On Watching Patti Smith singing 'Hard Rain' in Stockholm

It is well worth watching, on YouTube, the performance of Bob Dylan’s ‘Hard Rain’ by Patti Smith at the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm last Saturday https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2SPNT1lwBg

 It provokes all kinds of thoughts, which I will come to.

I think I heard this song for the first time in 1964 or 1965, some years after Dylan wrote and first performed it (I am told this was a month *before* the Cuban missile crisis to which many think it was a response).This was when news of the young Hibbing genius was still filtering into our steam-age nation. I was entranced by its ancient rhythm and prophetic tone.

As with all Dylan songs, I found that the more I thought about it the more I wondered whether he was just toying with us, or had a serious point to make. But I decided, at that self-righteous Utopian phase in my life, to believe it was serious, and that it was intended as a warning. I still think it *was* but that Dylan himself has long ceased to be the person who originally wrote it. See his interesting song ‘My Back Pages’ for a general repudiation of his more grandiose earlier attitudes, and presumably of the mainline Communist ideas  he got from Suze Rotolo, the rather lovely girl who is shown clutching his arm in the snow in the picture on the cover of ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’. Suze (confusingly pronounced Suzie), who broke up with Dylan in very sad circumstances and died quite recently, in 2011, had been brought up in a Communist home, and there are few places more doggedly unflinchingly Communist than an American Communist home. I quite like (though don’t wholly agree with)  her remark, made not long before her death that ‘The sixties were an era that spoke a language of inquiry and curiosity and rebelliousness against the stifling and repressive political and social culture of the decade that preceded it. The new generation causing all the fuss was not driven by the market: we had something to say, not something to sell.’

Adolescents, at least my sort of adolescent, love a bit of doom. The idea that heedless adults have got it all wrong and will be pulled down into a general collapse is appealing to the moody and sulky teen, such as I was.

I suppose it was a good choice for the Stockholm evening (though I would have picked ‘Chimes of Freedom’ as being the song which most sums up what Dylan stands for in the minds of his generation, whatever he might think now) , and others have pointed out that Patti Smith, despite a brief memory lapse, made a good, solemn job of it.  In fact, they have pointed out that she probably made a better job of it than Dylan would have done had he turned up.  When he performs his old classics now, he tortures them. Patti Smith looked, with her hawk-like, weathered face and  in her high white collar, like the rather fearsome pastor of some austere feminist Calvinist sect, if such a thing is possible, which almost anything is nowadays. She also looked very definitely unyoung, as the sixties lot tend to do nowadays, much as it displeases us.

And it is prophetic. Who, hearing the words written in 1962 ‘I saw a young woman whose body was burning’, does not nowadays immediately think of the 1972 picture of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the Vietnamese girl yelling in pain and fear after being (unintentionally) napalmed by her own side as she fled down the road? Well, I do, anyway.  The really surprising thing about this is that she survived, but at the time we just thought (I did, anyway) that the lid had come off human barbarism and that the only thing to do was to be against everything that was established. And so I was.

Much of the rest of the song seems to come out of a lost book of the Bible, or at least a lost chapter of ‘Revelation’.  And it prophesies devastation and ruin,  if in some way we don’t heed the warning. Humph. As it happens, we didn’t heed the warning, and a good thing too. In fact the world is as it is, and not a good deal worse,  because we didn’t pay much attention to the implicit nuclear disarmament message that I and plenty of other teenage minds took from it. Those stifling , repressive old Masters of War were quite right to mistrust the Soviet empire, which was in its own way quite capable of any atrocity you care to mention, and for a much worse cause.

And I am still amused by how extremely unpopular it was to take that view (as I came to do in the 1980s) with the Dylan generation. As someone who feared and disliked the Soviet regime and the KGB *when they still existed*,  I am endlessly amused to meet people who were indifferent at the time, and who now feign – or genuinely feel – a horror at post-Soviet Russia, who have no idea how bad the USSR was and how (comparatively) harmless Russia is.  For they are often the same people who belittled the Soviet threat when it existed.

Just as I was amused to see Ms Smith (who stumbled rather movingly in the song and recovered with what can only be called grace), being reverently heard  in Stockholm’s concert hall by an audience of extreme respectability, including royalty. Goodness, if we had foreseen such establishment acceptance back in 1965, we would have been enraged by what we would have seen as the ability of the powerful to co-opt everyone. What was that line from ‘It’s all right, Ma’?  I seem to recall it is  ‘One who sang with his tongue on fire now gargles in the rat-race choir’.

Yet we would have been wrong. The truth is that the white-tie establishment have more or less adopted the ideas in ‘Hard Rain’, and have certainly adopted those in ‘Blowing in the Wind’. Or at the very least they think they have.

For instance, the modern pseudo-pacifist fury at the atrocities, alleged or actual, of outcast regimes,  is the nearest a lot of secular liberals get to real, fire-and-brimstone moral passion. They aren’t allowed to disapprove of anything they themselves do, or that their neighbours do. And all domestic crimes, even including rape and murder and racism, are subject to the liberal Code of Excuses, under which the perpetrators aren’t entirely responsible for what they do, owing to poverty, bad housing, bad parenting or some other thing they couldn’t control.

But a foreign despot who can be accused of atrocities, now there at last is an outlet for all the things the modern liberal needs to feel but can’t. The modern liberal can hate, can rage, can denounce, can demand long prison sentences or even look tactfully the other way if the said despot is actually hanged, and in public too. Remember Saddam? I didn’t see the abolitionists making much of a fuss about that?  In fact he can indulge almost all the illicit pleasures of the lynch mob, while still feeling wholly civilised.

Could this explain the performance of the USA’s ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, who speaks (without producing any evidence that I can see) of ‘atrocities’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBFCRNm-zyY and compares events in Aleppo to Halabja, Srbrenica the Rwanda genocide.

WE shall see which will endure. Ms Power’s denunciation, or the retort of the Russian ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, who said Ambassador Power had constructed her statement ‘as if she were Mother Teresa’,  mentioned the West’s role in fomenting the Syrian war, and added ‘Please remember what country you represent. Remember your own country’s record before you start opining from the position of moral or any other kind of supremacy. History and God will judge who is guilty of what.’

The world turns upside down and inside out. Bejewelled monarchs applaud anti-authority subversive songs. The United States, no longer the villains of Vietnam, now thunders against the alleged atrocities of others. The Masters of War, in the Pentagon and the State Department, have now become the Protest Song Army, strumming away about the wickedness of brutal dictators.

As I listened to this exchange, this verse from ‘My Back Pages’ seemed to have some relevance.  ‘Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth, "rip down all hate!" I screamed. Lies that life is black and white spoke from my skull, I dreamed. Romantic facts of musketeers foundation’d deep, somehow. Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now’.

Give a Dog a Bad Name. Why is Russia Always Presumed Guilty?

I don’t think I’ve heard the old saying ‘Give a dog a bad name…’ for many years. The missing words were  ‘…and hang him’. It used to be common, a caution against prejudice. Maybe it’s been driven out of use by the seemingly universal belief in the rival maxim that ‘there’s no smoke without fire’, which most people who’ve tried to light fires on a wet camping expedition will know to be downright untrue. I think the expression ‘They can’t do that here’ has gone the same way. These days they *can* do that here, and they do.

It’s all part of the general disappearance of the presumption of innocence, not just in law but in life, an increasing belief that, whether the subject is climate change, foreign policy or paedophiles, how you feel is far more important than what you know -and that the authorities must know what they’re doing.

 

For instance, I get attacked here for being sceptical of claims made by spy organisations, as if this is disrespectful and even irreverent.  One of these days I really must review Graham Greene’s ‘Our Man in Havana’ here. If only more people had read this wonderful book, about the readiness of intelligent, serious people to be fooled when it suits them, we might have avoided British involvement in Iraq.

 

But people in politics and journalism need to be a bit more careful than that. Are we too inclined to act as if we know things we don’t know? Now, I don’t struggle to believe that Russian intelligence agencies may have hacked the US Democratic National Committee and leaked some of the results. Moscow cannot have been hoping for Hillary Clinton to win the Presidential Election.

 

But it is a long way from ‘they may very well have done it’ to ‘they did it’ and so far I have not seen anything resembling a *fact* . The CIA’s  supposed findings are ‘still-classified’ according to the International New York Times of today (12^th December) pages 1 and 6. So we cannot study them.

 

Mr Trump’s jibe that the CIA are the same people who found WMDs in Iraq seemed justified to me. I had the same thought. Could the CIA, and such supporters as the ever warmongering Senator John McCain, possibly have a motive? Likewise, could the Washington Post and New York Times, which leaked various versions of the claim , have motives (both papers are Clintonist rather than Trumpoid, and the Post has for years been an especially keen supporter of the Syrian intervention that lies at the core of the current tension between Washington and Moscow)?

But the Post did not publish the CIA’s actual evidence of Russian hacking. It reported that the CIA ‘believed’ this to be so(by the way, there is a disagreement between the CIA and the FBI over the nature and extent of the hacking, the FBI doubting that the Republican National Committee was also hacked).

The New York Times says at one point ‘tracking the origin of cyberattacks is complicated’, which I should say is understatement, especially if the hacker is any good.  As for what is ‘known’, we learn that a hacking group ‘long associated’ with the Russian internal security agency FSB got into the DNC . Then in 2016 a group of Russian hackers ‘long associated’ with’ the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence organisation, got into the DNC again. Forgive me, but terms such as ‘a group of Russian hackers long associated with’ are a sign of the brakes being applied. Cut them out and see how much more confident the report would then be.  I might add that the GRU and the FSB loathe each other as much as rival intelligence organisations always do.

How did the CIA know these things? Or rather, why did they *believe* them?  ‘Malware used in the cyber-attack on the DNC matched tools previously used by hackers with proven ties to the Russian government’.

Well, let’s not be too difficult here, but wouldn’t sophisticated hackers be quite likely to put someone else’s signature on their activity, and be in a position to replicate it? Well, yes. In fact, I would imagine this is close to routine.

For it continued ‘That sort of “pattern analysis” is common in cyber-investigations, though it is not conclusive (my emphasis PH)’.

But the New York Times then said that the agencies had more, and had identified individuals from the GRU who oversaw the hacking efforts. This, we are told ’may have come from intercepted conversations, spying efforts or implants in computer systems that allow the tracking of emails and text messages’.

It also mentions a forgotten fact, that President Putin has long accused Hillary Clinton of interfering in Russia’s 2011 elections, which might be playing some part in all this.

Well, forgive me, but if they can reveal this much in unattributable briefings (which everyone knows came from them) what is stopping them giving a press conference or at least attending an open hearing of a Senate Committee, and, say, naming the GRU operatives? 

 

A lot of intelligence is about not letting the enemy know what you know about him. Well, that’s not an issue here any more, is it? Next comes the vital need to conceal your methods and protect your agents. The highest classifications in intelligence briefings are given to the material which reveals the *sources*. This newspaper briefing pretty much reveals those sources. So what is there to lose in making a specific allegation against specific individuals. I’m not saying I don’t believe it. I am inclined to do so.  I just think we should stop treating it as fact until we know it is one

But there’s a much more serious charge being levelled against Russia, that of being guilty of deliberate atrocities and war-crimes in Syria.

In Foreign Secretary Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson’s recent (Friday 9 November) speech at the ‘Manama Dialogue’ in Bahrain:  https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/foreign-secretary-speech-britain-is-back-east-of-suez

... the following words appear (Note the pedantic Foreign Office spelling of ‘Assad’,as everyone else calls him): ‘It may very well be true that after months of barbaric bombing Bashar al-Asad and his Russian and Iranian sponsors are on the point of capturing the last of rebel-held Aleppo – perhaps within a matter of days, we can’t know. But if and when that happens it will assuredly be a victory that turns to ashes, it is but a Pyrrhic victory.

‘Remember that two thirds of Syria is currently outside Asad’s control, and that he is still besieging 30 other areas containing 571,000 tormented inhabitants. Surely to goodness, there can be no lasting peace in Syria, if that peace is simply re-imposed by a man who has engendered such hatred among millions of his own people.’

Well, first of all, let’s just mention some undoubted barbarism about which Mr Johnson, speaking in Bahrain,  was tactfully silent. Dialogue is not always welcome in Bahrain, it would seem:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/protesters-are-tortured-in-bahrain-while-britain-signs-45m-arms-deal

http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/bahrain-opposition-activist-arrested-while-protesting-king-hamad-visit-uk-621319653

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahraini_protests_of_2011

And then let’s ask:  Why does he describe this particular bombing, of Aleppo by Russia and Syria,  as ‘barbaric’? Is our Foreign Secretary a pacifist?  I do not think so. In what important way does Russian bombing of Aleppo differ from the bombings of Fallujah and Mosul, where Islamist fanatics have been bombed by Western planes (ours included, I believe), and where our one-time ally, Nouri el-Maliki of Iraq, used ‘barrel bombs’ (why are these so much worse than any other kinds of bomb? No bomb is nice) on ‘his own people’ in Fallujah? I hesitate even to mention the British bombing of Libya, in which civilians died as a result of our crazed decision to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi and replace him with flaming anarchy, which still persists.

But I will

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/06/as-dave-does-the-talking-war-dead-are-sneaked-out-of-the-back-gate-.html

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/02/a-plea-for-considered-coverage-lest-fear-and-panic-drive-us-into-the-pit-of-war-.html

The point is that aerial warfare can be relied upon to produce some horrible effects. Unless we can *prove* that Russia and Syria *deliberately* targeted aid convoys schools and hospitals (and I have seen no such proof) how can we say this this was so?  

As for the allegations that Assad ( or 'Asad')has used gas against ‘his own people’ , they remain just that -vallegations. I sought very hard for details of the charges, and evidence of gas use,  and have never found anything which establishes that Assad did this thing. It has always seemed to me that it would have been raving mad for him to do so, since it gained nothing significant but it was the one action which would have licensed the USA to unleash air power against him, and that was the one thing that could, at that stage of the war, have ensured his defeat.

Mr Johnson got something of a pasting from Andrew Marr on Sunday 4^th December, on Britain’s undoubted involvement in Saudi Arabia’s very bloody little war in Yemen, in which there have been a number of rather unfortunate civilian casualties, though nobody says the Saudis are doing this deliberately.

 

And interestingly it is generally assumed that it is this rather poorly-reported Yemen conflict that he was referring to in his now-famous contribution to the Med2 Group, in Rome, which you may watch in a rather poorly synchronised film here http://rome-med.org/speeches/med-shared-security-mediterraneans-path-to-a-new-order-the-helsinki-experience/

Mr Johnson first begins speaking at about 19 minutes in. He then starts again (this is the important bit about proxy wars) at about  46 minutes (though you can’t see him to begin with) I have tried and so far failed to obtain a text of this, which seems to have been off the cuff rather than scripted. The Guardian, which broke the story, reported it thus (it has its own video)

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/dec/07/boris-johnson-accuses-saudi-arabia-of-twisting-and-abusing-islam

But Mr Johnson cannot have been referring to Yemen. Yemen is not a ‘proxy’ war by Saudi Arabia. Saudi forces are directly involved, and this is not disputed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian-led_intervention_in_Yemen

The proxy war is in Syria. If Mr Johnson thinks it barbaric in general, he knows who to talk to. If he has specific allegations against Russia, I should be interested to hear them.

 

PETER HITCHENS: No 10 disaster! Minister is caught telling us the TRUTH

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

WHAT fun it is on the rare occasions when a Cabinet Minister tells the truth. It upsets all the right people.
The Government squawks and flaps and tries to drown out the revelation with fresh lies. The semi-official political press starts babbling about how the culprit has made a ‘gaffe’, a word used by nobody else, meaning ‘embarrassing but honest statement’.
And the rest of us can enjoy it. So it is with Foreign Secretary Johnson’s attack on Saudi Arabia’s nasty, violent meddling in other countries, mainly responsible for turning Syria into a wasteland of ruins, full of corpses and weeping mourners.
He was careful – and correct – to level the same charge against the Iranian ayatollahs. But attacks on Iran are politically and diplomatically acceptable, and anyone can make them. Justified criticism of the Riyadh despotism is taboo because this country has crawled so deep into the pocket of Saudi Arabia that it cannot find its way out.
Actually, I understand why we need to grovel quite a bit to the Saudis. We are poor and they are rich. They have lots of oil and ours has almost run out. They buy our aircraft and our weapons, which most people prefer not to do.
So a certain amount of politeness and flattery are necessary. They can have as many Royal visits as they like, and I can put up with us flying flags at half-mast when Saudi royalty dies. Why not? We recently entertained the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in Buckingham Palace.
We get a lot in return for such gestures. But in recent years, the Saudis have asked too much. We should never have agreed to support their attempt to overthrow the Syrian government.
It was a policy motivated by spite. It required Britain to back the Al Nusra front, a bloodthirsty gang of hate-filled fanatics. These are exactly the sort of people we warn against in our ‘anti-extremism’ programmes at home, and it is very hard to tell what separates them from Islamic State.
We have been reduced to pretending, to the laughter of all who know anything, that these merciless Christian-hating, church-defiling sectarian brigands are ‘moderates’. Worse, by helping them to destabilise Syria we have created the biggest wave of Middle Eastern migration into Europe in history. Worse still, we picked the wrong side.
Russia, understanding the Middle East far better than we do, bet that Syria’s Assad would beat off the Saudi attack. And the battle of Aleppo has proved them right. Moscow’s prestige and influence in the Middle East is now at an all-time high. Ours is pitifully low.
Even now we don’t realise it. The head of MI6, who was a much more impressive figure when we didn’t know who he was than he is now we can actually see and hear him, made an unwise public appearance last week.
It seemed he had not read the papers or watched the news, as he used the occasion for an ill-timed and particularly ill-aimed attack on Russia. He wrongly blamed the Kremlin for turning Syria into a desert (that was the Saudis, egged on by us, the French, the Turks and the USA). He also attacked Russia for ‘alienating’ supposed moderates in the Middle East.
This from the Chief of Intelligence of the country which has done more to annoy open-minded, pro-Western people in the Middle East than practically anywhere else, from the overthrow in a squalid putsch of Iran’s beloved (and elected) leader Mossadegh, to the Suez, Iraq and Libya fiascos.
Perhaps his agents out there are still telling him what he wants to hear, rather than what is actually happening. Once, all this stuff was far-away and theoretical. But now that the people whose countries we have wrecked can find their way to Calais in their tens of thousands, it isn’t.
And that’s why I prefer Boris Johnson’s gaffes to official falsehoods. Those who refuse to admit the truth cannot protect this country against the many dangers which threaten it.

 

The search for Sully's enemy

CLINT Eastwood’s clever and engrossing film Sully, about the amazing landing of a passenger jet on the freezing Hudson River, needed a villain. Who could it be?
After all, pilot Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger behaved like the well-trained and self-disciplined gentleman he is, keeping his head and using all his years of experience to land an Airbus on water without killing anyone, after geese destroyed his plane’s engines and turned it into an enormous glider. And the passengers, instead of scrambling over each other and clawing for their possessions as the plane sank (which must have been a temptation), behaved like grown-ups and made their way sensibly to the exits.
All the rescue services did as they should have done.
Who was left to be the bad guy? The government. To put it mildly, the movie plays up the investigations which concluded that Sullenberger might possibly have made it to an actual airport runway, if he’d acted inhumanly fast.
I found all this very believable. But actually the pilot had already become such a figure of admiration that in real life he was more or less above criticism. It tells you a lot about the modern USA, and the victory of Donald Trump, that the authorities are the ones who come out of it badly.

 

The myth of wind power...blown wide open

THE current mild weather may make us forget that British winters can still be ferociously cold. How will we cope with such cold, once the current plan to shut down coal-fired power stations is complete?
I asked National Grid to tell me where our electric power came from in the mainly chilly week from November 28 to December 4. For most of that time, an average of just above 14 per cent came from coal, while less than six per cent came from wind.
In the Friday of that week, just two per cent of our power came from all those forests of windmills which cost us so much and make such a mess of the landscape.
A surprisingly large part of the rest was made up of nuclear (just over 25 per cent) and gas (just under 55 per cent) with a small amount sent across from France and the Netherlands by undersea cable.
With coal gone, as it soon will be, and as our worn-out nuclear stations close as well, what are we going to do? Solar power, in midwinter? We are not building any new gas generators, new nuclear plants are many years away, and the wind often doesn’t blow much in very cold weather. France’s nuclear systems are getting old and are breaking down more and more frequently.
Any company or householder looking at figures like these would worry, and act. Yet we do neither. It is because our elite’s minds are closed by Warmist dogma. Quite soon, sensible people will be buying their own private generators, as they do in Third World countries.

*******

I’M not sure why the Government is so chipper about the big Commons vote for beginning the process of leaving the EU. One of the rules of politics is that really big majorities, like very long-standing ovations, are signs that people are concealing their real feelings. It is in the late-night sessions, the committees and the lobbies that the pro-EU MPs will try to frustrate the process.

*****

IT’S no good moaning now about the new plan to persecute soldiers for actions they undertook during the Northern Irish troubles, while IRA murderers go free. This is the ‘Peace Process’ you foolishly bought from the Blair creature back in 1998. It was a surrender, not a victory, and it is time we grasped that.

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PETER HITCHENS: Fifty years of 'enlightened' jails gave us one thing - more crime

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Modern politicians don’t like taking responsibility for anything difficult. They hate the idea that you sometimes have to punish people. That’s understandable. Locking people up and making them work hard and do as they’re told isn’t very nice.

But if you can’t bear the burden, then don’t seek paid public office. These nasty tasks are the most basic duty of the State. If it won’t protect us from the wicked, then we might as well wind it up.

We have disarmed in the face of danger. Until about 50 years ago, the stated aim of prisons was ‘the due punishment of responsible persons’. Under a clear criminal code, most crooks and most louts were scared of prison and tried not to go there. It wasn’t some savage place of torture and beatings. 

By world standards our prisons were very civilised. But they were austere, disciplined and under the control of the authorities.

Then along came the liberal modernisers. Police were turned into paramilitary social workers, soft on crime, tough on professors’ wives trying to stop trees being cut down.

Judges were no longer allowed to punish anyone without checking first to see if they’d had a horrid childhood. Voluntary drug abuse was treated as an unavoidable disease, rather than as the crime it is.

How the criminals laughed. Prisons were transformed into apologetic, weakly run places where something called ‘rehabilitation’ would supposedly happen. It never has.

The point of prison was to scare people away from doing things they knew would put them there. Nobody had any fancy ideas about changing the hearts and minds of those who were actually locked up.

With a bit of luck they wouldn’t want to go back, but if they did, there was room.

It worked. In 1950-51, the prison population of England and Wales was 20,474. Even ten years later it was a manageable 27,099. Then along came the enlightened ones. By 1980, the total was almost 40,000. By 1999, the same approach (plus lots of unpaid fines, cautions and community service) had taken it to nearly 65,000. Now it is a little more than 85,000.

These places are far from being ‘holiday camps’. That is not the problem. Many of them are terrifying because the authorities have lost control, and the nastiest inmates are in charge.

I often wonder how those who are so squeamish about executing a few vicious murderers feel about the monstrous annual tally of despair – the prison suicide rate, now more than 100 a year.

But our bulging prisons are full in spite of huge numbers of crimes not reported because nobody is interested, of crimes ignored by the police, of offenders cautioned but not arrested, of ‘restorative justice’, of decisions not to prosecute by the CPS, suspended sentences, probation orders, automatically halved sentences, tagging and other devices for keeping criminals out of prison.

It’s quite simple. The feebler you are, the more crime you get.

And in the end the crime so outstrips the space in prisons that you more or less give up. That is what we have done.

And if we don’t rediscover our nerve, our prisons and our country are heading fast towards the Third World, but without the sunshine and the beaches.

*******

Is that Donald a REAL dummy?

I have looked again and again at this picture, which is said to show Donald Trump meeting Nigel Farage in Manhattan. And I grow less and less sure that the man with the weird coiffure is, in fact, the President-elect.

The hair is right, but the face and the grin are not. Nor is the open-necked shirt. I am tickled by the possibility that Mr Trump sent his hair to meet the Ukip leader, but decided not to go himself. Does he already have a squad of doubles, as Saddam Hussein did?

I wouldn’t blame him. And if Theresa May ever does manage to arrange a get-together, she should make sure it’s the real deal.

 

******

Do you ever wonder how wicked Russian bombers attacking Aleppo manage to hit a children’s hospital at least once a day, according to all media, whereas our brave forces in Mosul never kill any civilians at all? I call it downright miraculous. 

 

*****

Finally... one brave bishop says sorry 

Is the panic over? Are we beginning to realise that child abuse allegations – just like all other crimes – must be fairly investigated?

The resignation-prone Child Abuse Inquiry is in trouble precisely because it was based on a crowd-pleasing frenzy. The police are in difficulty because they forgot their job is open-minded investigation – assume nothing, believe nobody, check everything.

Now there is a flicker of good news from the Church of England too.

Trying to look tough on priestly child abuse when it had been feeble, the Church shamefully smeared one of its greatest figures – the late Bishop Bell of Chichester – as a paedophile. This was on the basis of a single, ancient uncorroborated allegation.

Since then, they have angrily refused to consider powerful expert evidence in his defence, or to admit that the secret kangaroo court which condemned Bishop Bell without hearing his side was at fault. Instead, they have attacked their critics, including me.

But there are at last signs that they too are recovering a sense of justice.

Yesterday, after months of shilly-shallying, the Bishop of Chelmsford apologised to me for falsely claiming that I and others had made hurtful comments about George Bell’s accuser, now an elderly lady.

The Bishop had made this baseless claim in the House of Lords, while trying to defend the Church’s behaviour.

It was typical of their refusal to recognise that they might be mistaken. They had a rigid groupthink which led them to believe the worst about their critics.

But the Bishop has now written to me to say ‘I am sorry that I said an untruth about you. I am seeking to make amends.’ And I have in turn forgiven him for what he said. I hope his courageous and Christian decision to break ranks with his rigid-minded colleagues will help to get a fair hearing for George Bell.

For I also learn that the Church is about to name the head of an independent review of these unproven allegations. About time. I took on this case more than a year ago because I fear that the old safeguards of English law are being destroyed. Without them, this country would be a tyranny.

Much of the damage was being done with public support, because of a mass panic about paedophilia. We all go on about how 17th Century witch-hunts and 20th Century McCarthyism were wrong. And so they were.

But would we recognise such things if they happened in our own time? Or stop them? Let’s see.

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PETER HITCHENS: The falling pound is NOTHING to do with your freedom

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column 

The pound sterling would have fallen hard and fast if we had voted to stay in the EU. I am amazed it did not do so long before. More than three years ago, before the referendum was called, I advised you to keep an eye on the value of sterling as a true measure of our huge economic difficulties.

Since then they’ve grown worse – enormous state debts, enormous private debts, a disastrous balance of trade and a devastating current account deficit, which measures how much we owe abroad.

Add to that the £435billion of funny money pumped into the economy by the Bank of England since 2009 in so-called ‘quantitative easing’, the smooth modern way of printing cash which is backed by thin air.

 

If you do these things, the currency must shrink in value, as surely as water will wet you, and as surely as fire will burn.

And now it has. I suspect it will get quite a lot worse, and the day when the dollar is worth more than the pound is now in sight. But currency markets like to wait for their opportunity. My guess is that, on the eve of the referendum, quite a few currency dealers bet heavily on a victory for the Remain campaign (as others did) and bought sterling in the belief that it would rise on the news. But others, more cunning or better informed, wagered the other way.

The resulting turmoil of rapid selling set off the avalanche which followed.

If the vote had gone the other way, then roughly the same thing would have happened by now, perhaps on the announcement of bad economic figures (there are so many, if you’re paying attention).

Everyone who understands the issue knows this. So they should stop saying – and you should stop believing – that the fall of sterling is your fault for voting for national independence.

This decision will have its costs – nothing worth having comes free – but a weaker pound isn’t one of them.

****

Thanks to a 1950s childhood I like my gravy thick, salty and dark brown, best mixed to a background of Two-Way Family Favourites on the Light Programme. So I’m sorry to see the decline of Bisto and Oxo sales, which fell in September supposedly because of hot weather. They’ll be blaming global warming next.

Of course, the real problem is that nuclear families eating meaty meals around tables, such as the one portrayed by Lynda Bellingham in the famous old Oxo commercials, are disappearing faster than hedgehogs. I doubt anything can save them.
But there’s something a bit wet and defeatist about the new Oxo TV advertisements, in which a horribly correct modern family (the man looks terrified) are shown cringing to some ghastly female bully brought home for a meal by their daughter. The creepy interloper shows her approval of her meatballs not by eating them but by taking a photograph of them.

Advertising is such a slave of trends. Someone called Helen Warren-Piper, a marketing director for Oxo’s parent company, has actually said: ‘Those advertising scripts where the mum is literally tied to an oven just don’t work any more. It’s clear advertisers need to think beyond mum and do a better job at representing the whole of the modern family or consumers will reject them.’

Ah, yes, you’ll remember those days when mothers were literally tied to the oven, then briefly released to gulp down some gravy before being chained to the kitchen sink. It happened to Lynda Bellingham all the time. No it didn’t. What is she talking about?

And yet this rubbish dominates the world of business and commerce, which now peddle ideas once found only in seething, enraged ultra-feminist magazines.

****

My favourite ghost stories, by the genius M. R. James, usually involve someone being a little too curious, and so releasing from its hole or tomb a nasty force he wishes he could put back but can’t.

Pornography is like this. In my wild 1960s days I thought it would be clever to read Last Exit To Brooklyn (which had just escaped prosecution) as a gesture of support for freedom of expression. It poisoned and polluted my imagination, irrevocably. To this day, I wish I hadn’t read it.

The best thing to do with pornography is to keep it out of reach by the forces of shame and law. The claim that legalising it would be a great liberation has turned out to be one of the greatest lies of our time. It has enslaved millions.

It is not a passive, dead thing that can be examined in a classroom. It reaches out and leaps into your mind. Jenni Murray could not be more wrong in saying that children should study it.

****

What a pity that Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson, a man of great historical knowledge, blessed with a sense of proportion, has become a Russophobic warmonger madly suggesting that we start a conflict with Moscow in Syria.

Mr Johnson knows perfectly well that fighting Islamist fanatics in densely populated cities is hard, especially when they hold the population hostage, as the Al Qaeda affiliate Al Nusra is doing in east Aleppo now.
The West and its allies had similar difficulties last Christmas in Ramadi, where the RAF (among other forces) dropped bombs in and around that city to defeat ISIS. I suppose it’s possible that no civilians died, but I somehow doubt it.

The difference is that, unlike their close cousins in the Al Nusra front in Aleppo, the Islamic State fanatics in Ramadi don’t have access to a slick PR operation in the West, skilled at producing emotive, perfectly composed atrocity pictures of wounded children, and in manipulating Western news organisations who (for the most part) have no actual staff reporters or photographers on the scene.

So almost all the things you hear about east Aleppo are one-sided, carefully controlled propaganda, not news. One way of dealing with one-sided propaganda is to check it against the stuff put out by the other side.

In a rare moment of balance, the BBC recently transmitted this, from Fares al-Shehabi, who represents Aleppo in Syria’s ‘People’s Council’.

He said: ‘More than half of the city is occupied by Islamists, many of them foreigners…

‘Just go and check for yourself who is ruling eastern Aleppo, who is really issuing the laws there, it’s Islamic courts, it’s exactly like Kandahar and Kabul before the coalition intervened to get rid of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, it’s exactly the same thing, they don’t have any democracy, they don’t have any civil rule, they only have people with long beards with fundamentalist ideology running the show, and a lot of foreigners.’

If this is even partly true, what on earth are we doing rushing to the aid of these hairy-faced fanatics and infiltrators? Or are we, as we did so regrettably in Libya, once again backing the worse against the bad?

I am happy to help Mr Johnson on this, and respectfully remind him that my team beat his when we clashed on University Challenge. He’s not the only know-all in London.

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PETER HITCHENS: This farcical witch-hunt will drag British justice back to the Dark Ages

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Countries on the brink of madness are riven by whispered scandals about the powerful - some of them true, most of them not. Four years before the French Revolution, some tangled rubbish about a diamond necklace was used to smear Queen Marie Antoinette. Pre-1917 Russia seethed with obscene rumours about the monk Grigory Rasputin and the Empress Alexandra.This tittle-tattle helped to discredit the existing regime, and opened the way for a new order which was far, far worse. With us, there is a strange belief that a vast sex-abuse scandal, reaching high into the establishment, is being hidden by the powerful. The great thing about such claims is that they can neither be proved or disproved. And so those who doubt them can be condemned as part of the cover-up. You cannot be neutral. In a reversal of the normal rules on slander, an accuser can allege the vilest things about an alleged culprit, and yet not suffer at all.

He or she can also shelter for life behind legally-enforced anonymity. Meanwhile the accused are publicly humiliated, their homes absurdly searched – for what, exactly? This unjust lunacy reached its peak in 2014 when the then Home Secretary, a Mrs Theresa May, responded to a media frenzy by setting up an ‘Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse’. It was a very silly idea. If crimes have been committed, we have a huge and expensive police and justice system which, to tell the truth, isn’t half as busy as it likes to pretend. This is because it has decided that so many things that used to be crimes aren’t crimes any more, so it ignores them. And immediately, because of the wild and fantastic nature of the claims, almost nobody could be found who wasn’t in some way disqualified to lead it. Ridiculously, that fine lawyer and judge, Baroness Butler-Sloss, was ruled out as chairman because she was ‘part of the establishment’. I bet the Baroness is relieved to be out of it now, but isn’t it ridiculous that the joke MP, Simon Danczuk, later to gain fame for his sexually explicit text message habit, was allowed to influence the matter? Now on its fourth chairman, this gigantic, foggy inquisition has just lost its chief lawyer, Ben Emmerson QC, amidst a barrage of leaks and counter-leaks. Meanwhile most of those involved in the original scandal-mongering have suffered various embarrassing setbacks and aren’t quite as chipper as they were when they stomped around the land demanding a state-sponsored witch-hunt.

And Mrs May, who wants to be thought of as open-minded and willing to review the decisions of the Cameron government, now has the chance to review and reverse her own mistake. I do hope she does, and shuts the whole thing down. This gigantic kangaroo court, which is, incredibly, allowed to hear evidence against accused individuals without allowing any defence, is an embarrassing hangover from a bout of national lunacy. We are slowly recovering from it. The Metropolitan Police Chief who joined in far too keenly with the hunting pack has quit his post early.

A powerful new Channel 4 Drama, ‘National Treasure’ –in which Robbie Coltrane plays a showbiz giant brought down by abuse claims - is at least toying with the possibility that some of these accusations may actually be untrue and that some accusers may be hoping for gain more than for justice. About time too. For far too long media, police and – shamefully – the courts themselves have forgotten the rule which stands between us and tyranny – that an accused person is innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. It is no good saying that the crimes are terrible. Locking up an innocent person, or destroying his life with anonymous smears, is terrible too. And if we don’t stop doing it, we will soon cease to be a free country.

**********

If a small army of Islamist terror fanatics makes its base in a crowded city, and will not let women and children leave, it is very hard to know what to do. For instance, the Iraqi army was faced with this problem in 2014 when it sought to recapture the city of Fallujah from Jihadists. Nouri al-Maliki, then President of Iraq and so the West’s ally, used barrel bombs to fight ISIS terrorists in Fallujah. Pro-ISIS propaganda made much of the civilian deaths, but I don’t recall the USA, or the BBC, or the moralizing choir who now emote over Aleppo and shout ‘war-crimes’, saying much. Nor do we hear at all from these moralists about Saudi Arabia’s rather savage little war now going on in Yemen (using British munitions) in which more than 2,000 civilians are said to have died. There’s a similar problem over the severe criticisms of the Syrian government made by the USA’s diplomats and their mouthpiece, the BBC.

Near-identical repression of dissent in Bahrain and Egypt (currently our allies) passes with barely a mention. Their governments aren’t called ‘regimes’. Why is this? For instance, on a recent edition of BBC Radio 4’s over-rated ‘Today’ programme, the presenter, Justin Webb, stated as a matter of fact that Russia ‘has no obvious interest’ in bringing the Syrian war to an end. How does he know? He then used that interesting phrase ‘some who think’. There are some (namely me) who think this is a BBC way of sliding an opinion into a place where it shouldn’t be. Anyway, according to Mr Webb ‘There are some who think they (the Russians) want it to go on and on and on in order to damage Europe with the flows of migrants’. No doubt there are, but who are they, and are they right, and why is Justin Webb smuggling this opinion (especially if it isn’t his) into a major news programme?

A BBC spokesperson says feebly that this is ‘news analysis’, but it looks to me like taking sides. From the start I have been shocked by the BBC’s partial coverage of this issue, and its willingness to be a conduit for war propaganda in Syria, as it was in Libya. This is important because we are being softened up for a war far more risky than that in Libya or Iraq. In Syria, western forces might actually find themselves in direct combat with Russian troops and planes. Can you begin to imagine how dangerous that could be for Europe and the world?

Please don’t be rushed into supporting such a thing, even by the BBC.

***

I am sorry that Jeremy Paxman has gone into the memoir business. Surely he doesn’t need the money, and, whenever anyone attacks his or her dead parents in public I always wonder what those parents would say if they were still alive. But I am glad of this confession from the man who so loftily looked down on so many interviewees: ‘It is not necessary to be an expert — why bother interviewing someone if you already know it all? ‘The presenter is there merely as the representative of the average, reasonably alert viewer. You only need to know enough not to ask spectacularly stupid questions.’ Really?

*****

Tories attack Jeremy Corbyn for wanting to renationalise the railways (in my view, his best idea). Well, they can hardly accuse him of too much state interference while simultaneously demanding government control over pudding portions in restaurants. Nice big sugary puddings in old-fashioned British Railways dining cars, that’s my policy.

The world's fixated on Trump. But Hillary could drag us ALL into a catastrophic war, writes PETER HITCHENS in America

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Here in my favourite American small town, I detect a strange, ominous feeling of approaching danger. Something has gone wrong with the USA.
I first came to Moscow, Idaho, eight years ago when the great Obama frenzy was at its unhinged peak. This is a divided place, traditional rural conservatives living alongside a Left-wing university campus, but in 2008 they coped with their deep divisions in the usual way.
People disagreed, but they did it politely and openly, and were ready to accept the result even if they did not like it. Almost every front lawn had its partisan placard.
Now politics has gone underground in an almost sinister way. I searched the town’s pleasant suburbs for a Trump or Clinton poster and found none, only a single defiant declaration of support for America’s Jeremy Corbyn, the Left-winger Bernie Sanders, who long ago quit the race.
Republican headquarters in Main Street until recently contained posters supporting lots of the party’s candidates for local office, but none at all for Donald Trump. Last week they finally managed to mention his name, but you have to look carefully for it in their window.
Democrat HQ, almost directly opposite, is nearly as coy about Hillary Clinton.
In private conversations (the only sort where people will say what they really think), you find out what this means. Democrats are holding their noses over Hillary because they despise her and wish she wasn’t their candidate.
But many Republicans are stifling their genuine enthusiasm for Trump, because – in small towns like this – they don’t want to annoy or alienate neighbours who may also be customers, clients, patients or employers.
Of course there are conservatives, usually serious Christians, who loathe and mistrust Donald Trump and see him for what he is – a balloon of noise and bluster which will one day burst in a terrible explosion of disappointment and regret.
But they have been swept aside by the great carnival of resentment and revenge which has carried Trump past all the obstacles and restraints that are supposed to prevent such people getting near real power. For Trump is the anti-Obama – emotional, irrational, a spasm.
Those who had to sit, grinding their teeth, through all the long-years of Obama-worship, now hope for their own matching hour of gloating.
And we really ought to recognise that rejoicing over the woes of your enemies is one of the greatest sinful pleasures in life. Few will turn down the chance.
I can see no good outcome of this. Adversarial politics are a good thing, but only if both sides are ultimately willing to concede that their rivals are entitled to win from time to time. But that attitude seems to have gone. Now the rule is that the winner takes all, and hopes to keep it if he (or she) can.
A narrow defeat for Trump will poison the republic. Millions of his supporters will immediately claim fraud at the polls, and nothing will convince them otherwise. The bitterness of the Florida ‘hanging chad’ episode of 2000 will seem like brotherly love compared with that fury.
A victory for Trump – decisive or narrow – will give astonishing powers to a lonely, inexperienced, ill-educated old man who (I suspect) is increasingly terrified of winning a prize he never really intended or expected to obtain.
A clear victory for Hillary Clinton would create even greater problems. Educated, informed people here believe that there are serious doubts about her health. Even if they are wrong, her militant interventionist foreign policies are terrifying.
I lived through the Cold War and never believed we were in real danger. But I genuinely tremble at the thought of Mrs Clinton in the White House. She appears to have learned nothing from the failed interventions of the past 30 years, and scorns Barack Obama’s praiseworthy motto: ‘Don’t do stupid stuff.’
She will do stupid stuff, and drag us into it, you may rely upon it.
How odd it is, to hear on the air the faint but insistent sound of coming war, here in this place of sweet, small hills, rich soil and wistful, mountainous horizons.
Men came here in search of what we all really desire, to be left alone to get on with the really important aims of life, to build a home and raise a family, to see the fruits of their labour, to believe what they wish to believe.
I cannot quite work out how the good, sane impulse that gave birth to the USA could possibly have led us to this nightmare choice between two equally horrible outcomes.
I shall just have to carry on hoping that I am wrong.

Syria's 'WMD moment': Don't be duped again

Almost everyone (barring a tiny knot of deluded losers) knows that Saddam Hussein had no WMD. Most people now grasp that Colonel Gaddafi wasn’t planning a massacre in Benghazi or ordering his troops to engage in mass rapes.

How long will it be before we also grasp that neither Russia nor Syria bombed a UN aid convoy in Aleppo?

This incident, about which almost no independently testable, checkable facts have yet been produced, is the WMD of Syria. If we all fall for it, then we shall very soon find ourselves embroiled in the most dangerous international confrontation since the Cuban missile crisis.

Under immense pressure from the despots of Saudi Arabia, the USA will not give up its efforts to overthrow the Syrian government. It is clear that it is now prepared to risk an open confrontation with Moscow to achieve this. Why? Who do they think they are, and how can their cause be so good that they take such risks?

The deliberate sabotage of a workable peace deal in Syria (opposed from the start by the Pentagon) is one of the scandals of our age. There was a chance we might end the misery of millions, and it was thrown away.

We in Britain must resist being dragged into a Syrian war, not least because, if we are, it will not be long before any troops we send there are being hounded in their own country for alleged war crimes. We’ve been fooled enough by this propaganda. Don’t be bamboozled again.

We'll beat Corbyn with reason - not abuse 

Labour cannot win an Election whoever leads it, including Corbyn.

Look, there are plenty of good arguments against Jeremy Corbyn, the best one being his absurd thought-free loathing for grammar schools. Some of the greatest socialists in this country, notably the 1930s Jarrow MP Ellen Wilkinson, and that fine teacher and socialist Eric James, realised that such schools helped the poor.

But please can people stop proclaiming that Labour cannot win an Election with Mr Corbyn at its head? It is such a stupid thing to say, that every time I hear it I want to beat my head against the nearest wall.

Labour cannot win an Election whoever leads it. It is dead in Scotland and the South of England. And why on earth, after the 13-year catastrophe of the Blair government, do so many people seem so anxious to back the ghastly, dishonest Blairites against Mr Corbyn, who is at least open and honest about what he intends?

I personally prefer that to the conscious fraud practised by the Blairites and their Tory equivalents, the Cameroons, who pretended to be patriots and friends of the family, and turned out to be neither.

Mr Corbyn, as well as being generally right about foreign policy, actually confronts the issues that worry many people. His answers may be wrong, but if we listened to him and debated with him, instead of abusing him, this country and its people would benefit.

Freedom is all about being forced to listen to people we disagree with, and to defeat them (if we can) with facts and logic. The Corbyn abusers should try it.

**

*******

When will we learn that making new laws is useless unless we enforce them? It is no good having ‘tough’ laws against texting while driving unless lots of people are caught, prosecuted and punished for this.

Now car manufacturers, with breathtaking cynicism, are marketing new models with dashboard internet screens. This will undoubtedly mean more pointless deaths. My suggestion is that such cars should only be sold if the driver’s seatbelt and airbag are removed first, and that they should not be permitted to have any insurance apart from third party cover. Too many drivers think they are invulnerable. That is why they kill.

*

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Hurrah for the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee

Hurrah for the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee , whose report http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmfaff/119/11901.htm

has rightly criticised the absurd Libyan intervention, supported by two of the most ludicrous politicians of modern times, France’s former president Sarkozy and our own unlamented Mr Slippery, David Cameron.

I remain amazed that Mr Cameron has had so little trouble because of his role in Afghanistan, where he more or less became a servant of Rupert Murdoch and the neoconservative permanent war campaign, and in Libya, where he created a crisis where there wasn’t one.

This behaviour is not significantly better than the Bair creature’s behaviour in Iraq, and may actually have had as dire an effect. The anarchy in Libya certainly created much of the migration crisis that now engulfs Europe, and has changed our continent beyond recognition.

When will people understand that in the post-colonial world, it is no use getting hoity-toity about the morality of the rulers who have taken over the West’s former colonies?

We all accepted,  in the 1950s and 1960s, the argument that peoples had a ‘right to self-determination’, even if they used it to choose unpleasant despots. The alternative, that colonial rule might actually be better for almost everyone involved, became unsayable and unthinkable, and not worth advancing in civilised society. There's really not much point in removing Despot A if he is then replaced either by anarchy or by Despot B. And let's face it, we're never going to reconquer these places, even if we had the nerve and self-confidence to do so. 

 

Oddly enough this rule tended to apply only to the former possessions of the clapped-out European empires. China pays no attention to it, and the USA, a vast contiguous land empire assembled via purchase and violent conquest, is still strong enough to resist any attempts to get ‘self-determination’ by any part of its territory.

The USSR was rather amusingly compelled to grant liberation to most of its empire in 1991, after decades of preaching to others about their imperialism. This is doubly paradoxical, as the Soviet Empire was also the first ideological one, and it was this that did for it. The Soviet takeover in Afghanistan under Brezhnev may well count as the first liberal intervention of modern times (the Communist ideologues favoured it , the soldiers, diplomats and professionals, who knew what Afghanistan was like, opposed it). It was this failure that did for the whole Leninist empire. 

As for the Libya episode, I remember it well at the time, especially the growing attempt to pretend that the Cameron government had always had chilly relations with Gaddafi, and that the Blair government had been the Colonel’s patsies. Maybe they were, but if so, what about the Cameron government’s initial attitude to the Tripoli potentate. This is interesting. Look out for the reference to Mr Bellingham:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/08/bravo-blair.html

But the MPs’ report (see for instance paragraph 32) shows that  various claims made in favour of intervention, especially the alleged plan for a massacre in Benghazi, were – to put it kindly – seriously exaggerated. This was not the only thing of this sort.  I recall being asked on BBC Question Time around then to treat, as if it were proven truth, some atrocity propaganda about mass rape.

People sometimes accuse me of looking glum or bad-tempered on TV.  Perhaps I do, but if so it is because I am amazed at what’s being said around me. Honestly, how can any educated, responsible, conscious person not know the simple rule, that truth is the first casualty of war and that atrocity propaganda must always be treated with caution. Yes, it is sometimes true (and history shows that is exactly when we tend to disbelieve it most, as in the well-authenticated reports of the massacre of European Jews, smuggled out of Hitler’s efficiently evil empire by a few incredibly brave people).

Oddly enough the early proof of the Holocaust was dismissed, in my view, precisely because it was *not* a pretext for war – we were already at war with the perpetrators. It would have required us to do something much more complicated and politically complicated than war, had we acknowledged it.

But there is this strange impulse in the human breast to rush into benevolent wars (especially if you won’t personally be doing the fighting, killing or dying) which makes us unbelievably credulous at the worst moments.

I still wonder what the real reason is for our Iraq, Libyan and Syrian enthusiasms. I suspect it lies a bit south of Jordan and somewhere to the east of the Red Sea.

The Tories Can't have Their Own Jeremy Corbyn

What a funny country this is, and what funny political parties it has. Both appear to be more or less mad, as if designed by Lewis Carroll for a larger-than-original Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

 

The governing party has just lost its leader because a majority of voters rejected his principal policy, British membership of the EU. It has loopily replaced him with a successor who *also* favours British membership of the EU.

 

In doing so, it has perhaps accidentally avoided a vote in which someone else might have been picked.

 

The Labour Party is embarking on a leadership struggle between its old-fashioned left-wing members and its fashionably Blairite MPs, who barely speak the same language. Bizarrely, the week after Labour’s Iraq War was shown definitively to have been a colossal and inexcusable mistake,  the supposed standard-bearer of common sense, rectitude and goodness is a Labour MP. A Ms Eagle,  who voted for the Iraq war at the time (when the average Natterjack Toad could have seen it was a daft idea) and repeatedly voted against any investigation of it later.

 

She is, however, an accomplished producer of clichés, as she showed at her campaign launch. What she stands for, apart from stupid wars, it is very hard to see.

Ms Eagle's main task will apparently be splitting her party down the middle, possibly aided by lots of lawyers, and I can only wish her the best of British luck with that.

 

Mrs May's main task will be leaving the EU, a policy she disagrees with and campaigned (rather feebly) against, perhaps hoping nobody would notice (they did, Theresa, they did).

 

Thus, they have picked a leader who actively disagrees with her own government’s main and central task.  Almost every significant policy decision from now on is affected by the EU question. How can this possibly be sensible?

One has to ask why Mr Cameron bothered to resign, if this is the best they can do.

And thus Mrs Theresa May, who appears to have been elevated to her new eminence largely by ‘The Times’ newspaper, will shortly go to Buckingham Palace to see the Queen,  before she formally assumes her duties.   

It appears that the interview with Mrs Andrea Leadsom, which appeared in ‘The Times’ on Saturday ....(I have been struggling since to find any quotation from Mrs Leadsom which justifies the headline : ‘Being a mother gives me edge on May — Leadsom’ . I mean, I cannot find any words from her which contain this sentiment, which seems to me to be a problem given that it is so stated in the splash headline)....   seems to have frightened Mrs Leadsom into giving up her campaign for the Tory leadership.

 

I am not especially keen on Mrs Leadsom, who doesn’t appear to be a social or moral conservative, and whose collapse on Monday suggests she lacks the stomach for a fight.  But she might have done better than I or anyone expected. At the weekend I began to pick up signals that the Tory membership might be going to do to the Parliamentary Tory Party what the Labour membership have done to the Parliamentary Labour Party – choose a leader who was more loyal to the party’s aims than they were.

They may actually have been planning to vote for Mrs Leadsom. They would have done this on the very sound grounds that she supported the main task of the new post-Cameron government – taking Britain out of the EU. They may well have thought it ridiculous that, having ejected a pro-EU prime Minister, they then chose a pro-EU successor, who opposes her own government’s main aim.

Well, now they can’t. Mrs May, who I believe will be a grave disappointment in office to those who have become her cheerleaders, has thus escaped the possible danger of a grave humiliation.  But she has also lost the chance of a proper unquestionable mandate from the Tory members, who are now free to mutter against her that they were never asked. Which they will, soon.

I will return to this in more detail later in the week.

PETER HITCHENS: Want to see who started the Iraq War? Look in the mirror

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Oh, for goodness’ sake leave the pathetic Blair creature alone. He will never understand what he did and probably didn’t understand it at the time. 

He isn’t very bright and now lives a lonely, meaningless life of empty speeches delivered to bored businessmen in return for money, which will have to be penance enough.

If you want to blame anyone for the Iraq disaster, look at yourselves. I opposed it at the time, and remember how few others did. I don’t really count the Leftist demonstrators, who oppose all wars, just or unjust.

I mean the great mass of patriotic Middle Britain, normal decent people, who were so willingly misled. I mean those scores of MPs of both parties who scuttled, bleating, through the war lobby and now claim, falsely, that they didn’t know the facts.

I mean my media colleagues, who have been trained from their earliest years to doubt what they are told, yet swallowed Alastair Campbell’s great dish of steaming tripe without a thought. 

Come on, how hard was it to see that the danger was invented, that the war was illegal and that it was none of our business? I have no prophetic powers but I could see it.

And yet, diddled so blatantly that even an official report now confirms it, you still don’t learn. How many supposedly responsible voters are currently being fooled by today’s attempt to spin us into a stupid conflict with Russia, a country almost nobody in Whitehall knows anything about or understands?

At least as many as were misled by claims of a fictional massacre into supporting the Libya disaster. At least as many as were persuaded by a media chorus to admire Hilary Benn’s feeble, poorly argued speech urging us to bomb Syria.

Is there no idiocy you can’t be gulled into by a bit of atrocity propaganda or the endlessly recycled claim that the chosen target is the new Hitler, who must not be ‘appeased’? A word of advice: if you don’t like atrocities, don’t start wars. Wars are the mother and father of atrocities, and one day they will come home to us, if we keep launching them against others.

Vladimir Putin is already being turned into the new Hitler. Nobody who knows anything about Russia thinks this is true. But a couple of weeks ago we more or less secretly sent British troops to Ukraine, a country with which we are not in any way allied, and which is a war zone. Was Parliament asked about ‘Exercise Rapid Trident’? I can find no record of it.

We have just made the daft decision to send 650 scarce troops to Poland and Estonia. This is supposedly in response to a ‘Russian threat’ to these countries for which there is no actual evidence. Apart from the tiny exclave of Kaliningrad, Poland doesn’t even have a border with Russia. As the wise academic Professor Richard Sakwa, whose father served in the pre-war Polish Army, has rightly said: ‘Nato grew to meet the threat it had itself provoked.’

If we are not careful, we shall once again create a war out of our own exaggerated fears and by believing our own propaganda. Any of you who are taken in by this have no right to attack Mr Blair. You are as bad as he is. He and his like couldn’t do what they do without your help.

Baffled by the barmy NHS 

A member of my family had to hurry to a major hospital casualty department at the weekend. It was the usual NHS mixture – dedicated, overworked and kind doctors and nurses cunningly concealed behind a barrier of wooden bureaucracy bad enough to make you scream, even if you weren’t already in pain.

All ended quite happily. Soon afterwards she received this ludicrous text, which I at first thought was a joke: ‘We would like you to think about your recent experience at the **** **** hospital. 

How likely are you to recommend our Emergency Department to your friends and family if they needed similar care or treatment today? Reply 1 for extremely likely, 2 for likely, 3 for neither likely nor unlikely, 4 for extremely unlikely, 5 for don’t know.’

How does one begin to respond to this? She was in considerable pain and distress. She did not consult the Good Hospital Guide (not that there was any choice, given the sparseness of A&E facilities in modern Britain). It’s not a market. It’s organised mercy, and it would be better if it concentrated exclusively on that.

The campaign for justice for the late Bishop George Bell goes on. Bell has been denounced by Church and media as a child abuser without the semblance of a trial. 

This was recently the main subject of a powerful debate in the House of Lords. The Church’s response, as ever, was to use the alleged victim as a human shield. 

Arrayed in his flowing clerical robes, in a chamber where all speak ‘upon their honour’, the consecrated Bishop of Chelmsford asserted that campaigners for justice for George Bell had ‘made hurtful comments about her’ (the alleged victim). 

Have they? I have challenged him to say who these people were and what these comments were. He has not replied, though the Church press office has emitted some irrelevant and evasive guff. 

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A florid face we should save for the nation

How we shall all miss Ken Clarke. This week, while looking like some hedge-dwelling creature roused early from a comfy hibernation, he accurately summed up modern British politics in a few very funny words uttered when he thought the TV cameras weren’t rolling. 

Typically, he hasn’t complained about the recording being leaked. I disagree with almost everything he thinks, though he was dead right about Iraq and gets too little credit. 

But he is a modest, thoughtful and funny person, with a real life outside politics, whose wisdom we badly need. Can’t he be saved for the nation?

 

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Look, I am resigned to the coronation of Mrs Theresa May as our next Prime Minister. In a cynical way, I am quite pleased by it, as she is so Left-wing that she may well achieve my main aim in life – the final and utter destruction of the Useless, Fraudulent Tory Party.

But spare me the suggestion that she is the new Margaret Thatcher. I’m not actually a Thatcherite, and disapprove of a lot of what the Iron Lady did. 

But I did meet Mrs Thatcher, and talk to her, and watch her in action. And Mrs May is no Margaret Thatcher. She is in fact the new John Major.

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