PETER HITCHENS: This isn’t a revolution – it’s New Labour in a blue frock

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column 

British politics has finally vanished up its own pretensions. The old signposts and measurements have all been removed. We have no idea who stands for what or where we are going. Who would have thought to see a Tory conference applauding a Prime Minister for vowing to raise more tax and weaken employers’ rights? Surely that’s the job of the other lot?

In fact most of Chairman May’s speech could have equally well been written and delivered at a Labour conference. She may have derided Jeremy Corbyn personally but she has noticed quite a lot of his ideas are rather popular, especially with the young, and stolen them.
Who can blame her? She faces nothing but uncertainty and danger. The Labour Party is very nearly dead but her own Tories seethe with intrigue, rivalry and suppressed dissent.

The landscape before her is like one of those lakes covered in bright green water weed that looks – at a first glance – like a smooth lawn. In fact it conceals slimy depths. Only a fool would try to walk on it.

Her inexplicable breezy confidence about leaving the EU makes me shudder, and I am a veteran campaigner for national independence.
I wouldn’t dream of activating Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which starts the two-year clock for our exit, because it places all the negotiating power in the hands of our continental rivals. And they, especially Germany, hope to scare all the other EU nations into staying in. The last thing they want to do is to make an exit easy for us.

I’d insist on getting all the talking done before taking this dangerous step. As for her Great Repeal Bill, it is nothing of the sort. Until we actually get out, it just confirms 40 years of EU laws and regulations.

Already her Cabinet is openly divided about keeping access to the Single Market.
And if anyone thinks that the Bad Losers’ Party has given up its dream of rerunning the referendum, just wait and see. They will fight this in the courts, in the Commons, in the Lords, in the civil service and in the BBC.

Given all these perils, it is only wise of Mrs May to blow kisses in the general direction of Labour voters, while also trying to persuade refugees from Ukip to come back to mummy. The 2020 Election seems far away, but its result will probably be decided during the next two years.
You may not like any of this. I certainly don’t. But it comes, as so many bad things do, from taking short cuts and trying to bodge complicated bits of carpentry with a few swift strokes of the hammer.

Millions of voters thought they could have a policy without a government to implement it. They thought they could leave the nation’s fate to the political class rather than taking a hand in it themselves.

They fell for David Cameron’s promise of a referendum, which he never expected to keep because he intended to continue the Coalition with the Lib Dems until 2020.
They thought they could rely on the Tory Party to take them out of the EU, even though it had let them down on so many other things.

So, deep down, they changed nothing. A few toyed with the Dad’s Army party of Ukip, now once again enjoying ripping itself to pieces, its main activity. But they wouldn’t see that the Tories had become a blue-tinged version of New Labour.Now there’s a new collective delusion, that Theresa May is the new Margaret Thatcher. Actually she’s the new Harriet Harman. I’ve charted her embrace of political correctness here over many years.

Even her increasingly vague promise to maybe, just possibly, open one or two new grammar schools, provided the middle class cannot get into them, will probably trickle away into the damp sands of compromise where truly good ideas end up in our system.

*****

I know I’m not going to like Netflix’s The Crown, the new drama about the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. In fact I think it should not have been made, and should not be made for another 20 or 30 years when the actual facts are known and the papers available.
Even then, it would probably be nearly as bad. Like all such productions, it exploits the real people it pretends to portray. If it were about fictional royal figures, and did not claim to be their real lives, nobody would watch it.

But it cannot possibly be true. Above all, like the misleading, over-rated film The King’s Speech, it tries to see people through the distorting lens of present-day prejudice. My parents and their friends were more or less of the same generation as the Queen and Prince Philip, and my father was a naval officer.
And it seems to me that even the faces of Claire Foy, who plays the Queen, and Matt Smith, who plays the Duke of Edinburgh, are wrong. They lack the depth and grief and sense of duty carved into the faces of that generation by their stern upbringing, and by the war. They are too knowing about trivial things, and too innocent of important ones.

Their attempts at the accents of the time sound as if they have been laboriously taught them and they long to burst out laughing, not as if they think it normal to speak like that, as such people really did.

And the odd thing is that they spoke like that while enduring danger, pain and fear and, in a way, saving the world. There wasn’t anything funny about it
I am told King George VI, that improbably decent monarch, is shown using the c-word. I doubt he did. Naval man though he was, and so familiar with the whole range of filthy language, I think he would have regarded it as impossibly crude.

And if they can get that wrong, it is like a clock striking 13. All that went before, and all that comes afterwards, is in doubt as well.

*****

I am not sure that the alleged comedian David Baddiel was trying to be nice when he urged the BBC to give me a ‘Right-Wing Hour’ on Radio 4.
The last time we met, on a TV review programme, I said that I was pleased and relieved when his dreary film, The Infidel, came to an end. He may not have forgotten.

But even so he now joins many other BBC types, from Andrew Marr to Mark Thompson, in admitting ‘there is generally a centre-Left, liberal bias to its output’.
And this is getting worse. As this newspaper revealed last Sunday, diversity commissars are culling BBC performers on the grounds of race and sex. This is a mad outcome.

When I was a Leftist in the 1960s, we at least believed that discrimination of all kinds was wrong. To this day I write ‘human’ when asked for my ethnic details by some busybody.

Even an hour a week in which such wicked ideas could be attacked and mocked would be better than nothing.

*****

One of the saddest sights in the university town where I live is ‘Freshers’ Week’, which means nightly pathetic processions of bewildered teens, clad in uniform joke T-shirts, being led off to bars to be taught how to get drunk. I really hope that the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference was right when it said today’s sixth formers are sick of the Olympic boozing that has become so universal.

It is the drinking, of course, that also leads to so many of the rapes and alleged rapes that cause so much misery of so many kinds. I wonder why we treat this sad business as a joke.

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PETER HITCHENS: All that's missing from this sorry line-up is a seat for Humpty Dumpty

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

What are the real thoughts of Chairman May as she sits amid a Cabinet made up mostly of nonentities nobody would recognise in the street?

There this feeble Politburo hunches, squeaking amid the Elizabethan grandeur of Chequers, a government committed to a task most of them hate. Even Boris Johnson doesn’t really want to leave the EU.

‘Brexit means Brexit,’ intones the Prime Minister. But this slogan seems to have escaped from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, where Humpty Dumpty proclaims that words mean what he says they mean.

If I were her, I’d be scared of the months to come. France, our ancient rival, has spotted that nobody in London has decided what we really want. 

As we dither, they will undermine us. Before long it will be clear that either we exit the EU single market and take our chances, or do a deal under which we stay, more or less, under Brussels rule.

France wouldn’t be able to bully a government committed to departure, backed by a parliamentary majority. 

Such a government could be genuinely tough in talks, because it had a real, much desired aim.

But this lot? As Winston Churchill said of a similarly soggy Cabinet in 1936, they are ‘decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity’.

From behind them come the endless whispers, especially from the USA, which drove us into the EU in the first place, that we might ‘walk back’ the decision. 

Plus there are the mutterings of the Civil Service, the diplomats, and the BBC.

These are tricky times. Chairman May, who claims to admire the first Queen Elizabeth, may find that she faces nearly as many foes as that cunning monarch did, at home and abroad. 

But the most dangerous ones will be among the smiling faces round the Chequers table. 

She is not there because she is strong but because – for the moment – nobody else is stronger.

Cowardly truth about Oxford's state school 'success'

Oxford University boasts of increasing its state school intake to 59.2 per cent. How cowardly of it. On the same day we learned that most boys (50.46 per cent) leave state primary school without reaching the Government’s pretty basic standards in reading, writing or maths. Many will never catch up.

If state school children are getting into Oxford, it’s either because they go to super-exclusive fake comprehensives, surrounded by expensive houses or open only to churchgoers; or they go to besieged and rare grammar schools; or they have private tutors; or they have been given special treatment and are not really up to Oxford’s standards.

In the days before ‘comprehensive’ schools, Oxford’s non-public school intake was rising fast without any of these tricks or reduced standards – from 38 per cent in 1939 to 51 per cent by 1965. 

If grammar schools had survived, many reckon it would soon have reached 70 per cent, and maybe higher. Oxford should campaign to bring back selective state schools, not cringe before the equality commissars. 

But we are at the mercy of crude egalitarians. The supposedly Tory Government continues to employ Alan Milburn, the Blairite former Cabinet Minister and (so far as I know) unrepentant student Marxist.

Mr Milburn, who refuses to tell me where his own children went to school, regularly attacks the privilege of private education, though never that of the socially exclusive pseudo-comprehensive state schools favoured by well-off Leftists.

As head of the creepy quango the Social Mobility Commission, he cranks out regular reports claiming that public school toffs rule the world. He’s just got lots of headlines by claiming that City bankers still discriminate against applicants who wear brown shoes.

His evidence for this? A 15-year-old book about the death of the traditional banking industry, by a man whose name his report misspells, and another book on the City by a Dutch expert on the Middle East.

People do believe what they want to believe, I find. 

It's official: The British bobby IS dead

My ‘I told you so’ department is now back from a much-needed holiday, after a long summer of full-power gloating and smirking. Immediately it has new work to do. Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary has (after 50 years) finally grasped that police foot patrols have been abolished.

Congratulations, HM Inspector! Well spotted! Even so, he buried it in his complacent survey report, where among all the politically correct stuff, it reveals on page 38 that one third of us have not seen a uniformed police officer on foot in their area in the past year – in the past two decades, in my case. 

Even this fact is turned into a PC lecture about ‘more deprived areas’. One in four say they see one once a month. If so, he was probably nipping into Costa Coffee for a flat white.

So what are they doing instead? As we learned again last week, car pursuits seem to appeal far more than plodding the pavement deterring crime and disorder. Are these pursuits – which in some years have led to as many as 20 innocent deaths – even remotely worth the risk?

But while resources are available for such chases, what of shopping centres such as The Stow in Harlow, where a Polish man, Arkadiusz Jozwik, was violently (and fatally) attacked? Gangs of menacing youths smoking cannabis, that peaceful drug Sir Richard Branson wants to legalise, have been patrolling The Stow for months, promoting fear and disorder.

But police – as everywhere – seem to have paid little attention to either the menace or the illegal drug abuse. Now, too late, they are present – for a while. And there is a lot of grandiose stuff about a ‘hate crime’. 

Maybe, maybe not, but it might also be ‘Dope Crime’, that growing category, and also a ‘Neglect Crime’, the sort of thing that happens on streets which the police have quietly ceded to the violent and lawless.

Can there be any simpler way of putting this? Doctors should never go on strike. Mercy is not a commodity that can just be withdrawn. 

People living with pain and fear cannot be deliberately ignored by those trained and paid to help them.

 

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Notes on the Leadsom matter

I enjoy probing issues that other people think are dead. A comment on the Leadsom affair has stimulated me into penning the following thoughts:

 

 

A contributor (Peter Sullivan)  wrote : 

 - "I have to disagree on The Times/Leadsom issue. I believe she most certainly spoke words which justify the headline 'Being a mother gives me edge on May'. She said ... **genuinely I feel that being a mum means you have a very real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake. She possibly has nieces, nephews, lots of people, but I have children who are going to have children who will directly be a part of what happens next.**" (my emphasis) - Posted by: Peter Sullivan | 12 July 2016 at 10:46 PM

 

I would respond as follows: The Times headline was : 'Being a mother gives me edge on May — Leadsom '

For this to be justified. Mrs Leadsom would have to have said words which actually state that being a mother gives her the edge over Mrs May. This is because this is the undoubted sense of the headline and the added ' - Leadsom' clearly attributes this sentiment to Mrs Leadsom herself, personally.

The Times being behind a paywall, I cannot reproduce the whole article.

However, here are the direct substantive quotes attributed to Mrs Leadsom on this subject, in the page one summary of the interview which caused all the trouble,  in the order in which they appear and as they are juxtaposed by the newspaper (not necessarily the order or the context in which they were spoken, which we do not know as we have no access to any transcript of the complete interview, especially the questions asked):

1. Mrs May "possibly has nieces, nephews, lots of people. But I have children who are going to have children who will directly be a part of what happens next."

2. "Genuinely I feel that being a mum means you have a very real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake."

(Note that the above two are separate statements. We do not know how separate without a full transcript)

The reporters offer this interpretation. : ‘Mrs Leadsom, 53, who has two sons and a daughter with her husband, Ben, said that being a mother meant that the future of Britain was *more important* to her.  

 

(But where in the following words is this comparison 'more important'? "Genuinely I feel that being a mum means you have a very real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake." It appears to me to be a free-standing statement about herself, probably offered in response to a question, containing no comparison with Mrs May)

They also write: ‘Mrs Leadsom made clear that she intended to highlight the difference over children in the campaign’. I have to say I have been unable to find any quotation which conveys such an intention to highlight this difference. She may have said this, but once again I can find no quotation of her saying so in the published material.

3. *Asked to contrast herself with Mrs May*(my emphasis), she said: "I see myself as one, an optimist, and two, a member of a huge family and that's important to me. My kids are a huge part of my life."

4. '"I am sure Theresa will be really sad she doesn't have children so I don't want this to be 'Andrea has children, Theresa hasn't', because I think that would be really horrible." However, again, we do not know how closely these two segments occurred in the interview itself. Their juxtaposition in the text plainly influences the way in which the reader understands them, but does it correspond with the way in which they were spoken, or Mrs Leadsom's intended meaning.

... she said that having children kept her focused. "It means you don't want a downturn but, never mind, ten years hence it will all be fine. My children will be starting their lives in that next ten years so I have a real stake in the next year, the next two." She suggested motherhood meant that she had *more empathy than Mrs May*(my emphasis). "I think when you are thinking about the issues that other people have you worry about your kids' exam results, what direction their careers are taking, what we are going to eat on Sunday."

I cannot see in this material any justification for the claim, inserted in the headline and in the passage above,  that Mrs Leadsom said at any stage that these things made her superior to Mrs May or gave her more empathy than Mrs May. Perhaps such words were spoken, but they do not appear here. Such a claim would indeed have been crass. But she did not make it in any words quoted. Thus, this is a *possible* interpretation, though it is one which Mrs Leadsom specifically repudiates in quoted words (:'I don't want this to be 'Andrea has children, Theresa hasn't', because I think that would be really horrible.") and one which I would not personally make..

It is not, however, a fact. And headlines on news stories are supposed to be factually faithful to the material below. Indeed, the Independent press Standards Organisation (IPSO), to which 'the Times' belongs, recently revised its code to emphasise this as a requirement of good journalism. ‘i) The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information or images, *including headlines not supported by the text*.’

 

 

The Charmed Life of Ruth Davidson MSP

I am fascinated by the charmed life, in image, media and political terms, of the Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson. For example :

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/22/ruth-davidson-star-wembley-nicola-sturgeon-kezia-dugdale

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a critical article about her in the press. Mysteriously, this Scottish politician who has never held a Cabinet Post or even sat at Westminster was the leading Tory pro-EU voice on the BBC’s bizarre Wembley EU debate on Tuesday evening, matched against the Exit campaign’s biggest artillery, Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson. I haven’t been able to stomach the entire rather nasty event, but what I have seen was pretty banal.   She was praised for her part in the Scottish referendum campaign. Then she was praised for ‘pushing Labour into third place’ in the recent Scottish Parliamentary elections. In fact, Labour’s collapse, now an avalanche, and the similar collapse in the Scottish Liberal Democrats reshuffled the order and size of Scotland’s powerless and irrelevant minority parties, all of them hopelessly outvoted by the Scottish Nationalists. I doubt if Ms Davidson’s talents at being photographed with pints of beer had much to do with it.  I’ll return to the strange position of Scotland’s Tory Party later.

I might add that Labour’s collapse (now probably irreversible in Scotland) was actually caused by David Cameron’s handling of the post-referendum crisis, when he turned the ‘pledge’ of more devolved powers into an aggressive attempt (‘English Votes for English Laws’) to exclude Scottish MPs and voters from influencing national UK decisions. Scottish voters revenged themselves on Labour (which had been prominent in the pro-Union campaign). It provided many with the excuse which they had long needed to abandon the dying Labour Party and switch to the SNP.

But what does the Tory party in Scotland actually stand for? What, most interestingly of all, would happen to it if Scotland became fully independent from London ( as I think is inevitable) , and accepted formal direct submission to Brussels on its own account, rather than via London,  thus abolishing the formal, if forgotten, reason for the Scottish Tory Party’s very existence?

I think it would survive, as a political business, becoming perhaps a sort of Scottish Christian Democrat Party, sharing power from time to time with the SNP in a proportional Parliament, providing a safety valve for those Scots not wholly captivated by the SNP’s  increasingly unmistakable cultural, moral and political leftism. Indeed, maybe the SNP, its main purpose achieved, would split into leftish and rightish wings.

 In the last Scottish Tory leadership campaign, one candidate,  Murdo Fraser, said (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Conservative_Party_leadership_election,_2011 )

 ‘that if elected leader, he would disband the party in favour of setting up a new centre-right party that would be fully autonomous of the UK Conservative Party, but would take the Conservative whip at Westminster. Fraser states that this would be carried out in order to 'de-toxify' the party in Scotland, stating that it would have a distinct Scottish identity, represent Scottish values, support devolution and decentralisation, and fight to maintain Scotland's place within the United Kingdom.’ He also suggested the name ‘Conservative’ should be ditched. He lost, but his suggestions show the state to which the Tories have been reduced in Scotland, where (incredibly) they once held a majority of Parliamentary seats. In fact, in 1955 and 1959, the then Unionist Party wonn an outright majority of votes in Scotland.

The Unionist name was very important. The Scots were not voting for English Toryism, but for a specific form of Scottish Unionism, now quite dead. The closest comparison that can now be made is the various sorts of Unionist in Northern Ireland, many of whom would be Labour supporters in England, but who ally with the Tories at Westminster for national reasons.

Scottish Unionism was specifically opposed to Irish independence, rightly fearing that it would presage a break-up of Union and Empire. It was careful not to call itself ‘Conservative’ because of the strength of Liberalism among Scottish Protestant voters (whom it particularly sought to attract, in a country once nearly as religiously divided as Northern Ireland is now). But in 1965 the Unionists merged with the English and Welsh Tories. They were duly punished, especially in the Thatcher era (though in fact she was in many ways more Liberal than Tory, as was her father, the unforgettable Alderman Roberts). By 1997, they won no Scottish seats at all and were down to 17.5% of the vote. Since then, with many of their voters despairing of Unionism, abandoning the religion of their forebears  and switching to the SNP (which offers a new ‘union’ with the EU) ,  they have been searching for a role.

It is an extraordinary fact that the Daily Record, now seen as the Scottish equivalent of the Daily Mirror, supported the Unionists until 1964, when it switched to Labour (it is now suspected of flirtation with the SNP). There must be a lot of Scottish people who have, in their lives, voted Unionist, Labour and SNP.

Just as in England, the Tories appear to have shed any sort of political baggage to become a political party seeking office for the sake of it.

The FT’s account of the Scottish elections contained this interesting reflection on the nature of Ms Davidson’s party:  ‘One of the two Tory candidates elected on the Glasgow list was Adam Tomkins, a law professor and a one-time advocate of abolition of the monarchy. The other was Annie Wells, a food retail manager and single mother with a working-class accent who told one campaign rally how she had won over a sceptical voter who started their conversation with the comment: “Ah’m no a Tory, hen.”’

I think even a casual observer must be able to see that whatever is going on here is not conservatism as most of us understand it. Ms Davidson, after a BBC career where she was no doubt exposed to the strong ideology of that organisation, joined the Tory party in 2009 because she liked the look of David Cameron. Interestingly, she says that her decision to join the military (sadly frustrated by serious injury during training) was sparked off by the sight of British troops in the former Yugoslavia,  the anti-Sovereignty prototype for our later catastrophic intervention in Iraq. 

But one thing Ms Davidson certainly does believe in is continued British membership of the EU. This belief is actually very profound among most of those, especially the university-schooled professional elite,  brought up since 1960. It touches on the most fundamental creeds – internationalism, egalitarianism, the worship of modernity for its own sake and an active rejection of the past as a source of lessons for the present  -  of the new establishment uniting, whether they like it or not, Ms Davidson with Stephen Kinnock, and possibly Jeremy Corbyn, and David Cameron with my late brother. The great, deep switch from Protestantism, the 1688 settlement and a belief in national sovereignty , to secularism, disdain for sovereignty and a far greater affinity for France in 1789 to England in 1689, has more or less taken place. And enthusiasm for the EU is its badge and banner.  

Privatisation! Free trade! Shares for all! The great con that ruined Britain

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I am so sorry now that I fell for the great Thatcher-Reagan promise. I can’t deny that I did. I believed all that stuff about privatisation and free trade and the unrestrained market. I think I may even have been taken in by the prophecies of a great share-owning democracy.

I thought – this now seems especially funny – that private British Telecom would be automatically better than crabby old Post Office Telephones. 

I think anyone who has ever tried to contact BT when things go wrong would now happily go back to the days of nationalisation. Soviet-style slowness was bad, but surely better than total indifference.

And it’s all very well being able to buy cheap goods from all over the world, as we fling our borders wide and abandon the protection of our own industries that everyone says is so wicked and will make us poor and backward.

How I miss the old names of trusted brands, and the knowledge that these things had been made for generations by my fellow countrymen.

But the new broom swept, and it swept pretty clean. In towns I know well, car assembly lines, railway workshops, glassworks engineering plants, chocolate factories vanished or shrank to nothing. 

A journey across the heart of England, once an exhilarating vista of muscular manufacturing, especially glorious by night, turned into archaeology. Now, if it looked like a factory, it was really a ruin.

Someone usually pops up at this stage and says that we still manufacture a lot. If you say so, but then why are the drug-dealers so busy in our new factory-free industrial areas, and why can I never buy anything that was made here, except from absurdly expensive luxury shops? 

Why are our warships made of foreign steel? Why are the few factories that do exist almost always foreign-owned, their fate decided far away by people who don’t much care about this country?

And why is our current-account deficit with the rest of the world the worst it’s ever been in peacetime, and nearly as bad as it was during the Great War that first bankrupted this country a century ago? 

If it’s all been so beneficial, why do so many of the containers that arrive in British ports, full of expensive imports, leave this country empty?

Sure, some things have got cheaper, and there are a lot more little treats and luxuries available. 

The coffee and the restaurants are better – but the essentials of life are harder to find than ever: a good life and an honest place; a solid, modest home big enough to house a small family in a peaceful, orderly landscape; good local schools open to all who need them; reasonably paid secure work for this generation and the next; competent government and wise laws. 

These have become luxuries, unattainable for millions who once took them for granted.

And now the remains of our steel industry are vanishing, not because nothing can be done (any determined government could save it if it really wanted to) but because we’re all still worshipping that free-market dogma that captivated us 30 years ago. 

I never thought I’d yearn for the National Coal Board or British Steel or, good heavens, British Leyland. But I do begin to feel I was fooled into thinking that what was coming next would be any better. At this rate it may soon be much, much worse.

Maybe our real enemy isn't ISIS...

The cross-eyed prejudice of this country’s chattering classes sometimes gets beyond all bearing. 

We all loathe Islamic State. We were all rightly dismayed when these maniacs captured Palmyra, one of the great monuments of human civilisation, murdered its chief curator and began to smash it up.

Yet when the Syrian army, backed by Russian air power, succeeded in driving the fanatics out of Palmyra, the media could hardly bring themselves to put it anywhere further forward than page 94, and the politicians, always ready to say rude things about IS, could barely utter a word.

It’s this kind of thing that makes me wonder whether the alleged hostility of the West to IS is genuine, or a pose.

It often seems to me that they loathe Russia, and Syria’s President Assad, much more. Which side are we really on in this conflict?

Striving to identify the maddest moment of the week, I am forced to choose between two: the crazed closure of the majestic coal-fired power station at Ferrybridge to satisfy green zealots (remember that when the power cuts come, as they soon will); and the police ordering paying passengers off a Cornwall-bound train because it was too full – the culmination of a 50-year policy of trying to drive custom away from the railways, rather than expanding and modernising them. 

So bad, it had me backing the villains 

I have actually been watching the BBC’s dramatisation of John le Carré’s The Night Manager because it is so bad. How much worse could it get? 

A secret agent in deep cover who simpers nervously every time he is rightly accused of treachery and can’t stop himself ogling the boss’s girlfriend, while the boss is looking?

A supposed spy chief, who more closely resembles a grumpy Barnsley social worker who has just failed to arrange a gay adoption – and who, while many months pregnant, travels across the world and outshoots a professional assassin?

After not too much of this I was rooting heartily for the villains, who seemed to me to be making a perfectly sound case for the arms trade.

And, while I understand that plots sometimes have to be changed for TV, I think it was utterly gratuitous to invent scenes in which the beautiful Elizabeth Debicki was sadistically tortured, when no such thing happens in the book. Not to mention the ridiculous ‘happy’ ending. Please, spare us a sequel. 

Archbishop in an unholy mess

I am still scratching my head over the Archbishop of Canterbury’s bizarre response to powerful evidence, gathered and assembled by eminent lawyers, a former police officer and a judge experienced in child abuse trials, that abuse allegations against the late Bishop George Bell are highly questionable, and based on a sloppy, inadequate investigation.

The Archbishop, Justin Welby, hasn’t given an inch and continues to defend the Church’s acceptance of a solitary, ancient, uncorroborated, anonymous charge – even though, since it was made public, there have been no further accusations.

But Archbishop Justin has now told the BBC that George Bell – a man he believes to be a filthy child molester who dishonestly and selfishly abused a little girl – is also ‘the greatest hero that most of us have’. I’ve heard of a broad church, but this is ridiculous. One or the other. Not both.

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The bearded pacifists are right...Trident IS a waste of money

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Trident may seem to David Cameron to be a very useful weapon for attacking Jeremy Corbyn. But does it keep Britain safe?
Actually, no. There is a good, hard, patriotic argument for getting rid of this unusable, American-controlled monstrosity before it bankrupts us and destroys our real defences. And lazy, cheap politics shouldn’t blind us to these facts. I write as someone who has nothing against nuclear weapons. I used to deliberately wreck the meetings of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1980s, by standing up at the back and asking awkward questions.
I was howled down at my local Labour Party (to which I then belonged) for supporting the deterrent against the Corbyn types (he may even have been there) who wanted us naked in the face of Soviet power.
When I went to work as a reporter in the Soviet empire, I was greatly amused by a visit to Kurchatovsk, HQ of Stalin’s nuclear bomb laboratories. All along the main street were witty banners jeering at the folly of giving up your weapons when your enemy kept his.
How I wished I could have shown them to British ban- the-bombers who (though they were shifty about this) always had a sneaking sympathy for the Soviet Union – as it then was – and scorn for the USA. In those days, vast concentrations of Soviet troops, tanks and planes sat in Germany ready to move westwards. I went to look at them. They were no myth.
Our nuclear bombs neutralised this incessant blackmailing threat. They made sure that if those armies moved one inch beyond their territory, it would end in Armageddon. So they never did move, and the threat was empty. It worked.
Then the facts changed. And, as that clever man John Maynard Keynes once drily remarked: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’
The Soviet Union collapsed. I watched it happen, before my eyes. Its armies and navies melted away and its empire dissolved. Modern Russia, for all the silly nonsense about a ‘New Cold War’, would be our friend if we let her be, and has no interest in attacking us or any conceivable reason for doing so.
The USA, meanwhile, has ceased to be the arsenal of freedom and has become instead the headquarters of a bumbling neo-liberal policy whose main achievement has been to turn the Middle East into a war zone, which we could easily stay out of if we wanted to.
The principal threat to this country’s prosperity, liberty and independence has been, for many years, the European Union, whose agents work tirelessly inside our borders to subjugate us, our laws, economy, trade and territorial seas, to foreign governance. Trident is useless against this, just as it is against the mass migration now transforming our continent, and against the terrorism of the IRA (to whom we surrendered, despite being a nuclear power) and Islamic State.
WE do not even control Trident, relying on the USA for so much of its technology and maintenance that we could never use it without American approval. How independent is that?
Meanwhile the Army is visibly shrivelling, demoralised, ill-equipped, historic regiments hollowed out and merged, experienced officers and NCOs leaving. Something similar is happening to the Navy, saddled with two vast joke aircraft carriers whose purpose is uncertain, even if they ever get any aircraft to carry. The RAF is a little better off, but not much.
This is caused mainly by the giant bill for renewing Trident, which will probably end up more than £100 billion, at a time when we are heavily in debt already. If there were any obvious or even remote use for it, then maybe this could be justified. But there isn’t. We could easily maintain a small arsenal of H-bombs or nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, just in case, for far less.
It is not just bearded pacifists who doubt its use. Senior civil servants, serious military experts, senior officers in all branches, privately and in some cases publicly reckon it is simply not worth the money. Even if we decide to go ahead with it, I confidently predict we will have to cancel it (at great cost) when the long-awaited economic crisis finally strikes.
It would be a great shame if we failed to have a proper debate about this, just because it was easier to take cheap shots at the Labour Party. A grown-up country, and a grown-up government, would address it now.

The strangely bewitching face and voice of Jennifer Lawrence, with her cat-like presence, make her new film Joy well worth seeing. But seldom has a film been so wrongly named. In the end, it’s more or less a traditional Hollywood story of a lone individual’s triumph over adversity. But there’s little joyous about the portrayal of a bitterly broken family and devious business partners.

 

Only a society that had lost all sense of taste and proportion would mark the death of David Bowie as if some great light had gone out. He wasn’t Beethoven or Shakespeare. He wasn’t even Elvis. And it’s interesting that the Cultural Elite so easily forgave him for openly and explicitly praising the Nazis.
In general, I find, they’ll forgive everything provided you’re in favour of promiscuous sex and lots of illegal drugs. I was also fascinated to see Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, joining in the Bowie-mania and talking of ‘relishing what he was, what he did’.
Does that include the drugs and the sex? This odd praise came from the leader of a church that has recently been trashing the reputation of the late Bishop George Bell, a truly distinguished man of huge integrity and courage, by needlessly publicising an unproven allegation of child abuse against him.

How I shall miss Alan Rickman, his beautiful command of English and a voice he played like a musical instrument.
But how is it that this fine Shakespearean actor could have come from a council estate in Acton, son of a factory worker? It wouldn’t happen now. In those days we still had Direct Grant schools, alongside grammar schools, the great open staircase by which talented children could and did go all the way to the top. When he was at Latymer Upper School, 80 per cent of the boys at this superb establishment were from poor homes. Now it’s mostly fee-paying, but still tries hard to find places for the less well-off.
Direct Grants, private schools which took huge numbers of state pupils, involved effective co-operation between state and private sectors – a thing all modern governments claim they want.
So why were they abolished? And why aren’t they now restored?

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Snake oil and billionaires... Now I KNOW Blair's taken over the Tories

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

The really big political changes in this country take place inside the major parties, not at general elections. Think of the Heseltine putsch against Mrs Thatcher, or the cruel overthrow of Iain Duncan Smith, or the recent desperate recapture of the Labour Party (whatever next?) by socialists.

And last week the Tory Party finally transformed itself into New Labour.

There are a few finishing touches to be added between now and 2020. But after much writhing and struggling, the chrysalis finally burst open to reveal the Heir to Blairism, glistening with snake oil and hair oil and surrounded by trilling choirs of happy billionaires, just as in the old days of Lord Cashpoint and bombing Iraq.

The process will only be complete when Lord Mandelson himself accepts that his life’s work is now being done by David Cameron and George Osborne, who is even starting to look like the Blair era’s Sinister Minister. Perhaps it’s time for a moustache.

The Tories also yearn for the open endorsement of Alan Milburn, whom they already employ as Commissar for Equality.

For the moment, they will have to content themselves with the embrace of Lord Adonis, more Blairite than Blair, who is in charge of concreting over what remains of the English countryside, a long-term New Labour obsession.

Privately, they are on good terms with the Blair creature himself, whose advice is always welcome in Downing Street. He is known there as ‘The Master’ and, with a few very minor changes (mainly the replacement of the word ‘Conservative’ with ‘New Labour’), he could have delivered the Prime Minister’s Manchester speech on Wednesday.

Who said (I have removed any mention of the party name): ‘It wasn’t just me who put social justice, equality for gay people, tackling climate change, and helping the world’s poorest at the centre of our mission – we all did’?

Honestly, could you tell? Where now are all those who thought David Cameron would unleash his inner Tory when freed from the embrace of Nick Clegg? Mr Cameron doesn’t have an inner Tory, and Wednesday’s performance suggests that Mr Clegg is actually the more conservative of the two.

Even the slightly embarrassing off-colour joke about sex, astonishing in the mouth of a serious politician, was the sort of thing that Mr Blair likes to do, along with the mention of ‘the kids’, the tinny business-school English, and the use of terrorism as an excuse for dubious actions.

Though I doubt whether Mr Blair would have had the nerve to make the deeply dishonest misrepresentation of Jeremy Corbyn’s perfectly reasonable and civilised objections to the extrajudicial killing of Osama Bin Laden.

The false and cheap suggestion that Mr Corbyn does not regard the events of September 11, 2001 as a tragedy – when he specifically said that he did – was a disgrace for which Mr Cameron should quickly make amends.

This is the thing that is most wrong with Blairism – its instinct is to lie. It is at bottom a nasty mix of greed, Leninist party discipline, advertising slickness and ruthless, intolerant political correctness. It attracts and promotes power-worshippers.

To survive and prosper, it must always pretend to be something else.

And as long as it succeeds in doing so, we are stuck with it.

Finally, a movie that's right to use the awful F-word

I don't generally approve of the F-word, but I must admit that the opening scene of the new film The Martian, about a US astronaut stranded on the red planet, provides a rare example of the wholly justified use of this powerful expletive.

Even I might be tempted to mutter it, under the circumstances.
There are many interesting things about this drama, one of them being that we never see the marooned spaceman’s family, whose powerless pain would normally feature largely in such a story.

But perhaps the most fascinating of all is its oozy, flattering attitude towards China, shown as a noble ally and as a highly advanced country, with no attention paid to its repressive, nasty features.

It’s all rather different to the way the equally despotic Soviet Union used to be dealt with in the movies, when it was America’s chief rival.

Still, at least there isn’t a Russian villain. I suspect they’ll start featuring in Hollywood productions soon.

The face of a REAL politician 

For those who think that Jeremy Corbyn is a threat to national security, how about this fellow, who appeared before the Labour conference in military uniform, denouncing the upper classes of every nation as ‘selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent’, and promising they would be dealt with shortly by the coming ‘socialist revolution’ (by which he meant the arrival of Russian tanks).

It was the 1945 Labour conference. And it was Denis Healey, who died last weekend, full of years and honour, having been one of the best Defence Secretaries in modern times, and a reasonably competent Chancellor. Healey was in fact a terrible old Stalinist, an actual member of the Communist Party in the worst gulag days, who may just possibly have stayed sympathetic to Moscow for rather longer than he later admitted.

Yet when it came to it, he showed undoubted courage on the field of battle in his country’s service, and later proved a wise and competent Minister, ending his life fiercely opposed to the succession of stupid wars into which lesser men dragged us.

Proper countries are full of awkward, discontented people who may in fact turn out to be better patriots than the more obvious and noisy flag-wavers. Bear it in mind.

Is there a worse thing than having your child wrongfully snatched away from you by the State, which cannot be bothered to wait to see if charges against you are proven? Are we truly free if such a thing can be done, irrevocably?

The case of Karrissa Cox and Richard Carter is a grotesque injustice. No court should have been able to hand over their child for adoption until the charges of abuse against them had been heard and proved beyond reasonable doubt. In fact, the charges collapsed.

The presumption of innocence is all that stands between us and tyranny, and I hope that some wise judge acts swiftly to restore the lost child to its parents. This isn’t a free country if this doesn’t happen.

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I don't Believe the 'Pig's Head' Story - but Anyway Cameron's Libya Mistake is Far More Imporrant

 

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

If you know something damaging about a major political figure, then, in a democracy, it is surely your duty to tell the voters before they go to the polls.

 

So I am puzzled by Lord Ashcroft’s motives for emptying a huge bucket of slurry over David Cameron’s head just after the Prime Minister has safely survived a fiercely-contested general election.

 

I have met Lord Ashcroft briefly a couple of times. He gives off an enjoyably sinister whiff of brimstone. He has a smile like the winter sun glinting on a coffin-plate. You wouldn’t be surprised to find he had steel teeth. 

 

He was known in his years of influence as ‘The Man Who Bought the Tory Party’, or alternatively as ‘Blofeld’, and I don’t imagine he minded.  I was never sure what he wanted in return for all his money.

 

Was it just a ministerial red box? Well, he didn’t get it and now he’s annoyed, and who can blame him? If they hadn’t planned to give him anything in return, the Tories shouldn’t have taken his cash. The same applies to those who bankrolled their 2015 victory.

 

 

I wrongly thought the Tory Party was impossible to save, a task as hopeless and morally wrong as reviving the popularity of Capstan Full Strength cigarettes. I still think we’d all be better off if it collapsed and died.

 

But money and lies eventually revived the ghastly old monster. Alas for Lord Ashcroft, it was somebody else’s money. He’d been five years too soon.

 

So what good came of his expensively-compiled book in the end? I’ve never doubted that Mr Cameron, like most of his generation, was disastrously soft on drug abusers, but that’s true of all the major parties, the media, the legal profession and the police, and he took this view openly. I don’t believe the story about the pig.

 

One important thing remains. Mr Cameron is not fit to be in charge of our foreign policy. His performance over Libya and Syria, the two biggest reasons for the mass migration crisis now menacing all Europe, was historically, politically and militarily illiterate. In a serious country he should resign and vanish into obscurity.

 

Yet he survives undamaged, which is the true scandal, that is never pursued and will never be punished.

 

********

 

I don’t at all mind George Osborne sucking up to the ghastly old waxworks who run the increasingly aggressive and sensitive Chinese police state.

 

And it is a police state. Peaceable professors, such as Ilham Tohti, are locked up and mistreated after lawless show trials. 

 

Communist activists have recently torn the crosses from 1,200 churches across the People’s Republic, claiming with cynical grins that they are acting to preserve ‘safety and beauty’.  People disappear into the night and fog of a vast Gulag. Human rights lawyers are arrested for defending dissidents.  

 

I don’t mind us canoodling with this awful regime because I can’t afford to.  Thanks to the batty self-defeating foreign policy we have followed since 1914, we are a minor debtor nation in danger of turning into a beggar nation.

 

Well, this is the sort of country we are now. It’s a shame, and a warning against joining wars when you don’t need to, the root of our fall from power and wealth to our current status.

 

Talking of which, let us examine anew Mr Osborne’s righteous wrath against the Assad government in Syria. Recently Mr Osborne said Parliament had been wrong to veto the planned attack on Syria two years ago. He seems to want to try again.

 

This can only mean that he still thinks we should have bombed President Assad’s forces in 2013, an action which would have hugely bolstered the factions which soon afterwards became the Islamic State. Given our furious hostility to IS, this seems to me to be very nearly clinically mad.

 

Indeed, the Cameron-Osborne policy towards Assad has from the start been based on a righteous condemnation of that regime. How can these two men spend so much time seeking favour from the cruel, intolerant despots of China, and imagine that they have any moral right of any kind to condemn Syria? It is a nonsense, and they should grow out of it. We certainly aren’t the world’s policeman any more, and we’re not the world’s vicar either.

 

********

 

Do good books die when nobody can understand them any more? Today’s children would never stand for most of the Victorian and Edwardian books I loved (and still love). The world in which they were written has gone forever.

 

But how strange to see this happening to a 20th century classic, ‘The Go-Between’. I was amazed by the favourable reviews of a dreadful BBC TV adaptation of this bitter, brilliant little book. I don’t think the makers or the reviewers can properly have understood it at all.

 

Apart from the silly, cheap decision to portray one of the main characters naked (when the book makes it quite clear he wasn’t),the main problem was (as it so often is) the faces.

 

The two lovers looked like models, aching for their smartphones, with nothing going on behind their eyes. It was impossible to see these people as the Victorians they were supposed to be.

 

Instead, they were modernised. A needless bit of class-war resentment (about a handkerchief!) was inserted. And the child at the centre of the drama, son of a bank manager and book-collector from Wiltshire, was given a northern accent and asked ‘can I get a cup of tea’, as he would never have done.

 

Look, people, manners, customs, belief and language were all different then. Which bit of ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’ don’t you understand?

 

***********

I don’t normally mention my daily struggles with the railways, as most train commuters have it far worse than I do. But I did laugh when the company which tows me back and forth each day, ‘First Great Western’, tired of being called (with much justice)  ‘Worst Late Western’ and grandiosely changed its name to ‘Great Western Railway’, after Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s matchless enterprise of superb engineering and inventiveness.

 

On the very day of the fanfared change, I was of course held up for ages behind a ‘broken down train’ (You never actually see these, but like ‘signal failures’ and ‘track circuit failures’ you are told about them a lot. Great Western indeed.

 

 

 

 

 

How long before the police stop investigating murder?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

At least our state-school system maintains schools, terrible as many of them are. The NHS, creaky as it is, still treats actual patients.

And in the dear dead days of big nationalised industries, British Coal dug actual coal, British Steel made actual steel, and the same was true of the gas and electricity boards.

But the police force now can’t even be bothered to turn up and investigate burglaries, and its chief spokesperson openly says so.

For the first time we now have a huge and expensive nationalised industry that does not do what it says on the label. The police do not police, as we understand the word. They are busy doing something else, as you will find if you ever try to speak to them. I am not sure what it is.

I discovered this nasty fact many years ago, the night some vandals put a stone through my front window, and I chased after and caught them.

I had to let them go. The sheer hilarious uselessness of the police on that occasion, their general absence, their pitiful excuses for not coming to my aid when urgently asked (‘we couldn’t find you, the officers didn’t know the area’) alerted me to a problem I’d until then been only dimly aware of.

I ended up writing a book about it, gasping with growing amazement as I found out from the archives what had happened to a body I used to trust and admire. I have to say here that many of the police officers I meet or talk to are perfectly decent men and women (though a minority are not, as recent figures of criminal convictions show). It’s just that the police force itself is now trading falsely on a name and reputation it earned in another time.

You’ll find this out if ever you actually need them. In the meantime, how many warnings do you want? I have to say that the statement by Sara Thornton, head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, that ‘if you’ve had a burglary, for example, and the burglar has fled, we won’t get there as quickly as we have in the past’ is a pretty clear indication of how things really stand.

I’m not sure how quickly that actually was, as it happens. Car break-ins long ago went on the police’s ‘ignore if you possibly can’ list, along with drug possession, littering, shoplifting, vandalism, disorderly drunkenness, public swearing, driving while texting or phoning, and a hundred other things they no longer think are their affair. And, as if by some miracle, once the police stop bothering with these offences, fiddled figures claim that they are not happening any more, and the magistrates’ courts are being closed for lack of business. Well I never.

Don’t be surprised if, in 20 years’ time, homicide goes the same way. To save time and trouble, it’ll be recorded as something else (murder is already often downgraded to manslaughter to save time and trouble), and people watching old episodes of Inspector Morse will wonder why anyone is making such a fuss over a dead body.

Once upon a time, I would have minded. Now I just laugh. But, be warned: like other nationalised industries, the police will act swiftly and decisively if you dare to challenge their monopoly. If you are foolish enough to defend your own home against burglary, expect to be arrested, fingerprinted, DNA-swabbed and probably charged. They wouldn’t want the idea catching on that we could manage without them.

The perfect 50s face - and NO cigarette!

Jessica Raine’s captivating features might have been designed for the fashions of the 1950s, or whenever the BBC’s new series Partners In Crime is supposed to be set.

I’m not quite sure when it is meant to be happening. We’re told it’s post-war, yet Jessica is shown reading a fresh new edition of Dorothy L. Sayers’s (very good) 1930 whodunit Strong Poison. And some of the sexual innuendos sound very up-to-date to me. But for once, the director hasn’t forced everyone to smoke all the time to make sure we realise it’s the past. Instead a lengthy scene is set in an actual grammar school, which for most British people is as historic and distant as a dinosaur.

Forget Chilcot - let's probe our Libya folly

Let's forget the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War. We all know who’s guilty, and the main actors are finished and disgraced in the public mind. Instead, let’s have a new and urgent inquiry (report within a year please) into David Cameron’s equally stupid and irresponsible Libyan war, which is the direct cause of the scenes at Calais and Dover, and may, in the long run, mean the end of European civilisation as we have known it all our lives. It is also thanks to people like him that we have, as a country and a culture, given up all the weapons and defences we might once have used to keep our island secure.

You think this can be stopped, or will be stopped? No. All that will happen is that we will get used to it.

Please continue to pray, if you can, for my friend Jason Rezaian, now wrongly held in an Iranian prison for more than a year. Jason, son of a Persian father and an American mother, went to live in Tehran so that he could report truthfully on that fascinating, misrepresented place.

He took me there a few years ago and opened my eyes to much I had misunderstood or never known. His chief concern was to improve understanding between his father’s people and his mother’s people. He was mysteriously arrested and is still being held, despite the outbreak of peace between the USA and the Iranian government. There is no justification for this.

Let him go.

The ignorance of modern politicians – even about the recent past – is astonishing. The Chancellor, George Osborne, said last week that ‘the central attraction of European Union membership was the economic one’.

Yet in 1972 his own department, the Treasury, argued strongly that joining the Common Market would be bad for Britain’s economy. They were dead right.

Their advice was buried and ignored by Ted Heath, whose reasons for joining were clearly political.

I'll return to this another time, but the Tories should not be too pleased if the Labour Party collapses. Deprived of a bogeyman, what will then hold them together?

Last week the number of visits to the Peter Hitchens blog (address at the top of this page), where I have debated with readers on many subjects since February 2006, passed the 20 million mark. If you haven’t visited, may I urge you to do so?

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PETER HITCHENS: They've destroyed Sunday - just when we needed it most

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Does anyone miss the British Sunday, when our cities were like vast, well-ordered cemeteries, the sky always seemed to be black with impending rain, and a deep quiet fell on the land?

Actually, I do. I chafed at it as a child, because children don’t grasp the point of such things. Now that I know what it was for, it is too late.

I know this partly because of the experience of being in Cairo on a Friday morning, or Jerusalem on a Saturday, cities where a universal day of rest still exists, in defiance of all the racket and commerce of the 21st Century.

Before you have even opened your curtains or fully woken from sleep, you can sense that the day is different from all the others. You can feel the peace in your bones and blood.

Does anyone miss the British Sunday, when our cities were like vast, well-ordered cemeteries, the sky always seemed to be black with impending rain, and a deep quiet fell on the land? (Above, Oxford Street in London) 

Resting from work and routine on your own is one thing. Doing it in company with millions of others is quite different.

Work, especially if you’re lucky in what you do, is one of the great pleasures of life, but – like all pleasures – it can become selfish. We need to stop.

In fact, we have probably never needed a day of rest more than we do now that we have become the slaves of the alluring hypnotic electronic devices we carry about everywhere with us.

The So-Called Conservative Party would know and understand all this if it were what it claims to be.

But as the amoral mouthpiece of commercial greed and globalisation, it prefers to see us scurrying from workplace to shopping centre every waking minute of every waking day.

Relaxation is a few hours of drugged sleep, preceded by a bout of ‘entertainment’ thickly laced with advertising and propaganda. Then it’s back to getting and spending.

Even atheists have begun, in recent years, to see the virtue of gathering weekly to read and hear poetry, think, sing songs and celebrate the joys of being alive. And there’s also this simple point. If you want a day free of work, you must expect others to have the same privilege.

If families are ever to gather, then that free day must be on the same day of the week for everyone.

And if that means a lot of things are closed, it’s a price worth paying.

A world without a proper day of rest is like a landscape without hedgerows, trees or landmarks, a howling, featureless wilderness in which we incessantly seek pleasure because we cannot find happiness.

Farewell to fiery Yanis, a reminder of how politics ought to be

There’s something enjoyably piratical and breezy about the ousted Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, riding off on his motorbike with his lovely wife for a post-resignation beer.

These scenes, and Mr Varoufakis’s general irreverent and non-servile behaviour, remind me of what I once found attractive about politics.

It’s also worth noting that the Syriza government in Athens has pretty much done what it promised voters it would do, and has fought its corner with nerve and style, and with a fair bit of the patriotic feeling that has been missing from British politics for quite a while.

Perhaps it’s time for me to change sides again. It’s a joy to see Europe’s Leftists, from Guardian writers to Greek politicians, finally realising that the European Union is a German-dominated imperial bully.

Maybe conservative patriots should now infiltrate the Left, its media and its political parties. There’s more future there than there is in the dehumanised, passionless, corporate wastes of Cameronism.

It’s quite obvious that the Left-wing candidate for the Labour leadership, Jeremy Corbyn, is a principled and uncorrupted real human, quite unlike the bland cybermen and cyberwomen he is standing against, whoever they are. I hope he wins, not because I think he’s a loser but because it would be good to have someone in front-rank politics who knows what he fights for and loves what he knows, as Englishmen are supposed to do.

A combination of fiery Leftism and Ukip-type patriotism could be the very thing to sweep away the So-Called Conservative Party which represents nothing except the careers of its MPs and the interests of its donors.

In Greece, an alliance of Leftism and patriotism demolished the rich established parties in months. I’ve wasted years trying to do it the other way. Well, the last time I owned a motorbike, it ended badly, but I’m thinking of getting another one.

Facing the truth about a legend

Now at last we have absolute confirmation that Graham Sutherland’s ruthlessly honest portrait of Sir Winston Churchill was indeed burned because the great man’s wife, Clementine, couldn’t bear to look at it. You can see why. It’s not flattering. But no good portrait is flattering.

By the time it was painted, Sir Winston, like the country he had led, was failing, weakened by disappointment and fearful of the future. The picture showed that truth. We still do not like to admit it.

I seldom agree with the Children’s Commissioner, whoever he or she is, but Anne Longfield is absolutely right that children in care should not be shoved out to fend for themselves at 18. 

Being ‘in care’ is pretty terrible, but it’s the only stability these poor, abandoned teenagers know. And 18 is a ghastly age. 

I remember Harold Wilson giving me the vote and telling me I was an adult when I was 18. I spent the next three years showing him how wrong he’d been. Not that he took any notice. 

How can students be expected to pay for their time at university, an increasingly impossible burden? 

Here’s a wise suggestion from a reader, Mrs Sylvia Langley. Offer them the chance to look after the elderly in care homes (or their own homes). 

In return for doing this, their fees could be reduced or even cancelled altogether. In my view better still, idealistic young people could regain contact with the old, who are rapidly becoming a separate and despised minority, the Untouchables of our time and place.

I see the plans to expand grammar schools in Kent have been strangled by lawyers, as I always thought they would be. But why are we still messing about with this?

Thousands of parents want new grammar schools, all over the country. The only thing that prevents this is a brief, easily repealed clause in David Blunkett’s 1998 School Standards Act.

But there’s no sign of that. The new So-Called Conservative majority is more interested in relaxing the laws against foxhunting, which is obviously so much more urgent than a good education for children whose parents aren’t rich.

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