PETER HITCHENS: The best way to tackle terror? Keep calm and carry on quietly

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Hogwash: Nicky Morgan spoke about how to spot a potential fanatic in the classroom

Politicians react to terrorism much as parents might respond when their lisping tiny offspring come home from sex-ed classes and ask them to explain what lesbians do. They panic.

They have no idea what to say and they are terrified of committing themselves, rightly suspecting that their answers will be stored up and embarrassingly remembered years later.

But they have to pretend to know. And so they talk drivel.

I have watched this for years, with growing, grim amusement. But last week they outdid themselves, churning out gallons of swirling hogwash.

The most ridiculous of all was (as usual) the comically unqualified Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan. Attempting to explain the latest goofy, futile plan to root out extremism in the classroom, she groped for an example.

How could teachers spot a potential fanatic, who was in danger of rejecting British values and might end up waving an AK-47? You could almost hear the poor woman’s brain flapping wildly from side to side.

Then she reached for the one thing that absolutely everyone is now compelled to agree on, if they don’t want the thought police and everyone on Twitter to think they are an extremist.

‘Sadly, Isis are extremely intolerant of homosexuality,’ she gabbled.

Alas, until quite recently, Ms Morgan took a position which could, in these days of sexual liberation, be viewed as ‘extremely intolerant’ of homosexuality.

‘Marriage, to me, is between a man and a woman,’ she said in February 2013, after voting against same-sex weddings. This view, she argued, tied in with her Christian faith.

She has since had the politically correct technicians in to adjust her brain, and said in October last year that she had changed her mind, though it wasn’t quite clear how she had done this. The fact is that, in her previous state of mind, she could quite easily have been reported to the police by some zealous sneak, under her own guidelines.

Even more hilarious (if you find this sort of thing funny) is the fact that homosexuality is now officially a fundamental British value.

It’s true that the French have always claimed this was so, especially in the upper reaches of our ruling class, but I have never before heard it confirmed by a Minister of the Crown.

Conservative? David Cameron also urged the BBC to drop the term Islamic State, saying the group is 'neither Islamic, nor a state'

This was followed closely by a widely publicised attempt to spread fear and despondency, by mocking up a gun battle in the middle of London, in which men dressed up as terrorists ran about shooting off blanks, and a woman lay groaning in the street.

I can think of few ways better designed to help Islamic terrorists in their task of frightening us all into a state of quivering funk.

Then there was the Prime Minister’s weird attack on the BBC for using the term ‘Islamic State’. This was very ungrateful, given the Corporation’s huge efforts to rehabilitate the Tory Party, after it turned liberal and decided that homosexuality was a core British value.

If we can’t use the term ‘Islamic State’, on the grounds that it’s not Islamic or a state, then surely we can’t use the term ‘Conservative Party’ either. It certainly isn’t conservative, and I’m not sure it has enough members left to be called a party.

But our glorious rulers were not done yet. To crown a week of wild floundering, the Government announced that our few remaining bombers will soon be fighting alongside President Assad of Syria.

Two years ago they wanted to use the same aircraft to bomb Mr Assad.

Four years ago they did use them to overthrow the Libyan government. As a result Libya is now a failed state, where the man who murdered 30 British men and women in Tunisia is said to have been trained. Had our Prime Minister not bombed Libya, Seifeddine Rezgui could not have been trained there.

I can think of no simpler way of explaining what a stupid mistake this action was. Yet the man who made it still sits in Downing Street posing as a world leader.

Our Government do not know what they are doing. Let us hope that they all calm down before they do any more damage.

Anna's gripping drama, and a very troubling thought

I was gripped, against all my instincts, by Anna Friel’s performance as a female soldier who suddenly finds her own side is the enemy, in BBC2’s Odyssey.

Perhaps I’ve had enough of thrillers with plots so subtle that you can’t work out who’s good and who’s bad.

Perhaps, after years in which I genuinely believed that our Government and the Americans were a pretty straightforward force for good, I now find it harder to accept, having seen the wrong and foolish things we do in the Middle East and now also in Ukraine.

It’s hard to be a conservative patriot when your beloved country is run by people who aren’t conservative patriots.

Powerful: Anna Friel in BBC2s Odyssey suddenly finds her own side is the enemy

I still don’t understand why we need a gigantic airport sprawled across South East England. What does it gain us, compared with the misery of noise, pollution and congestion it causes in our cramped country? Would it really be so bad if we had to take a train to Paris or Amsterdam to fly to the USA?

Why the obsession with grandiose projects, such as new runways and the mad, useless HS2, when the shocking scandal of the broken promise on electrifying our decrepit, low-speed railways passes without scandal? The abandoned plans were specifically promised in a Tory manifesto published only a few weeks ago (pages 11, 13 and 14, if you want to check).

I know politicians lie habitually, but this is surely the most blatant false prospectus of modern times. Yet nobody has even resigned.

Greece isn't the only debt dodger

Whatever happens this weekend, the poor Greek people are helpless in the hands of dogmatic zealots who want to save a political project, the euro, at all costs. 

For them it must be much like waking up in the middle of an operation and realising the doctors are all mad and cannot hear you. Of course, their past governments were to blame for swallowing the promises of magical prosperity that came from Brussels. But why should ordinary people pay for this?

I see no end to this except more pain. But those who smugly lecture the Greeks for being in debt should recall that Germany was once a prostrate debtor nation, too, and was forgiven, and that in 1934 Britain defaulted on war debts to the USA worth about £225billion in today’s money.

Most people think we have paid them off, but we haven’t.

Pain: The poor Greek people are helpless in the hands of dogmatic zealots who want to save the Euro