Soldier Island Revisited - How the BBC Made Agatha Christie Look Like Shakespeare

Well,  I have now sat through the whole three buckets of the BBC’s Agatha Christie adaptation,  ‘And Then There were None’.

It was, alas, garlanded with good reviews all over the place. This can only mean that TV reviewers share the programme-makers’ deep, prejudiced ignorance about the past, and indeed about this country as a whole.

If you haven’t yet watched it, and plan to, don’t read on. Multiple spoilers follow:

The moment that made me bridle most of all was during the final grotesque scene, as the retired Judge explains why he has killed everyone else on the island. 

As he sadistically watches a young woman (who has bizarrely decided to end her life by using a noose which has appeared from nowhere in her bedroom to hang herself, apparently unconcerned by how the said noose comes to be there at all, given that everyone on the island is dead expect her, and it wasn’t there before) , the Judge explains why he sentenced a certain young man to hang.

We have been given to believe that the young man involved may have been innocent, and that this judicial murder is the Judge’s crime, for which he has been brought to the island to die with the others.

The Judge says, in the TV version:

‘The evidence that led me to convict Edward Seaton was too terrible to be made public’.

 

What!?!!?

Does nobody in the BBC, no scriptwriter , no researcher, no anyone, know that in English courts, Judges do not convict (or acquit) defendants? Do no TV reviewers know this? Do they also not know that (save in very rare cases involving national security) there can be no such thing as secret evidence, and even that must be disclosed to the jury (Note to BBC: twelve ordinary citizens, who decide guilt or innocence at English trials) at the trial ‘in camera’, in a court cleared of public and press?

I have also never heard of a Judge attending the execution of a defendant he has sentenced, and certainly not of any doing so regularly. It’s also the case that if the jury brought in a guilty verdict on a charge of murder, the Judge in the days of the death penalty had no option but to pass the prescribed sentence of death. The Home Secretary might grant a reprieve, and often did, but the Judge could not.

As for the execution, repeatedly shown in flashback in the programme, it was wrong in so many well-known details that one wonders whether anyone cared in the slightest about getting things right.

I suspect they didn’t.

Yet again there was incessant smoking to make it clear that we were in the past, and a small fortune had been spent on period clothes and cars. It looked as if several of the cast weren’t willing to do any smoking, so a small minority had to smoke even more,  to make up for it. I hope they were paid extra.

But (as usual) either the director or the actors balked at adopting the actual hairstyles, male or female,  of the era, which would seem very ugly and unsexy to modern eyes.

As for the language, leaving aside the impossible swearing in mixed company, I don’t believe any Englishman in 1939 even knew the term ‘Krauts’ . Germans might have been rudely referred to as ‘Huns’ or ‘Fritz’ , or ‘Jerry’, even (among war veterans) ‘the Boche’ . But ‘Krauts’ was then an entirely American term and probably not widely used even there, before World War Two.

Next, we have a policeman whose crime seems to have been to have beaten an arrested man to death in a police cell. The man has been arrested by this officer for homosexual importuning, but the police officer is himself a repressed homosexual (there are no homosexuals or lesbians in Agatha Christie’s original book, so it has been necessary to create some, because this is the BBC, after all).

In the book, the officer has perjured himself to ensure the conviction (by a jury, yes, one of those things the BBC hasn’t heard of) of an innocent man who has then died in prison leaving his wife and children bereft. You might think this more likely, and also more likely to have gone unpunished,  than beating and kicking a man to a pulp in London police station.

I have no doubt people sometimes ‘fell downstairs’ in pre-1939 British police stations. But the idea that a man could actually be beaten to death in such a place, and that nobody would be brought to justice for it seems far-fetched to me, and I will stick to that view unless and until anyone can show me wrong with facts.

In the book, all the people on ‘Soldier Island’ have a guilty secret, but in most cases it is one that couldn’t have been proven in court or even prosecuted under normal law, or wasn’t punished adequately when it was. That is, if I may say so, the whole point of the story. Justice is coming anyway, even if they have escaped it up till now.  In the TV series, almost all these crimes are made more blatant or more gory, or both. A World War One soldier who sends a brother officer to certain death in No Man’s Land, when he finds he’s been having an affair with his wife is shown, ludicrously, shooting the said brother officer in the back with his service revolver,  in a Flanders dugout. Someone would have noticed this.  

In the book, the officer involved can’t bring himself to go to his village church on Sundays when the Bible story about David, Bathsheba and Uriah is to be read.   Why change this? The original story is so much more interesting. Perhaps anything that isn’t crude or blatant is simply beyond the people in charge of these things nowadays. Christie isn’t Shakespeare, but by comparison with this soapy simplicity, she nearly is.

The sinister servant couple,  whose malign but undetectable neglect led to the death of their rich employer, who has left them a large legacy, are transformed. The TV version husband suffocates the rich old lady with her own pillow (a common form of death in the modern soap opera) , while his protesting wife looks on in horror, and then he viciously beats her for protesting.

Wife-beating is also, of course, a common feature of soap operas (so are drunkenness, swearing and casual sex, all also inserted pointlessly into the story).  But it isn’t in the book and doesn’t add to the story. In the England of the 1930s, I suspect the deliberate suffocation of an old woman by her servants would have been quickly detected and the culprits hanged.  Even the doctors of the era might have been able to detect the signs of suffocation, and the police of the time would certainly have suspected servants who stood to benefit from such a  death. The whole point of the original crime was that it couldn’t possibly be proved in court.

You might say this would have been harder to portray than a suffocation, but the programme wasted an awful lot of time in moody long-shots and recaps, not to mention a stupid, pointless and interminable drunken scene, and dialogue-free shots of birds flying in slow motion. It must have used up the entire BBC supply of sinister music for the next ten years.

Then of course there’s the one overtly Christian character, Miss Brent, a smug woman who has driven her maid to suicide (by drowning, but in the gory TV version she hurls herself under a train) by cruelly throwing her out into the cold and the rain when she becomes pregnant.  In the TV version, the overtly snobbish spinster actually assaults her errant servant, another soap-opera moment utterly out of character with the person involved, the times or the original story. I mentioned Miss Brent in my earlier article on this programme, because her ocean-going hypocrisy and heedless over-the-top self-righteousness seemed to me to suggest that Miss Christie had an anti-Christian prejudice . But if she had such a prejudice it is as nothing compared to the BBC’s.

I wasn’t sure, but I thought the TV drama sought to portray Miss Brent,  the Christian spinster,  as some sort of frustrated and of course repressed lesbian (there was a curious, slyly suggestive scene involving blood oozing from her pricked thumb and exchanged glances with the maid).  Like the murderous police officer, by being repressed she sacrifices the moral superiority her sexuality would otherwise give her in BBC eyes. And then there was the device by which Christie’s Judophobia was brought into the story  and attributed, well, I never,  to the only overtly Christian character.  

Isaac Morris, the man with the ‘thick, Semitic lips’  (Christie’s words) who is hired by the mysterious U.N.Owen to assemble his doomed guests, is not portrayed as especially Jewish, apart from his name, and certainly doesn’t have thick lips . But the Christian spinster is given the bigoted line: ‘Whenever there’s a problem there’s Jews at the bottom of it’   

The trouble is that, if you didn’t know anything, you might genuinely be beguiled by this stuff, and not notice its manipulations. And if you do know anything, you can’t possibly enjoy these dramas.  

A Discussion on Radio 4's 'The World Tonight'

Some of you may be interested in a discussion on the politics of the past year in which I took part, on BBC Radio 4’s ‘The World Tonight’ last night (29^th December 2015)

The programme may be found here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06shz1f

and begins at roughly 24 minutes

Swallowing a Dozen Camels, and Straining on a Gnat. The Same Sex Marriage Debate Drags On

It is now more than three years since I publicly gave up arguing about same-sex marriage.  The best summary of my position can be found here http://www.spectator.co.uk/2012/03/the-gay-marriage-trap/. I also moderated a debate on the subject in Moscow, Idaho, in which my old friend Doug Wilson discussed the issue with Andrew Sullivan (it’s described and discussed here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/03/moscow-nights-a-debate-on-same-sex-marriage-between-andrew-sullivan-and-douglas-wilson.html  and I believe there is a YouTube version, though it is very long and gets a bit patchy towards the end). During my preparation for this debate I became even more convinced that same-sex marriage was a consequence, not a cause, of the collapse and evisceration of marriage as a whole. I do not believe same-sex couples would seek to contract pre-1968 exclusive indissoluble lifelong marriages.

Since adopting this position, I have continued to receive the abuse and misrepresentation of sexual liberationists, who (like many people, both ‘supporters’ and critics) don’t actually read what I say but prefer to imagine my opinions. I was struck, during a BBC ’Question Time’ in which I explained why the issue was too trivial to matter, by Stella Creasy MP even so aiming a barb at me based on the belief that I had just expressed opposition to same sex marriage. I suspect that many of my conservative ‘supporters’ likewise continue to imagine that I am in the forefront of the battle against this tiny phenomenon.

And, during my now-notorious clash with Dan Savage and others on ABC’s ‘Q&A’ in the Sydney Opera House, I never expressed any opinion on same-sex marriage, nor was I asked to do so,  but was treated throughout as if I had done so.

So, as usual, I have gained nothing by being truthful. You can see why so many people in public life decide that lying is a wise course of action, but I still hold out against it.

Now I find my position being challenged here, rather oddly, by contributors who appear to be atheist radicals. If I have mistaken the position of Neil Saunders, for instance, perhaps he will put me right.

And yet these critics rail at me for not continuing to oppose same-sex marriage.

I have been having a bit of a dialogue of the deaf with Mr Saunders.

Here are two recent posts by Mr Saunders in which I have inserted comments in the usual way.

1: To Peter Hitchens: What (and please be specific yourself) in what I wrote in my previous post is "inaccurate"? PH writes: What was inaccurate was his claim that I concede all advantage to the revolutionaries by refusing to get worked up about a few thousand same-sex couples contracting civil marriages. What advantage do I concede? Were I to engage in furious campaigning against them, would I weaken their position? On the contrary, I would strengthen it. They long for my opposition and are frustrated and disappointed when I decline to provide it. **** Also, until you say exactly which "moral conservatives" have made fools of themselves, and which of their arguments have been "silly" and "self-damaging" you are simply striking a rhetorical posture, and not offering any kind of genuine argument. *****No, that is not so. I don't believe Mr Saunders doesn't know to whom I am referring, but the recent failed campaign for marriage led by Lord Carey at al, is a good example of this sort of thing, and of its utter, embarrassing failure. He might also read Hansard for the debate in the Commons on same sex marriage.**** Again, it is not sufficient simply to assert that the issue of SSM is "minor"; you must show: a) that it is in fact so, and 2) why it is so.) ***I have many times done so by noting the actual number of same sex marriages, and the proportion of marriages they encompass. He can look this up.**** Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the matter, in the present debate your repeated references to no-fault divorce are at best an irrelevance and at worst some kind of diversionary tactic in debate. ***This response just shows that he does not understand my point. I will make it again. Same sex marriage neither establishes nor violates any principle which was not established nor violated at the time heterosexual marriage was reformed and eviscerated, in 1968. If Mr Saunders disagrees with this simple point, then he can show what principle was established or violated by same sex marriage, which had not already been established or violated by the 1968 legislation. I am agog to hear what it is. **** Colm J has stated very lucidly the principles at stake in the issue of SSM, with absolutely no reference to no-fault divorce. ***I have missed this. Perhaps, if it was so lucidly stated, Mr Saunders could quote or summarise. *** Would Peter Hitchens find SSM acceptable if no-fault divorce were to be reintroduced for all marriages including same-sex ones? ****This is truly odd. I am not arguing about 'acceptability', a subjective matter of no interest in a debate on principle and on reality. Who cares what I find 'acceptable' in this discussion? Anyone can see that my own preference is for indissoluble lifelong monogamous faithful marriage. But it has been abolished, and I have absolutely no power to restore it, so my preference is of very little moment. As for no-fault divorce, how can this be reintroduced when it is what we have had for nearly 5 decades? Does he understand what we are discussing? If he means the opposite, I believe there would be very little enthusiasm for pre-1969 marriage among any group of sexual liberals of any kind. That is the whole point****

And 2: To Peter Hitchens: I should have thought that the freshly-minted entitlement of "a few thousand same-sex couples" henceforth to dictate the meaning and content of marriage for the entire society (on pain of social, legal and financial penalties to dissentients) is worthy of a little more than a defeatist shrug (to the establishment forces you - with good reason, perhaps, as far as your livelihood is concerned - fear) and a patronisingly dismissive attitude towards the "little people" like me who look to people like you - in view of your general social attitudes and the public platform you command - to articulate our despair. To begin with, which of Lord Carey's arguments were you particularly unpersuaded by? Which was especially injurious to his cause? Short as the debate in Parliament on the subject of SSM was, both in absolute and relative terms (given the momentousness of the changes being proposed and legislated for), it is not possible to discuss adequately here all of the arguments reported in Hansard. I note simply that Sir Tony Baldry and Nadine Dorries raised the interesting technical issue that since non-consummation and infidelity retain their previous legal meanings (i.e. as involving partners of the opposite sex), these notions do not apply to same-sex marriage. So much for "equality", then. Meanwhile, another opponent of SSM, Robert Flello (Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent) remarks: "The state has sought to treat marriage in a special way in recognition of its intrinsically child-centred nature. That is the only reason why the state has previously had any interest in marriage at all. If marriage were simply about love and commitment, we would first have to define love as being sexual love, because otherwise non-sexual relationships that are based on love and commitment would also have to be treated as marriage on the basis of the definition of equality. If the definition of marriage is simply love and commitment, why is the state interested at all? What business is it of the state's to register and record such unions? It is because marriage is about so much more that the state has historically wanted to be involved.... "I fully accept that the state has changed some aspects of marriage, but not its intrinsic, fundamental values. "The irony of the Bill is that it takes the current situation of equality of marriage and civil partnership and creates inequality. Under the terms of the Bill, there will be marriage in two forms - traditional marriage and same-sex marriage, which are neither the same nor equal. The Bill creates further inequality, with traditional marriages being allowed within some Churches and same-sex marriages not allowed. Same-sex couples will have the choice of civil partnership of marriage, whereas opposite-sex couples can have only traditional marriages - yet more inequality. The Bill is trying to engineer a cultural equivalence to tackle a perceived lack of equality in wider society. That does not sound to me like the basis of marriage." I should be interested to know why you disagree with these statements, or think that they have misfired and justifiably brought obloquy and ridicule on their authors' heads.

I’ll now reply to the above.

A 'defeatist' seeks for and encourages the defeat of his own side. Once his own side has been defeated, he cannot do this even if he wants to. It is not 'defeatist' to acknowledge defeat after it has happened. It is simply honest and realistic.

 

My point remains – what principle is established or violated, by the introduction of same-sex civil marriages, that hasn’t already been established and violated elsewhere?

In short, why is this one small event, affecting a tiny number of people, worth arguing about at all? What does Mr Saunders mean when he speaks of ‘dictat[ing] the meaning and content of marriage for the entire society’.

 

What is this ‘meaning and content’ , which same-sex marriage dictates? How does it dictate it? 

No-one can answer. Lord Carey’s campaign asserted that same-sex civil marriage would damage marriage as a whole.

But how would it do this? What specific blow would it strike? I have never been able to find an answer to this. 

There are some dud attempts to do so, for instance: 

The argument that a same-sex marriage cannot produce children (except by surrogacy or IVF or other indirect methods) is a) perfectly true and b) fundamentally weak. Even the 1662 Prayer Book (which specifies that marriage is firstly ordained for the procreation of children) allows for a variation in wording, for couples past childbearing. If a mixed-sex couple who cannot have children, can be lawfully married, then why should procreation be insisted upon as a rule for same-sex couples?

If that’s of no interest to you, then the universal availability of the female contraceptive pill, to the married and unmarried alike, not to mention the free distribution of morning after pills to all who ask, and of abortion on demand, all of which are much used by heterosexual married couples to ensure that they do *not* have children, makes it hard to argue that the childlessness of same-sex marriage sets it apart from heterosexual unions, or that it violates or establishes a principle not already violated or established by tens of millions of married heterosexuals all over the western world. If so, what principle is it?

The issue of non-consummation is technically interesting to those who are interested in that sort of thing, but again has no real bearing on anything much. I cannot recall that many heterosexual marriages have been dissolved on this ground. Some (only one in six) are still dissolved on the grounds of adultery, but I think it would be fairly easy for those involved to have found another route to divorce, had they not been able to prove adultery. Nor am I aware of any wording in heterosexual civil marriage ceremonies which refers to or requires consummation. Raising such a subject in a parliamentary debate smacks of desperation, and a general lack of ammunition.

Fidelity? Leaving aside any other considerations, about which we can only guess because of the lack of recorded facts on fidelity in heterosexual marriages, the remarriage of divorced persons with living spouses, permitted by law and increasingly by the churches as well, makes a nonsense of any principled support for fidelity or even monogamy.

Some recent statistics (England  and Wales):

15% of divorces are granted for adultery, with equal proportions of men and women initiating the petition ; 36% of all divorces granted to men and 54% granted to women were for ‘unreasonable behaviour’; 32% granted to men and 22% granted to women followed 2 years of separation,  and consent; 16% of divorces granted to men and 9% of divorces granted to women followed five years of separation, and did not require consent. These last were effectively ended by the state against the wishes of one spouse or the other – the extraordinary arrangement (unique, I think, to marriage law)  under which the state takes the side of the one who breaches a contract, rather than the side of the one who wishes to maintain it.

Knowledge that this sort of imposed divorce is ultimately possible can, I think, be presumed to affect the attitudes of spouses who might otherwise fight a divorce, but decide not to knowing they are, in the end, bound to lose.

42% of marriages now end in divorce. Almost one in five divorces involve one spouse who has been divorced once before. In almost one divorce in ten, both spouses have divorced before.

 

Very large numbers of people cohabit, and begin and end partnerships at will, without ever marrying or divorcing at all. 

In the seven years 2005-2012, just 120,908 individuals entered (same sex) civil partnership (17,273 per year, though this figure may be distorted by an initial rush when the law was first changed. Currently there are about 500 same-sex marriages a month). The total number of marriages as a whole is approximately 260,000 a year (roughly 21,660 a month) 

There are indeed anomalies resulting from this. Heterosexual couples cannot contract civil partnerships, but same-sex couples can.  I think our post-Christian state will resolve this (will probably be compelled to do so by the ECHR) by allowing civil partnerships for heterosexuals, this creating an openly temporary and wholly non-religious alternative to marriage, which may attract some secularists, and others seeking to establish some sort of contractual, enforceable relationship but who still regard marriage with suspicion and hostility.

Just as there is no significant difference between civil partnerships and same sex marriages, except the name, there will be no significant difference between heterosexual civil marriage and heterosexual civil partnerships, except the name.

But if so it will merely be a pause on the way to the disappearance of formal partnerships, except among those who have propagandist reasons for contracting them, such as lesbian clergywomen, and perhaps among declared Christians who may (like French Roman Catholics) find themselves having to marry twice, once in a religious ceremony which binds them personally but is unrecognised by state or courts, and once in a civil ceremony which necessarily involves the state in their affairs, for the purposes of taxation, inheritance and property,  but whose provisions and limits fall short of their desires and intentions.

 

There will, I suspect, be very few of either sort within 100 years. There may well be, as part of this, attempts by the church to introduce forms of ‘marriage’ which actively defy scriptural authority (just as the remarriage of divorced persons with living spouses in Church already does). These will be distressing to serious believers, but are a consequence of decades of divorce, promiscuity, remarriage, abortion etc, often unopposed and sometimes supported by the Church,  which are the real sources of distress.

Baroness Hale’s long-ago perceptive pronouncement, that ‘family law no longer makes any attempt to buttress the stability of marriage or any other union. It has adopted principles for the protection of children and dependent spouses which could be made equally applicable to the unmarried’, remains as true as when she first said it.  The Baroness, now an eminent Justice on our  (misleadingly named, as it is subject to the ECJ in Luxembourg)  ‘Supreme Court’,  prophesied correctly that the ‘piecemeal erosion’ of the distinction between the married and the unmarried could be expected to continue. So it has, by the increasing dilution of marriage to the point where it is almost impossible to distinguish it from unmarriage.  And she concluded that we should be discussing ‘whether the legal institution of marriage continues to serve any useful purposes.’

That’s the real problem, and has been for decades.

The claim that ‘Under the terms of the Bill, there will be marriage in two forms - traditional marriage and same-sex marriage, which are neither the same nor equal.’ Seems to me to be inaccurate. There is no such thing in English law as ‘traditional marriage’, and there has not been since the 1968 Divorce Law Reform Act ended any lingering resemblance between readily dissoluble civil marriage and indissoluble Prayer Book marriage. There is a form of heterosexual civil partnership which is politely called ‘marriage’ but is in fact nothing of the sort.  

 

The claim that ‘The Bill is trying to engineer a cultural equivalence to tackle a perceived lack of equality in wider society.’ Is by contrast more or less right. But so does most sexual and social legislation passing through Parliament, and such things (which might well have been resisted in the pre-revolutionary Britain before the cultural revolution) are now normal. What new principle is being established or violated? It’s just another rather thin slice of salami, taken from a sausage which is pretty much used up anyway.

Why strain at this gnat,  having swallowed so many very large camels without so much as a pause for breath?

There is one undoubtedly powerful argument here -  the one which points out that brothers and sisters living together in non-sexual relationships cannot contract civil partnerships and so cannot obtain the privileges of inheritance tax exemption or next-of-kin access which come with such things.

This anomaly makes it plain that the whole thing has been from the start, and always will be, a propaganda exercise rather than an impassioned search for justice. If you seek justice for yourself, you must seek it for others who are affected by the same injustice. But the same sex marriage campaigners were never interested in this problem. I've never even heard or seen them address it. 

 

Now, for what purpose was this begun? Was it truly because homosexuals were jealous of the heterosexual married state and its largely non-existent privileges and standing? Many of them must have changed their minds profoundly in this case for, in the 1960s,  most sexual revolutionaries despised marriage of any kind as a patriarchal prison, best dispensed with altogether.

Or was it a clever chess move, designed to tempt moral and social conservatives into a doomed campaign to oppose it? I know what I think.

PETER HITCHENS: Blair's secret victory? He's taken control of the Tory party

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The most dangerous falsehood of the past 20 years has finally been exploded. The idea that Anthony Blair's New Labour was 'moderate' and 'centrist', a sort of pink conservatism, still grips the minds of millions.

It certainly grips the minds of the monstrous regiment of political journalists, a vast gossip factory, few of whose toilers understand politics or care about the future of the country.

But one of the authors of the Blairite project has openly confessed the dangerous truth. Peter Hyman, once Blair's chief speechwriter and strategist, has blurted it out.

The Blair project, he declared, was 'infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy Corbyn'.

Yes, you have heard this from me already, last October, when I wrote here: 'Our political media never understood that the Blairites were in fact far more Left-wing than Jeremy Corbyn.'

But now you needn't take my word for it.

Let Mr Hyman explain. He says New Labour was devised 'to take and hold the levers of power... winning power and locking out the Tories to ensure that the 21st Century was a Labour century with Labour values'.

The scale of that ambition was 'breathtaking'.

He explained: 'If Labour could be in power for a serious amount of time, then the country would, we believed, change for good; not a burst of socialism for one time (if that), but changed institutions and values that could shape the country for all time.'

As you may have noticed, this was to involve a gigantic increase in spending and taxation, an imposition of radical Leftist dogma in the name of 'equality', the smashing up of the House of Lords and the impartial civil service, plus a sexual revolution – not to mention the growing domination of the EU and open borders.

Some of this remains unspoken, though fairly obvious because of the visible results. Some of it doesn't.

Another New Labour apparatchik, Andrew Neather, famously revealed the driving purpose of mass immigration, 'to rub the Right's nose in diversity'.

The biggest triumph – in fact the main purpose of the Blairites – was to turn the Tory Party into the neutered Blairite clone it now is.

This it achieved, by utterly destroying William Hague (who never recovered from the experience) in the 2001 Election.

The veteran commentator Steve Richards, himself close to the Blair project, recalled that Blair and his entourage were often in 'an exasperated fury' during that contest.

He wrote that they would occasionally scream: 'You don't get it! The Election is a historic referendum on a Right-wing Conservative Party.

If we win a second landslide, we would kill off Right-wing Conservatism for good.' And so they did, starting the progressive collapse that ended with the election of the self-proclaimed 'Heir to Blair' as Tory leader.

There was only one problem. They were too successful. When the Tories seized the Blairite torch, they left the husk of the Labour Party behind, with no real purpose.

Its senior figures are indistinguishable from Mr Cameron's front bench.

They look and sound the same and believe the same things.

They even combined with Mr Cameron against their own leader and their own members.

I suppose they could all just join the Tories. They might as well.

But Mr Cameron wouldn't like that, as his remaining conservative-minded voters might then finally notice that their old party has now become a coalition of radical Leftists.

And that would never do.

Mess with Agatha if you must - but leave mighty Leo alone!

Should we care that the BBC sexes up Agatha Christie’s 1939 mystery And Then There Were None? Not much.

Since the book has, quite rightly, been renamed and partly rewritten to remove the N-word, it seems a shame that the Corporation has decided to include the F-word in dialogue (which few respectable people would have used in 1939, even while committing murder).

But Christie is hardly a classic. She was an entertainer, and her text isn’t sacred.

Tinkering with Leo Tolstoy’s mighty and profound War And Peace, on the other hand, is a bad mistake.

I’ve yet to see an adaptation of any book I liked by Andrew Davies that didn’t violate and misunderstand the original.

Tolstoy wasn’t trying to ‘appeal to modern sensibilities’. He was writing for all time.

Banks have created a sneaky new crimewave

Now we find that contactless credit and debit cards can still be used by thieves long after they have been reported stolen. It’s up to us to scan our statements to check.

When these sneaky things first came in, I warned (to the usual jeers) that they were risky.

I tried to refuse to have any – but while my bank rather grudgingly agreed to issue me a non-contactless card, American Express said I had no choice.

Do these people actually care if there is more crime? Or are they prepared to absorb the cost because of the money they make from lending too much to people to buy things they don’t need?

We used to be told that the free market gave us more choice. But I find this is less and less true. Small shops I liked keep closing because of high rents and taxes.

Big shops don’t stock things I like, because there’s ‘no call for them’. And card issuers positively urge me to use a type of card that I don’t want, and which is less secure than it was before.

Are Army generals' requirements of toughness being lowered on the pretext of 'equality'?

Strange that the Government should be talking about allowing women to serve as frontline combat soldiers just as the Army faces a severe recruitment crisis.

I don't doubt that some women can meet the fierce physical demands of hard fighting. Two American female soldiers recently passed a special forces course that would leave most men begging for mercy. The question of whether it is wise for them to fight alongside men is more complicated – Israel's army forbids it.

But I doubt this is the real issue. I suspect politicians and civil servants of planning to lower the Army's general requirements of toughness and fitness, on the irresistible pretext of 'equality'. The result won't be more women in the ranks. It will be more weedy men.

Government using threat of Islamic extremism to snoop on our private lives 

The most subversive thing you can do in the conformist modern world is educate your children at home. In the USA this movement is now unstoppable and its products win major awards at Ivy League universities.

But here the Government, stuck with a 1944 law that still allows home education, and afraid to ban it outright, loathes the idea that anyone (apart from the super-rich) is escaping the indoctrination of the comprehensive classroom.

That's why they have resorted to the ridiculous smear, that home schooled children's minds are being poisoned with Islamic extremism.

This provides the pretext for more snooping on private lives. How dare anybody do anything without State permission! This country reminds me more and more of the USSR, which I saw collapse in 1991 and which is gradually reassembling itself here.

• If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens' blog, click on comments and scroll down

Christmas for Grown-ups

And so time seems to slow and the light thickens, and for a short and sheltered few hours we try to fall into step with eternity. Those of us brought up to love Christmas will always feel the tug of the ancient festival , however busy and preoccupied we may be (I am at work as I write this, and a police siren is howling not far away) at some point on the 24^th December.

As children, we came to it through presents and rich food (in the austere Protestant Britain in which I grew up this brief period of luxury and affluence was far more separate from normal time than it is now). So we remember it, not as a series of single Christmases but as a time set aside in each year when the usual was held at bay, the shouting and the mechanical roar of the modern world ceased, and we only realised in the following silence how much we had been longing for them to stop.

The music, the feeling of the world holding its breath, the bells, the haunting light from the low sun, the sensation of the past being mixed up with the present, went deep into us, so that later we came to look for a more important meaning in a time that inescapably changed our mood.

I think those of us who have this inside us are far more fortunate than those who don’t. Even sensible unbelievers will concede that the Christmas story, especially when told in the lovely cadences of the Authorised Version of the Bible, is an especially powerful evocation of the heart of the faith it promotes.

Those of us who learned it as children find it yields even more to us as adults, if we let it.  Lancelot Andrewes’ tremendous Christmas Day sermon, preached to James I in 1622 (and borrowed by T.S.Eliot in his fine poem on the Wise Men  ‘ A cold coming they had of it…’ ) ,  gives us a grown-up, unexpurgated and much grimmer understanding of the feast and its meaning, death and birth, fear and joy mixed up together, no less glorious for all that:

‘Last,  we consider the time of their coming, the season of the year. It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, the very dead of winter…. This was nothing pleasant, for through deserts, all the way waste and desolate. Nor secondly, easy neither; for over the rocks and crags of both Arabias, especially Petra, their journey lay.  Yet if safe, but it was not, but exceeding dangerous, as lying through the midst of the black tents of Kedar, a nation of thieves and cut-throats; to pass over the hills of robbers, infamous then, and infamous to this day.’

And yet it concludes (being a meditation on the star and its meaning) ‘There now remains nothing but to include ourselves, and bear our part with them, and with the angels, and all who this day adored Him.’

Tonight or tomorrow we may hope to hear again those most astonishing words of hope which, if they are true, transform all history and philosophy  ‘And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth.’

And these words of reassurance, as the storms of the material world rage round our rooftops

‘Thou Lord, in the beginning, hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands. They shall perish, but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment; and as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.’

Intervention, Terrorism and Training - an exchange with Douglas Murray

About 16 minutes into this Spectator podcast....

http://www.acast.com/viewfrom22/christmasspecial-2015inreview?autoplay

 

....I have a discussion with Douglas Murray and some aspects of the recent terror attacks, and on the tendency of governments and media to make connections and assumptions which are not wholly supported by known facts.  I like Douglas, who has  a far better grasp of the world than most in his political faction, but he does occasionally veer into conventional wisdom on terrorism

 

New Labour Insider Confirms it: Blairism Far More Revolutionary Than Corbyn

I have often said that knowing anything about politics is a grave disadvantage if you want to set up as a pundit, especially (but not exclusively) when the Labour Party is under discussion.  Most political reporters think and thought that Michael Howard, an incorrigible liberal, and the man who did more than anyone else to turn the Tories into a Blairite faction, was a hardline right-winger.

They think Blairism was Toryism. They thought Neil Kinnock’s attack on Militant was a right-wing purge of the party. Etc etc.

Alas, as a result, many of their readers, listeners and  viewers also end up thinking these daft and untrue things, and are, as a result, quite unable to understand what is going on. It was to put this right that I wrote my book ‘The Broken Compass’, later re-engineered as ‘The Cameron Delusion’.  The effect has been minimal.

Now the conventionally wise all think that Jeremy Corbyn is a wild leftist, steering a moderate and conservative Blairite Labour Party away from the safe centre.  The way in which he is pilloried for his dealings with Irish Republicans is especially funny, given the Blair creature’s direct role in arranging a humiliating and wholly unnecessary national surrender to the IRA, who, having won almost all their demands, were allowed to keep all their guns and bombs, and exonerated for any atrocities which might happen after the surrender was signed,  to make sure that they would be able to squeeze the rest out of us in due time. By their deeds shall ye know them.

I have to point out that I’m not a supporter of Mr Corbyn. He and I don’t agree about much, except the serial stupidity of our military interventions. This is not because we have a meeting of minds. We don’t. Mr Corbyn’s old-fashioned 1930s leftist attitude to war (learned from his old-fashioned leftist parents)  accidentally coincides with my wholly different Christian view of it.

Modern leftists (which Mr Corbyn isn’t, but my late brother was, and which the Blairites are) love interventionist war as a means of imposing utopia. For them, the might of the liberal democratist USA, bringing ‘democracy’ to the world by bomb and missile,  has replaced the vanished might of the USSR, and they worship it in the same way.

Mr Corbyn is old enough to recall the days when the left mistrusted the USA, and a kind of inertia keeps him thinking this way. At his age, he doesn’t want to reconstruct his entire philosophy.

There’s a lot of this sort of inertia about, on the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ .  For example, as I make my way in and out of Paddington station, I often have jolly encounters with railway trade unionists, who are friendly towards me largely because of my attitude to Russia, though they also like my support for renationalisation of the railways, and my pluralist belief in union freedoms.

I feel it would be unkind and ungenerous of me to pick a quarrel with these pleasant people over the Russia issue, but I suspect they (just like the ‘New Cold War’ merchants) still cannot really separate Russia and the USSR in their minds (as I can, having seen the USSR collapse, close to) , nor do they distinguish between the USA of the Cold War and the very different post-Clinton USA of liberal intervention. They think my defence of Russia’s behaviour is a continuation of the Cold War. They don’t grasp that I defend Russia precisely because it is *not* the USSR any more, and criticise the modern USA precisely because it is no longer the arsenal of conservative liberty, and has turned instead into a globalist, ultra-liberal ideological state.

Anyway, all this is a preliminary to pointing out that my view of New Labour(and its Cameroon clones in the Tory Party) has been spectacularly vindicated by a Deep Throat from the heart if Blairism.

To the mockery of the conventionally wise, I wrote in the MoS on 9t^h August

‘Today's Tory Party is indistinguishable from Blairite New Labour, and is probably more Marxist in practice than Jeremy Corbyn is in theory.’

And I then wrote on 4^th October, to yet more derision from the massed bands of received opinion: ‘Our political media never understood that the Blairites were in fact far more Left wing than Jeremy Corbyn. The Blair faction's ideas came from a communist magazine called Marxism Today. The magazine, in turn, got the ideas from a clever Italian revolutionary called Antonio Gramsci. He wanted a cultural revolution, a Leftist takeover of schools, universities, media, police and courts (and of conservative political parties too). That is exactly what New Labour did.

An astonishing number of senior New Labour people, from Peter Mandelson to Alan Milburn, are former Marxist comrades who have never been subjected to the sort of in-depth digging into their pasts that Jeremy Corbyn faces. Why is this? Is one kind of Marxism OK, and the other sort not? Or is it just that most political writers are clueless about politics?’

Ha! Sunday’s ‘Observer’ published the following article by Peter Hyman, a close associate of the Blair creature at the height of his popularity

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/20/labour-party-directionless-political-future?CMP=share_btn_tw

This is the key passage:

'The [New Labour]“project” was infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy Corbyn or his supporters'

The context is below.

I think it entirely vindicates what I have now been saying for nearly 20 years, and makes nonsense of the idea that Blairism was a form of Toryism.

‘New Labour was not intended merely as a short-term electoral fix after 18 years out of power and four crushing election defeats (though that would not have been a terrible thing), but as a radical new force in British politics. The “project” was infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy Corbyn or his supporters. The idea of New Labour was not to be a good opposition party, to protest loudly or have an “influence” over events, but, rather, to take and hold on to the levers of power. New Labour sought political hegemony: winning power and locking out the Tories to ensure that the 21st century was a Labour century with Labour values in contrast to a Tory-dominated 20th century.

‘The scale of that ambition, in a country dominated by a stridently rightwing press and the quiet conservatism of large swaths of the British people, was breathtaking. If Labour could be in power for a serious amount of time, then the country would, we believed, change for good; not a burst of socialism for one time (if that), but changed institutions and values that could shape the country for all time.

‘The project worked at a number of levels. We told a story about Britain that was optimistic, tapped into people’s aspirations, stressed our tradition as a pioneering nation and showed how once again, through knowledge, know-how, new technology and networking, our creativity could help shape the prosperity and success of Britain in the future. We championed a society in which community and solidarity played a more important role – “giving” as well as “taking”.

‘We put forward a practical programme for government and new delivery mechanisms to ensure that policies were actually working on the ground. A plan to get the young unemployed back to work. A plan to end rough sleeping on our streets (now sadly back in big numbers). A radical plan to end child poverty in a generation. A plan to cut huge waiting times in the NHS both for routine operations and in A&E departments. A plan to get the trains to run on time. Through massive new investment and judicious reform, the infrastructure of Britain and the life chances of the poorest families improved dramatically. The case for an active, empowering state was being made. There was a moral imperative too: to rebuild the public realm, to shape a more tolerant, kinder society and to devolve power to the nations of Britain.

‘There were many mistakes, many messy compromises. To those who want to compare this imperfect Labour government with some Aaron Sorkin-scripted, West Wing-style fantasy, it was doomed to come up short. But the real comparison should always have been between an imperfect Labour government and a Tory government. For if Labour holds out for something pure and untainted by reality, if we pretend that there are black-and-white answers to complicated situations, then, as we are finding out now, the left is ruined.

It’s too easy to forget what life was like under the pre-New Labour Tory government or what it would have been like if they had continued in power. It was illegal to talk about gay relationships in schools; pupils still used outside lavatories in crumbling buildings; free-market Tories were urging the end of the NHS; while the government defended apartheid, foxhunting and the massive, unregulated profits of privatised utilities.

It’s also easy to forget just how much the centre of gravity of British politics has moved to the left as a result of New Labour.’

Dave's quest for an EU deal is like Lord Of The Rings - with no elves

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

It is now quite plain that David Cameron neither expected nor wanted to win an overall majority at the General Election. He promised the EU referendum in the belief and hope that he would never have to redeem his pledge.

He has no idea what to do. The concessions he claims he will win aren’t available, and he wouldn’t want them if he could get them, as he’s rather keen on having the country run by foreigners.

Remember the wild haste with which he rushed us back into the European Arrest Warrant, a gross interference with our laws and freedom?

I bet he gulped, rather than whooped, when news was brought to him that he was going to have a majority big enough to allow (or rather force) him to do as he had said he would. He’s still hoping nobody has read the wild Election manifesto he issued, when he was sublimely confident that he would be heading another coalition.

His never-ending journey round European capitals, in search of an unattainable deal, is the most desperate quest since The Lord Of The Rings.

And he is not going to be rescued by any wizards, elves, walking forests, giant eagles or ghost armies.

Only one thing will save him, the ghastly flitting grey shapes of the politically undead, John Major, Michael Heseltine and the rest of the Europhile Black Riders, screeching and wailing (quite untruly) that Britain cannot survive outside the EU.

As long as he can persuade the Blair creature to stay silent, such a campaign of fear may just work. Millions of British people have never lived in an independent country and are scared of trying to do so, like infants who have never ridden a bicycle without stabilisers.

And when they are not scared, they are bored by the subject, or put off it by the blazer-and-cravat bangers-on, who can speak of nothing else.

It’s a pity really, that it should come to this, that a country created by repeated episodes of dangerous valour and solitary endeavour should come to an end because its voters are frightened of letting go of Nurse Angela Merkel, or think they can’t manage on their own in the world without Jean-Claude Juncker to wipe their noses for them. But, after the failure of Mr Cameron’s latest scrabble for unavailable concessions, I suspect that’s the way it will go.

Fear conquers all.

You'll envy these lesbians - for their cheap flats

I have now seen my first Hollywood Lesbian Romance, the much-hyped Carol starring Cate Blanchett with co-star Rooney Mara and have to tell you that it was extraordinarily dull.

Spoiler warning here, but the solitary gun doesn’t even go off, which about sums up the action. By contrast, the careful re-creation of early 1950s New York, just before Christmas, was wonderful.

The most astonishing thing was that a young person on a small wage was still able, in those times, to afford a chilly but perfectly habitable flat in the centre of a big city while he or she started out on a career.

This aspect of life is more far-fetched now to us than lesbian marriage would have seemed to the New Yorkers of 1952.

Secrets are safe with Charles

Why is anyone shocked that the heir to the throne, who will one day be head of state, is allowed to see Cabinet papers? I’m more shocked by the idea that quite a few senior modern politicians, unrepentant communist hacks, fantasists, drunkards, tax-dodgers, etc, have had such access.

If ever I have a moment’s doubt about the Monarchy, it is dispelled when I look at those who hate it. Why do they loathe it so? It has no power as such.

But, like the king on a chessboard, it prevents others from occupying the space where it stands.

Politicians long to be the ones being cheered, they long to have mounted guards of honour and anthems played when they enter the room. They want their own aeroplanes. They want the Armed Forces to be their personal toys. They dream of requiring us to be loyal to them.

It creeps up on them. Cherie Blair (having failed to get elected as an MP) once acted as hostess aboard the Royal Train, and her husband loved posing with soldiers. Lady Thatcher started turning up at the scenes of national disasters.

David Cameron claimed to be speaking ‘on behalf of everyone in Britain’ when he wished astronaut Tim Peake luck on Tuesday. No he wasn’t.

He’s a divisive politician and he doesn’t speak on my behalf (or on the behalves of quite a few others) about anything. It was the Queen’s job, and she duly did it.

One day, God willing, Charles should do it. Reading the papers that reveal the miserable deals and compromises of government should help him keep his poise when he grants audiences to the trivial, unmemorable men and women who secretly think they’re more important than the Crown of England.

Mother of all bias

The current Radio Times, previewing a documentary on The Golden Age Of Children’s TV (BBC4, 9pm Monday), refers to ‘the inherent wrongness of Watch With Mother’. The writer doesn’t feel any need to explain what was ‘inherently wrong’ with this innocent programme. Given the magazine’s BBC origins, we can guess. The Corporation’s ‘Producers’ Guidelines’ used to say that categorising women as housewives was like categorising black people as criminals. So you can imagine what they think of the idea that mothers might actually stay at home to raise their own children. It doesn’t cross such minds that anyone might disagree.

The French Tory party and the French Labour party have just publicly combined to defeat the National Front, which has nasty leaders and a nasty past, but which many mistreated Frenchmen and Frenchwomen have turned to in despair at their existing elite.

This cynical alliance just confirms that these parties are two faces of the same worthless coin. Doesn’t it make you pleased that, thanks to Jeremy Corbyn, this country now once again has two parties which actually disagree on major issues? Sinister movements flourish when real politics dies. Yet the Blairites in politics and the media continue to spit rage at Mr Corbyn simply for existing. Even his Christmas card is analysed for signs of Marxism.

Do grow up. In an adult country, it is possible for people to disagree, and for all to recognise that nobody (especially George Osborne) is right all the time.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

A Radio Debate on Religion versus Multicultural Secularism

Earlier this week I recorded a discussion with Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society, on Justin Brierley's programme on Premier Christian Radio. Some of you may wish to listen to it. Here it is: 

 

http://www.premierchristianradio.com/Shows/Saturday/Unbelievable/Episodes/Unbelievable-Is-the-UK-s-Christian-heritage-history-Peter-Hitchens-vs-Terry-Sanderson

 

'And Then There Were None'. The BBC Sexes up Agatha Christie

Warning: Multiple plot spoilers:

I see the BBC (having introduced explicit incest into Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’, the staid old boy having carelessly omitted to describe it  in the book)  are also planning to sex up a 1939 Agatha Christie story for Christmas TV,  the interestingly entitled novel ‘And The There Were None’.

It will, we are told, feature on-screen gore, the f-word and cocaine, not the sort of thing you’d normally associate with this tweedy author, who liked to leave violence undescribed and would (I have no doubt at all) been greatly shocked by the use of the F-word in mixed company, let alone on the BBC.

As for cocaine, it’s not as anachronistic as I at first thought.  I can’t find any mention of it in the Christie story. But it is at the centre of the plot in Dorothy Sayers’s 1933 Peter Wimsey novel ‘Murder Must Advertise’ . And at least one of the characters in the Christie book might well be the sort of person who would take this drug.

There’s less excuse for gore and swearing. But should we care? Is Agatha Christie’s work sacrosanct?  I’d say not. In fact, if it were, the whole thing couldn’t be screened (see below) or even mentioned.  I’m just afraid that it will (as so often) fail to sustain the illusion of being set in the late 1930s. And if it does, then the whole plot, based as it is on a morality and a society now vanished, won’t work.

I thought Agatha Christie was a thing of the past until I went to live in Moscow in the early 1990s. There I saw the station bookstalls heaped with the works of ‘Agata Kristi’, probably illicitly translated in defiance of copyright, often a  problem in Soviet days. Russians love English crime fiction, and Russian TV did a rather fine ‘Sherlock Holmes’, in which a foggy, cobbled Vilnius impersonated Victorian London, and almost every scene contained a huge picture of Queen Victoria, much as all Soviet scenes would contain a  bust or portrait of Lenin.

 This glimpse of her popularity with Russians didn’t persuade me to read her. On a long Soviet train journey, I needed something longer, denser and more  credible. I recall being read some of her stories at school (one in which a telephone call for help is cunningly disguised, by means of depressing a key during the conversation and only allowing some of the words to get through). And I also remember a black-and-white TV version of ‘And Then There Were None’, though I think it was under a different title, which I enjoyed, but not so enthusiastically as to want more of the same.

By my twenties I had come to see Agatha Christie (with some justice) as stuffy, prejudiced and pedestrian, but also rather given to daft confected fantasies – such as ‘Murder on the Orient Express’, a great disappointment.   Somehow I had her mixed up in my mind with another suburban grey-haired female author, Enid Blyton, as a sort of book factory. How could anyone who wrote so many books possibly be any good?  Compared with Dorothy Sayers, who consciously flatters her vain readers with literary and cultural references (I’ve often wondered if her occasional heroine, ‘Harriet Vane’ is accidentally named) , or with the incomparable Josephine Tey (whose detective novels are icy spring water for the mind, and lovely bits of social history and commentary into the bargain) she was dull.

My late brother had actually met her, at her house near Cholsey between Oxford and the Chilterns, in the late 1960,(I cannot recall how this came about). He formed the impression from the conversation that she was an old-fashioned pre-war English anti-Semite.  No doubt she disapproved greatly of Hitler and his mass murders.  But an author who can refer to the ‘thick, Semitic lips’ of a Jewish character (and a character who is by no means pleasant), as Christie does in ‘And Then there Were None’  can fairly be accused of not liking Jews very much. I shall be interested to see the BBC’s treatment of this character. I expect they will evade the issue.

This unlovely phrase about thick lips occurs in the very opening scenes of ‘And Then There Were None’, and is still included in a very recent paperback of the book, under a reputable imprint.  It adds nothing to the plot and if, as some might argue, it is of historical interest that such things could still be written in 1939, then why has the word ‘N*****’ been removed , not only from the title of the book (formerly ‘Ten Little ‘N*****s’, now wholly rewritten) but also from the doggerel verse (‘Ten little N*****-boys, which has  become ‘Ten little Soldier boys’) on which the plot is based. Even the name of the island on which most of the action takes place, originally ‘N***** Island’ , is changed to ‘Soldier Island’. And the little figurines, which disappear one by one as the characters are done away with, are likewise transformed into ‘Soldiers’. Guess what they were in the original.  At one stage, I think for the American market,  the word ‘Indians’ was substituted for the N-word, but that, too, has now been deemed unacceptable.  Yet the ‘thick, Semitic lips’ of Mr Isaac Morris remain.

Oddly enough, what I think is the only open objection to racial prejudice in the book is made by one of the least attractive characters, Emily Brent. She is  a tiresome and overly pious and rigid Christian hypocrite whose self-righteousness has caused havoc to the lives of others, though she refuses to take any responsibility for this. She is, quite possibly, the least sympathetic and most dislikeable character in a book entirely lacking in heroes or heroines, which makes me wonder what Miss Christie’s attitude towards Christianity was.

She discusses the allegations made against all the guests with another character Vera Claythorne. One is an army officer accused of abandoning his men to their deaths in Africa.

"Ah, I understand you now. Well, there is that Mr. Lombard. He admits to having  abandoned twenty men to their deaths."  Vera said: "They were only natives..."

Emily Brent said sharply: "Black or white, they are our brothers."

Vera thought: "Our black brothers - our black brothers. Oh, I'm going to laugh. I'm hysterical.  I'm not myself..."’

I wonder if that bit will survive the BBC adaptation.