PETER HITCHENS: Gold for Synchronised Sunburn and self-delusion goes to...

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

Imagine a country that isn’t very successful, but wants to boost its image in the world. Its economy is rocky, its cities grubby and run-down. Its education system isn’t much good.
So this country spends huge sums of scarce money and great effort to find young men and women who can win medals in international sporting competitions.
It carefully chooses sports where the competition is weak. It relentlessly drives the chosen athletes. And it works. At home and abroad, its image is transformed.
Its national media go into hysterics over each medal.
The people at home forget for a moment the dreariness of their lives.
The anthem plays and the flag flies high.
The country I am thinking of is East Germany, the self-styled ‘German Democratic Republic’. You may remember the superb figure skater Katarina Witt, who won Winter Olympic gold medals in 1984 and 1988, and a pile of other awards for her ghastly country in the years just before it collapsed in a cloud of rust.
What did her triumphs prove? Nothing much, except that state power can achieve sporting success. In which case, what is so joyous about it?
If sport is about anything, surely it is about individual achievement, not plans, budgets and political prestige.
What could be further from the burning individual talents and grit celebrated in Chariots Of Fire than some Ministry of Sport fulfilling its medal plan?
But what, deep down, is the difference between this episode and Sir John Major’s dash for Olympic gold which has now paid off in Brazil?
In fact, I think our state-sponsored medal programme may be worse in some ways than East Berlin’s because, as a free society, we had the power to question it and we didn’t.
It might also be worth recalling that Sir John’s much-praised initiative was financed mainly by the Lottery – in which a British government for the first time actively encouraged gambling, especially among the vulnerable poor, the main payers of this tax on false hope.
Indeed, Sir John’s legacy of gambling and debt, forced on students in the universities he so wildly expanded, may be his main memorial.
You may say, quite rightly, that I am jaundiced because I couldn’t care less about sport. My sympathies in Rio lie mainly with the empty, wet seats, which beautifully sum up my view of the Olympics.
But even if I were an enthusiast for Underwater Motorcycling, Bovine Ballet or Synchronised Sunburn, or whatever it is we currently lead the world in, I’d still have the same misgivings.
This is what failed and powerless countries do to make themselves feel better.
It is an illusion, and when it ends, things will be worse than they were before.

Tragic Victims of our deal with the devil

Who can fail to be moved and grieved by the sight of a small child in distress? But please do not let your emotions stop you thinking.
The picture of the shocked Aleppo survivor, Omran Daqneesh, like that of the drowned child Alan Kurdi last year, should not be allowed to enforce a conformist opinion on the world.
The death of Alan Kurdi did not mean that it was wise to fling wide the borders of Europe (as Germany’s Angela Merkel now well knows).
The rescue of Omran Daqneesh should not make us side with the bloody and merciless Syrian rebels.
Why is Aleppo a war zone in the first place? Do you know? I will tell you. Syria was a peaceful country until it was deliberately destabilised by Saudi Arabia and its fanatical, sectarian Gulf allies, consumed with hatred for the Assad government and, above all, its ally Iran.
Worse, this monstrous intervention was supported by the USA, Britain and France, all sucking up to the Saudis for oil, money and arms contracts.
In the hope of bringing down Assad, we made a devil’s bargain with some of the worst fanatics in the Middle East, people who make Anjem Choudary look like the Vicar of Dibley.
We know of Britain’s role for certain because of the very strange case of Bherlin Gildo, a Swedish man accused by British authorities of attending a terror training camp in Syria. His trial collapsed in June 2015 because his defence lawyers argued that the terror groups he was accused of supporting had been helped by British intelligence.
The Assad state, as you might expect, defended itself against its attackers, helped in the end by Iran and Russia.
And the war which followed was the ruin of Syria, whose innocent people found their peaceful cities and landscape turned into a screaming battlefield, as it still is.
If you are truly grieved by the picture of poor little Omran, just be careful who you blame.

Anjem Choudary, broadcasting’s favourite Islamist loudmouth, was and is a vain, bloviating, blowhard fraud, another boozy drug-taking low-life posing as a serious person. He found a role and fools to indulge him, many in the same media who now queue up to rejoice at his imprisonment.
But I do not feel safer from terror now that he is locked up. Worse, I feel less safe from Chairman May’s sour-faced surveillance state, which takes a dim and narrow view of free speech and liberty. Choudary has been locked up not for what he did but for what he said. Claims he influenced anyone into crime are thin. Even the sneaky wording of the Terrorism Act, in which he was charged with ‘inviting’ support for IS, is suspicious.
It sounds like ‘inciting’, and is meant to, for incitement to terror and murder is a real crime, even in free countries. But it isn’t the same as ‘inviting’, a much weaker word. You may gloat that Choudary is eating Islamic porridge. But be careful what you gloat over. A law as loose as this could easily be used against anyone the state doesn’t like. I predict that it will be, too.
By the way, I spent several hours last week circling Government offices trying to find out how many such charges there have been – the CPS sent me to the Justice Ministry, they told me to call the Home Office, who sent me back to the CPS. This pathetic pass-the-parcel evasion suggests they don’t care much. This stuff is propaganda, not genuine security.

******

A few days ago I took part in a recorded BBC debate on prisons, What Point Prison?, which will be transmitted on Radio 4 at 8pm on Wednesday

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07pj2pk

 There was a startling exchange on capital punishment between me and Erwin James, a penitent convicted murderer much admired by liberals, who has now become a distinguished writer on prisons. You may be surprised at what he said.

 

This Ghastly Planned Exhibition of Blairite Waxworks should ensure British exit from the EU

This richly comic plan, reported by James Macintyre, on the ‘Christian Today’ site,  should greatly help the  ‘Leave’ campaign’s current surge towards victory:

Cameron, Brown, Blair and Major 'to share platform' in last-ditch bid to keep Britain in EU | Christian News on Christian Today

If the predicted event takes place, all the appalling old waxworks of liberal elite Britain, all those to blame for the mess in which we now find ourselves, collectively responsible for disastrous wars in places where we had no business to be, a creepy surrender to criminal gangsters on our own sovereign territory, the accelerating break-up of the United Kingdom, breath-taking economic incompetence, needlessly surrendered sovereignty, spectacular educational failure, a combined assault on private and family life unprecedented outside the USSR, and a frightening decline in law and justice, assembled in one place, all urging the same mistaken course of action...

Here we have it, the modern world in arms, or at least in each other’s arms.

And here, in the Financial Times , we have from Mr Janan Ganesh the underlying explanation of such an event – the elite ranged together to oppose the people. Mr Ganash has spotted the real division in our society today, as opposed to the artificial boundary which cruelly divides Blairites from joining with each other in a single assembly of enthusiastic Tonyites.

Apart from asking ‘Why did it take them so long to spot it?’ I am grateful to the Blairite of Blairites, John Rentoul, for drawing my attention to it:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5c108032-314f-11e6-ad39-3fee5ffe5b5b.html#axzz4BUILaIKk

The core of it is here

‘If there is a lesson from recent weeks, it is that mild Conservatives and moderate adherents to the Labour cause share more with each other than with the rest of their own parties. On Europe, but also migration and globalisation, they want to amend the status quo not break it. In their tone is an absence of anger that my trade habitually elides with a lack of passion.

Against them in this referendum is a party in all but name and formal incorporation, drawn from the Tory right and the Labour left and incubated in the Leave campaign. These politicians are conservative and anti-establishment at the same time.’

Which, without the sympathetic description of the New Labour/Cameroon alliance as ‘mild’ or ‘moderate’( which their actions certainly are not, given their devastating effects on this country and the Middle East over the past few decades), is much what I have been saying for many years now.

He asks :  

‘…take Ms Rudd and Mr Umunna, or George Osborne, chancellor, and his former adversary Ed Balls, or even David Cameron and any of 100 Labour MPs: do they disagree over the size of the state more than they agree over Britain’s place in the EU, its future as an open economy, its indispensability as the liberal thumb on the continental scales? And which of the two sets of issues is now the real stuff of politics?’

And he urges them to get together, thus :  

‘Under the blur of digits, these politicians have the same basic orientation. Scorn it as the Davos consensus but it has done more for British prosperity and self-respect than the admixture of socialism and Tory paternalism ever could — or, to judge by the 1970s, ever did. If this settlement is menaced by forces that will outlast this referendum, it is myopic of its guardians to remain separate out of fealty to a party system that was forged in the industrial age for an empire nation.’

Predicting a ‘different arrangement of forces’ which may not be neat (he’s right), he notes: ‘But at least elections between a Christian Democrat-style party and a Liberal-ish party would correspond to the arguments we are having today. Millions of Eurosceptic Labour voters would have a team, and so would those of us who want more not less of the world as it is. I hear the Tory and Labour moderates newly mingling in the Remain offices rather get on. As a glint of the future, it will have to do.’

 

It just makes me wonder what that other Blairite, Michael Gove, is doing in the 'Leave' campaign, a development that has always puzzled me and continues to do so.  

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.

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The Dave diet: hair gel, snake oil and terminological inexactitudes

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
How odd it would be to actually watch Oxford beat Cambridge by a mile in the boat race, and then open the papers next morning and read that Cambridge had won.

Last week was a bit like that for me. I watched the Tory conference carefully. And then I read the papers, and it was all plain wrong.

Take this quotation, from a Tory document, describing the ‘key objectives’ of their planned new bill on ‘Human Rights’.

One of them is to ‘put the text of the original Human Rights convention into primary legislation’. In other words, the Tories plan to make Human Rights a permanent part of our constitution. Is that what you thought they were doing?

It goes on to say: ‘There is nothing wrong with that original document.’ Is that what you thought they thought? Because it is.

The only way to escape the ‘Human Rights’ curse is to abolish it entirely, and rely (as we did when we were truly free and independent) on our own well-tried laws, forged in centuries of constitutional battle.

Canada, which has its own homegrown ‘Charter Of Rights And Freedoms’, modelled on the European one, is just as entangled in liberal drivel as we are. It’s not where the Charter comes from that’s the problem. It’s what it is.

You have deliberately been given a wholly false impression of what is planned – and, alas, much of the media has joined in the deception.

There are other falsehoods. Perhaps the worst and most wounding for a British patriot is Mrs Theresa May’s plan to ban ‘extremists’ from the airwaves and the internet. What is an extremist? Why, anyone the Government says is one. I might be one. You might be one.

What joy this idea must have given the Chinese despots currently resisting peaceful demands for more freedom in Hong Kong.

I can just imagine the glee with which they will throw back any British protests at repression, by saying how much they admire Mrs May’s reintroduction of medieval tyranny into our penal code. For this disgraceful outburst, Mrs May was praised as a possible future premier by choirs of sycophants.

But then we must come to that great streak of snake-oil and hair gel, the Prime Minister’s speech in Birmingham on Wednesday. I confess I swore at the TV set several times, enraged by his sheer nerve. 

His ostentatious wearing of a Help For Heroes wristband after needlessly prolonging the peril of British troops in Afghanistan was particularly repulsive to me.

I hope his endorsement did not harm that excellent charity too much, though I have never understood why wounded soldiers should need to rely upon charity for their care.

IT WAS full of what I will politely call terminological inexactitudes. Of these the greatest was his pretence that he hates being in coalition with Liberal Democrats. All the rest flowed from this falsehood.

Let me remind you of what he said on September 20, 2009, long before he was allegedly ‘forced’ into this arrangement: ‘On so many progressive issues, there is strong agreement between our parties.’ By ‘progressive’, he means left-wing.

The next greatest falsehood was his pretence that he fears Labour more than he fears Ukip. The opposite is true. His Blairite project would be quite safe under Labour.

Only a Ukip breakthrough offers the poor, betrayed British people any hope of real change. The others must lie, because they know their real aims are hateful to us.

No happy ending for story time 

How sad to hear that BBC radio is ending its last children’s programme – because its audience is mostly made up of over-60s.

For me, the words ‘It’s a quarter to two’ and ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’, which began the old programme Listen With Mother, are still infused with magic. I actually did listen to it with my mother, and there were plenty of others who did the same.

We make a lot of fuss about how adults should read to children, but I’m not sure we really do very much about it. It’s difficult. Children are incredibly sensitive to the atmosphere around them, and our age is too noisy and frantic to listen to stories. 

It only works if you can see the story unfolding in your head. And modern children face so many distractions – and have their imaginations hoovered out of their heads by TV and computer games at incredibly early ages.

And language gets cruder and coarser every year. I was enraptured when teachers read Conan Doyle’s great historical romances to us on dark afternoons, and John Masefield’s The Box Of Delights. But how many eight-year-olds can cope these days with their richly embroidered English?

A brave attempt to revive the lost art is being made in Oxford now, by the extraordinary new Story Museum, which should get more attention. It has a real wardrobe, through which you can reach a snowy forest, and many other wonders and surprises.

But above all it is devoted to the idea that children who know stories will grow up happier and richer in spirit than those who don’t.

My homebound train slowed, then halted meaninglessly in the middle of some post-industrial wasteland. Late again. In fact, at least a dozen trains were held up by about half an hour, on a major line.

This happens so often that I wouldn’t mention it, except that the delay was blamed on a mysterious ‘object’ on the line, which announcers were careful not to name.

My mind raced. What could it be that was so bad they couldn’t mention it? A dead sheep? A lavatory? A coffin? A Human Right?

By diligent enquiry, I found in the end that it was... a solitary plastic traffic cone. Instead of hooking it off the track with a pole, or jumping down and picking it up, or just letting trains biff it out of the way, now legally perilous, those in charge launched a major alert, as signals switched to red for miles around.

Of course they knew it was silly – that’s why they wouldn’t reveal what the object was. But this is the state of our country since the Thatcher and Major Governments allowed no-win-no-fee lawyers to operate – in the full knowledge of the misery and stupidity they had already brought to the USA. Next time I’ll ring the Cones Hotline – if it still exists.

The Prime Minister says he prefers pounds, pints, yards and miles to litres and metres. Perhaps he does, or perhaps he is just saying that because he knows it plays well with people like me.

If he really means it, then he can do something about it. For many years, the Government – and increasingly the BBC – have acted as if Parliament abolished our traditional measurements.

It never did. Nor was it ever discussed at a General Election. What’s more, these measures are still used in the USA, a successful and efficient country with which we do a lot of trade.

Yet schools and officials act as if feet and inches, yards and acres are antiquated and subversive, coldly refusing to use them. There’s no warrant for this. Mr Cameron has the power to stop it. Everyone in this country should know how many inches make a foot, and how many pounds there are in a stone.

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An Interesting Man

Having spent a lot of the 1990s abroad in various places, I missed much of the Major era, the forerunner of the Cameron age. So I occasionally do a bit of digging in the files to improve my understanding of this fascinating time, and its continued influence on British politics.

 

Today’s episode is stimulated by the presence of Lord Chadlington, formerly Peter Gummer, in the Prime Minister’s entourage on his visit to Peking and other parts of Zhongguo. It is quite well-known that Lord Chadlington is a close neighbour of the Camerons in an idyllic hilltop hamlet in Oxfordshire. But I have long thought it an interesting reflection on British political journalism that so little was written about this obviously very important man. Here are a few notes from the library.

 

Peter Gummer, as he once was, was for many years in charge of Shandwick PR, ‘the world’s largest PR company’. He is now boss of Huntsworth PR,  is the brother of the more famous John Selwyn Gummer (now Lord Deben). The Times, reporting on the Tory search for help in its 1992 election campaign,  in 1991, said that Chris Patten, then Tory chairman, had asked Peter Gummer to draw up a shortlist of possible advertising agencies. The Times also reported that Peter Gummer had advised the Foreign Office on media relations during the (first, successful) Gulf War.

 

In the same year the Mail on Sunday’s ‘Black Dog’ insider column said ‘I am watching with interest the PR activities of Peter Gummer, younger brother of Agriculture Minister John and boss of Shandwick Communications. After giving his advice to the Foreign Office during the Gulf War, Mr Gummer was also involved in advising the Ministry of Defence and the Arts Council.

Now the enterprising Mr Gummer has turned his gaze on the Department of Health and I hear that his excellent connections have even won him an entree to 10 Downing Street and a tour of the place conducted by the Prime Minister himself.’

 

The Times, reporting on an apparent smoothing of John Major’s image in late 1991, said ‘But most attention is being focused on Peter Gummer, head of Shandwick Public Relations and the brother of the agriculture minister, who has quickly become part of the Downing Street inner circle. ``Peter is in and out a lot working on the presentational skills of many cabinet members,'' says one who admits to having benefitted from his attentions. ``I cannot believe he has not also given the prime minister the benefit of his advice.''’

 

In the same month, the London Evening Standard ran a joint profile of Selwyn and Peter Gummer, under the headline ‘The Blue Brothers’. Both men, it seems, originally wanted to go into the Church. Their father, a Welsh miner who himself became a priest, is said to have sold collections of his sermons to pay his sons’ school fees.  Later, Peter Gummer ‘wanted to be rich’. He thought it would be ‘wonderful’. At the time of this encounter, he had recently handled the PR for McDonald’s in Moscow (What a job that must have been . Few will now believe what an extraordinary and fascinating moment it was when the incarnation of global consumer capitalism opened its first outlet in what was still a Communist capital). He was said to be worth £12.5 million. Interestingly, Peter Gummer was a newspaper reporter on the Isle of Wight before switching to PR, a useful training  which many people in public life would have benefited from.

 

The Daily Mail called him ‘John Major’s favourite PR man’ in 1992, soon before the election of that year. He had some business troubles ( and overcame them), and was talked of as a possible chairman of the Arts Council ( and did become chairman of the Council’s lottery Advisory Panel). He won a contract to promote Cambodia as a tourist destination in 1994,  became Chairman of the Royal Opera House in 1996 and was also involved in advising to Tories on how to combat New Labour in 1996, just before getting his peerage in August of that year at the age of 53. Lord (Maurice) Saatchi was in the same list. There was a bit of a fuss about this. Left-wing papers got cross.  In a rather chilly leading article, even the Daily Telegraph asked if he would have enough time to devote to parliamentary work.  Others said that Peter Gummer was jointly responsible for the notorious ‘demon eyes’ campaign showing a demonic Mr Blair above the slogan ‘New Labour – New Danger’, which in my view wouldn’t have been a bad slogan at all, if anybody could have worked out at the time exactly what the danger was.

An amusing footnote was provided by the late, great Alan Watkins, one of the most astute and observant political writers of the age, who  said in the Independent on Sunday that Peter Gummer had once told him he was in fact a Labour supporter.

By 1998, Lord Chadlingtn and the other veterans of Tory PR had been told by the new post-Major leadership of William Hague that their services were not required. By 2003 he was said to be in an ‘advisory group’ helping Iain Duncan Smith, a hopeless if chivalrous task. Edward Bernays himself, the founder of the science of PR, could not have saved IDS from his own party.  I am not sure if Lord Chadlington was active during Michael Howard’s leadership. Given Mr Howard’s great helpfulness towards David Cameron, it’s not impossible that the two co-operated. But I can find no mention of it.

 

In 2005, he was musing helpfully about David Cameron’s selection as Tory candidate at Witney (which he attended as President of the West Oxfordshire Conservative Association): "He was the only candidate out of 20 who delivered his speech off by heart in front of the lectern,'' he says. "My guess is he is very self-analytical and hard on himself - he always wants to do better.''. "David and Samantha were good-looking, they had lots of friends and fantastic careers''.

 

In September 2005, he was one of five senior city figures who write to the Financial Times to say: ‘Sir, Britain needs the Conservative party to get back on its feet, rediscover a sense of mission and then get out there and put right the problems that the current Labour government has created. Voters will back a Conservative ticket only when they really believe that the party is bold, in it for the long term and has a leader who they believe has got the courage to take the hard decisions and inject the energy needed to get things done. When it comes to choosing their next leader, Conservatives must think about the future. The country cannot afford them to drift. We have listened to all the potential candidates but one stands out above all the rest. David Cameron has conviction and a sense of direction coupled with the energy and dynamism to get things done. We believe he would make an excellent prime minister. Roddie Fleming Sir Tom Cowie Lord Harris Michael Green Lord Chadlington’ (He was by now Chief Executive of a new PR firm, Huntsworth).

 

A few weeks afterwards,  afterwards, he did it again, writing to the FT with a different group of colleagues : ‘Sir, The Conservative party needs a leader who can deliver economic stability and carry out the necessary reforms to make our economy more competitive. It is our view that David Cameron is the candidate most likely to deliver the dynamic economy on which all else depends. He shows an impressive grasp of the factors that contribute to a strong economy - namely competitive tax rates and good public infrastructure in areas such as transport and education. He is the only candidate to have gone beyond simplistic platitudes when it comes to deregulation - recognising that to cut regulation we need first to tackle this country's risk-averse culture. And he has been prepared to face up to tough decisions on long-term problems such as pensions, university finance and road-building. We sincerely hope that the Conservative party has the foresight to elect Mr Cameron as its next leader. Simon Wolfson, Chief Executive, Next; Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover, Former Chairman, J. Sainsbury; Lord Kirkham, Former Conservative Party Treasurer; Lord Harris of Peckham, Founder and Chairman, Carpetright; Michael Spencer, Chief Executive, ICAP; Sir Jack Harvie, Conservative Fundraiser and Donor; Jonathan Green, Founder, GLG; Lord Chadlington, Chairman, Huntsworth .’

 

The Sunday Times recorded in April 2007 that ‘Cameron's neighbour Lord Chadlington, brother of John Selwyn Gummer, owns the magnificent Queen Anne manor in this Oxfordshire village, and also its little farm and the pool in which the Camerons are invited to swim.’

 

In January 2009, the Times wrote that Lord Chadlington had ‘bankrolled Mr Cameron’s leadership bid’. The Independent On Sunday reported in July 2011  that  ‘When Cameron came to the [Witney]area 10 years ago, he rented a cottage from Lord Chadlington, the brother of John Gummer, before buying a farmhouse in the hamlet of Dean when he won the seat of Witney.’

 

In May 2012, Mr Cameron famously dressed down, in an ordinary suit rather than spongebag trousers, while attending the wedding of Naomi Gummer, Lord Chadlington’s daughter. More recently, a Chinese PR company bought a large stake in Huntsworth, which perhaps brings us back to where we started, on the plane to Zhongguo.

 

The thing that interests me about this relationship is that it tells us about a side of Mr Cameron the political reporters seldom trouble with – his past as a professional PR man, his strong links, through business and personal connections, with a part of Britain which is personally prosperous but not especially socially or morally conservative. I suspect that its members, thanks to their backgrounds and educations, generally regard themselves as naturally patriotic in a sort of ‘God save the Queen’ way,  and are puzzled by any suggestion that their adherence to the EU might call that into question.

 

I have no idea, by the way, what Lord Chadlington’s detailed politics are (though I am amused by Alan Watkins’s mischievous suggestion that he is or was a Labour supporter). We know, of course, that  his brother John Gummer is on the Heathite wing of the Tory Party, especially on EU issues. But people at this level of professional politics often do not have much interest in policies as such, or in the struggle between competing ideas. Office for people like them is what they want.

 

 It also, in my view, shows that the Major version of the Tory Party, a largely depoliticised machine for winning office, survived the Hague and IDS era and has now reasserted itself. But how times have changed since 1997. Now they can only hope to keep the Tories in being. Presumably ready for the new era of proportional representation which the Lib-Lab Coalition of 2015-2020 is likely to bring in. 

Marine 'A' is going to jail - but the guilt is all Blair's

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

This is the season to be soppy about servicemen and women. We buy and wear our poppies, and go on about ‘heroes’, a word which embarrasses soldiers quite a lot.

This is typical of our national doublethink about fighting men. The more we gush about how wonderful they are, the less we spend on the Forces and the less we understand what they do.

And the more we treat them as sentimental figures in stained-glass windows, the more we recoil from the unpleasant reality.

As we prepare to shove a Royal Marine sergeant into jail for killing a wounded enemy, we piously intone ‘we will remember them’ at war memorials.

As we do so, do we really think that the wars of 1914  and 1939 were chivalrous affairs, fought by schoolboys, in which we did no wrong? Does anyone really think we never shot prisoners?

We certainly let them die. I still possess somewhere a card signed by the pitifully few survivors of the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst (36 out of  a ship’s company of 1,968). Shouldn’t there have been more? My father’s ship, the cruiser Jamaica, had been sent in, with HMS Belfast, to finish off the burning, crippled Scharnhorst with torpedoes on Boxing Day 1943.

He was quite pleased to have been there, but got a bit gruff about the last bit. They had left quite a few German seamen to die horribly in the freezing water and the poisonous fuel oil, and they could be heard calling out for help.

This is a terrible breach of the laws of the sea. But much like Marine ‘A’, most of the British bluejackets present would have muttered, as they steamed away from the screams, that Hitler’s navy would have done the same for them, if things were the other way round. Like Marine ‘A’, they would have been right. The official reason for this was justifiable fear of German U-Boats.

But I suspect that the Russian convoys, an especially merciless theatre of war, had hardened hearts on both sides. In war, good men are ordered by their superiors to do bad things, the opposite of what they would do in peacetime.

They obey because they can see the sense in it. It has always been so. In which case, their superiors had better know that their purpose is justified. They had better win the war, so that the other side doesn’t drag them before a war crimes  tribunal. And, in all justice, they should not ask too many  questions afterwards.

If our criminal justice system ruthlessly pursued every crime ever committed, then the prosecution of Marine ‘A’ in Afghanistan would be justified and necessary. But we do no such thing. Millions of crimes, some very severe, go unpunished, often for political reasons.

Worse, we now have a political class which likes to go to war solely to make itself look good. Our current Prime Minister so enjoyed his vanity war in Libya that he yearned for another one in Syria.

He models his life and work on Anthony Blair, who knew (if it is possible) even less about the world than David Cameron. This empty person longed to make the planet better with bombs and bullets. The scale  of his failure, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is still not fully clear, but it is colossal, a pyramid of human skulls as big as the Millennium Dome.

Yet while Marine ‘A’ awaits news of his sentence, and prepares for prison, the Blair Creature wanders the world in luxury, advising despots on good governance and trousering enormous fees for greasy little speeches, pausing only to buy more property.

The Chilcot Inquiry, which ought at least to have shown Blair publicly for what he is, is stalled, perhaps forever. It seems it may never report properly. This is because British officials are blocking the release of documents recording exchanges between Blair and ex-President George W. Bush.

We are now being told this is the Americans’ fault. Perhaps it really is. But why are the men who actually created these wars allowed to hide their private conversations, when the unwise remarks of sergeants and privates can be used in evidence against them, to fling them into jail?

The next time you see Mr Blair wearing a poppy, or see any politician simpering about our ‘wonderful Armed Forces’, remember this. Those who did Blair’s bidding end up dead or maimed, or on trial, ruined and in prison cells. He remains whole, at liberty and rich.

 

Is a new Royal Train steaming into sight?

Maybe the Royal Train can after all be saved by steam, as I urged the other day.

The people who built the superb new British steam engine Tornado tell me the Queen has given them permission to name a planned new engine The Prince of Wales in honour of Charles’s birthday.

It’s a replica Gresley P2, for those who understand these things.

 

One of the reasons nasty people like the metric system is that it destroys landmarks and helps them bamboozle the customer. When jam and marmalade were sold by the pound, you could tell when the makers were raising the price.

Now they’re sold by the gram, they quietly shrink the jar instead. And last week, Mars and Cadbury cut the size of Christmas boxes of chocolates (once a reliable two pounds), ‘while keeping prices the same’. That is, they’ve sneakily raised the price.

 

A big grey shadow is stalking Dave

 

Is Sir John Major planning a comeback? The terrible thing is that it is not unthinkable.

The talent pool of British politics is shallow and depleted, and full of small croaking creatures so slimy that you can’t tell if they’re frogs or toads. As a result, Sir John now looks like a gigantic figure.

The father of the Cones Hotline and railway privatisation is mysteriously said to be a ‘decent guy’ when his life history suggests he is a master of cunning and a betrayer of promises.

If I were Mr Cameron, I’d be watching out for him.

Sir John is outraged by our lack of social mobility. He seems to blame this on the independent schools. How odd. Britain’s comprehensive state school system, whose main aim is to make us more equal, condemns most of its young victims to exclusion from the elite, while the private schools, whose main aim is still education, waft their lucky products straight on to society’s upper deck.

An intelligent person (are there any in politics?) would understand the real reason, the closure of hundreds of state grammar schools 40 years ago. Labour started this, but Tory governments smashed up hundreds of fine schools from 1970 to 1974 – and then between 1979 and 1997 failed to reopen a single one. Now it would be illegal to do so (one of the laws we actually enforce).

If Sir John wants social mobility, he can find it in Northern Ireland, where a fully selective grammar school system still exists.

There, children from the lower social classes have a much better chance (roughly a third greater) of getting to university than their equivalents on the mainland.

 

 

 

On Doing Your Homework - a Riposte to a Bog-Standard Attack on Grammar Schools

If I could, I would write an article at least once a week calling for the return of state grammar schools. But unlike Emile Zola, who wrote about nothing but the unjust imprisonment of Alfred Dreyfus for years until justice was done,  I don’t own my own newspaper.  So I wait for a good opportunity. And one has just arrived.

 

The fact is that there is huge public demand for selective state education, which has no significant ally or spokesman at Westminster or in Whitehall.  It is up to people such as me to express it, and I like to think that years of hammering away have brought the issue much further up the agenda than it was 15 years ago.

 

But there is still no obvious shift. Despite the occasional wisp of smoke from below the decks, the issue has yet to burst into flames. Why?  All the major political parties, and the official elite, are committed to comprehensive state schooling. All of them, having been captured by Gramscian revolutionary thought some years ago, are dogmatically wedded to ‘equality of outcome’, a policy which demands aggressive egalitarianism in education.

 

At least,  they are wedded to it for everyone except themselves, and the super-rich oligarchs who finance their dead parties. Politicians know all the tricks for getting their children into secretly selective schools,  closed to non-insiders, or they buy their way into the catchment areas of better schools, or they pay fees, as do the Oligarchs and plutocrats. In all cases, this means they do not really understand the terrible position of bright children from poor families, or care about it. I read the other day that Anthony Blair’s youngest child is now attending a London Roman Catholic ‘comprehensive’. There seems to be some general reluctance to say which school this is, so I shall stay silent. But  the school involved is ‘comprehensive’ in the same way that Ten Downing Street is an ‘inner-city terraced house’ – the description is technically correct, but otherwise deeply misleading.

 

 

This miserable hypocritical, self-serving egalitarianism - not some empty piffle about public ownership which was a dead letter 50 years ago- is Labour’s real ‘Clause Four’.  Not only has Labour never abandoned it . The other parties have adopted it too.

 

Some politicians are perhaps not bright enough to grasp this. One of them is probably Sir John Major, the supposed ‘decent man’ and ‘nice guy’ (really?)  who mysteriously rose to the top of politics (by not being Margaret Thatcher or Michael Heseltine), mysteriously won a general election( by not being Neil Kinnock), and was (nominally at least) Prime Minister for an incredible seven years, only ceasing to hold the office because he wasn’t Anthony Blair.

 

Now (and one has to wonder why this is) he seems anxious to remind us all that he also isn’t David Cameron. So this account of a speech he gave on the 8^th November somehow found its way on to the front of a Tory newspaper on the following Monday. I wonder how. Sir John is not inconsiderably distressed to find that Britain is in the grip of a privately-educated elite. Has he only just realised this? What was he actually doing when he was occupying all those great offices of state? What has he been doing since? Watching the cricket?.

 

Ludicrously, Sir John blames this bipartisan catastrophe on Labour. Perhaps he doesn’t know that his own Tory Party supervised the destruction of hundreds of fine grammar schools under Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher instead of saving them.  But he must surely know that he didn’t reopen a single one of them in his seven long years as Britain’s helmsman, instead concentrating on an irrelevant scheme to create so-called ‘Grant-Maintained’ schools, which did nothing to address the real problem. He must also know that the softening and dilution of the examination system was largely achieved by Tory governments.

 

The newspaper which trumpeted Sir John’s outburst (see below) has corrected in its online version the claim made in the print version that Sir John attended a comprehensive school, when in fact he went to a grammar school (Rutlish School). One wonders what would have become of the young Major if he really had gone to a comprehensive. But it retains the misleading statement that Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, ‘went to state school’, when in fact Mr Gove won a scholarship to a private school, Robert Gordon’s College,  where he received the most important part of his education. How interesting that a Tory newspaper should get into such a muddle. It used to be considered politically advantageous for Labour politicians to claim to have been less grandly-educated than they had been. Now it’s the egalitarian Tories who do this, notably Mrs Theresa May, who went to a Convent School, and then to a girls’ grammar school which became a comprehensive while she was there (presumably retaining a grammar stream for the existing grammar pupils, as this was standard procedure at the time) ,  but says in a major reference book that she went to a ‘comprehensive’.

 

 

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/10439303/Truly-shocking-that-the-private-school-educated-and-affluent-middle-class-still-run-Britain-says-Sir-John-Major.html

 

This outburst, whose purpose is mysterious, appeared on the same day as this puce-faced assault on the grammar school idea by Mr John Harris of the Guardian newspaper.

 

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/11/grammar-schools-social-mobility-deluded-thinking

 

Mr Harris is particularly annoyed that some on the left are beginning to realise that the return of grammar schools would be a good policy for a party which truly spoke for the poor, as here

 

http://shiftinggrounds.org/2012/06/more-grammar-schools-please-but-open-them-up/

 

This is very interesting and an encouraging sign. But my main business is with Mr Harris and with his comrade-in-arms, Owen Jones (‘The Peter Hitchens of the Left’),  who stormed on to Twitter to declare :  'Anyone who thinks grammar schools would improve social mobility needs to do their homework. They make things worse.’

 

Ah, now, do they, though? Regular readers here will know the trick that is being pulled by these two. But do Mr Harris or Mr Jones grasp that their argument is hollow?

 

The most significant concentration of remaining grammar schools in England (there are now none in Scotland or Wales) is in Kent and Buckinghamshire.

 

 

Both these counties are within commuting distance of London (Other London commuter Counties, such as Oxfordshire, Sussex, Hertfordshire, Essex, Hampshire and Berkshire, have very few grammar schools or no grammar schools at all). The same is true of the outer London boroughs. It is therefore both rational and practicable for families whose breadwinners work in London to plan their lives so as to give themselves access to grammar schools. (In most parts of the UK no such planning is possible, as grammar schools are a remote memory).  Given that the cost of five years of  private single-sex secondary day-school education (comparable to a grammar school education) is roughly £100,000 of post tax income, it is not surprising that parents who value schooling do the following:

1.Buy houses in the catchment areas of grammar schools.

2. Spend money on preparatory school and tutor fees to ensure that their children pass the grammar school examinations. In this, by the way, they are comparable to the many left-wing (but non-RC, for leftist Roman Catholics have another way out) London parents who boast that they use state schools, but spend fortunes on private tutoring to make up for the inadequacies of their children’s bog-standard comprehensives (so also making those schools appear a good deal better than they really are at results time).

 

But Mr Harris doesn’t seem worried by this equally important distortion. Nor is he worried by the behaviour of left-wing luminaries (some of them zealous and noisy campaigners against selection by ability) who move into the tiny and expensive catchment areas of certain nominal comprehensives in North London, which are in effect selective schools. If Mr Harris gets in touch with me, I’ll suggest some lines of inquiry.

 

As for the grammars, this siege of catchment areas, and the linked systematic targeted cramming of course completely distort school provision. But it is a *consequence* of the closure of hundreds of other grammar schools, not a criticism of the existence of the remaining 164, whose continuing survival is loathed by the comprehensive campaigners, because it emphasises the utter and unquestionable failure of the comprehensive project in educational terms.

 

When we had a national selective system, state primaries routinely prepared children for the eleven-plus (which readers here will know I would like to replace with an agreed assessment, on the lines of the ones used in Germany, coupled with more flexibility about the age of transfer). There was no need for people to move house or splurge on tutors.

 

Mr Jones, meanwhile, needs to do *his* homework on the subject of social mobility. People such as me are calling for a reintroduction of a national selective system. The inevitable failure of a localised, pressurised selective system to promote social mobility does not in any way refute our case.

 

The first bit of homework he needs to do is geography. Northern Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom(just) and still has a wholly selective secondary school system (just, despite the efforts of Sinn Fein to kill it off).

 

I contacted the Higher Education Statistics Agency (an independent body set up by the universities)  in Cheltenham, and asked them for the latest figures on the proportion of lower-income entrants to Higher Education institutions, broken up into the constituent parts of the United Kingdom. .

 

This, it seemed to me, would be a good indication of the effect of grammar schools on social mobility, because we could see directly how well lower-income children did in university entrance, in a system which was wholly selective, as against three systems which were either wholly comprehensive or almost entirely comprehensive.

 

I can see no objections to this as a good, objective test of the matter.

 

So, in 2011/2012 the proportion of young full-time first degree entrants,  from socio-economic class 4 to 7*,  to Higher Education institutions were as follows.

(*National Statistics Socio-Economic Classes)

 

 

England…30.9% (Largely comprehensive)

Wales…..29.1% (Totally comprehensive)

Scotland….26.6% (Totally comprehensive)

Northern Ireland…..39.1% (Almost wholly selective)

 

The UK average is 30.7%

England and Wales combined 30.8%

 

So the university chances of a child from a  poor background in selective Northern Ireland are almost one third greater than those of a similar child in largely comprehensive England and Wales, and the advantage of Northern Ireland over totally comprehensive Scotland is greater still.

 

It took me about 45 minutes to obtain these figures. But of course that is because I was already aware of the Northern Ireland exception, which is for many reasons unwelcome to the Comprehensive Zealots. Mr Harris is clearly aware that the Province still has grammar schools, as he mentions it. But he is interested only in the measure of how many pupils receive free school meals.

 

This is of course significant.  But it is not the whole point. It would hardly be surprising if the middle classes, with their bookish homes and educated parents who value education and understand how it works,  *dominated* grammar schools. Such schools do not represent a Maoist new dawn of total equality. The point is that in a selective system they  dominate them by *merit* and by *ability*, not by paying fees or buying expensive houses. And that the schools they dominate also retain an open door to bright children whose parents do not have these advantages, a door which is not closed against poor homes by bars of gold.

 

That is the best we can hope for, and it is much better than the selection by influence, faith,  secret knowledge or raw unadorned money, which we now have.   

 

The second bit of homework Owen Jones needs to do is History. I wish I could reproduce the whole chapter I wrote on this subject in my book ‘The Broken Compass’, later republished as ‘the Cameron Delusion’. But any good library will find it for you for a trifling fee (the relevant chapter is called ’The Fall of the Meritocracy’).

 

This traces the blatantly political, and egalitarian origin of the comprehensive idea as developed by Graham Savage. It also reproduces the figures from the (1966) Franks Report into Oxford University, which noted that in 1938-9, private school pupils had won 62% of places at that University . A further 13% were won by direct grant schools (fine institutions which after 1944 operated as combined grammar schools and independent schools, until stupidly abolished and driven out of the public sector by Labour in 1975 – now they moan that they want the independent sector to ‘help’ state schools, but of course they wouldn’t want that sort of ‘help’, on terms that challenged the comprehensive orthodoxy). And 19% came from other state schools, presumably all grammar schools at that time.

 

By 1958-9 (14 years after the Butler Education Act created the national selective system),  private schools were down to 53%, direct grants up to 15% and state grammars up to 30%. By 1964-5, private schools were down again to 45% , direct grants up to 17% and grammars up to 34%.

 

(The totals do not add up to 100% because of foreign students and home-educated entrants)

 

Until Antony Crosland put a stop to this, this was an accelerating, almost revolutionary process. The next year (the last recorded by Franks) private schools were at 41%, direct grants at 17% and grammars up to 40%. Michael Beloff, a former President of Trinity College, Oxford has said that the state schools were supplying 70% of new entrants to Oxford by the early 1970s, just as the grammar schools began to disappear in large numbers, but (though it seems perfectly possible on the basis of the figures I do have)  I have not been able to verify this.

 

Note that the grammars and direct grants stormed Oxford (and Cambridge) in the 1950s and 1960s, without any special provision or concessions, despite the great advantage the private schools had in those days in the teaching of Classics (then essential for Oxbridge entrance). Now, Oxbridge colleges struggle to raise their state intake by all kinds of concessions, striving to fulfil egalitarian quotas, and as a result give huge advantages to applicants from the remaining grammars, religious schools, elite sixth-form colleges and covertly selective ‘comprehensives’  which are in truth selective, but not in fair or open fashion.

 

Mr Harris and Mr Jones are very welcome to reply here at length if they wish. 

I’m so sorry... but I don’t mean it, it isn’t my fault and no, you can’t sue me

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

Why won’t anybody say sorry properly any more?

The miserable behaviour of the police officers in the Plebgate affair, questioned by the Home Affairs Committee, is just the latest example of the strange apology crisis which has this country in its grip: too few of the right sort; too many of the wrong sort.

Nobody is ever straightforwardly sorry for what he  has done.

He may be ‘sorry if’ you were upset, or inconvenienced or offended. But listen carefully. This is just a way of telling you to stop being so sensitive. It is not an admission of fault. Watch out for the treacherous little ‘if’, that gives the game away.

He doesn’t regret doing the thing that angered you. But he hasn’t the courage to say so.  He just thinks it is tiresome that you are making a fuss about it, and wants to shut you up by faking contrition he doesn’t feel.

Then there is what I call the Railway Apology. There are now millions of these worthless things in circulation, like the old Zimbabwe dollar. They trickle out of station loudspeakers in an unstoppable, computer-generated flow.

They result from some long-ago market research, which showed that passengers thought they were due a bit of penitence for the lateness and unreliability they constantly suffered.

They did, and they do, but what they really wanted was some sort of readiness to put things right in future. It’s no good saying sorry for doing something you intend to repeat almost exactly, within a few hours, and then again and again for as long as you live, or as long as your franchise lasts.

It’s also no good getting a robot to do it for you. Real apologies stick in the throat, involve some shame and humiliation, and are intensely personal.

Perhaps it’s because the Japanese take apologies so seriously that their railways are so much better than ours.

Imagine the directors of some wretched rail company lined up in their suits at a big London terminus, bowing deeply to their customers as they promised to make amends for years of profiteering, cheeseparing and neglect. You can’t? Nor can I.

Some of this is of course the result of Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s too little-known legal time bomb, the delayed action decision to allow American-style ambulance-chasing no-win, no-fee lawyers to operate in this country.

The 1990 Courts and Legal Services Act (Section 58) cleared the way, followed in 1995 by the Conditional Fee Agreements Regulations. These, not ‘Human Rights’ or ‘Health and Safety’, are the source of the lawyer-infested culture in which we now dwell, in which a simple, decent and sincere apology has been turned into a dangerous admission of liability.

I am truly sorry about that. But it’s not my fault.

A lovely sign that Dave's in trouble

You can always tell when the Prime Minister’s poll ratings are in trouble, for photographs of Samantha Cameron, looking lovely, will soon appear in all the papers.

And this time she looked lovely in her sari, left. But is this sort of thing really wise?

Our Indian community are a great asset. But so are many others, from whom the Camerons might seek votes.

Will we see Mrs Cameron in a hijab, attending a mosque? And why is it only the womenfolk who go all the way?

How about the premier in a shalwar kameez?

Come to that, when things get really bad, will  we discover that our head of government has quietly slipped out of the back entrance in  a burqa?

I knew we were well on our way down the plughole when, aged nine, I watched our last battleship, HMS Vanguard, being towed out of Portsmouth to the breakers on a sultry afternoon in August 1960. She ran  aground on a mudbank, just  to make it worse.

Now poor old Pompey is to lose its shipyards. This is sad for so many reasons. That battered old city has suffered quite enough in the last hundred years. But there’s also this point.

Nobody is supposed to mention it, but defence contracts have always been a quiet way of protecting our own industries and jobs from foreign competition.

Everyone’s supposed to be in favour of free trade, though you can be sure the French, the Germans and the USA look after their own all the time. But we won’t do it. We abide by rules our rivals mock. And so the dole queues lengthen, and we lose the skills to recover.

How funny that we are being accused of spying on the Germans from our hideous new embassy in Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse.

It reminds me of a much more interesting unsolved case, revealed by that mysterious but authentic writer of spy thrillers Alan Judd. He says a British diplomat was once caught spying on us, on behalf of the European Union.

The wretched traitor’s reward was to have his photograph secretly taken with Jacques Delors, then president  of the European Commission.

Australia's losing its past AND its future

I HAVE been spending a  few precious days in Australia (my first visit in  20 years) and New Zealand (my first visit).

It is still very moving for a British person to experience these two civilisations, which are rooted in our ideas of justice and liberty.

Would either place be so happy and free had they been colonised instead by China, Japan, France or Germany? I don’t think so. Yet the link is weakening.

Thrilling as it is for me to  see Australian warships flying ensigns very similar  to our own, and moving as  it is to see the Queen’s head on the coins, these things  are vestiges.

The British elements are all old, from the age of the floral clock, the war memorial, the silver sixpence, the domed Guildhall and the bowling green. Now they have kilometres and dollars, symbols of globalisation and of US influence. Political correctness has swept away the old tough male Aussie  ideal, as I learned in detail when I appeared on the local version of Question Time.

And in Sydney the other day, Rupert Murdoch urged mass immigration on Australia, much as he has supported it here. If he gets his way, Australia will become ‘the world’s most diverse nation’, though Britain under the same policy must be competing  for that dubious title.

I hope he doesn’t succeed. If Australia just becomes another money-making multicultural desert of concrete and plastic, its origins in our misty islands forgotten, it will lose much more than it gains.

To comment on this article, please scroll down

 

Still Useless After All These Years - the Tory Party

More than five years ago I summed up the case against the Tory Party as it then was. The indictment is to be found here and is still, in many ways, valid:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/10/the-tories-are-.html

 

But the events of the past few weeks have not only confirmed my view, but taken us into a new stage in British politics.  So I will now re-examine the case against the Tories, and reinforce it.

Among matters I will discuss are :

The Draft Bill on a referendum , about which there is so much fuss

http://www.conservatives.com/Policy/Issues/~/media/Files/Downloadable%20Files/Draft_Referendum_Bill.ashx

 

Those who read this will see that every single contentious matter (timing, whether the result is binding, rules on broadcasting and advertising spending, and on the distribution of factional manifestoes to voters,  freedom of front benches to campaign etc etc etc) has been left to be defined at the time, bad in any case, but even worse when the time will never come. Who is fooled by this stuff?

 

A e-mail allegedly from David Cameron, sent out by Tory headquarters to journalists including me (For my own amusement I have added some emphases) :

 

‘In January, I set out our party’s position on Europe. I made clear that the EU needed fundamental, far reaching change - and that Britain would lead the way in negotiating that reform.

I also promised an In-Out referendum once those negotiations were complete, and at any event by the end of 2017. That's the right time to have a vote - it is wrong to ask people whether to stay or go before we have had a chance to put the relationship right.

But make no mistake - my commitment to a referendum is absolute. If I am Prime Minister after the next election, there will be an In-Out referendum. No ifs, no buts. And before the 2015 election, we will do everything we can to make it the law.

That’s why today the Conservative Party is publishing a draft bill that would legislate for a referendum by the end of 2017. We understand that we are in a Coalition government - but we are going to examine every opportunity to bring it before Parliament and try to get it on the statute book.

For too long the British people have had no say about their future in Europe. I am absolutely determined to put that right. Our action today is further proof we’re serious.’  

 

It does make me laugh that even as he pledges no ifs and no buts, the Prime Minister inserts the biggest if he can find in the shops,  ‘If I am Prime Minister after the next election’ . And he begins with a ‘but’ the absurd idea that a minority party can get its own Referendum Bill on to the statute book.

 

And a recent ICM poll, published by the Guardian (but, oddly enough, not picked up much by other media, which I feel it should have been, given its very striking data), showing the Tories at 28%, an extraordinarily low level of support at this stage in a parliament for a party which carries on as if it is the next government.

 

The complete chart was

 

Con 28% (-4)
Lab 34% (-4)
LD 11% (-4)
UKIP 18% (+9)
BNP 4% (+3)
SNP/PC 3% (nc)
Other 0% (-1)

 

 

This was the lowest Tory share since 2002, when Iain Duncan Smith was leader,  and also a record showing for ‘other’ parties of 27%, almost equalling the Tory total. This distressingly includes 4% from the BNP, a surge which can please no civilised person .

 

If I have read the figures..

 

http://www.icmresearch.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/05/2013_may_guardian_poll.pdf

 

..aright, the raw data are even more striking. Out of 1001 people polled, 104 said they would not vote, 222 said they didn’t know how they would vote, and 102 refused to say. Thus, 42% of those polled expressed no party preference.

 

Just 152 (15%) said they’d vote Tory, 210 (21%)  Labour and 109 (11%) UKIP. The raw BNP figure, reassuringly, was 22 people,  (2%)

 

The none-of-the-above party which before 2010 tended to be around 36%, has plainly grown quite sharply, to 42%. How long before it has the majority? . The UKIP vote seems to me to be  mainly Tory defectors and predominantly older people,   but with a significant number of Labour dissidents now joining in. I suspect Labour would do worse, but for a flow of deserters from the Liberal Democrats back into their old Labour-voting habits.

Tory support is weakest among the 18-24 age-group, at a pitiful 9%, though interestingly it is no better among the old (17%) than it is in the 35-64 age range. I had always assumed that Tory strength was concentrated in the over-70s. Maybe they have broken with the Tories in larger numbers than other age groups. UKIP is significantly stronger in the 65+ age group.

 

Now, to revisit days, weeks , months and years gone by – my article of October 2007. I said then that we had a unique opportunity to remake British politics. The chances are not quite so clear-cut now, as the Try Party cannot be despatched to its reward with a single blow, as I think could have happened had it been treated as it so richly deserves back in May 2010.

 

The principal difficulty we have now with habitual Tories is that they have fooled themselves into thinking that their party did in fact win the 2015 election, when it didn’t.

 

This explains their frequent empurpled rage when their desires are frustrated, on the grounds that the Tories are in Coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Of course, anyone who understands the Tory party knows that these desires , on the EU, on immigration, on crime and punishment and on education, etc, etc,  would be frustrated anyway. The Tory party doesn’t actually need the Liberal Democrats to help it take the wrong view on all these subjects. It takes it anyway. How could it be otherwise, when its chief brains are David Willetts,  Oliver Letwin and the Right Honourable the Lord (Michael) Heseltine, Companion of Honour?

 

So we have a double delusion here. One, that the Tories can still win an election, and have done so, when they can’t, and haven’t. Two, that the feebleness of Tory policies is attributable to the wicked Liberal Democrats, rather than to the Tory party’s own conscious and deliberate choices of policies and leaders.

 

Thus the argument can still seriously be advanced that votes for UKIP might prevent a Tory victory at the next election.  You cannot prevent something that isn’t going to happen, and can’t happen. Thus voting for UKIP will have no effect at all on the Tory prospects of forming a majority government. But millions still believe that it might, and may be restrained from taking a perfectly reasonable step, when 2015 comes, by this absurd fantasy.

 

Next, the fantasy can be maintained that, if there *were* such a Tory majority government under David Cameron, it would be significantly different from the Coalition. It wouldn’t be. It might even be worse, given the grave shortage of talent and intelligence among Tory MPs.  It just wouldn’t have so many excuses. But since it couldn’t exist, that’s of no interest.

 

Thus, the people who have it in their power to demolish the Tory Party and clear the way for real change are heavily restrained by commonly believed falsehoods, which cloud their minds and restrict their willingness to act decisively in their own interest.

 

Even so, UKIP's success has attracted success, and will attract more success before it begins to falter in the year before the general election. And, as I have mentioned before, the frenzied personal attack on Gordon Brown, which shored up the sagging Tory vote in 2010, cannot be repeated. Much of the loathing then directed at Mr Brown is beginning to turn towards Mr Cameron himself, who is increasingly seen to have portrayed himself as something he was not.  Without the Gordon Brown weapon, the Tories will struggle to keep the seats they have, especially since Labour is now aware of the damage which mass immigration has done to its cause and , while it won’t undo the damage, it is prepared to fight dirty on that topic if needs be. Gillian Duffy (referred to by Mr Brown as a ’bigoted woman’ after he met her on his campaign trail, because of her perfectly reasonable views on immigration and welfare benefits)  will be wooed, not insulted, in the next Labour campaign. They’re already working on it.

 

I would like to reproduce here what I wrote in 2007:

‘Even if the Tories could win an election (I speculate on this unlikely event at greater length because so many people now seem to believe that this is the case), what would that mean? I predict a government very similar to that of John Major, only even more torn by its unhealable division over the EU.  People forget now, but Major's government was one of political correctness, weakness on crime, failure on education, high taxes and conflict over the EU.

 

‘It is claimed that the Tories are now more anti-EU. In truth, this is not really the case. Many Tories have shifted from passive acceptance of the EU to what is called 'Euroscepticism', an unrealistic belief that, while the EU is bad for Britain, it is possible for us to negotiate ourselves a safe corner within it, which does not threaten our independence and laws, or the control of our borders. This 'in Europe but not run by Europe' view simply doesn't stand up to practical politics. The EU demands of its members a constant and accelerating surrender of national independence. If you win a small battle, you will rapidly find that the EU tries another attack from a different direction to achieve the same end. Don't like the Euro? How about a constitution? The end result, the whittling away of sovereignty, is the same. Why shouldn't it be? Ever-closer union is the EU's stated purpose.

In practice, those who are honestly in favour of EU membership and all that it entails, or honestly against it (the only two honourable positions in this debate) still cannot possibly agree - and it cannot be long, in the nature of the EU, before any government is confronted with the choice of continued reduction of national independence, or departure. There is no doubt which option Mr Cameron would choose.’

 

In what way was I wrong? Taxes are in fact rising, though it has been uncontroversial because the opposition would have raised them just as fast. It has been done largely by stealth methods the extension of the ‘higher rate’ to modest earners, the increasing load on council tax, the savings tax through ‘inflation’, which reduces the government debt while shrivelling our savings, and of course the huge green taxes, levied through household bills,  funding the mad dash for wind power.

 

I’d also like to reproduce (in full, as, though I was righter than any other prophet,  I was not perfectly right) my predictions for the last election, made two and a half years before it took place:

 

‘The result of the next election is already decided - the Left will be in office, either with a Labour majority, or a Lib-Lab pact, or a Lib-Con pact, or a Tory government in thrall to left-wing ideas. No radical change, on the areas which Tory voters care about most, will take place.

But it is far more likely that it will be either a Labour government or a Lab-Lib pact.’

 

I wish, in retrospect, that I had left out the most far-fetched of those options,  a Tory government in thrall to left-wing ideas.  It wasn’t really possible then (not that such a thing would have been desirable from any rational point of view) , and is even less possible now.  What remains wholly unthinkable is a conservative Tory government, a contradiction in terms.

 

The last line, actually, is now a better prediction for 2015. I can’t presently see much likelihood of a Labour majority, but it’s not wholly impossible, especially if the Coalition stays together and the Lib Dems are dragged beneath the waves by the suction, as the Tory Titanic gurgles and bubbles towards the ocean bed, with Dan Hannan at the prow and Ken Clarke at the stern.   

The Question Mr Slippery Still Cannot Answer

Some of you may recall my long-ago brush with Mr Slippery, during what I think was his sole press conference of the general election campaign in 2010. Laughingly, but reluctantly, he eventually took a question from me , jeering that it was ‘The Peter Hitchens Memorial Question’. He didn’t answer it then, and he can’t answer it now.

 

A full account of this (from this weblog on 3^rd May 2010) can be found here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/05/who-made-a-fool-of-whom.html

 

Here’s the relevant excerpt: “There was a bit of banter at the beginning which went (as far as I've been able to piece together):

 

David Cameron (after I'd had my hand up since the start of questions): ‘Let's take the Peter Hitchens memorial question.’

PH: ‘Will there be only one?’

 

DC: ‘No, we'll be happy to take lots of questions from you - actually that was the first lie of the campaign.’ (Laughter)

PH: ‘Would you say you were politically closer to Norman Tebbit or Nick Clegg?’ (Laughter, but more nervous)

DC: (summarised) ‘Blah blah, Norman's written a great cookery book, very much like Norman Tebbit, blah blah, Nick Clegg always changing his position, blah blah blah.’

PH: (summarised, trying to hang on to microphone while DC hopes to move to another question) ‘But you change your position - notably on the Lisbon Treaty - and you haven't answered the question.’

DC: ‘I thought I answered it very well.’ “

 

Now a very similar question has been asked of Mr Cameron by Philip Davies MP ( who I suspect is well aware of the fact that I asked the same one all those months ago) .

 

This is from Column 313 of Hansard for the House of Commons, 9^th January 2013

‘Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con): Just in case anybody is in any doubt, will the Prime Minister confirm who he is closest to, politically? Is it Lord Tebbit or the Deputy Prime Minister?

 

The Prime Minister: I managed to get through Christmas without spending any time with either of them. I would remind my hon. Friend that I am closer to all Conservatives than I am to anyone from any other party.’

 

 

This gives me some satisfaction (though also makes me a bit jealous) for two reasons. One, when I asked it the Coalition was not – as far as we know - even a twinkle in Mr Cameron’s eye, though it was in fact just days away. I knew Mr Cameron couldn’t win the election,  and I had suggested a hung parliament and a Con-Lib coalition as possibilities, but I think the question I asked now ranks as quite prophetic, whereas Mr Davies’s version was asked after the fact.

 

The other reason is that while my question was born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air, as my fellow reporters couldn’t be bothered to mention it in their accounts of that odd, rare occasion, Mr Davies’s near-identical question was transmitted at the beginning of the BBC’s ‘Yesterday In Parliament’ report on the ‘Today’ programme this morning. It also attracted  quite a lot of attention in the Internet, and was reported in the Independent by my old friend Don Macintyre.

 

By the way, Mr Macintyre also correctly chided Mr Cameron for dismissing John Spellar MP as a ‘red pest’, a silly mistake which shows that Mr Cameron knows nothing of the recent past and was, to all intents and purposes, born yesterday.

 

Mr Spellar, now the last surviving ‘right-wing’ Labour MP in captivity,  was in fact the chief lieutenant of Frank Chapple, the ferocious battler who destroyed Communist party control of the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) and exposed the left’s ballot-rigging.  I believe it was Mr Spellar who wrote the devastating speech at the TUC conference,  in which Frank Chapple’s successor, Eric Hammond, attacked Arthur Scargill, who had led many members of the National Union of Mineworkers into a disastrous self-defeating strike.

 

Mr Scargill had to listen as Mr Hammond described the poor miners as ‘Lions, led by donkeys’. (The phrase, attributed by Alan Clark to the German general Erich von Falkenhayn, was also applied to British soldiers in World war One, and seems to have been first used by a Russian officer about British troops during the siege of Sevastopol in the Crimea).

 

There was no doubt who the chief donkey was. Mr Hammond was howled down, despite the fact that what he said was absolutely true.  Given this, it was particularly dim of Mr Cameron to call Mr Spellar a ‘red’ . I always thought that one of the points of the clubby atmosphere of the House of Commons, with its many bars, libraries, cafes , corridors, lobbies and terraces, decorated with scenes from British history, was that it gave a chance to rising to young MPs to get to know and meet their opponents, and find out the history of their country through the human beings who had themselves experienced it. For most of my life, for instance, the House of Commons still contained men who had fought in war, or had actually seen the fall of Chamberlain in 1940, and the great wartime speeches of Churchill. I can myself claim to have watched from the gallery some of the clashes between Margaret Thatcher and Denis Healey, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock , and also the moment when Norman Lamont more or less slew John Major with the jibe that he was ‘In office, but not in power’, a barb so deadly and unforgettable that you could all but hear it penetrating Mr Major’s flesh.

 

A note on ‘GPI TV’. I am asked for an explanation of this jibe. Very well then.  ‘GPI’ is ‘General Paralysis of the Insane’, the old name for the appalling tertiary stage of Syphilis. I think that when I discovered this reference I understood for the first time the stinging fury that lay at the back of the wit of ‘Peter Simple’. The column may often have seemed elegiac, partly because of Michael ffolkes’s lovely, wistful illustrations, but in fact it was grounded in a sort of rage of loss.