings me to my second point. He was sacrificed on the altar of the BBC, which in return will continue its amazing love affair with the Cameroon Tory Party. Used as I have been for decades to the BBC's undisguised hostility to the Tories, its refusal often even to mention their opinions, let alone give a fair crack to its spokesmen, its attempt to build up the 'Liberal Democrats' as the main opposition, I never cease to be amazed by the exaggerated respect with which Mr Cameron's party is now treated.

Some dim people seem to see this as a rediscovery of impartiality by the BBC. It is nothing of the kind, as Robin Aitken found when he wrote his book attacking BBC bias, and then mysteriously found himself not being invited on to any of the Corporation's many programmes that discuss books of this kind.

In fact it is the best proof that the Cameroons are in fact the heirs to Blair, that the BBC - the magisterium of official liberal opinion in this country - can now stomach the idea of a Tory government and so treats the Tories, for the first time since about 1979, as a legitimate political body.

You'll note also how the story degenerated from a force 12 hurricane on Thursday to nothing by Monday, when once a 'race' row in the Tory party would have raged for at least a week, and on this occasion Mr Mercer had several powerful defenders. That's a sign of how most political journalists, too, have bought shares in a Cameron government. Your opinions? Nobody cares about them.

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Global warming scare.

I believe Channel Four's excellent programme on 'the Great Global Warming Swindle' can now be found on the web, and also obtained as a DVD. Google will I am sure help you locate these resources. I urge all readers to try to see that this programme is shown in schools, where children are subjected to endless biased propaganda on this contentious issue.

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Decimal ignorance

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

A warm thank you to Rolf Norfolk, for supporting the old duodecimal system, adaptable, flexible, friendlier to human beings (who like to divide by threes from time to time) than to machines. Decimal currency and metric measurements are a step downwards, crude, toe-counting things designed for an ill-educated population. In my memory, all British people (who had chanted the old measures in class till they were engraved on their hearts) had no trouble with either the old money or with stones, pounds and ounces.

What's interesting about these allegedly more efficient systems is that the younger generations, educated in nothing else, are so bad at using them. You're much more likely to get short change or short measure now than you ever were before. And by accident, not because someone is trying to swindle you. That's because almost anyone who's ever handled a pound of meat or a half-pound of butter or a pint of milk knows what it looks and feels like, whereas a gram is a meaningless thing. Also, you don't learn the decimal system by heart - how could you? So if the calculator or the electronic till are wrong, you cannot do the mental arithmetic to check it. If you have learned your pounds, shillings and pence by heart, you never need a calculator. And I know hardly anyone who buys petrol by the litre (though we all used to buy it by the gallon). We buy it by the pound (sterling) because most of us haven't a clue what a litre is. It's such a useless measure for anything. One litre of petrol would barely get you home. No decent wine, as I often point out, is sold by the litre. And only Bavarians drink litres of beer.

It is true that inflation - which the new currency disguised, would have wrecked the old 240 penny to the pound system anyway. We would have had to revalue the pound about ten times over to make it work, by the time Ted Heath and Harold Wilson had finished. But if people realised - as we pre-decimal ones do - how bad inflation has actually been, they would be far more discontented than they are.

You see, when I am charged 50 pence for something I think of what I could once buy for a ten-shilling note (and how wealthy I used to feel with one of those). And the new two-pound coin (which is actually quite attractive) now buys about as much as a silver half crown once did, and feels the same in the pocket. Except, it took 16 half-crowns to make two pounds.

People think that debauchery of the currency is normal - and it is in many foreign countries. But it used not to be here. If you read Robert Graves's haunting historical novel 'Wife to Mr Milton', about the Civil War period and published in 1949, you'll find that Graves notes in the introduction that the prices of many goods in 1949 are still recognisably similar to their prices in 1649.

That break in continuity, that cutting off from the language and habits of our forebears over centuries, is a horrible characteristic of the last 50 years. Children do not understand things that their parents used to see as normal, and are often taught in schools to deride or ignore them. Parents are asked by their children why they still use 'American' measures when they refer to inches and feet. These children genuinely do not know that these are the ancient customary measures of these islands, inherited by the USA from us, polished by centuries of use and familiarity.

I sometimes wonder if this isn't part of the purpose of the metric fanatics, to place barriers of confusion and misunderstanding between the generations. I always enjoy it when they fail.

I usually get up very early on Saturdays, and listen, half-stunned by sleep, to a BBC Radio 4 programme called 'The Living World'. Those who take part appear to have been ordered by the BBC's metric commissars to use nothing but metric measurements, but the nice country and seafaring people who are interviewed frequently lapse into yards, feet and inches. Nobody will ever love the awkward, angular, inhuman, inconvenient metric measures concocted (on the basis of a false measurement of the earth's circumference) by a committee of French scientists.

I noticed the other day how many references to yards, inches, feet and miles there are in 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Alice Though the Looking Glass'. Assuming these ingenious, endlessly clever books are allowed to survive, or that anyone still bothers to read them

twenty years hence, will these references be converted to metres, centimetres and kilometres? I suspect some metric fanatic is even now going through Shakespeare and the Bible, converting away. But what will they do about Robert Frost's great poem "Stopping by woods on a snowy evening"? Will the final lines be converted to read "The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and kilometres to go before I sleep, and kilometres to go before I sleep'? Lacks something, doesn't it? What it lacks is poetry. But what kind of silly person wants poetry in our daily lives? The very idea.

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