Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 214

A Winter's Tale - 'Greenmantle' revisited

It was deliciously cold the other evening, so I sought out a favourite old book, wrapped myself up warmly and turned my imagination up to the full.

 

The book is a nonsense, really. I first read it at a Sussex preparatory school when I was nine, when large parts of it baffled me completely, yet I did not want to stop reading.  I must have read it again a dozen times, and now parts of it infuriate me, especially the wide-eyed patriotism and enthusiasm for one of the stupidest, most pointless wars ever fought.

 

But , if you are willing to suspend a lot of disbelief, and put yourself inside the mind of a man still wholly in the grip of a very simple untutored patriotism, the opening few chapters are still a masterpiece of the thriller-writer’s art. It is John Buchan’s ‘Greenmantle’, preposterous no doubt, but actually far less preposterous than its forerunners ( ‘the Power House’ and ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’) or its successor (‘The Three Hostages’).

 

In my view, Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the ‘Thirty-Nine Steps’ is far superior to the book, and has probably kept the book alive when it would otherwise have vanished. Talking of which, has anyone heard of or read Buchan’s earlier novel ‘The Half-Hearted’ which is set amidst the ‘Great Game’ of intrigue between Russian and Britain before 1914? I only discovered that it existed the other day, for reasons I’ll explain in a future posting.

 

Anyway, why does ‘Greenmantle’ appeal to me so on a cold night in November? First because it is set in an actual winter, between November 1915 and February 1916. It is bracketed by real events.  The hero, Richard Hannay, begins the book while convalescing from wounds received at the Battle of Loos a few weeks before (the first in which we, the British, used poison gas as an offensive weapon) . He ends it caught up in the Russian capture of Erzerum in Turkey.  He’s sent off behind German lines by his old friend, the Intelligence Chief Sir Walter Bullivant, whose own son has died in pursuit of a great secret.

 

There are many things which I missed to begin with and now find fascinating. Most of all is the prescient, surprisingly sympathetic  discussion of Islam, and the fear that the Germans may use a new and fanatical preacher to raise a Muslim rebellion against Britain in the East. Sandy Arbuthnot, the Scottish aristocrat who is one of the main characters, is so captivated by the purity of the desert religion, and in awe of this preacher,  that he sometimes sounds like Lawrence of Arabia.  

 

My schoolboy self must also have missed the very strong suggestion that the enormous and terrifying Colonel Ulrich von Stumm – the principal German villain -  is homosexually inclined, a fact revealed by this bull-headed monster’s possession of a knick-knack infested, thickly carpeted boudoir,  softly lit and crammed with sculptures.  Hannay notes that he had heard of ‘such practices’ among the Germans, though how he had avoided hearing of such practices on our own side, too, I am not sure. In any acse, I don’t think we are supposed to like von Stumm more because of this.  The passage is entertainingly antique. Will it disappear from future editions, or will  some enterprising and inventive author copy George Macdonald Fraser’s ‘Flashman’ idea, and write a series of thrillers set in Edwardian and Great War Berlin  in which von Stumm is the hero? Not a bad idea.

 

But I am running ahead of myself. Hannay’s discovery of Stumm’s secret coincides with Stumm’s discovery of his, namely that Hannay is not, as he claims, an Afrikaans-speaking South African engineer dedicated to German victory , but a British agent sent into the heart of Germany.  Hannay’s story is mostly tosh, and so full of the impossible coincidences which litter Buchan’s Shilling Shockers (as he called them)  that one begins to wonder if Buchan wasn’t actually a Coincidence Theorist, possessed by the idea that the world is in fact governed by such events. Even so, the coincidences keep the narrative rattling along, and nine-year-olds don’t notice such things anyway.

 

But it is an excuse for a wonderful winter journey, much of it by train, deeper and deeper into the heart of the dark forest. His imagination of how it would have been to be such a spy, on a frozen foggy day in 1915 Berlin, walking past the enemy’s ministries and headquarters,  is extraordinarily evocative and stayed with me until I eventually saw the real Berlin for the first time (at about the same time of year) and his description of that captivating city seemed very accurate to me.

 

But the crown and wonder of the book, for me, a very brief passage when Hannay, on the run from von Stumm, falls ill with Malaria in a snowy forest, and blunders to the door of  a woodman’s cottage. The husband is away fighting on the Russian front. The wife and mother is left trying to feed her brood of small children. Hannay can barely stand, so she takes him in and promises to hide him if searchers come to the door, before he collapses into bed, he gives her the food he has been carrying with him, and money to buy more. The woman is pitifully grateful that the Christ child will after all be visiting her home.

 

It is a moving moment of tranquillity in the midst of fear. Buchan’s obvious feeling for the woman and her children , and his revulsion from war, are a curious contrast with his belligerent jingoism elsewhere in the same book.

 

‘That night I realized the crazy folly of war. When I saw the splintered shell of Ypres and heard hideous tales of German doings, I used to want to see the whole land of the Boche given up to fire and sword. I thought we could never end the war properly without giving the Huns some of their own medicine. But that woodcutter’s cottage cured me of such nightmares…What good would it do Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and eave children’s bodies by the wayside? To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts’.

 

I was annoyed and puzzled by this aged nine, when I believed strongly in slaughtering the enemy.  Now I think it is the best bit if the book. In fact, Hannay has many flashes of intelligence, and frequently remarks on the talents,  decency , honesty etc of Germans he meets on his perilous way. At one stage he even notes the similarity of Frieslanders to East Anglian Englishmen.  Buchan knew what sort of readers he was trying to please, but was always too clever to believe his own propaganda. That is why his Edward Leithen books, in which the hero is a person much more like him, are in some ways more enjoyable than the shockers – but less fun.  

 

If it weren't for the Christmas passage, I don't think I'd bother with 'Greenmantle' any more. The American Blenkiron is particularly tiresome. None of Buchan's thrillers was a patch on Erskine Childers's 'Riddle of the Sands' , the Edwardian spy mystery to beat all Edwardian spy mysteries. Poor Childers led an even more interesting life than Buchan, though it ended quite horribly.  I assume the two men must have met, and that Buchan would have greatly liked Childers. 

Theresa's right, we DO face a dire new threat - from people like her

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

For years there was a site on Facebook called ‘Peter Hitchens Must Die’. I thought it was funny, and I miss it now it has gone. Hardly a week goes by on Twitter without some Left-wing oaf going online and wishing I was dead. Sometimes I write back and ask if their mothers know they are doing this, but I haven’t hired a bodyguard yet.

In short, the internet is crawling with stupid people saying moronic things they do not really mean, like the man who said he was going to blow up an airport because it was closed by snow.

Dealing with this is a simple matter of proportion. The ludicrously over-rated Home Secretary, Mrs Theresa May, obviously has no such sense. She claims to think that the terror threat to this country is now ‘greater than it has been at any time before or after 9/11’, a comically wrong belief.

Actually, the greatest terror threat this country ever faced came from the IRA, as some of us remember well. But we got rid of that threat by surrendering to them, which is perhaps why everyone now forgets it.

If this country is now a target for terror, it is largely because the terrorists know that we will eventually give in to their demands, just as we gave in to the IRA.

There ought to be a museum in which politicians’ bombastic statements after terror outrages, vowing revenge and justice, are displayed beside the eventual shabby outcomes of terrorist pressure.

Yet these same two-faced cowards are constantly trying to pretend that they are our noble protectors against a shadowy foe. They do this especially when they are trying to steal our liberties.

Now, because the drug-crazed killer Michael Adebowale made an unhinged threat on Facebook, we are asked to support the secret-police surveillance of the internet.

On the same logic, we might as well allow MI5 to open all our letters, listen to all our telephone calls and bug our bedrooms, and for this creepy snooping to be allowed in evidence in court.

I don’t see how this differs from the powers given to the East German Stasi.

Not merely is this response crass and wrong, it is based on a total, wilful misunderstanding of the murder of Lee Rigby. We are looking in entirely the wrong direction, and so not seeing the blazing, illuminated signs which show what is actually going on.

Adebowale was obviously crazy when he committed his crime. An eyewitness, Cheralee Armstrong, told police he ‘looked mad, like he’d escaped from a mental hospital’.

During the trial of Adebowale, and of his accomplice Michael Adebolajo, newspapers received a very unusual warning from the judge that they must not report ‘the demeanour of the defendants’ on the video link from prison. What was it about their behaviour that prompted this strange instruction?

It wouldn’t be odd if they had behaved weirdly. Both killers were habitual users of cannabis, a drug increasingly correlated with mental disturbance, especially in young users. It was after Adebolajo began smoking the drug in his teens that his character wholly changed. Many sad parents of ruined teenagers will know about this process.

Adebowale had a history of serious mental illness, heard voices in his head, and was on anti-psychotic drugs while on remand. At one stage he had been recommended for treatment in Broadmoor.

A psychiatrist found him ‘paranoid and incoherent’, and said his symptoms were worsened by ‘heavy use of cannabis’.

Most people don’t even know this, as it doesn’t fit the ‘Al Qaeda plot’ storyline and has barely been reported.

Yet how can these gibbering, chaotic husks have been part of a disciplined, intricate terror organisation?

It’s very strange. Our Establishment sees proper enforcement of the laws against the dangerous drug cannabis as an infringement of liberty. But it is ready to place us under totalitarian surveillance, never before seen in our history, in pursuit of terrorists it will probably give in to later. 

Despite the invariable claims of the adults involved that everyone’s fine, there just isn’t any serious doubt that divorce damages children. 

Last week’s report from the family lawyers’ group Resolution confirmed it. So why isn’t it harder for couples with children to get divorced than it is for the childless? 

Dozy Fred holds the secret to improving our private schools

The British Left is working up a new wave of spite against private schools. Following a wrong-headed speech on the subject by the fashionable historian David Kynaston, Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt has joined in.

He threatens them with tax penalties if they don’t do more to help nearby state schools. Actually, such a measure will only make private schools more inaccessible. Their fees are now so high that soon only Russian oligarchs will be able to afford them.

It’s difficult anyway to see quite what form this help will take. But here’s a suggestion.

Mr Hunt claims to be a historian. In that case he should know that there was once a superb system called the Direct Grant. Under this scheme, many of the very best private schools in the country opened up their classrooms to boys and girls from poor homes, selected on merit.

What happened to it? Why, it was shut down in 1975 in an act of egalitarian spite by Fred Mulley, then Labour Education Secretary, later notorious for falling asleep while sitting next to Her Majesty during a very noisy air display. Labour had then – as it has now – a special loathing for selection on merit.

While Mr Mulley is fated to be recalled mainly for his ill-mannered nap, his decision to slam the educational door in the faces of the poor was a far greater offence. If Labour really loved the people, as it claims to do, then Mr Hunt would want to reverse this crime, rather than win cheap applause from dim MPs for sniping at private schools. I suspect he’s just afraid they’ll notice he went to one himself.

Unvarnished truth from Moscow

If only Anna Chapman, the glamorous Russian ex-spy, were the Kremlin’s Foreign Minister instead of the much less attractive Sergei Lavrov, people might pay more attention to what Moscow says.

Even so, Mr Lavrov’s speech last week, in which he warned that sanctions directed against the Russian people are blatant, unprecedented bullying and won’t work, is worth searching out. Those who read it might learn quite a lot they didn’t know they didn’t know.

My local newspaper heralds the approach of Christmas by welcoming the opening of a mobile A&E unit to ‘treat drunk and injured people’. 

It will be a ‘safe haven for those who have been found in the street too intoxicated to stand or speak and who cannot find their way home’. Actually, there are plenty of these when it’s not Christmas, but it’s nice to see that the season of goodwill hasn’t entirely been drowned out by commercialism. 

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See What I Mean? More criticism of 'The Imitation Game'

Last week I got into the usual trouble for pointing out that a popular film was cavalier with the facts.  People wrote crossly to me to say I was wrong to call 'The Imitation Game' laughable. I’m never sure why critcising these films for fooling with history is such a  terrible sin in the eyes of so many. These films are not, usually, Shakespearean in quality, and won’t endure as art. But in a world ignorant of real history, their accounts will stick in people’s minds and influence their view of the present.

 

This was particularly serious in the case of ‘The King’s Speech’, a film based upon a real memoir and real events, but which veered away from the truth so much that it was, in my view, utterly misleading both about King George VI and about the monarchy’s political role in late 1930s Britain.   Far more people will have seen this film than will have read the detailed accounts of the events involved. I just think this is plain wrong. What’s more the film would have been better if it had been more accurate. A less-than-adulatory portrayal of Winston Churchill (who gravely damaged his standing when he foolishly supported Edward VIII in the Abdication crisis, though the film shows him taking the other side) is long overdue. So is a general understanding that appeasement of Hitler in 1938 was a hugely popular policy (just as appeasement of Stalin would become very popular in the 1941-45 period) . Both policies were of course products of our military and political weakness, a state of affairs we have long concealed from ourselves, but can surely cope with now, 70-odd years afterwards.

 

Anyway, I wrote of ‘the Imitation Game’ :

 

 ‘And I objected strongly to the portrayal of the Bletchley Commanding Officer,  Commander Alastair Denniston, as nothing but an obstruction. Can this really have been true?

 

‘Once again, the clothes are right but the portrayal is wrong. Commander Denniston is shown wearing the distinctive wavy rank stripes of a Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) Commander, which he was. The RNVR was in fact known as ‘The Wavy Navy’ because of its very different uniform. But he is made by the scriptwriters to refer to himself as being part of the ‘Royal Navy’, which I doubt very much an RNVR officer would have done, the RNVR having its own pride, and its members being reluctant to claim to be regulars.’

 

Well, in today’s Daily Telegraph , at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/letters/11256138/Letters-State-schools-suffer-because-the-most-demanding-parents-go-independent.html

Commander Denniston’s descendants write :

 

SIR – While the much-acclaimed film ‘The Imitation Game’  rightly acknowledges Alan Turing’s vital role in the war effort, it is sad that it does so by taking a side-swipe at Commander Alastair Denniston, portraying him as a mere hindrance to Turing’s work.

We, his descendants, prefer to remember his extraordinary achievements in the First and Second World War, as well as his unstinting devotion to Britain’s security for more than 30 years. Cdr Denniston was one of the founding fathers of Bletchley Park. On his final visit to Poland in the summer of 1939, he was briefed by Polish mathematicians on the electrical equipment they had developed to break the German cipher machine, Enigma. The Enigma machine that Denniston took back to Bletchley ultimately allowed Britain to read the German High Command’s coded instructions. Such was the secrecy surrounding his work that his retirement in 1945, and death in 1961, passed virtually unnoticed, and he remains the only former head of GC&CS (the precursor to the intelligence agency GCHQ) never to have been awarded a knighthood.

It was he who recruited Turing and many other leading mathematicians and linguists to Bletchley, where he fostered an environment that enabled these brilliant but unmanageable individuals to break the Enigma codes. The GCHQ of today owes much to the foundation he created there.

Nick Denniston 
Dr Susanna Everitt 
Libby Buchanan
Judith Finch
Simon Finch
Alison Finch
Hilary Greenman
Candida Connolly 
Clifton-upon-Teme, Worcestershire’

 

The paper’s leader column further notes : ‘As Sir Harry Hinsley, his [Denniston’s] fellow cryptanalyst wrote , Denniston by his “trust in subordinates and his charm, set his stamp on the character of Bletchley Park”. Depicting him as a hindrance is a cruel caricature’.

 

Personally, I can’t see why this depiction was in any way necessary to the plot, or improves the film. Must the whole past be portrayed as a struggle between the enlightened liberal (Turing, supposedly) and the obstructive, stupid conservative? It seems so.

The Grammar of Equality - Has Selection been Discredited?

A week ago several newspapers carried stories about a report ( jointly prepared by the Institute of Education and the University of Manchester) which was said to show that Grammar Schools were no better than comprehensives at getting working class students into top universities.

 

For instance, The ‘Independent’  said (on 21st November) :

 

‘ Grammar school no better for students than a comprehensive    

  

Apparent success is due to an advantaged social background, says new research

By: SARAH CASSIDY

 

Grammar schools are no more successful than comprehensives at getting their pupils into elite universities, according to new research.

 

Working-class pupils are just as likely to get a degree after attending a comprehensive school as a grammar school - contradicting claims that bringing back grammars would improve social mobility.

 

Researchers at the Institute of Education and the University of Manchester analysed the education histories of more than 7,700 people in England and Wales whose lives are being followed by the 1970 British Cohort Study.

 

They found that those who attended private secondary schools in the 1980s were about two-and-a-half times more likely to gain a degree from a highly selective Russell Group university than comprehensive or grammar school pupils with the same A-level results. They were also almost one-and-a-half times more likely to graduate from a mainstream university than their state-school peers.’

 

The whole thing can be found here

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/grammar-school-is-no-better-for-pupils-than-a-comprehensive-9873886.html

 

It does contain a rebuttal from the Grammar Schools Association: ‘Yesterday grammar school heads insisted the findings revealed little about selective schooling in the 21st century.

Dr Mark Fenton, vice chair of the Grammar School Heads’ Association and headmaster of Dr Challoner’s Grammar School in Buckinghamshire, said: “Any study of pupils in grammar schools in the 1980s would need to take account of the fact that this was a period of sweeping change during which many grammar schools became comprehensives; so many children born in 1970 would have started their education in a grammar school and finished it in a comprehensive.

“The process of application to the top universities was also very different in the 1980s, as was membership of the Russell Group of universities.” ‘

 

But please note that the pro-grammar forces only ‘insisted’, and did not ‘say’.  ‘Insist’ is the word the media use to suggest that the person quoted is publicly maintaining a hopeless position. It is much like ‘claim’, generally used as a verb before statements which the writer does not believe, and hopes you won’t believe either.

 

I was interested that the stories in the papers generally reflected the Institute of Education’s own account of the research, which you may read here

 

http://www.ioe.ac.uk/newsEvents/107903.html

 

I think it would be fair to say that the Institute is not exactly a conservative body, nor has it been a dogged opponent of the radical changes made to education in the past 60 or so years.

 

The Daily Telegraph ran a similar story, beginning

 

‘Private pupils gain better degrees than brighter state peers
Extensive study reveals dramatic influence schooling has on students' chances of graduating from top university, regardless of A–level results
By: Rosa Silverman

PRIVATE school pupils are significantly more likely to graduate from an elite university than state school pupils, even if their academic ability is inferior, researchers have found.

A study of more than 7,700 people cast light on the immense advantage that a private education confers on children, regardless of their exam results.

It found that those who attended private secondary schools in the 1980s were about two and a half times more likely to have gained a degree from a highly selective Russell Group university than comprehensive or grammar school pupils with the same A–level results.

They were also almost one and a half times more likely to have graduated from a mainstream university than their state school peers. It would follow that private school pupils with worse A–level results were more likely to have obtained a degree from a top university than their higher achieving state school contemporaries, Professor Alice Sullivan, the study's lead author, said.

 

You can read the whole thing here

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/11243899/Private-school-pupils-get-better-degrees-even-if-theyre-less-clever.html

 

‘The Times’ which I cannot quote in full because it is behind a pay wall, carried a broadly similar story under the headline: ‘Grammar Schools offer little advantage. Similar but not the same. Interestingly, it began thus : ‘Grammar school pupils have the same chance of enrolling at an elite university as bright children who attend comprehensive schools, a study has found.

'Although a higher proportion of grammar school pupils attended leading universities, this pattern is believed to be as a result of their academic ability prior to sitting the 11-plus exams and their family background, it suggested.

Academics who studied the schooling of thousands of children found that those who went to grammar schools did do better at exams aged 16, when they sat O-levels — replaced by GCSEs in 1988 — but this advantage disappeared when comparing A-level results and university progression.’

 

There’s also a BBC website version, which I have to say (and I surprise myself by doing so) I personally thought was a fairer representation

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-30128472

 

 

Interested by this, I obtained a copy of the full report.

 

The Grammar Schools Association, it seems to me, do have a point.  The children chosen for research were born in 1970, five years after the abolition of most grammar schools began (there were about 1,200 in England and Wales, now 164 survive. In Scotland, all the comparable schools, generally known as ‘Academies’ have been abolished. In Northern Ireland, which I will come to, a broadly selective system has survived to this day) .

 

This was a complicated era.

 

 

The process of reform was uneven, and affected different areas in different ways at different times. I have alluded to the case of Mrs Theresa May, who won a place in a grammar school which was turned into a Comprehensive while she was there, in the early 1970s. This fate befell others much later.  In many cases, pupils in this position remained in a ‘grammar stream’ until they left. But in other cases (one of which was recounted to me recently by a prominent politician who went through it) the school was immediately turned into a comprehensive, and the grammar pupils were expected to cope in mixed-ability cases from the start.

 

At the same time,  there had been a revolution in teacher training, with older and more traditional teachers increasingly supplanted by younger teachers trained quite differently in less formal ways. It has always been difficult to disentangle the comprehensive revolution from the effects of the expansion of teacher training (under Harold Wilson) and the bipartisan first expansion of universities (following the Robbins Report of 1963).

 

For instance, many of the early comprehensives continued to behave much as grammar schools had done, with teachers in gowns and even mortar-boards, honours boards on the wall, formal meals,  religious assemblies, strict discipline, houses, organised games etc.  This faded away gradually as the staff changed, and new, ‘progressive’ heads rose to the top.

 

The other thing one has to note is that in 1981, many people planning on a professional white collar career would never have considered going to university. The modern idea, that a university degree is an essential qualification for such a life, did not then exist.

 

Also it is perfectly true and always has been that children from poorer homes come under pressure to leave school as soon as they are able. Their families cannot afford to keep them, when they could be earning. Like many of the supposed arguments against grammar schools (the poor quality of secondary moderns,  the non-existence of technical schools, the shortage of grammar places, the inadequacies of the 11+, this is not a fault of grammar schools themselves, but a fault in wider society, easily soluble without destroying grammar schools.

 

So the measure used by the study as a mark of success, the gaining of a degree, and most especially the gaining of a degree from an ‘elite’ university, may not actually be much of a test of success for a working class child born in a poor home in 1970.

 

The report quite rightly stresses the significance of certain things in the home, to mark out the fortunate form those less so. It is a giveaway sign of a poor home that the child has not been read to, that the house is crowded, that mothers gave birth when young. ( and so probably have little formal schooling themselves). It is plain that houses which have well-educated parents, where serious newspapers are available, are more likely to produce ‘elite’ university graduates than those which lack these advantages.

 

One might say ‘so what?’, and it would not be a bad point. Schools alone cannot possibly make an unequal world equal. Nor, in my view, can any other force. All they can do is find and nurture talent wherever it is, and lift the talented out of poverty and ignorance, so that their lives are not wasted.

 

But the point here is the report’s contention that , as the institute’s own summary puts it : ‘Grammar schools have been no more successful than comprehensives at helping to ensure their pupils gain a university degree or graduate from an elite higher education institution, new research suggests.

 

Contrary to popular opinion, a grammar school education also does not appear to have increased working-class pupils' chances of getting a degree.’

 

First of all, note that the summary clearly and correctly states that it is referring to the past. The children involved are now 44 years old. So can you see anything wrong with the introductory sentence of the Independent’s report ‘Grammar schools are no more successful than comprehensives at getting their pupils into elite universities, according to new research.’

 

Yes, it’s that word ‘are’. The experiences of those born in 1970 are very different from those of the current generation of 11-year-olds, not least because what grammar schools remain are (precisely because there are so few of them) besieged by pushy parents, hopelessly oversubscribed and are much-beloved of Oxbridge admissions tutors anxious to crank up their state school admissions rates. I wonder how many working-class pupils even get into them in the first place. In 1981, it was very different.

 

By the way, I must note here that the report says without qualification (on page 10) that ‘British qualifications have been subject to substantial grade inflation since the abolition of norm-referenced marking in the 1990s’.  How I longed for anyone to admit that back in the 1990s when I first started saying it, to hoots of rage and derision from supposed education ‘experts’.

 

But here on page 12 is what I think is the crucial bit: ‘Private schooling is powerfully linked to degree chances. Compared to their peers at comprehensives with similar backgrounds and cognitive attainment at age 5 and 10, privately educated cohort members had 1.7 times the odds of gaining an ordinary degree, and over three times the odds of an elite degree. In contrast, there was no statistically significant advantage of attending a grammar school or disadvantage of attending a secondary modern school (my emphasis). Differentials due to the cohort member’s home resources, both economic and educational/cultural, are only modestly attenuated by school type, which makes sense given the very small proportion of children who attended private schools (5% of the sample).

 

And this

 

‘…were grammar schools especially beneficial for those working class pupils who attended them, even if there was no overall grammar school advantage? However, we found no statistically significant interactions, suggesting that the advantage or disadvantage of attending each type of school was similar for pupils of different backgrounds and prior attainment levels.’

 

The main influences appear to have been having graduate parents and going to a private school. But then,  of course they were. In 1981, the numbers going to good universities were very small, most did not expect to go to them, or indeed to any university. In that era, Graduate parents could either afford fees, or houses in the catchment areas of well-researched ‘good’ comprehensives. Working class parents were unlikely to be properly informed about such things, and powerless to act if they were informed. In any case,  they did not expect their children to stay on at school.

 

Because here comes the bit the media reports tended to underplay, and which I think highly significant.

 

On page 14 we find: ‘Surprisingly, grammar schooling was not linked to any significant advantage in getting a degree.’

 

I agreed with that ‘surprisingly. It requires an explanation (and I think I may have offered one above).

 

It continues, rather devastatingly for those who think the report demolishes the case for grammar schools: : ‘Note that the lack of a grammar school advantage in degree chances does not imply that grammar schools made no difference to attainment within compulsory schooling. Indeed, our preliminary investigations (not shown) suggest that grammar schools did make a difference at O level, but this did not follow through to university chances.(my emphasis).

 

They rightly conclude: ’This ‘leaky pipe’ between grammar school attainment and university entrance warrants further investigation. In future work, we will investigate the characteristics of these schools in detail, including the degree of academic selectivity, as it may be that some grammar schools attended by this cohort were no longer highly selective institutions.’

 

It might be. Or it might just be that in 1981, university entrance was not a realistic test of the effectiveness of such schools in bringing their pupils forward. Whereas ‘O’ levels might have been.

 

One indication of this is the current performance of selective schools in modern Northern Ireland. In this part of the United Kingdom , which still selects at 11 by ability, the university chances of a child from a poor home are now almost one third greater than those of his or her equivalent in largely comprehensive England, and almost 50% greater than in fully-comprehensive Scotland ( figures supplied by the independent Higher Education Statistics Agency). I think the case for selection by ability remains strong.

The Night a Fleet of Tory Snake-oil Tankers Sailed into Rochester...and Sank.

I wondered how our neutered,  bootlicking, pro-government media would manage to turn David Cameron’s devastating personal and political defeat in Rochester into a disaster for Red Ed.

 

Piles of money, tankers laden with snake-oil, five visits by the Prime Minister himself, even a frantic plea for Guardian readers’ votes, could not save the Tories from what I reckon was the worst  defeat in their entire history, losing a seat to a party which really believes in what the Tories pretend to believe in. 

 

Yet you’d think the main event was the sacking of a Labour nobody by another nobody for doing nothing. 

 

Here’s the supposedly big story: Emily Thornberry MP posted a Tweet in which she wrote the words “Image from Rochester” next to a picture of a house draped with football flags. Gosh.

 

Somehow this non-event has led to her sacking. Admittedly she has been sacked from a non-job. And if I were Ed Miliband I would have relished the chance to get rid of this blowhard and poser.

 

She once tried to attack me on ‘Question Time’, shrieking ‘How dare you!’ at me for making a few mild remarks about the need for welfare reform. She sought (quite wrongly) to imply that by doing so I had attacked single mothers personally. 

 

I suppose it’s fitting that someone who uses phoney outrage against others should herself be destroyed by phoney outrage. Ms Thornberry is a typical modern politician, struggling to fool her party’s remaining loyal voters into believing she is anything other than a careerist professional.

 

Like the former Tory MP and Cameron-boosting media figure Matthew Parris, who sneered at length about Clacton, Ms Thornberry was baffled and amazed when she actually visited modern England. 

 

Presumably, in her smooth daily journey from her rarefied London district to her office, she has never before seen St George’s Cross flags draped on a house. The remarkable thing is that she thought such a sight was unusual and interesting enough to Tweet.

 

But the incident is essentially trivial. Compared to the earthquake of the Rochester result, it is as weighty and significant as a seagull-dropping falling on to a politician’s greasy head.

 

What does Rochester mean? It means that a barrier to real and significant change is crumbling and may yet collapse. Seven years ago the brilliant pollster and Blairite establishment figure Peter Kellner (a longstanding Labour Party member) told me at a public debate:

 

‘I think it's really important that the Conservative Party does survive as a substantial brand, because there will always be a need for a centre-right party.’

 

Need? I wondered as he spoke, who exactly needs it? Why does a lifelong Lefty like Mr Kellner wish to save the Tories?  Mr Kellner read my mind and continued ‘If the Conservatives were to go the way that Peter expects (and I think possibly would relish) I am frightened as to what kind of right-of-centre politics would then spring up...

 

‘One of the great virtues of British politics...is that we have not had a substantial far-right nationalist xenophobic party in Britain. A substantial Conservative Party is our best bulwark against the kind of politics that I think could become very nasty.’

 

When Mr Kellner uses terms such as ‘far-right nationalist xenophobic’ he means a party that would be hostile to the European Union’s control of our government, laws and borders. The British left have for many years seen Brussels as the way to turn Britain into the sort of country they want, by the back door.

 

If you doubt the strength of this link, please note that Mr Kellner is married to Baroness Ashton of Upholland, who has just retired from the European Commission, where she was its (greatly underestimated and unfairly mocked) foreign policy chief.

 

The Tory party has helped the Left for decades. It has blocked the creation of a strong pro-British parliamentary force.

It has done so by pretending to love Britain when it doesn’t. Its every pose is a fake. All its principal figures are fakes as well. And they have got away with it.

 

For nearly eight years I have been in something close to despair  at the continued willingness of patriotic British men and women to give their votes to the Conservative Party.

 

This weekend, for the first time, I begin to have a very faint hope that they have finally seen through the Tory Fraud.  Rochester has shown that a pro-British rebellion against the Tories could, if properly handled, sweep the country, elbowing Labour aside as it does so.

 

What I hope for is what the establishment fear. That is why they hope you will be distracted by the drivelling fate of a New Labour nonentity. Do not be.   

 

**************

A Vital Message Hidden in a Laughable Movie

Crowds are flocking to see the laughable new film about the computer genius Alan Turing ‘The Imitation Game’. I think they are  mainly women besotted with Benedict Cumberbatch, though some men may enjoy the sight of Keira Knightley got up as a 1940s intellectual sexpot.

 

It’s the usual hopeless attempt to recreate the past by dressing the cast in acres of tweed, making them all smoke and renting some ancient cars.

 

But the ending is genuinely horrible. The homosexual Turing is shown robbed of his mental powers by hormone drugs supposedly intended to make him ‘normal’.   

 

We can all shudder at this stupid and wrong treatment.  But it is easy to condemn the follies of the past. At the time, fashionable opinion believed Turing’s ‘chemical castration’ was a humane alternative to prison.

 

What similarly stupid things do we believe today? How about this? Despite growing medical doubts (a report this week said it had more to do with drug marketing than medicine), we dope huge numbers of children with pills very similar to illegal amphetamines.

 

This mass-doping is justified by the suspect ‘diagnosis’ of an alleged complaint called ‘ADHD’. If Alan Turing were a child now, I think it pretty likely that his ‘odd’ behaviour would lead him to be drugged in this way, killing his special talents.

 

It seems to me very probable that, as you read this, some potential genius is having his life blighted, forced by smiling adults to swallow pills to make him ‘normal. We can see this was wrong in 1953. Why can’t we see it is wrong now?

 

 

*********

I just thought I’d note that it is now officially recognised that the police have been fiddling crime figures, a fact I was jeered at for exposing some time ago. Mind you, the authorities still can’t quite admit that the reason for this is political pressure. Of course it is.

 

****** 

How can it possibly be balanced for the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme to run an uncritical, near-reverent commercial for cannabis, as it did on Wednesday? This is not a joke. People who take this drug can end up in locked wards for the rest of their lives. Who was responsible?

 

An Interview of PH by Brendan O'Neill

Some readers may be interested by this programme from Australia’s Radio National. In part of it, I’m interviewed about atheism and religion by Brendan O’Neill.  Some may not be interested.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wQEBw8SMxM

 

I do understand that, as it concerns religion, comments on the subject must be expected. But can readers please comment only on matters strictly relevant to the programme, rather than having tedious private conversations (or indeed competitive monologues) about their understanding of the scriptures?

 

Note: It is amazing how people, including educated and informed journalists, will believe that I write for the Daily Mail, even when they’ve corresponded me at the Mail on Sunday. 

The Imitation Game

There is no reply to the taunt that ‘You Have No Sense of Humour’. Apart from the fact that, in all such arguments, while you're explaining, you're losing, there are other difficulties. For a start, it doesn’t mean what it appears to mean. I have come away from broadcast discussion programmes or debates in which I have won the best laughs of the evening, and been told by those who watched to ‘lighten up’ and ‘smile more’, and of course that ‘I have no sense of humour’.

 

What it means is ‘You do not share *my* sense of humour, or that of the majority of people present’.

 

In other words: ‘You are different from me and my friends, and therefore inferior’.

 

Humour’s a strange thing, often foolishly mistaken for happiness. Laughter is often a badge of belonging, a noisy way of affirming our membership of the crowd we’re in. Sometimes my homebound train is invaded by football fans, and I can bear almost everything, the tuneless singing, the loud swearing, the needless shouting and banging and the aggressive swaying down the aisles, the enveloping  miasma of lager fumes. But the repeated hee-haw of loud, fake communal laughter (nothing could be that funny) is deeply dispiriting.

 

There are other kinds of laughter which are nearly as horrible, especially the high-pitched giggle of the intellectual. Real laughter (I tend to think) is involuntary, and emerges as a sudden shout, a snort, or silent shaking accompanied by tears of mirth streaming uncontrollably down the face.

 

Anyway, all this is a preliminary to some thoughts about the much-praised new film ‘The Imitation Game’, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley.  I watched it last night in a crammed cinema (I assume it’s the strange Cumberbatch magic that brings them in, a magic brewed mainly from his stardom as a new kind of Sherlock Holmes, beautifully designed for the 21st century, without the heart, the romance or the originality).

 

And quite close to me a young woman fell for every single crude laugh-line. Most of the audience had the decency to laugh at only about one in ten of these supposed jokes. But this person was so transported that she forgot the basic rule of laughter – do it in company. I suppressed my rare snorts of amused contempt, though everyone within ten feet of me could have heard the low rumble of my eyes rolling in scorn.  

 

Oddly enough, this is the second attempt to make a drama out of events at the Bletchley Park codebreaking establishment, the first being ‘Enigma’, based on a Robert Harris novel, made in 2001, with Kate Winslet instead of Keira Knightly. Love interest is important in such productions, but I suspect that the women of Bletchley were not much like either of these striking young women.

 

Harris’s reasonably successful book made a clever connection between Bletchley and the Katyn massacre of Polish army officers by the Soviet NKVD, a crime which it suited many people, for many years, to lay at the door of the Germans. The film, from what I can recall of it, was a bit silly (it even contained a car chase, rather hard to stage with the vehicles and English roads of the time). And I’ve no doubt it was full of the usual anachronisms but I can’t recall what they were.

 

This one (I’ll get this over because at least one reader is sick of me pointing these things out) makes the usual mistake of thinking that if you get some old cars, hire a steam engine, get the clothes right (acres of tweed), distribute red lipstick to the women and hair-oil to the men, and make  everyone smoke all the time, you’ve recreated the past. You haven't.

 

In the past, people didn’t talk about others being ‘radicalised’. They didn’t say ‘Omigod!’. They didn’t fall about and embrace each other when they succeeded at their tasks.  They didn’t make sexual jokes in mixed company. The police hardly used cars at all, and certainly wouldn’t have driven to a burglary.  The silly scene in which the brilliant Cambridge mathematician Joan Clarke (in reality a perfectly ordinary-looking, bespectacled young woman very unlike Keira Knightley) is snubbed and refused entry to a suppsoedly top-secret codebreaker’s examination because she is female) seems to me to be infuriatingly superior and unlikely.  How coudl she even be in a top-secret building for a top-secret examination if she hadn't been invited?  And how could the person in charge not know that one of the examinees was female?

 

And I objected strongly to the portrayal of the Bletchley Commanding Officer,  Commander Alastair Denniston, as nothing but an obstruction. Can this really have been true?

 

Once again, the clothes are right but the portrayal is wrong. Commander Denniston is shown wearing the distinctive wavy rank stripes of a Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) Commander, which he was. The RNVR was in fact known as ‘The Wavy Navy’ because of its very different uniform. But he is made by the scriptwriters to refer to himself as being part of the ‘Royal Navy’, which I doubt very much an RNVR officer would have done, the RNVR having its own pride, and its members being reluctant to claim to be regulars.

 

A few other quibbles.  There is not and so far as I know never has been such a rank as a ‘Gunnery Ensign’ in the Royal Navy, though the US Navy still has ‘Ensigns’ .  ‘Honour’ is spelt with a ‘u’ in Britain. Military Policemen looked gaunt and terrifying, not like the mild-faced pasta-fed new Brits in unconvincing red caps that feature in the film, looking more like porters at American railroad stations, as seen in 'North by Northwest'  than military policemen. (Did someone order the wrong kind of Redcap?) The chief of the secret Intelligence Service could not , I think, have been telephoned by an unnamed outsider on an open line. Educated people pronounced the ‘hom’ in homosexual’ to rhyme with ‘bomb’, not with  ‘dome’ (It’s a Greek root, you see, not a Latin one).  

 

But they would have been unlikely to use it at all, or even allude to the existence of homosexuals, a subject regarded as embarrassing and unmentionable in an age when embarrassment was a much more potent force than it is now.

 

My favourite total misunderstanding of the past in the film was the label on a compartment window in a supposed 1939 train, saying ‘Standard Class’. This euphemism for ‘the cheaper seats’ is very much a feature of the present day, dating from 1987. In 1939, they would have been more honest, and said ‘Third Class’ (in those days there was no ‘Second Class’. That was reintroduced in 1956, when ‘Third Class’ was abolished). I laughed and laughed (silently) that anyone can have believed that such a term would have been in use in those franker (about most things) days.  

 

For the first 30 or so years of my life, hardly anyone knew about Bletchley or Alan Turing. The film claims that Bletchley was kept secret for 50 years, which would mean until 1995, and I am sure that it was well-known by then. A book called ‘The Ultra Secret’ was published in 1974 by Frederick Winterbotham and was by no means the first mention of the secret in public.

 

I am genuinely unsure if modern claims of its huge importance (that it ‘shortened the war’ by two or four years) are true. Espionage needs to secure and maintain budgets, and to be mythologized in popular ways, and today’s GCHQ and NSA benefit from the belief that Ultra was decisive, so I hope readers will forgive me for being a little sceptical about these assertions.

 

As the film quite rightly if rather crudely makes clear (in an absurd episode in which one of the codebreakers has to remain silent about information which might have saved a naval convoy in which his brother is a ‘gunnery ensign’), Bletchley would have been useless the moment the Germans realised that we had cracked their codes. We had to be very careful what we did with the information. So its actual application in combat was limited, and had to be covered by credible alternative explanations.

 

It might well have tipped the balance in the Battle of the Atlantic against the U-Boat menace, but then again, so did the extreme dedication of those engaged in this fight, such as Captain Frederic John ‘Johnnie’ Walker, who died of exhaustion in 1944 after a distinguished and gruelling period of unrelenting battle against the U-boats, from which he would not rest (His son, a submariner, died in action in the Mediterranean). One might add that the concentration of the RAF on bombing German civilians weakened the enormously important RAF anti-submarine operations. Given that its product cannot have been fully shared with Stalin,  It is hard to see that it can have turned the balance on the Eastern Front. But I’m open to persuasion.

 

The real issue here is, of course, the rehabilitation of poor Alan Turing, who fell foul of the stupid laws of the time (the so-called ‘Blackmailer’s Charter’, repealed at last in 1967) which made homosexual acts a criminal offence.  He was abominably treated, though the offer of hormone treatment to repress his sexual urges (‘chemical castration’) was viewed by the authorities of the time as a humane alternative to prison.

 

Quite rightly, everyone now recognizes that this was wrong. Quite rightly, it is now clear that Turing was a considerable genius, a truth only partly understood in the pre-computer age of the 1940s and 1950s.

 

Restitution is impossible for these failings, as Alan Turing is dead, and in terrible circumstances. His mother never believed he had killed himself, but it is the general view. We don’t know why, for certain, though it is easy to speculate that public humiliation, combined with the (no doubt very disturbing) effects of the hormone treatment were to blame.

 

Whether a posthumous pardon does any good, it is hard to say. In any case, what about the many thousands of others, similarly ruined and dragged through the slime, according to the laws and customs of the time? Many are still alive. Just because they were not incomparably brilliant codebreakers and computer scientists, does that mean that they too must endure criminal records?  Hard to see why. It’s an odd situation, deeply unsatisfactory. Part of me thinks that we just ought to recognize that the past was as it was, and look for failings in the present rather than handing out posthumous pardons to make ourselves feel better about ourselves. That is what we were like. If we admit that, then we might be better at discovering what are we doing now that we will one day feel equally sorry for? It’s no good looking down on our dead forebears, while failing to examine our own conventions and customs with a critical eye.

 

I’ll make a small suggestion in that direction in a later article.

 

But I’d also like to say that I’m sorry that Turing’s childhood and schooldays have been so gloomified in the film. My reason for saying this is a charming and touching memoir by his nephew, Sir John Dermot Turing, published (alas behind a pay wall) in The Times newspaper of Friday 14th November. It is worth getting hold of.

 

He casts some doubt on the suggestion that his uncle was bullied at Sherborne, which his parents chose for him precisely because it was then ‘more relaxed and accommodating’ and ‘had a more progressive outlook’ than most such schools of the time. Sir John says that his uncle hung a Foucault’s Pendulum in the staircase of his boarding house in his final year, adding ‘ If you’ve been relentlessly bullied and are retreating into a tiny shell it’s not something you would do’. As for the touching friendship with the boy ‘Christopher’, (Christopher Morcom), points out that the friendship lasted only 15 months (until Christopher’s premature death at 18 from Bovine TB, then an incurable scourge).  Sir John says that his friendship with Christopher’s mother, a wealthy and bohemian sculptress, lasted for ten years. The story sounds happier than its portrayal. Pre-1939 England was not as uniform or as crabby as people think it was. The past is another country. They do things differently there. And one day, today will be a long time ago, and others will wonder at how we behaved, and get it wrong.

 

Getting Putin Right - but Russia Wrong. Two old articles.

In a Twitter argument with the BBC journalist John Sweeney, I pointed out that I had been alert to the tyrannical nature of Vladimir Putin before most people had heard of him. This caused me to look in the archives and revive this article from 7th March 2004.

 

I have since then revised my view to some extent. That is, I’ve more or less abandoned the position I then held, that the internal affairs of other countries are our business. I don’t think I’d thought very hard about this in 2004, when I was still a recovering Cold Warrior. But I don’t in any way draw back from the general sentiments about Mr Putin’s aims and behaviour . I would stress rather more that this is Russian nationalist authoritarianism, not in any way a revival of Communist power or of the Cold War. I also wish I had made more at the time of Russia's resentment of its post-1989 humiliation. I was aware of it. But I don't think I imagined that the EU would try to push into Ukraine. 

 

 

RUSSIA'S HARD MEN STAGE A QUIET COUP      

Russia is holding an election, but you would never know it...because there's only one serious candidate and only one thing voters want -  and it isn't democracy  

 

Like a column of tanks in human form, Vladimir Putin slowly crushes the freedoms that flourished in Russia after the sudden collapse of the old Communist order - and nobody cares.

 

The world, and the Russian people, are now witnessing the KGB putsch that everyone feared back in August 1991, when I watched as real tanks rolled, halted and then mysteriously turned back.

 

But this time the coup d'etat is clever instead of clumsy; quiet instead of noisy, and its leaders icily sober rather than slurred, incoherent and drunk.

 

And what is worse is that this assault on liberty is actually popular at home and willingly excused abroad. It seems to me to be part of a new death of freedom taking place around the world, where more and more exhausted, insecure and frightened people are sinking into the arms of authority with sighs of relief.

 

Unless I am very much mistaken, the Russian people are about to vote for a tyrant who does not really think they have any right to choose him, and who despises democracy.

 

They will do this because the word 'democracy' has been poisoned here. To most Russians it means crime, chaos, the wiping-out of their savings, the loss of their jobs and the humiliation of their nation. They have had enough of it.

 

Perhaps that is why this election is being held more or less in secret. You would barely know it was happening if you had not been told. There is hardly a poster to be seen, though there are strange advertisements - including one on the backs of Tube tickets - urging people to vote. They do not say who to vote for, but they might as well.

 

For Comrade Vladimir Putin is the only candidate, or more accurately the only candidate who counts. For the sake of form, a few others have been allowed to stand, but not run.

 

They include a token Communist, Nikolai Kharitonov, so he can be beaten and Communism shown to be finished; a token nationalist, Sergei Glazyev, for the same reason; and a token Thatcherite liberal, Irina Khakhamada, ditto.

 

The authorities would be devastated if these fig-leaf contenders withdrew, the only action within their power that could seriously upset the Kremlin. The veteran dissenter Yelena Bonner, widow of the majestic liberation fighter Andrei Sakharov, has actually called on them to do so.

 

But when Ms Khakhamada said she would pull out if the others would, nobody took up the offer.

 

Here is an example of the shameless rigging of this poll: the campaign began with a 30-minute televised meeting between Putin and his supporters shown on the big national channels, all government-controlled.

 

But when the other candidates pleaded for equal time, the supposedly impartial election commissioner told them to get lost.

 

The President meanwhile appears constantly on the prime- time TV bulletins, floating above the phoney fray like an archangel on a cloud. He is portrayed sitting in an ornate, thronelike chair looking serious, rebuking ministers or meeting global notables.

 

His challengers, if they appear at all, are shown doing stupid, trivial things such as playing billiards.

 

A few heavyweight newspapers, with tiny circulations among the big city elite, discuss the poll and cover it properly. But there is no middle ground between them and trashy papers adorned with Russian nipples and packed with showbiz trivia, but which also find time to print large, damaging stories about Irina Khakhamada.

 

Ms Khakhamada, a young and slender 48, is by far the most appealing of Putin's challengers. A former economics teacher, she is a successful businesswoman and mother with a real if tumultuous family life. Her Japanese father was an ardent Communist who came here to build paradise and died disappointed. She sees the best hope for the future in a prosperous, free middle class, still a tiny force in this country.

 

When I met her in a Moscow Italian restaurant, she explained her purpose in standing, though she has few illusions that she can win: 'I hope to provide strong opposition and to show that Putin is building a regime rather than a democracy.

 

'The President has huge power, his will rules everything and he is personally responsible for everything that goes on,' she explains. She complains of the self-censorship of the media and of 'the suppression of independent centres that express the will of the ordinary people'.

 

When I put to her that her cause is hopeless, she resorts to an optimism which seems completely unrealistic.

 

'The true democrat should carry on fighting,' she insists. In many ways, she is Putin's ideal opponent. Her Japanese ancestry and looks make her unacceptable to the racially prejudiced Russian masses. Her business background also repels many poor Russians who associate all commerce with sharp practice and corruption.

 

Another of Moscow's rare democrats, MP Vladimir Ryzhkov, 38, is even more scathing about the new Russia's fake freedom. 'It's a pseudo-democracy,' he says. 'It's impossible to have real competition with Putin and his group. As for the mass media, it can either be free or influential. Not both. The influential media are not free. The free media are not influential.' In recent years all three major TV stations have fallen under direct or indirect state control. They suppress or play down bad news within Russia, just as the old Soviet TV did.

 

One victim of this is Yevgeny Kiselyov, who was for a while as close as Russia could get to Jeremy Paxman; an irreverent and searching TV interviewer. Now not merely has he been taken off the air: his old TV station has been bought up by a state-controlled company and turned into a poodle channel.

 

Kiselyov admits this is not a full return to the old Communist days. Those who wish to think and speak freely can do so, but are simply denied any major platform. Books are published without difficulty. It is the TV transmission towers that are controlled. Kiselyov is infuriated by the way foreign leaders fail to criticise Putin for his tightening grip on the airwaves.

 

He recalls his one meeting with Putin, during the state takeover of his TV station. Putin began by being utterly charming, as he is to almost everyone, but switched to a cold, bullying manner the moment Kiselyov challenged him.

 

'He immediately became very angry, aggressive; accusing me of speaking words put into my mouth by others.

 

'He wagged his finger at me and asked, "Do you think I don't know anything about your hour-long conversation with your boss?" ' But when Kiselyov asked Putin outright if he was saying his phone was tapped, the President changed the subject and ignored him. Kiselyov believes Putin's charm is entirely false, instilled into him during his KGB training - for the best way to recruit and handle an agent is of course to pretend to be his friend.

 

Those grim initials KGB are never far away in any discussion of the new Russia. Recently details were published of an Eighties secret KGB plan to allow economic freedom but keep iron political control, more or less what Vladimir Putin now seeks to do.

 

Putin's potent private office is infested with KGB veterans with mysterious gaps in their official biographies, the so-called 'Siloviki', or 'men of force'; hard, quiet men from Russia's dark heart. They still openly admire Yuri Andropov, the KGB boss who briefly ran the USSR before his early death.

 

Putin himself recently declared that the 1991 collapse of the USSR had been 'a national tragedy on an enormous scale'. Yet outside the feverish, garish capitalist enclave of Moscow, the USSR more or less survives, merely waiting to be called back into being.

 

I travelled 120 miles south-east to the city of Ryazan and was instantly transported back to the old Soviet way of life, with a few important changes.

 

The town centre is still dominated by a statue of Lenin, but behind him is a brand new bank - the Zhivago Bank, of all things. And down the road, the churches of Ryazan's beautiful miniature Kremlin are being lovingly restored. A brash new newspaper tries to expose corruption.

 

The new Russia has realised it can dispense with the rubbish of Communism; the nationalisation of ice-cream stands and the suppression of faith, criticism and independent thought. In truth, kept under control, these things are no threat to central power.

 

Ryazan, a heavily military city whose factories once turned out components for Moscow's fleets of tanks, submarines and bombers, suffered badly from freedom. Amid dingy apartment blocks bundled, ill-looking people, aged before their time, still struggle through wildernesses of rubbish, wreckage and vast brown puddles. The new economy, dozens of unconvincing banks and people selling mobile phones to each other, is just topdressing here, failing to conceal the glum reality.

 

When I conducted a miniature opinion poll on Ryazan's streets, Putin won it. Many will vote for him out of a sort of habit, some because they reckon that if they do not use their ballots the authorities will steal them anyway.

 

Most are worried sick by poverty and deprivation, salaries of £50 a month, failing jobs, housing shortages. 'My son must wait for me to die to get a flat,' said one sad grandmother. A few believed Putin had helped them, including a pharmacist who had finally started getting her wages again after a long gap.

 

But perhaps my most interesting encounter was with Lydia Kryuchkova, deputy editor of the conservative local paper, the Ryazan Bulletin.

 

I say 'conservative' because she loathes pornography and swearing, crime and disorder, unpunctuality and low culture.

 

But Lydia, with her classic Soviet face straight out of the Sixties, is an unashamed Communist, even though she now wears a crucifix round her neck. 'We had so-called democracy,' she says. 'We never had real democracy. What's essential now is to get rid of crime, to bring back order.

 

Only after that will we install democracy.' What she - and millions of others - want is the security of the predictable.

 

If they cannot have the rule of law, and such a thing is terribly remote in this place, they would at least like to be sure that tomorrow will be much like today.

 

Putin hopes that is exactly what he can achieve, as long as the oil price stays high. And we, who in truth care more about Russia's oil than about her democracy, will look the other way as yet another brief, failed experiment in freedom slowly flickers and fades. How long before we decide that our freedom, too, is an expensive nuisance?

 

 

Here’s another article from February 2007, on the same subject. Once again, events since the ‘Arab Spring’ and the attempted overthrow of Syria have altered my view. There’s a small flicker, towards of the end, of doubt about the ‘Orange’ and ‘Rose’ revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia.  But again, I think it was the Syria episode that shifted my view of this:

 

 

 

I am more scared of Russia now than I ever was in the days of the Cold War, when silly disarmers fanned exaggerated fears of nuclear war.And so should you be. Then, we were the respected members of a great and potent alliance that stood united against an economically and politically decrepit Kremlin, whose colossal armies dared not move forward one foot, and whose rockets could only be fired in an act of global suicide.

 

Now we are a small and lonely country, singled out for the ire and spite of a reborn, vigorous Russian nation: ruthless, aggressive, rich; flushed with a revived national pride and armed with the entirely usable weapons of oil and gas.

 

Russia's state-controlled gas monolith, Gazprom, is an enormous energy power, second only to Saudi Arabia in the size of its reserves. It is the biggest extractor of natural gas in the world and the planet's third largest corporation. It is the sole supplier of gas to the three Baltic republics, as well as to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Finland, Moldova and Slovakia. It is by far the biggest gas provider to Turkey, supplying around 65 per cent of that country's needs.

 

It sells about a quarter of the gas used by the entire European Union. This includes

 

97 per cent of Bulgaria's gas, 89 per cent of Hungary's, 86 per cent of Poland's, almost 75 per cent of the Czech Republic's, two thirds of supplies to Austria, 40 per cent of Romania's, 36 per cent of Germany's, 27 per cent of Italy's and 25 per cent of France's.

 

At present it has only two per cent of Britain's gas market but this is expected to rise to 20 per cent during the next few years, and Gazprom is also talking about buying Britain's gas distribution company, Centrica.

 

Significantly, in recent disputes with Ukraine and Belarus it has been ready to turn off the tap to get its way.

 

Suddenly, it is believable that Russian agents might murder their government's enemies, blatantly and spectacularly on British sovereign soil – and that we will get no serious help in tracking the culprits. We are also being treated in general with snorting, bullying contempt designed to let us know just how far we have fallen.

 

Her Britannic Majesty's Ambassador to Moscow, Anthony Brenton, who ought to be a figure of status and respect, is subject to a crude and unsubtle campaign of personal harassment, sometimes actually dangerous, and unashamedly winked at by the Moscow authorities. The BBC's Russian service is mysteriously told it can no longer broadcast on the FM band, thanks to alleged licensing difficulties. And now a strange whistling noise is interfering with reception on the AM band as well.

 

Britain's official cultural arm, the British Council, has been raided by tax inspectors, famous for their selective zeal against those who upset the President. And, laughably in this country of low safety standards, it has just been fined for breaking fire regulations in its Leningrad office – run, as it happens, by Neil Kinnock's son, Stephen.

 

It is a new experience for Britain, so long herself a feared power who could behave much as she wished, to be the weaker party in such a quarrel, and with no great hope of getting stronger.

 

We are, in my view, being warned crudely and bluntly that in future we must treat Moscow with respect, in the street-gangster sense of the word. There are to be no more grants of political asylum to foes of the Kremlin. There are to be no more lectures on human rights from diplomats or the BBC. Or else.

 

This is a calculated humiliation. At least America has been tactful as it has quietly deprived us of our empire and reduced us to second-class status.

 

The new Russia is as tactful as a teenager full of lager. This is a raw, adolescent society. Moscow, once somnolent and repressed, is now Europe's most exhilarating, exotic and expensive city. It glitters with money like a Gulf oil state. Significantly, its seven great Stalin-era skyscrapers, assertions of overbearing might dating from the last years of the great dictator, have been scrubbed and regilded as an expression of nostalgic national pride.

 

The Russian rouble, once a sort of joke money traded in wads, like wastepaper, on the black market and useful only for buying bottles of raw vodka or blue, diseased chickens, is now a petrocurrency available from exchange offices in London and accepted by airlines for duty-free goods.

 

At street level you see other significant signs of brashness, lawlessness and immaturity.

 

Bodyguards, dressed in obligatory black, sit next to hotel lifts guarding their rouble-billionaire clients, or march through the lobbies with their shut, blank faces and that strange, swaying gait. Shops display the gross bad taste of the new rich.

 

Within the fences that keep out the poor, the expensive women totter about, dressed as if to satisfy the sexual fantasies of 14-year-old schoolboys: no heel lower than five inches, every skirt tight and short.

 

Amid such scenes I briefly snatched a conversation with Andrei Lugovoi, one of the men suspected of playing a part in the death of Alexander Litvinenko.His two bulging bodyguards loitered, adopting boxers' stances, presumably ready to floor me if I misbehaved.

 

Mr Lugovoi had until then been ignoring my requests to see him but a Russian colleague tracked him down and bravely blocked his path while I caught up with him. Mr Lugovoi is a slight man in bizarre shoes with long, tapering toes. He bestows on me a disarming smile and twinkles as I try to question him. Will he be returning to London? 'I hope so,' he lies merrily before walking off. If this is a Kremlin hitman, he puts on a good act. But then such a man would, wouldn't he?

 

Shaped as I was by the Cold War and by two melodramatic years living in Moscow as the old regime collapsed 15 years ago, I had begun my enquiries by meeting Mikhail Lyubimov, now in his 70s but once a real-life KGB hood, expelled from London after he tried to recruit female Whitehall clerks at tea dances.

 

Compared with Russia's modern hard men, Lyubimov is Santa Claus. He still has a spy's instinct, insisting on sitting in the darkest corner of the pizzeria where we meet. He remains very much the loyalist, praising President Vladimir Putin as 'more sensible than Boris Yeltsin, more sensible than Gorbachev'.

 

He is plainly impressed by the revival of national self-confidence under the ex-KGB agent. 'Putin understands the mind of the people. He understands Russian pride.' Lyubimov doubts the reinvigorated Russian state would nowadays kill its enemies on foreign soil. 'The idea that he gave the order to kill Litvinenko, this is rubbish,' he says. In his time, the KGB certainly took stern vengeance in its cellars on such traitors as Oleg Penkovsky. But in a revulsion from the methods of the Stalin era, it was careful about killings abroad. He recalled: 'In the Stalin years, we killed a lot of people abroad.' But he explains this stopped under Khrushchev and never seriously started again.

 

'I remember there was a decision to kill Oleg Lyalin, the Seventies defector. This was sent to all KGB stations, "If you see this man you must do all in your power to eliminate him." I imagined I might meet him on the London Tube – what should I do? [Smilingly, he mimes a pushing action] Shove him under the wheels of the train? It was a typical secret service order. They knew it would not be done.' Nor was it. Despite having helped to wreck Russian spy networks in London for a generation, Lyalin died of natural causes in 1995, at an unnamed location in England.

 

All very comforting. But Alexei Venediktov, one of Russia's leading political commentators, widely believed to have excellent Kremlin access and the ear of influential billionaire Roman Abramovich, suspects things have changed. I spoke to him at the studios of the radio station Echo Moscow, a favourite forum for the capital's politically aware.

 

He points out that in 2004, two Russian agents were convicted by a Qatari court of killing a Chechen rebel exile in the Gulf state. The pair have since been returned to Russia, supposedly to serve their sentences there, but actually to an official welcome and likely release. And he draws my attention to a new law signed by President Putin last July, specifically allowing Russian special service agents to kill 'terrorists' abroad.

 

He also explains that Britain's stock is low in the new Russia. 'Our ruling elite believe Britain is not a country with its own policies, but one which follows American policy, so there is no sense in talking to the British when they can talk to their American bosses.' But it is more than that. There is a specific dispute, and it is personal between President Putin and Anthony Blair. It is caused by an argument over extradition. The treatment of the British Ambassador, Anthony Brenton, has been personally permitted by the Kremlin and is a sign of its displeasure over the asylum given to anti-Putin billionaire Boris Berezovsky and to the Chechen leader Ahmed Zakayev.

 

Venediktov, referring to Kremlin potentates as 'the people from behind the walls', says: 'The Russian authorities are also displeased that Berezovsky travels on a British passport under what they regard as the false name of Platon Yelenin.

 

'They are sure the decision about this asylum was not taken by the courts but by the Home Office, and we know Putin talked to Blair about that. Putin thought Blair was not being helpful. They think, surely, there is a way to overrule the courts in Britain.' Apparently – in a bizarre throwback to old Soviet propaganda ideas about Britain – Putin's advisers believe Ministers and judges belong to the same clubs and communicate with each other privately there.

 

When I suggest to him that the Russian Embassy in London must surely know this is all wrong, Venediktov replies that Russia now has the sort of government whose foreign envoys tell it what it wants to hear.

 

The dispute is personal. 'Putin's disbelief of Blair was the start of the sudden cooling of relations with Britain. The Russian government thinks the British Government has not met expectations. Putin thinks Blair fooled him when he promised tight co-operation against terrorism. Putin is very personal in his relations with other political leaders.' He would do them personal favours, and presumably expects the same in return.

 

Boris Berezovsky is regarded by Putin as a sort of terrorist because of his open calls for the overthrow of the Russian government.

 

But the Kremlin had got used to that. The incident that really damaged relations was the granting of asylum last summer to executives from Yukos, the oil company now effectively seized by the Russian state but once owned by Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, currently doing time in a remote jail for supposed tax offences. Russian prosecutors were livid that they were prevented from extraditing the Yukos men.

 

And soon afterwards the troubles of Ambassador Brenton began. To some extent they are his own fault. He spoke at a meeting of opposition groups under the umbrella of an organisation called Another Russia, which he was absolutely entitled to do. But among these groups was the repellent National Bolshevik Party, led by Eduard Limonov, a creepy writer of dirty books, accused by his enemies of being an open supporter of discredited Stalinist and National Socialist ideas. Certainly his party's symbols are startlingly – and intentionally – similar to those used by Hitler's Nazis.

 

But this cannot be the reason why Mr Brenton has since been singled out and harried, as we shall shortly see. Two American diplomats spoke at the same gathering and the French ambassador was present, but nothing has happened to them.

 

Venediktov says the treatment of Mr Brenton is the first of its kind since a dangerous frontier quarrel between the old USSR and China in 1969. Then, an officially sponsored demonstration was unleashed against the Chinese embassy. Since then, there has been no action comparable to this by a Moscow government. But the pursuit of Mr Brenton is obviously happening with official support.

 

'There is no doubt they are acting on the orders of the Kremlin,' Venediktov says.

 

Who can doubt he is right about that? The organisation that pursues Mr Brenton is a supposed patriotic youth movement called Nashi, which means, roughly, 'Our thing'.

 

Nashi is as spontaneous as North Korea. If it is a popular youth movement, why is its Moscow headquarters bare of any indication of who operates within? Why have its leaders met President Putin three times?

 

Why are its finances such a mystery?

 

Nashi's campaign against our man in Moscow is an elaborate, malicious and sometimes risky tease, which in my view could not have been dreamt up by a few teens and which clearly has official sanction and help. Mr Brenton called for a 'civil society' in Russia, with freedom of expression. And that is what he is getting.

 

Youths, including 19-year-old computer student Tikhon Chumakov, have been demonstrating outside the British Embassy and wherever Mr Brenton goes. They are mysteriously well informed about his movements. They even follow his official car through the hellish Moscow traffic, which can be dangerous. How do they do it?

 

I spoke to Chumakov, a slim fair-haired character who looks a little as the young Putin must have done. He is slightly vague about how the protests began or how he came to be involved but he now has a personal grudge after being thumped by a (Russian) security guard during a protest outside the Ambassador's beautiful residence just across the river from the Kremlin.

 

The Ambassador has since said sorry for this excess of zeal. But Chumakov wants a broader apology for associating with the 'fascists' of the National Bolsheviks. He is currently planning a trip to London during which he hopes to appeal to the Queen about the matter.

 

He claims to be outraged. But he is curiously passionless as he says he is motivated by disgust at the National Bolsheviks and similar types. 'We in Nashi think such people are just scum. Since we are an antifascist youth movement, we were outraged.' He asks: 'Can you imagine the Russian ambassador to London going to an IRA conference, or the Russian ambassador in Washington at a Ku Klux Klan rally?'

 

Mr Brenton has offered to have tea with Nashi representatives to explain his position but they have responded by displaying banners saying: 'We don't want your tea.' Chumakov says they want a proper apology, not a nice meeting. 'I will carry on pursuing him until he either apologises or leaves the country.' Surely, I asked him, Nashi is a front organisation for Putin? He replies: 'We do support the ideas of the President. But to say that my actions are ruled or ordered by the Kremlin is untrue. I am doing it on my own.' He admits he has been given some travelling expenses when he has pursued Brenton to distant cities such as Samara but says only small sums are involved.

 

He is, obviously, only a footsoldier in someone else's army. I get a more subtle explanation of how the group works from Anastasia Suslova, 21, a Nashi official.

 

While unable to say where Nashi gets its money (it is said to come from pro-Putin businessmen, as it happens), she explains that: 'In 2005, with the "orange" and "rose" revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, we realised we needed a young generation which would understand that Russia is equal to the other European nations, and we would need a young generation that would not blindly follow such revolutions.

 

Our job is to bring up young patriots from the generation of people who grew up to survive the failure of democracy in Russia.' That phrase 'failure of democracy' is very important. The Gorbachev-Yeltsin years are seen as a time of chaos and national humiliation. Many refer to it in Russian as 'Dermokratiya' which translates rather unpleasantly as 'The rule of s***'.

 

'Our ideas and tasks coincide with what Putin wants from youth. We support the political goals of the President,' adds Anastasia. Which is a very happy coincidence for Mr Putin, who was severely shaken by the outbreaks of 'people power' in neighbouring countries, seeing them – with some justice – as the manipulation of crowds and public opinion to overthrow authoritarian governments much like his own. Had such a thing happened in Moscow, I think we would have seen hordes of Nashi supporters holding gigantic counter-demonstrations and waving their symbol: a combination of the Tsarist St Andrew's Cross and the old Soviet red flag, which is a good summary of Putin's view of Russia.

 

Putin, aided by his brilliant spin doctor Vladislav Surkov, has shown some skill in creating or backing – at arm's length – political movements that serve his purpose at the time, and dumping them later. Nashi is just the latest and Britain is its present target. Once we have learned to do as we are told when Russia wants to extradite someone, the outrage over Mr Brenton's behaviour will mysteriously die away.

 

At approaching elections, President Putin rather wittily plans to back two parties at once: United Russia to get the patriotic vote and Just Russia to pick up support from the old Communists. Real opposition parties will disappear or get tiny totals. The battle will be so hollow it will make our own bloodless contest between New Labour and Cameron Toryism look like a real struggle for the soul of the nation.

 

Under the leadership of this clever, secret police-trained cynic, the new Russia will go on getting stronger, more authoritarian, more confident; casting a longer shadow over a Europe which has yet to realise the size of the threat that this new oil and gas state poses, or of the resentment it feels over the way it was humbled by a triumphalist West at the end of the Cold War.

 

Now it is getting its own back. There will be worse to come. 

On Being Right Before Everyone Else Is

Hilarious to observe the coverage of the revelations about crime figures by the BBC – see their online text version: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30081682

 

The failure to record sex crimes is no doubt an important part of the story. But it is not the story, which is a general failure to record crimes of all kinds.  Perhaps the BBC cannot get properly outraged about any other sort of crime, whereas I am distressed by all crime.  It was also amusing to listen to discussions on the BBC Today programme, in which the very suggestion that the police themselves might be fiddling the figures for political reasons was repeatedly dismissed or minimised, and the pressure to suppress the truth attributed to ‘middle-managers’.

 

No doubt, middle managers play a part, but whom are they trying to please? In whose interests could it be to minimize the levels of crime in this country?

 

As in so many stories in which I have been years ahead of the gullible, somnolent flock which is modern British journalism, the truth eventually forces itself through the blanket of indifference and conformism.

 

I’ll no doubt return to this subject at length later but must spend most of today travelling,  so will just make the point that, yes, I told you so.

Here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/01/should-we-trust-official-crime-figures.html

 

and here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/11/the-fiddling-of-crime-figures-vindication-of-my-warnings.html

 

Will all the people who jeered at the time now apologize? Or admit that they were wrong? Or alter their scornful, dismissive attitude towards me? No.

 

I’ve been sneered at for so many things – for commuting by bicycle in the 1970s, when almost nobody did it (now the main danger is from fashionable swarms of other cyclists who think they are taking part in the Tour de France) for fighting against the Hard Left in the Labour Party in the 1980s, and objecting to leftist dominance of industrial reporting in the same period. My interest in Eastern Europe, and my desire to see it freed from Soviet dominance in the same era was regarded as eccentric.  Hilariously, I am nowadays accused of having been a supporter of that Soviet domination. Even my preference for railways over roads (in an era when railways and stations were still being closed rather than reopened and expanded) got me mocked. My opposition to rail privatization got me into trouble with right-wing dogmatists – and alerted me to their failings.   I criticized the Blair creature when he was universally praised and admired, saw the dangers of liberal interventionism as far back as Kosovo. I opposed the Iraq War from the start. I was among the first to notice that the police had ceased to be servants of the public. I opposed identity cards and pre-trial detention and criticised the Guantanamo prison-camp when it was still popular (I still remember the furious tide of e-mails I received for defending the presumption of innocence).

 

I was sceptical of the ‘Arab Spring’ from the beginning, noted the role of foreign jihadis in Syria in 2012, opposed the Libyan adventure from the start ( and dared to doubt atrocity propaganda about rapes which turned out to be without foundation) . I began to campaign for the restoration of grammar schools when the cause was regarded as hopeless, and have since seen the argument win wide acceptance everywhere accept among politicians. And I noted the complete divorce of the Tory Party from its natural supporters, and explored its consequences, many years ago. Currently I’m being sneered at for refusing to conform with the ignorant Russophobia of the mainstream, and of course for disagreeing with conventional wisdom about the non-existent ‘war on drugs’, and questioning the mass prscription of 'antidepressants'. Come back in a few years.

A Visit To Rochester and Strood

This account of a recent visit to Rochester and Strood appeared in the Mail on Sunday of 6th November:

 

Modern England comes as a shock to most Westminster persons. The former Tory MP Matthew Parris was so appalled when he visited Clacton that the resulting article was used in UKIP propaganda in the by-election there. Mr Parris appeared to be looking down a very long nose indeed at that town’s people and their lives. It didn’t seem to cross his mind that he – as a politician, broadcaster and influential journalist – might have helped to make it like that.

 

Rochester – at first glance – is not much like Clacton. It is an ancient cathedral city you might have glimpsed and wondered about as you took the Eurostar to Paris, or the M2 to Dover,  and saw its Norman keep and ancient spire in the middle distance.

 

Its High Street is a glory of old-fashioned Englishness, a chapter from Charles Dickens in brick, stone, timber and plaster. Almost every enterprise is named after a Dickens character.  At this time of year, when the dusk begins to fall quite early, and the yellow lights come on behind the small panes of glass, it is so moving and evocative that I almost stopped breathing at the sight of it.

 

But then Dickens and his books are real to me. The place must be as mysterious as Japan to most modern English people, for whom Dickens is a firmly closed book. It is also, like so much of picturesque England, a museum where you can buy and eat the exhibits.

 

Strood lacks these luxuries. While Rochester is steeped in history and literature, Strood is just there, an unremarkable place where English people have lived in reasonable prosperity and freedom for centuries. It is possible that Dickens was thinking of ‘Strood’ when he named his last, unfinished book ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’ (which rhymes with Strood) . But he actually set it in Rochester.

 

It certainly has a past. Its people must  have seen the smoke and heard the guns in 1667 as the Dutch Fleet sailed up the Medway to nearby Chatham and burned or seized the pride of the British Navy, a national humiliation now almost completely forgotten, but once considered a grave warning to any British government which neglected the Navy, as Charles II did then, and we are doing now.

 

Cross the now-peaceful Medway to Strood and you are in the real world of Fast Food, cut-price supermarkets, charity shops, a pound store, amazing numbers of hairdressers (does Britain have enough hair to go round all these establishments?) the usual riot of architecture-free concrete shops, anti-pedestrian fencing and wide fast highways whose Pelican crossings are so slow to change that you could easily forget, while waiting, why you wanted to cross the road in the first place.

 

This is just standard semi-urban southern England, a few ghostly older buildings surviving amid the post-sixties modernization which turned so much of the country into a pallid and unsuccessful copy of the less appealing parts of the USA, with a hint of East Berlin thrown in.  

 

In Rochester the UKIP office had been full of optimism and busyness. People were coming up to UKIP candidate Mark Reckless in the street to offer encouragement.

 

But in Strood, despite the lovely autumn sunlight, I found a curious angry apathy. A few weeks ago, in Scotland, everyone I spoke to about the Referendum had an articulate opinion on ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. All planned to vote, None resented the process. 

In Strood, my wholly unreliable and unscientific sample was the polar opposite They were a very English sample – not a Pole or a Somali to be seen.   After a while I began to dread asking anyone his views, and to wonder if I was the victim of an elaborate trick,  and they were all actors hired by Downing Street to confuse me.

 

Almost everyone I talked to in Strood (I took up station close to KFC and not far from Morrisons) was disillusioned to the point of cynicism. I can’t really disapprove of this on principle. I am a hardened non-voter, and can’t remember when I last bothered to cast a ballot in the safe Labour seat where I dwell. But if I lived in Rochester or Strood I should certainly vote next week, because it seems to me that, on this rare occasion, it would make a difference.

 

If the Tories can’t hold this seat, politics in this country will change deeply and forever. If they do hold it, politics in this country will remain the same. That’s quite an incentive to vote whatever way you feel. I’m still amazed by the Prime Minister’s direct appeal to Labour supporters to vote Tory, which they are as likely to do as they are likely to tandoori and eat their  grannies. 

 

But in many cases this is a crossroads that ordinary human beings aren’t even interested in visiting.  People told me they were sick of immigration, sick of low wages, sick of false promises. I said that in that case UKIP was their ideal party, but they said that no, it wasn’t. They had heard of it. They knew what it was, but they didn’t trust it. Some thought the whole election was a waste of money.

 

Others were just hopelessly confused, the most perplexed being an enthusiastic Green Party supporter who suddenly launched into a diatribe of dislike against Eastern Europeans. It was a reminder that, for many people, politics is as baffling, distant, pointless and uninteresting as sport is to me.

 

Now, I respect opinion polls. They are generally right, provided you read them carefully and remember that they are a device for influencing opinion much more than a way of measuring it.  And I respect the judgement of political professionals on the spot whose unvarying view is that the Tories are not doing well in Rochester and Strood.

 

So I expect that UKIP will win, not least because I personally will be glad if they do. I am amazed that it has taken so long for ordinary Tory supporters to see through their party and particularly through David Cameron, an unusually transparent snake-oil salesman, even for these times.

 

But the polls can’t really cope with the kind of people I talked to in Strood. These are the great unmoved, the people who neither speak nor vote, the biggest political party in Britain if anyone could mobilise them. I am surprised that they remain unstirred.

 

Yet others are stirred. If UKIP win next Thursday, it will be first because the Tory circle cannot be squared. The Tories cannot win new voters without driving away just as many old ones. And they cannot shake off the hatred which clings to them from the Thatcher years.

 

 

Second, it will be because those who pinned false hopes on Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and then pinned equally false hopes on Anthony Blair in 1997, are turning once again to someone who looks and sounds as if he knows what to do about a country in deep trouble.

 

If that is so, then next May’s general election will mark the boundary between the long, settled Labour-Tory era and a new period of groping and uncertainty. Political parties take a long time to die, and they can still kick and bite quite hard while they are expiring. Rochester and Strood won’t mark the end of this long process, but it might well accelerate it quite sharply. I daren’t go further than that. I have no great expectations. But as all readers of Charles Dickens know, such expectations can turn out to be deeply misleading, or worse.