Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 159

Some recent broadcast appearances by PH

In this LBC interview, which seems to me to be rather more of a contest to see if the interviewee can actually say anything without the interviewer talking over it,  I am said to ���rail��� against both major parties.

http://www.lbc.co.uk/rotting-corpses-peter-hitchens-rails-against-tories-and-labour-133164

And here is a discussion I took part in on the political revolution, on C4 News (you���d have thought they���d have worked out by now which newspaper I work for, but apparently not)

http://www.channel4.com/news/catch-up/display/playlistref/300616

The George Bell Affair is debated in the House of Lords

Last Thursday, the great day of Tory Turmoil, I was invited by Lord Lexden, the noted historian, to be one of his guests in the gallery for a House of Lords Debate on ���Historical Child Sex Abuse���, in which he planned to bring up ( among others) the case of the late Bishop George Bell, often dealt with here.

It is always a treat to visit the Upper Chamber, the only legislative body in the world that I have ever thought it might be fun to belong to, which is also a paradise of Pugin design, hierarchy,  red leather and monarchist and Christian symbolism (you can see why radicals hate it).

Lord Lexden is one of several prominent figures, including members of both Houses, lawyers, retired judges and police officers, churchmen and women, who believe the Church of England���s public condemnation of Bishop Bell without trial ��� and its subsequent attempts to turn him into a sort of unperson ��� is mistaken.

The Church now says, absurdly, that it acknowledges his great acts of selflessness and courage, which are proven,  but that these have to stand equally beside the unproven claim that he abused a young girl, many years ago based upon a single ancient, uncorroborated and anonymous charge investigated in secret by persons unknown.  And because of the unproven claim, his name has been removed from many institutions and buildings which it once adorned, because of the proven truth. Work that out, if you can.

My view is that such an act is wholly inconsistent with all that is known of George Bell, by people who knew him personally and by those who have made his life their study,  but that if it were proven to be true beyond all reasonable doubt then his reputation would be at an end. Good is done in minute particulars. If a man can cruelly and dishonestly ruin a child���s life, using his authority to conceal his crime,  then his other public deeds are dust.

The debate is mentioned briefly on BBC Radio 4���s ���Today in Parliament here (the passage begins at about 22 minutes into the programme, with the George Bell issue reached after 24 minutes)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07hj3xm

and can be read in full here

https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2016-06-30/debates/16063032000573/HistoricalChildSexAbuse

Two days before the debate, the Church rather suddenly announced  that it planned a review of its handling of the case. It says the review is routine, but at least one national media journalist was alerted by the church to the review, which is odd if it is routine.

https://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2016/06/independent-review-into-handling-of-george-bell-case.aspx

Lord Carey, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, described the Church���s procedures as a kangaroo court, a phrase which clearly stung the C of E���s spokesman on the spot, the Bishop of Chelmsford, The Rt Revd Stephen Cottrell. I have written to Bishop Stephen about part of his speech and expect to return to the subject here when I have seen his reply.

I was most taken by the contribution of Baroness Butler-Sloss, a distinguished lawyer and judge. I think she was very right to say that ���I suggest that a distinction should be made between the management of allegations against a living person and those against one who is deceased.���

She added (and I have emphasised one passage) ���The more improbable the event, the stronger must be the evidence that it did occur before, on the balance of probability, its occurrence will be established���.

���Of course there will be cases where there is a strong body of evidence against a deceased person, but the words of the noble and learned Lord should be carefully considered.

���The issue that causes me considerable concern is where the balance of probabilities is applied to historic cases of child abuse in which the alleged perpetrator is dead. I was taught as a young barrister ���audi alteram partem������that is, one has to hear both sides. Jimmy Savile may have been an exception because the volume of evidence of many, many victims built up to a horrifying degree, and there are other cases, but in general, with a few or particularly only one person making the allegation, however convincing, the authority or organisation dealing with the allegation has a duty to recognise that it may be able to get the story only from one side.

���Consequently the authority, organisation or agency with the unenviable and difficult task of dealing with allegations against a person who may have died many years ago needs to have a policy and indeed a formula. In particular, it needs wording which makes it clear that it should listen to and recognise the seriousness of the allegations and give appropriate support to the person making those allegations, but that generally���I should perhaps say always���it should resist the temptation to say that the account is convincing and is to be believed. Even on the balance of probabilities, if one side cannot be heard, that in my view is a step too far.

���The authority also has to be absolutely aware of the media���s ability to elaborate and distort the statements. Great, great care must be taken not to allow the media to convict the deceased alleged abuser based on the loose language used in the authority���s statement. ���I understand that the Church of England did not actually say that Bishop Bell was a sex abuser but it appears not to have taken steps to correct the media impression.���

I think this goes back to the beginning, and it si fascinating that a really fierce and sharp legal mind has identified exactly the same problem as the one that first struck me when this whole business started. The original statement  in October 2015 https://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2015/10/statement-on-the-rt-revd-george-bell-(1883-1958).aspx did not state anywhere that George Bell���s guilt was proven. It couldn���t, because it wasn���t.  So how did three national newspapers, two local papers and the BBC end up saying so?

You voted for a revolution... you got a Blair robot

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

So 17���million people voted for a revolutionary change in the way we are governed, and the result is going to be Theresa May. These ignored multitudes were not, I think, hoping for yet another Blairite robot, a living symbol of everything that is wrong with our political system. But this is what they are going to get.
I am sure Mrs May is a perfectly nice person and an ideal neighbour. But this is not the point. She is completely unfitted to answer the national demand for change.
She is a conventional Left-wing liberal. She wanted, for heaven���s sake, to stay in the EU, though she lacked the nerve to campaign actively for this. Given the growing campaign to overturn the referendum by guile and fear, can she be trusted not to fudge us back in?
Look at her. Trevor Phillips, when he was boss of the HQ of Political Correctness, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said in 2011 that Mrs May was ���just as aggressive as Harriet Harman was on women���s equality���.
She is keenly politically correct. She mysteriously converted from opposition to all-women shortlists for parliamentary selections, to support for them. As Home Secretary she has done little to reduce or control the mass immigration which worries so many.
She also prefers not to mention in reference books that she went to a girls��� grammar school, strange behaviour for someone now alleged to support such schools. She is even quieter about having attended a private school.
Her most important political act was her speech in October 2002 in which she described the Tories she now seeks to lead as ���the nasty party���.
Incidentally, in the same speech, she specifically endorsed Anthony Blair���s Iraq War policy, perhaps the single stupidest act in modern politics. Her only criticism of Mr Blair was about his ability to deliver on policies she supported.
Crucially she demanded that the Tory Party should adapt itself to Blairism. ���Twice we went to the country unchanged, unrepentant, just plain unattractive. And twice we got slaughtered. Soldiering on to the next Election without radical, fundamental change is simply not an option.���
The Blairite insider Steve Richards has written about this era, saying that, in the 2002 Election, the Blair entourage were often in an exasperated fury. ���You don���t get it,��� they would occasionally scream. ���The Election is a historic referendum on a Right-wing Conservative Party. If we win a second landslide, we would kill off Right-wing Conservatism for good.���
To do that, a Blairite fifth column was needed inside the Tory Party ��� ably aided, as Blairites always are, by media allies.
This first ran the putsch against Iain Duncan Smith. Then it arranged the amazingly prolonged leadership election which allowed the unknown Blair clone David Cameron to defeat the far better qualified David Davis.
You know the rest, in all its ghastly detail. Now it���s going to continue. The Tory Party will be shored up once again by billionaire cash and broadcasting rules which give it airtime worth many millions of pounds and deny it to any rival.
Oh, and if you thought Michael Gove was any better, never let it be forgotten that in 2003, under the headline ���I can���t fight my feelings any more: I love Tony���, this supposedly ���Right-wing��� great hope garlanded the grinning Blair creature with words such as ���right and brave���, ���impressive��� and ���resolute���.
Having dug our way out of the dungeon, we find we have merely reached another dungeon, just as deep and just as dark.

***

I will not join in the gang attack on the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. I disagree with much of what he says, but any free Englishman ought to defend, fiercely, his liberty to say it.

This is partly because of my pre-revolutionary schooling, in which I was taught to admire lone figures who stood against overwhelming force. We used to recite Macaulay���s wonderful poem about ���How well Horatius kept the bridge in the brave days of old��� ���  one man defying thousands to save Rome. ���How can man die better���, it asks, ���than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?��� A good question, I always thought and still do.

But it is partly because of a growing fury against the whimpering, snivelling legions who won���t accept votes and seek to overturn them.

In this case they are the same people, the Blairites. Not only are they seeking to undo the referendum. They are trying to bypass the awkward fact that the Labour Party, according to its own rules, elected Jeremy Corbyn as its leader by a large majority.

In actions plainly co-ordinated with media allies, Mr Corbyn���s enemies have tried to scare their foe into quitting. I very much hope he doesn���t, and that he beats them because this is now a matter of honour.

These people deserve to be in the fix they are in. They clubbed the Tory Party into becoming just like them. Now that it is, they have no purpose left. If the Tories won���t have them, there���s a vacancy for another futile ���centre��� party, now that the Liberal Democrats are all washed up. They can fill that.

******

Any fool can break a taboo, and it���s gone forever. In the same way, any fool can cut down a tree that has taken three centuries to grow. Later we find out what we have lost.

And I continue to wonder why there���s so little concern about the  breach of the old taboo against public swearing. The singer Adele Adkins swore repeatedly on live TV, as she performed at Glastonbury last week. What effect will this have?

Those of us who have already lived long enough to see the country transformed, and know that nothing which seems permanent will necessarily survive, are perhaps better able to imagine how far things might go.

Those who are relaxed about this might wonder how they will feel when they start hearing teachers using the f-word in class, nurses using four-letter words to patients, see the strongest words used without asterisks in newspaper headlines, or politicians using them in major speeches. This will happen. I wouldn���t be surprised if some future Archbishop didn���t decide to pander to the spirit of the age by swearing from his or her pulpit.

Some may say they wouldn���t care. But that���s half the point. A thick-skinned society is also a callous society.

******

It is now clear the referendum result is being used as a pretext or cover for many things which would have happened anyway.  Sterling was bound to fall - especially after all that ���quantitative easing��� inflated our economy. George Osborne���s dropping of his 2020 budget surplus target was simply a recognition of his total failure to control spending, concealed for too long by his many media toadies. There���ll be more. Don���t be scared by it.

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Interruption of Normal Service - an explanation

I must apologise to regular readers for the drought of postings here. The truth is that I have been busy with several other matters, and that after so much intense, dense politics I feel almost drained (I have been engaging in daily combat on Twitter on the Labour leadership and the miserable Bad Losers campaign to undo the referendum and to lie about its consequences, but my immediate thoughts can be found on my feed there @ClarkeMicah).

 

I have a great difficulty in choosing any stance on the Tory leadership save one of contempt for the mess they have all made of it. What should I care which of these Blairites takes the helm? Can any be relied on to regain our independence or (just as vitally) make good use of it once they have it? 

 

I should also point out that I have no special sources of inside information about these developments for fairly obvious reasons. 

 

And I am a bit distressed by my inability to do justice to the commemoration of the catastrophe of the Somme, 100 years ago today. My general thoughts on this horror are well summed up here, in an article I commend to new and old readers.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/11/covenant-with-death.html

 

The book I refer to, I'm delighted to say,  is back in print and everyone should buy and read it. 

 

My fury at the waste (and it was a waste) of the Flower of the Nation on that day is undimmed and grows with time. I wish all these commemorations were harsher on the folly of the 1914 war, and that there would be more consideration of the real alternative which we could have followed by staying out of a Franco-Russian war against Germany in which we had no interest.

 

As I watched the Thiepval ceremony, I made a connection I had never made before. This glorious plangent piece of music, 'The Banks of Green Willow'

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Q9dz1kse8

 

was played. I had never realised its composer, George Butterworth (who liked to set A.E.Housman to music as well) had died at the Somme. 

 

It breaks the heart to think of the country in which this was written, the men and women who lived there, the landscape, the ideas, the habits of mind and the lives they knew, which have all now perished from the earth and which we can only make vague efforts to recreate in our minds. 

 

 

'Conservative Woman' interviews PH on the Referendum and its Outcome

Some of you may be interested in this interview with Laura Perrins of the excellent 'Conservative Woman' website.

 

http://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-laura-perrins-interview-brexit-is-a-chance-for-a-new-socially-conservative-party-says-hitchens/

 

Why We Need a General Election by mid-September

Out of the froth and fog of the last few days, something is beginning to emerge. I���m not surprised at all by the unlovely shape of it. You may not like the look of it. But first I thought I���d make a brief tour of some of the more interesting (and perhaps unexpected) commentary in this morning���s newspapers.

Let us start with this fascinating and (in my experience) wholly accurate article about the state of modern England ��� betting shops, payday loans, mobility scooters and all - from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/27/liverpool-london-brexit-leave-eu-referendum, a good piece of left-wing journalism in the tradition of Orwell���s ���Road to Wigan Pier' and Priestley���s ���English Journey���. The closeness of this devastation and demoralised despair to London itself will surprise many, who think it is confined to the West Midlands and the North. I fear it will surprise a lot more who have no idea that it exists anywhere. I think the destruction it records can be blamed on many other things as well as the thatcher era. But BBC Remain types need to read this, by one of their own(though perhaps he���s one of Jeremy Corbyn���s, I don���t know) .

They may then begin to grasp what happened last week, and even start to sympathise with it.

Next, from the same paper, is this typically perceptive analysis by Larry Elliott:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/26/brexit-is-the-rejection-of-globalisation

He correctly notes that Britain���s self-image as an economic success story is batty self-delusion, saying:��� To be sure, not all Britain���s problems are the result of its EU membership. It is not the European commission���s fault that productivity is so weak or that the trains don���t run on time. The deep-seated failings that were there when Britain voted in the referendum last Thursday were still there when the country woke up to the result on Friday. Evidence of just how unbalanced the economy is will be provided when the latest figures for Britain���s current account are released later this week. These show whether the country���s trade and investment income are in the black or the red. At the last count, in the final three months of 2015, the UK was running a record peacetime deficit of 7% of GDP.���

Then  he points out that the EU (the same is true of the post NAFTA USA) has failed to protect its working population from the ferocious downward pressures of globalisation: ���In the shiny new world created when former communist countries were integrated into the global model, Europe was supposed to be big and powerful enough to protect its citizens against the worst excesses of the market. Nation states had previously been the guarantor of full employment and welfare. The controls they imposed on the free movement of capital and people ensured that trade unions could bargain for higher pay without the threat of work being off-shored, or cheaper labour being brought into the country.���

He adds : ���Europe has failed to fulfil the historic role allocated to it. Jobs, living standards and welfare states were all better protected in the heyday of nation states in the 1950s and 1960s than they have been in the age of globalisation. Unemployment across the eurozone is more than 10%. Italy���s economy is barely any bigger now than it was when the euro was created. Greece���s economy has shrunk by almost a third. Austerity has eroded welfare provision. Labour market protections have been stripped away.���

He is very good on the implications of this for left-wing parties which have blithely backed open-doors immigration policies.

Many people, once they understand what free trade really means, are beginning to wonder whether protection is really quite such a bad idea as the modish economists keep telling them.

Finally there is this from the distinguished and original-minded Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the ���Daily Telegraph���

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/26/parliament-must-decide-what-brexit-means-in-the-interests-of-the/

The shape of a compromise, miles from what many in the ���Leave��� campaign want, but acceptable to the current Parliament, is here very accurately and credibly set out. Something of this kind may very well happen. Just as we are not now fully in the EU, but pretend we are,  we could end with a position where we are not fully out of it, but pretend we are.

This is why anyone who seriously wants a thorough break with the EU that will restore our control of our borders needs to realise that a referendum was never going to be enough to achieve this.

Something ��� perhaps yet another petition ��� needs to be done to encourage and record public support (if there is any now people are beginning to realise what's at stake) for a swift general election,  held to cement and confirm the decision of the referendum. In my view, the referendum cannot possibly take full effect( and will have been waste of time) unless the composition and the balance of forces is irrevocably altered now in the Commons.

If an election is held soon enough (certainly before October) then all candidates can reasonably be asked to state without equivocation whether they support or oppose the verdict of the referendum, and how they will vote on the matter if elected. This must then be more important than their party allegiances. It will compel local alliances which could make almost all ���safe��� seats unsafe. And it would also compel the elected members in such a Parliament to seek new allegiances, refusing the old Labour or Tory whips. It could be the first step towards the complete realignment our political system so badly needs. If it does not happen, then some sort of Norwegian arrangement under which we remain in the Single Market and lack full control of our borders, will be what we will get. It will resolve almost none of the problems described above.  Good luck with that.

.

An article for the US 'First Things' website

I wrote the following article

 

http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/06/very-well-alone

for the US website 'First Things'. Some of you may wish to read it.

 

 

No, we have not escaped from the EU - and we may not ever do so.

Please note: The United Kingdom has not left the EU. It is by no means certain that the United Kingdom will ever leave the EU.

As we now move into a new week, I felt I should go more deeply into the difficulties which face this country as it struggles to understand and act on what happened last Thursday. I do hope people won���t mistake my necessarily pessimistic thoughts for desires. I want Britain to leave the EU. I have wanted this for about 20 years, since the end of the Cold War exposed it as the key national issue of our time.

But as I warned some months back, here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/02/the-eu-is-our-own-hotel-california-we-can-check-out-but-well-never-leave.html , a referendum was a daft way to try to get out. And it may well not get us out.

Sure, the EU is playing tough and stand-offish now (but that, I guess, is just to try to scare us) .Unless its leadership is a good deal more stupid than I think it is, it will soon be seeking a compromise which will keep us in.

And the Bad Losers Alliance, with its petition for a second referendum and its emotional whimpering about how everything has been ruined and it���s not fair and so forth, and its media claque acting as if we���ve more or less gone Nazi overnight, is softening the ground for just such a development.

I am oddly reminded by present events of Winston Churchill���s weary comment on the resurgence of the Irish Question as soon as the First World War ended

'The whole map of Europe has been changed ... but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again.'

Similarly, after the greatest political convulsion of my adult life, the people in the media who decide what is important about politics have once again returned to the subject which has, I do not understate, obsessed them: the battle between Jeremy Corbyn and the Shadow Cabinet. Dreary steeples indeed.

When I was invited on to the BBC TV news channel on Friday afternoon, 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/ph-interviewed-on-eub-referendum-result.html

it quickly became clear that this, the Corbyn matter, was what they really wanted to talk about . I boggled. Here we were, facing a huge constitutional, diplomatic and political crisis. The markets, though not in the free-fall alleged by the panic-mongers of the Bad Losers Alliance (see above), were certainly pretty volatile.

The Prime Minister had resigned that morning. His Party was exposed as utterly divided, cloven from the nave to the chaps by discord. It was and is seriously proposing to leave the country to drift till October before picking a new leader ( see below for an analysis of why this is so disgraceful) .

A majority of the electorate, in a high turnout had specifically endorse a policy rejected and indeed sneered at for decades by both major political parties, plus the BBC and most of the media, the civil service and the whole establishment. They had done so after a fair fight, in which the other side had flung millions of pounds and a great deal of frightening propaganda at them.

* By the way, please note this little-noticed fact. Only after the vote was over did the Russian tyrant, Vladimir Putin, issue a statement objecting to the way in which our Prime Minister had tried to drag him into the campaign, claiming he wanted a British exit. President Putin's dignified and diplomatically proper response can be read here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/25/vladimir-putin-slams-david-cameron-over-eu-referendum/. It���s an interesting contrast with the naked intervention in our internal affairs, including actual threats, by the President of the United States. I note this because it may help some people understand my objection to the ceaseless characterisation of Russia as an aggressive, interfering and menacing power. No doubt Russia often behaves badly. But it is not unique in doing so, and there are many weapons other than tanks which great powers may use to try to get their way.***

And in the midst of all this the BBC wanted to talk about Jeremy Corbyn, and the presenter was clearly perturbed and discombobulated when I sought to talk about the future of the country instead. She was also puzzled. Surely Mr Corbyn was the main topic? Not for me.

This odd, faintly unhinged preoccupation is also noticeable among the battalion of establishment political commentators, who also seem to have little else to talk about. I say it is unhinged because it is a failure of proportion, for me the first sign that someone is losing touch with reality, probably deliberately.

The reason for this obsession is that one of the main functions of modern political journalism is to act as a sort of thought police. Anyone who strays from the 'centre' (an apparently objective term for a subjective opinion) is mocked, belittled, subjected to scandal and exposure, pictured looking foolish or eating messily, accused of ���gaffes��� and ceaselessly the subject of stories about how he or she is being plotted against and is weak.

This supposed ���centre��� can loosely be described as Blairism, a set of ideas which I won���t spend much time defining here because my readers have a pretty good idea of what they are ��� egalitarian, socially and morally liberal, opposed to the concepts of individual responsibility and national sovereignty alike. It is absolutely committed to membership of the EU. They are certainly not the 'centre' of anything, deriving as they do from the radical Eurocommunism (Communism adapted for the modern world, in the light of and learning from the failure of the USSR) which escaped into the Western mainstream at the end of the Cold War.

Mr Corbyn offends against this because he still openly defines himself as a socialist, something which the Eurocommunists are deliberately careful not to do. He is also, from the Blairite or Eurocommunist point of view, a foolish throwback, as he has not cured himself of the 19th century socialist interest in state ownership and trade union power. And he has the usual embarrassing baggage of sympathies with various unappealing Latin American leftists. Deep down, this package makes him hugely suspicious of the Blairites, because he can see that supranational bodies such as the EU will favour the big corporations he despises against the attempts of left-wing governments (such as he dreams of heading), and that the destruction of national sovereignty means the extinction of his dreams. Only a proud and independent Britain could ever implement his desired programme. So, as Dominic Lawson rightly wrote a few weeks ago in the Sunday Times, he is like a paraded hostage, frantically signalling to those who watch him on TV, through demeanour and body language, that the things that come out of his mouth about the EU are not in fact his real sentiments.

The Blairites return the favour. They can���t stand him. But as we know they can���t easily get rid of him either, and if they do, they can't replace him with one of their own. Mr Corbyn doesn���t owe his election to them but to the Party members, who are also Europhiles but love Mr Corbyn���s old-fashioned positions so much, and reasonably enjoy his principled and unflinching political style ( as I do too) that they don���t care.

The mystery is this - what are the Blairites still doing in Jeremy Corbyn���s party anyway? They were elected on the wrong ticket. They have fulfilled the great 1990s dream of forcing the Tories to agree with them, and have belatedly discovered that the same Tories are better than they are at raising money, and at winning elections. It could be a decade before the Tories lose an election, if then. The billionaires are all on the Tory side and likely to stay there. Labour have also been cut off at the knees by the destruction of their party in Scotland, which was all their own fault, as they thought that devolution would defuse the Nationalists, when in fact it was the making of them. This loss, combined with a general weakening of Labour in the South of England, means Labour has little prospect of wining a majority ever again.

They know in their hearts they can���t win. They must also know that they can���t get rid of Mr Corbyn, unless they accept John McDonnell instead, which would be just the same if not worse form the Blairite point of view.

The whole lot of them, no more than professional career politicians, would be much happier in the Cameron Tory Party. But the mad irrational tribalism of British politics prevents them from doing this without being denounced as traitors (to what, exactly?) or ���defectors���, as if they had gone over from one opposing ideology to another.

So, in yet another illustration of Kissinger���s Law, that the fighting is bitterest where the stakes are smallest, they occupy their long-honed political skills in undermining their own leader. This is a task in which they can probably never succeed, but they have come to enjoy it in the absence of any other purposeful activity. And the pitiful flock of political reporters, who can���t stand Corbyn because he won���t conform, are happy to join in. It's s much better than actually finding out what is happening to the country, or asking why the Tories plan to spend three months picking a new leader when they could do so in a week .

I���d got used to this Corbyn-obsessive rubbish, but for this to be the dominant strand of political coverage, three days after the momentous vote, is simply absurd .

Take this problem, for instance. Though the Remainers claim in tones of squeaky panic that we are in an economic meltdown, we have a lame duck caretaker Prime Minister and an even lamer duck Chancellor. We are expected to put up with this till October while the Tory Party rambles through its leadership process.

Surely this is a time for swift and decisive ���action this day���. The Tory Party can act much faster than this, and actually did so in October 2003 after the media-sponsored coup against Ian Duncan Smith (the model for the current campaign against Mr Corbyn) removed IDS from office on 29th October.

Eight days later, on 6th November, Michael Howard was declared the new leader. All his rivals withdrew in the interests of unity and peace. There was no election among MPs, and the Party Board decided there was equally no need to ask the party membership what they thought. As far as I know, the rules are the same now as they were then. All we need is for Theresa May and that other chap to recognise that they have no hope, and that the country needs a new prime minister pronto, and Alexander ���Boris��� Johnson can be in Downing Street, chairing his first Cabinet, by Friday.

No doubt this was an urgent matter back in 2003, the security and continuity of the Tory Party being an important thing, at least to its members, if not to me. But surely the prosperity and integrity of the country are more important.

If ambitious rivals can stifle their ambitions for the higher good to save their party, how much more they should do so for the sake of the country. Alexander ���Boris��� Johnson plainly has a mandate, as he is the most recognisable Conservative in Britain, has just headed the most thumpingly successful political campaign in modern British history, is personally identified with it, has held major office as Mayor of London, has in fact conducted himself during the campaign in a sober and restrained manner despite great provocation. So there is an unanswerable argument for handing him the crown ��� a far more unanswerable one than there was for doing the same to Michael Howard in 2003.

Why is this not happening? Do the supporters of the EU truly accept their defeat? I think not. Do the EU high command themselves think and hope that the force and power of the referendum can be lost in the swamps and bogs of compromise and manoeuvre which now stretch for months ahead? I should have thought so. A eading Labour MP, David Lammy, is already calling for Parliament to frustrate the referendum. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-result-latest-david-lammy-mp-eu-referendum-result-parliament-twitter-statement-stop-this-a7102931.html . I teased him about this on Twitter, recalling Bertolt Brecht���s 1953 joke that, the people having failed the elite, the elite needed to elect a new people.

But Matthew Parris, in his Saturday Times column (behind a paywall) , mused similarly but more subtly about how few MPs actually support a British exit form the EU, and especially a British exist from the Single Market, which may well be the sticking point as the referendum made no mention of the single market. Then we have that petition calling for a second referendum which everyone is now saying has no force. Of course it hasn���t, now. But it could help the pro-EU faction later, when the referendum is months ago, the Leave campaign has long ago been dissolved and disbanded, ���normality��� has returned and the EU has abandoned its current hard cop mode and begun trying to charm us.

That���s why we mustn���t let ���normality��� return. ���ll be explaining how we can act, soon.

PH interviewed on EU referendum result

Some of you may enjoy this exchange on the BBC about the result of the referendum. Listen carefully and you can hear the bells of Westminster Abbey pealing in the background (though I am sure they are not in fact celebrating the event) 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0mj4Pbcw68

An interview with PH

I gave this interview last Monday afternoon, when the result of the referendum was not known. Look out for the bit where I threaten to pour water over the interviewer's trousers. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enbnpbWKO_4&feature=youtu.be