Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 16
October 23, 2022
If Liz Truss was the answer, whatever was the question?
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
The Truss tragi-comedy, almost by accident, showed that we are a country in terrible debt. We live on a reputation for solvency that we no longer deserve. Jeremy Hunt���s cancellation of the Truss Package on Monday morning was delivered and timed to placate the Money Markets. Our supposedly sovereign Parliament had to wait for hours to be told the same thing. Let us look at the extent of the mess which this crisis has revealed, like a flash of l...
October 22, 2022
October 18, 2022
How Dunkirk Did for The Tories
I have been asked to post this article originally published only on Mailplus, on this site. Here it is :
IT WAS Dunkirk that really did for the Tory Party. They have never recovered from it. The history books and the TV documentaries remember this terrible national humiliation as part of our finest hour in 1940.
But at the time and for long afterwards feelings were much more mixed. The successful 2017 film of the event, starring Kenneth Branagh, barely bothered to...
October 16, 2022
The lowering of Royal Standards, my Buckingham Palace flag Royal scoop
King Charles has dispensed with the tradition of raising and lowering the Royal Standard at the residence being used by the monarch.
This is because when he is in London, the King usually sleeps and eats at Clarence House and works at Buckingham Palace. He won���t be able to move into Buckingham Palace until 2027 while renovation work continues. From now on, the Royal Standard will fly at both at the same time to save a footman dashing up to the roof twice ...
The amazing non-business of blood donation. From the Mail on Sunday, 16th October 2022
Donating blood is one of the loveliest things we do, and one of the most frightening. I suppose that is why I have been doing it for more than 50 years.
I started in the days when they collected it in imperial pints, and donors lay in silence on iron beds with grey blankets in church halls, tended by starched nurses of the old school.
I was never offered a post-donation pint of stout, as some claim happened to them in those days. But I was given iron pills, a procedure now regarded as rank her...
Liz Truss bought her policies on eBay. My Mail on Sunday column , 16/10/22
The Tory Party is like a knight dying in his armour. Looked at casually from a distance, it still appears formidable and important. Seen close to, it is obviously done for, gasping for breath inside its visor, kept upright in the saddle only by the steel plates which are supposed to protect it.
Nothing but habit, and a reputation gained long ago, keep it in being. If it were not for the money given to it by donors who are in most cases not actually political, its organisation would collapse. Wi...
October 14, 2022
The glories of continental rail travel before the modernisers wrecked it
Are discussed here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKkNAy8AhdU from 45 minutes. on Specttaor TV
and in this article in the Spectator
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/make-rail-travel-great-again
October 12, 2022
My Prophecy Department notes: My fears for the Coronation, first published in Standpoint Magazine January 2020
It must have been around 1960 when I first saw the power of monarchy over the English mind, as it once was. It was a summer weekday afternoon, bright and windy, on Portsmouth Hard, that ever-scruffy patch of pavement, bus-stops and tidal cobbles where Pompey meets the sea.
Suddenly, as if a giant hand had gathered them, people - mainly women - began hurrying towards a spot near the great gate of the Naval Dockyard. Within less than a minute a craning, twittering crowd had gathered. I, aged e...
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