Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 297

Darker Later - at last the clocks return to our natural time

As we finally return to the natural time of these islands, though only for a few months,  I thought it would be pleasant to remember the battle to save us from Berlin Time, fought so doggedly here and by some doughty allies in the House of Commons.

 

It still amazes me how obtuse so many people were. Why, they moaned angrily,  do you call it Berlin time? Why not Paris time, or Rome time?

 Well, I would quietly insist, because it isn’t either of those (Paris, poor subjugated city, really ought to be on GMT but endures Stygian mornings to satisfy Germany’s federalist desire for Europeanised time on the Berlin meridian).

 

Whereas it*is* Berlin time.  I’d explain that while the Greenwich meridian was artificial, time was actually a real event – noon is when the sun is at its zenith. That varies, depending on where on the planet you are. So if our clocks are set an hour, or two hours ahead of where they are now ( and in summer it would have been two hours) they will say it’s noon in London as much as two hours earlier than it really is.

 

In winter, when we would have been an hour ahead of GMT, the clocks would have said it was six in the morning when it was really five. Early risers will have noticed, over the past few weeks, how very dark their journey to work or school has been. But as from Sunday 28th October, when the clocks return to where they ought to be, the mornings will be wondrously lighter, only getting really dark again towards the shortest day just before Christmas.

 

Under the Berlin Time plan, we wouldn’t get those lighter mornings in November, and – worse still – we wouldn’t see the sun till round about nine in the morning in the depths of winter.   

 

Before the First World War wrecked everything, European time zones were much more accommodating. A lovely new reproduction of the old Continental Bradshaw( a railway timetable, for non-Sherlock Holmes readers) details the time that Paris and Amsterdam used to follow, before the stupid war caused the heavy shadow of Germany to fall  across us all . It’s enjoyably complicated and quirky, as foreign travel ought to be.

 

Of course, I’d leave the clocks entirely alone if I could. I’ve never seen the point of messing around with them, a process which gives me something very like jet-lag every spring. I love the seasons. Why shouldn’t the evenings in autumn be dark, and why should we put off the lovely twilight till so late in summer?   But for most people it has gone on all their lives and they never consider that there might be a case for simple, all-year-round time.

 

Lucky Queensland, in Australia, has no truck with this at all, and nor do several of the 50 American states. Perhaps, when I take up my planned late-in-life second career as an annoying, querulous Cornish nationalist, I can achieve all-year-round Truro time, as well as demanding a Cornish-only TV channel, and Cornish street and station signs.  

 

But the danger of Berlin Time hasn’t gone away. The EU wants it, and a ‘private members bill’ demanding it will be tabled again within three years, you may count on it.

And an independent account of the St Bride's debate between me and Brian Paddick

I say it's independent, but it is undoubtedly partisan.

http://londoncitynights.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-tom-olsen-lecture-2012-at-st-brides.html

As is this longer account of my appearance in Belfast on Monday evening

http://www.newsletter.co.uk/lifestyle/weekend/addiction-doesn-t-exist-hitchens-1-4413140

 

An Independent Account of my Oxford debate with Howard Marks

Some readers were interested in reading a fuller account of my recent debate with Howard Marks in Oxford ( we meet again in Bristol on Monday). I found this on the web, and thought I would share it with you.

 

http://aw1x.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/the-peter-hitchens-experience/

At some point I expect to be able to provide a recording of the Olsen lecture debate at St Bride's Church in London last night, during which I debated the issue with Brian Paddick, the former senior policeman who was involved with the Brixton cannabis experiment.

 

My own feeling was that, partly due to acoustic problems(my clip-on microphone failed, so I had to croon into an enormous hand-held thing, like Bing Crosby), and partly due to the ecclesiastical atmosphere, the debate never really caught fire or rose above the basics.

 

Others may feel differently.

How to Get Psychoanalysed for Nothing - The Joy of Interviews

I can get myself analysed succinctly and free of charge almost any day of the week. Just ask a cyclist to stop riding his bike on a pedestrians-only path in Kensington Gardens, and you will be given a mordant and concentrated assessment of your failings. Another good way of doing this is to upbraid a driver for illegally using his or her mobile phone while at the wheel. But these encounters are necessarily brief and intense.

 

Thanks to my status as minor celebrity, I can now go one better. I can be interviewed. As some readers have noticed, I often do this in establishments where coffee is served, so inviting daft questions about the non-existent parallels between coffee and cannabis. By doing so, I lay my character open to all kinds of judgements and conclusions, either the interviewer’s or the reader’s.

I can also arrange to have my perfectly unexceptionable statements made to look daft, by the judicious insertion of exclamation marks (a guaranteed way of conveying to the reader that the speaker is mad).

I posted here, the other day, a selection of recent interviews of me, and I promised to give some response to Decca Aitkenhead’s account of a rather enjoyable encounter we had in, of all places, the Groucho Club. She chose it as a bit of a tease, as a place where I might not feel exactly at home. Well, of course not, but I can cope with worse than the Groucho, believe me.

I’ll do this in the context of the other interviews, but spend much less time on them. 

As it happened, the location didn’t matter. We were so absorbed in conversation ( I certainly was) that neither of us much cared where we were. The waiting staff had to be very pressing to get our attention. And it went on far longer than either of us had expected it to. I was quite late for the photo session afterwards. I think it’s fair to say we both enjoyed it. This is at least partly because (well, how can I put this?) I can’t help liking Ms Aitkenhead.

I first encountered her, bizarrely, at a conference (what can the theme have been?) organised by the outfit then known as LM, which I think was descended from some obscure Trotskyist heresy. We certainly weren’t members of this odd cultish group. But they’d invited us both to speak and I was struck by her bold frankness and force, and by her very strong personal presence. She’s also a very fine writer and interviewer, certainly among the very best interviewers around at the moment. For an example of her writing (recently pointed out to me by a friend), please read this powerfully moving account of her mother’s death, and of her childhood in general, here http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2005/oct/29/weekend7.weekend5

Be warned that there’s some bad language in it, but not gratuitous, and justified by the context.

She’s also, just as importantly, an ideological opponent. As the foregoing article makes clear, she comes from a tradition very different from mine and is on the other side in the Cultural Revolution. She wrote a much-praised book ten years ago (‘The Promised Land: Travels in Search of the Perfect E’ ) which could not be said to be an attack on the drug culture. And she interviewed my brother shortly before he fell ill. I suspect this got her into trouble with some on the Left, because the result (though perceptive, original and funny) wasn’t perhaps as adulatory as they would have liked. I had thought for some time that it would be amusing and instructive if she interviewed me too, and was pleased to hear from her that she wanted to talk to me about my new book.

I understood from the start that I was not going to persuade her that I was right, especially about drugs. What was important to me was that the interview would be intelligent. I would quite like it if at some stage the entire transcript of what must have been at least a two-hour conversation were to be published, but I don't think that's really practicable, interesting as it would be.

It’s my view that Decca, in reporting our various disagreements about drugs, was perhaps a little fairer to herself than she was to me. Readers of this blog, or of my book, will know that many of the points she flourishes triumphantly are ones I have in fact rebutted. Be assured that I rebutted them at the Groucho, too. It strikes me that she may not have devoted as much space as she might have done to my rebuttals. Why should she? It was her interview. I’m not going to go over all that again. She asked me at one point what I most feared she might write, at least I think that’s what she meant. I said I wasn’t afraid of anything she might say about me. I’d agreed to do the interview knowing she was free to do what she wanted. I thought and think that this is the only sensible view one can take. Later, if I wanted to, I might comment on it.

 

As for the point about addiction, readers here will be wearily familiar with it. It amused me that the electronic left-wing mob on Twitter thought that it was enough to repeat what I’d said, as if that proved I was too heretical to be taken seriously. Again, as readers here will know, the concept of ‘addiction’ is not a matter of objective science, but a moral attitude undermining any belief in human free will. To believe in it (or not to) is, much like believing in God (or not believing in Him), a chosen statement of opinion about the universe. Funny to think that modern atheists think they are being bold and dangerous when they attack religion. But if you want to experience a 21st century heresy hunt, it’s man-made global warming, addiction or egalitarianism you have to dissent from. These are the orthodoxies of our time.

 

Now, to the interview itself. I never actually said the thing about Millwall. It’s not that I particularly object to the sentiment, though it’s unoriginal. I just didn’t use the word, or make the comparison, and I noticed that (though Decca doesn't attribute it to me) some readers thought I had. The point I made about enjoying being written about was just (as I thought then and think now) a necessary piece of honesty. Should I pretend that I disliked being written about, or didn’t care? Absurd. Of course I like it. I said something a little more complicated than what’s quoted, and I’ll try to recapture it. I recalled that when I had first come to London as a child I had been thrilled by its atmosphere, by the excitement of a capital city and the feeling that this was the centre of things. (This is a sensation I still get very strongly especially in autumn, when I walk anywhere near Whitehall , though the buildings are no longer the sombre black they were when I first glimpsed them). I had ever since wanted to be part of that, to be part of the capital as one of the people who was involved in the arguments which decided what happened. I also said that I had been thrilled above all things to discover that it was possible to argue with opponents without disliking them. I suppose it might have been ‘guileless’, though it was certainly calculated. I’d consciously decided to be as open as possible about any subject she cared to raise (including several she never did raise) as I thought that was part of the bargain.

I don’t think what I said about the exhilaration of London was even in response to a question. I just thought, let’s start as we mean to go on, and truthfully admit that I’m pleased to be doing what I’m doing, and getting the attention I get. Why pretend otherwise? It was also worth pointing out (though she didn’t spot that) that I had this impulse from a very early age. I mention this because one or two people have been especially puzzled by that passage.

 

I don’t think I actually said that the Edwardian era was a golden age either (I don’t believe in golden ages at all), just the moment from which our decline began, and the point at which the Christian remoralisation of the country went into reverse (well, August 1914 was that point, actually. I know perfectly well about Edwardian slums and snobbery as what reader of Somerset Maugham and H.G.Wells could not?) and I seem to recall mentioning Zweig’s ‘The World of Yesterday’, and his view – which carries some weight since he was there - that the pre-1914 age had been stifling. I imagine it was, though it seems to me to have been a worthwhile price to pay for its great security, gentleness and hope.

 

And I also think I said that we might have saved civilisation if, at Christmas 1914, the soldiers’ truce at the front had become general, and the armies of both sides had just got up , dumped their weapons and walked home in their millions. It’s a favourite fantasy of mine. When she tried to make an issue out of coffee, a tedious diversion also used by the man from the Evening Standard a few weeks before, I asked her ( as I’d asked him) if she was perhaps a Mormon. This seemed to go straight past her. But I think they are the only people who truly regard coffee as some sort of dangerous drug.

 

As for jumping naked into an English river, I’d (almost)swear that I said ‘in midwinter’ ( as many people are quite capable of swimming naked in English rivers, after drinking coffee if not because of drinking coffee, during the warmer months) . Where I’d really part from her is when she says ‘time and again, Hitchens cites their (schizophrenia and psychosis) grave risk as the reason why cannabis should be illegal.' I don’t think I do, in fact, do this. I refer to mental illness, but I hesitate to use these specific categories and classifications, as I explain in the book, since they lack objective definitions.

Where others use them and I quote them, I leave things as they are. But my doubts remain, and are clearly expressed in the book. I believe, for instance, that it is evident that Henry Cockburn was in some way mentally ill after he smoked cannabis as a schoolboy. But I would hesitate to give a name to his illness, though I might quote what the doctors have called it, as that is what they said. This doesn't bind me to their precise diagnosis.

These are two different points - whether the person is objectively ill (Yes), and what, if anything, you can call his illness (I personally don't know).

 

Then there’s a bit of simple naughtiness with figures. Decca writes : ‘Hitchens maintains that it's practically impossible to get locked up for possession, and that even dealers are unlucky to wind up in jail. That might come as a surprise to 16% of the prison population. Between 1998 and 2006, the number of people sent to prison for drug offences increased by 91%, whereas the increase for other offenders was just 53%.’ These figures don’t in fact contradict my point. How many of these went to prison for simple possession of drugs, without intent to supply? Very few, and I would guess none for simple possession of cannabis. How many people actually go to jail for dealing? The number doesn’t vary much, year by year, as my book shows. Yet there’s a huge and active drug market, in my view growing all the time. The criminal justice system is going through the motions.

Here, even though I know it is almost certainly useless, and that I will be accused of confirming the charge, or of moaning about how I am treated, I might as well take the chance to deal with the section which runs: ‘ It was Hitchens's defining misfortune, almost 61 years ago, to be born the younger brother of the more famous writer Christopher. "When you're a small child, and you have a brother, you want to catch up with them. I just wanted to be as big as, be as strong as, all the things a younger brother feels." Hitchens owed his first job – in 1973, on the Socialist Worker – to Christopher's connections, and was a loyal young apprentice to his brother's revolutionary leftwing politics. But he could never compete with his mercurial sibling's legendary charisma, leaving a rightward march back towards their parents' parochial, blimpish politics as the only available alternative. In 1977, he joined the Daily Express, where he toiled away as a worthy if unglamorous reporter until Richard Desmond's arrival propelled him – a conscientious objector to pornography – into the arms of the Mail on Sunday and a weekly column where he could be as unlike his brother as humanly possible. If Christopher was louche, hedonistic and iconoclastic, Hitchens would be fastidious, puritanical and Christian.’

 

It was certainly not a 'misfortune' to have such a brother. Who knows how things would have been had I been an only child, or had a big sister, or been the elder sibling? But that's the point. Nobody knows. I benefited from his life. I like to think he benefited from mine too. I know more about this, of necessity, than any interviewer.

 

The words about childhood were actually said wistfully during a discussion about Christopher’s death, and the fact that I am about to be 61 and will soon be older than my brother was when he died. I said, which I think is true of many younger siblings, that when I was small, I wanted to catch up with my older brother’s birthdays, and perhaps imagined that if I tried hard enough I could. Now that, assuming I didn’t die myself , I was about to do so, it was a melancholy reflection, that a foolish childish wish was coming true in a way I’d never imagined it would when I’d made it.

 

I also said, truthfully,  that of course as a younger brother I wanted to be as big and strong as my elder sibling. I think this is normal, even when relations are good between brother and brother. He certainly wasn’t more famous in those days. I’ll say here something which I have long hesitated to say, but which might as well be openly stated sooner or later, so how about now?

It always seemed to me that it was Christopher who had the problem with me, rather than the other way round. I won’t go into the petty details of our childhood, but if anyone wanted to Freudianise it, they would probably be drawn by the evidence to the old belief that the first child resents the arrival of the second child. I thought it quite natural for brothers to love each other, and was puzzled when it was clear that in my case this feeling wasn’t returned. I thought it was something odd about my own family for many years, until, in my twenties, I realised that ‘sibling rivalry’ was a normal feature of many families. So that’s what it was. I think it’s simply misleading to place this next to a discussion of my adult career. And let’s go through some of this. I’m not dealing with every error in the account, because some are too trivial to matter or impossible, at this distance, to demolish reliably.

But first I would say that my politics are not in fact those of my parents, but my own, reached through my own experiences. Are they blimpish or parochial? I suspect Decca has no idea what I think about most subjects, and might be surprised (for instance) by my views on railway nationalisation, Suez, political correctness or Bomber Harris. I don't have her down as a regular reader of my column, let alone of my blog. She called  me 'devout',  for heaven's sake.

These things never came up, so I don’t know what she thinks I think. As for parochial, I’ve spent much of the last twenty years travelling abroad, and learning from it. And I’m quite happy to be described as unglamorous, and as toiling, and as being a reporter, but I don’t know, was it all as dim as Decca seems to suggest? Tearing around Eastern Europe witnessing the frantic collapse of Communism, followed by opening the Daily Express’s first Moscow Bureau for 20 years, being in Moscow for the 1991 putsch, knocking about the world for a year (Somalia, Israel, South Africa, Australia, China) before setting up another bureau in Washington, were quite enviable reporting jobs, and not everyone managed to do them. I had a reasonable time as a columnist, and as an unglamorous toiling assistant editor (urged by several colleagues to apply for the editorship of that paper at one stage) on the old Daily Express, as well.

Well, how could Decca know any of this (unless she’d asked, that is)? The really odd thing is that we did actually discuss the path I’d taken to my current minor eminence, Much of it took the form of controversies where I'd become the story.

There was the row about the Jennifer’s Ear episode in 1992, which got written about quite a lot, my pursuit of Gerry Adams round the USA in 1994 (which won me mentions in some of the big American papers, quite a lot of North American TV appearances, and a recommendation from Mr Adams that I be decommissioned) and then the other row about witnessing Nicholas Ingram’s execution in 1995, and then the other row, in 1996, about investigating Cherie Blair’s parliamentary campaign which got me a half-page denunciation in Decca’s own paper, and attacks in several others too. Not to mention my little difficulty with Mr Blair during the 1997 election, when he refused to take a question from me, and then eventually cracked.

 

These were simple outgrowths of my own activity and (I happily confess it) ambition as a national newspaper journalist. I wasn't sorry to be getting the attention  ( see above).

I’m really not sure how she concludes that these things were done in competition with my brother, at that stage ‘toiling’ for an American glamour magazine (glamorous, eh?), Vanity Fair, and for various minuscule left-wing publications in the USA, and unknown in this country outside a fairly tight circle of left-wingers, and the readers of small circulation weekly reviews. Christopher’s later enormous rock star fame had not by then arrived. The Mother Theresa book attracted quite a lot of attention, but not the ballistic attention that would come later.

 

In fact his first real brush with full-scale front-page notoriety came in 1999 with his famous affidavit concerning Sidney Blumenthal’s role in the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. Next came his great switcheroo, after September 11th 2001, to support for American military adventures abroad, which I challenged him over, leading to our famous row, which would hardly have been interesting if I’d just come from nowhere. And finally (and in my opinion crucially) his book, TV appearances and permanent lecture tour attacking God which (as I discovered in Grand Rapids) had touched a vast and passionate audience such as I never expect to command.

The truth is that we had very different, parallel careers, in different parts of the same trade, both of which matured at roughly the same time. Though there was an early, comical episode when we both arrived independently at the Daily Express in the same week, he a club-class Editor’s appointment, I a glamour-free toiler from the provinces in a horrible suit, who’d only recently finished an indentured apprenticeship. I’m still not sure which of us was more surprised, either by the coincidence or the fact that it was the Daily Express.

 

Much later, there was a period when I think quite a lot of people in Britain had heard of me, and had not heard of him. And at the same time, quite a lot of people in Britain had heard of him, and not of me. His fame in the USA , where I barely exist, is a different thing altogether. But during most of that time we lived entirely separate lives. Even when we were both living in London we would rarely meet. My milieu was, at that time, the Industrial Correspondents, a small, boozy club of (in many cases very talented) troublemakers who regarded themselves as Fleet Street’s shock troops and who lived an intense life on the edges of the endless industrial conflicts of the time. All of us had served our apprenticeships in the feral trade of daily newspaper reporting, and each of us was a troublemaker in his own right. That’s why we chose to report trouble. Out of this school came people as diverse as Paul Routledge, Alastair Stuart, John Lloyd, Trevor Kavanagh, Don Macintyre, Julia Somerville, Geoffrey Goodman, Nick Timmins and Richard Littlejohn. We were very busy and we spent most of our waking hours in each other’s company, or with union contacts.

 

I don’t think sibling rivalry took up much of my time, and it was also about then that I began to develop a proper interest in Eastern Europe and the Communist world, beginning with a private journey to Prague in 1978, and continuing with an assignment (begged for) to Poland during the Solidarity strikes of 1980. These were the foundations of my career, such as it is. And then I was a fairly active member of my local Labour Party, though not a very welcome one (Described in ‘The Rage Against God’). I have absolutely no idea what my brother’s political activities were by then, and can’t even remember if he’d left for the USA. His world wasn’t mine. Mine wasn’t his. I was struck, when his FBI records were put on line a few months ago, by the fact that at least one of his London addresses was completely unfamiliar to me.

 

I went to his wedding, in Cyprus. He came to mine in London. Once or twice we met on visits to our father in Oxford. I remember him, on one such occasion, chiding me for wearing a Remembrance Poppy. It amused me that 25 years later he made a great business about wearing a (Canadian) Remembrance Poppy in Washington DC, and offered to get me one. My first child was born, then his was. There was the now infamous moment where, on a rare if not unique visit to my house in Oxford, he said he didn’t care if the Red Army watered its horses in Hendon, a memory he later found unwelcome. I visited him during a Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Washington, and stayed at his tiny house on Capitol Hill. It was then that I told him what he would never have found out himself, that our mother was partly Jewish, a piece of information which he always told me had changed his life. I've often been struck by the fact that he never came to visit me when I lived in Moscow, though he would have been welcome.

Now, all this was available to Decca if she’d asked. As was the account of his determination to escape the suburbs which I gave to Tom Cook, who was not , I think, so constrained by a fixed picture of me. Maybe we could do it again some time. I’m sure it will be therapeutic.

The Usual Abuse - Part Two in a Series

What is the left-wing version of the traditional caricature of the puce-faced, spluttering retired army officer of Tunbridge Wells, scribbling explosively about the outrages of the modern age? Why, it’s the puce-faced, spluttering ‘Guardian’ reviewer, close to apoplexy when confronted with any opinion different to his own, jabbing his delicate fingers onto the keys of his Apple Mac as he rages against the very existence of conservatives.

You’ve got to laugh.

Not long after the Observer’s error-packed attack on my book, here comes its sister  the Guardian with a (website only) howl of rage against my book that is so empurpled it’s actually incoherent.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/26/war-never-fought-peter-hitchens-review?newsfeed=true

Needless to say, it’s not  really a review, but the usual  caricature,  interspersed with astonishment that anybody might possibly fail to share the reviewer’s opinions. It pays little attention to what I actually say, and responds to the awkward (for the reviewer) comparison between the general attitude towards dangerous cannabis and the general attitude towards dangerous tobacco, and the comparison between the  apologists for both substances,  by having a  sort of brainstorm.  Do check it out. As far as I can make it, it runs thus. Tobacco, which was, alas, on legal sale for centuries, and was later found to be a deadly danger, is now being reasonably successfully restricted by the intervention of the law. So the ‘obvious inference’ is that we should legalise cannabis too, despite the growing evidence that its use is correlated with severe mental illness. I believe this person is some sort of philosopher. I should be interested to discuss the use of the word ‘obvious’ with him.

And then of course there is the standard-issue fact-free wail about ‘prohibition’. As it happens, I point out (on page 55, Mr Ree)  that US alcohol prohibition, by failing to ban possession and use, was rather similar to the current arrangements for cannabis in this country, and that this is one of the many reasons why it failed.  So I do not call for ‘exactly the same’ approach to cannabis.  But why bother with what’s in the book, when you can attack the author?

If he has evidence that my central argument (accurately described by him as ‘the law against cannabis and other stupefying narcotics is now "so feebly enforced that it might as well not exist".’), he does not produce it. Yet he treats the proposition as if it is in some way self-evidently false.
 
Jonathan Ree, the reviewer in question ( did I run his cat over too?), writes of me  ‘His own instincts strike him as so self-evident that anyone who does not share them has to be dismissed with total contempt’ .  How very, very funny.

 

Even More Peter Hitchens Interviews - read them here

I seem to have been giving rather a lot of interviews lately, can’t think why.

You can read them here:

by Tom Cook, for the New Statesman website

http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2012/10/other-hitchens-boy

Mr Cook, still a university student,  enterprisingly got in touch with me.

Then there’s this, by William Dove for the International Business Times (I’m not sure about the transcription of one or two things, but  transcribing is notoriously difficult, and I think readers will be able to see where it’s a bit out)

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/396858/20121022/peter-hitchens-interview-transcript-full.htm

The resulting  interview is here

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/396807/20121022/peter-hitchens-drugs-police-agreeing-russell-brand.htm

 

Then there’s this one, from ‘Hard Copy’:

www.hard-copy.co.uk/peter-hitchens-part-one-the-kalashnikov-diaries

Also, here’s a brief account of an appearance in Belfast on Monday evening (which I might say I much enjoyed, Malachi O’Doherty doing a superb job as sparring partner and inquisitor).

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/entertainment/belfast-festival/reviews/hitchens-finds-a-home-in-selfdeprecating-gags-16228399.html

 

 

The Dangerous Edge of Things - a Visit to Londonderry

I still call it Londonderry, as I was brought up to do, though I find it harder and harder to use this name when I’m in Ireland. The fascinating city on the Foyle is the last outpost of the United Kingdom on the very edge of British rule, where the power, influence and authority of the Crown are weak and fading. It’s a lovely setting, and it ought to be a lovely place.

Imagine, a cathedral city perched on a hill above a river, rounded by walls and full of architecture and history. If Londonderry were anywhere in Southern England, it would be choked with tourism, full of bookshops and crammed with upmarket restaurants and cafes. But this is poor old Ireland, poor in more senses than one, and for decades this was a conflict zone. So despite a recent polish it doesn’t quite feel that way. There are certainly attempts. You really can get a good caffe latte there now (my coffee problem again), and I had a rather good dinner for a bargain price in a very pleasant restaurant.

 But next year’s City of Culture still has a lot of bad patches, lovely old houses semi-derelict, streets that look as if nobody has bothered much with them since the 1970s, pubs emitting angry republican songs, with more of an air of menace than of welcome, at least for this visitor. And there’s a lot of poverty, as we understand it in advanced countries these days – the poverty of emptiness, family breakdown and ignorance rather than of starvation, the pale faces and the overweight look that comes from a sugary diet and a lack of exercise, just as wretched but much harder to alleviate.

You can find all this in poorer parts of England, Scotland and Wales, but usually in blighted ex-industrial areas. It’s a greater shock in anywhere as potentially beautiful as Londonderry . I say potentially beautiful because the modern developers haven’t done the city many favours. The new ‘Peace Bridge’ is fun to walk across and has moving views of the river and the hills. But many modern developments, often close to the Foyle, are lumpish and obtrusive, pulling the eye away from the walled town climbing uphill towards the joyous spire of St Columb’s cathedral. Compare these new malls and hotels with the exuberance of Austin’s the amazing department store on the Diamond, the walled city’s crossroads and central square, so extravagant with its turrets and windows that it might have been transplanted from Edwardian Chicago. Not to mention one of the finest First World War memorials I have seen. What a [pity that arcitecture has lost its way so badly.

I was in the city because I had two engagements in Belfast, one a TV programme on Sunday morning, the other a public appearance at the Belfast Festival on Monday evening. My hosts kindly combined to allow me to stay in Londonderry in the Sunday evening. Alas, the railway from Belfast to Londonderry is now being repaired (a good thing in itself, but inconvenient for me) so I missed the superb run along the north coast and along the banks of the Foyle which is one of the best train rides in these islands. But instead I took the bus through the very moving landscape of the Sperrin Mountains, an piece of unspoilt high countryside which would life anybody’s spirit. Northern Ireland, as I’ve mentioned here before, is full of beauty and I have only just begun to explore it . Like almost all places people fight over, it’s easy to see why they do.

 

And they still do. We were slowed down on the way through Dungiven by a Republican demonstration (no police visible) in which about 30 people lined up in the middle of the road in support of ‘Republican PoWs’, presumably belonging to the ‘Real IRA' or, as I term it 'The I-Can’t-Believe it’s-Not-The–IRA’ . I was still in time, as I’d meant to be, for Evensong in St Columb’s, beautifully sung in a setting that was both very English and very Irish. I have now heard this powerful, evocative service in Anglican outposts in many far-off places, and also failed to find it in some others where it ought still to be sung, but isn’t. I wonder how long it will survive here. Anglican churches and cathedral in Ireland (except in Dublin itself, where both of the city’s largest and oldest church buildings are in Anglican hands, a strange anomaly) are for the most part far smaller and poorer than in England.

The failure of the Stuarts to make Anglicanism take firm root in any of their non-English dominions was either a warning that Englishness is not for export, or that the whole United Kingdom project was bound to come apart in the end. The Church of Ireland has genuine roots in that country, and is not just a transplanted Church of England. But it inevitably faces problems, rather summed up in the fact that the prayers for the Queen and Parliament, an essential part of Anglican worship, have to be adapted in churches south of the border. Even, or perhaps especially, the plea ‘O Lord, save the Queen’ in the suffrages has to be changed into something rather longer and less poetic. And how long before they have to be adapted here in Londonderry too?

 

Maybe it won’t be necessary. I heard a horrible rumour that the ancient chants and organ music were to be displaced by ‘modern worship’ featuring drums and guitars, the same appeasing horror that has engulfed much Anglican worship in the country of its birth, driving away the faithful while not attracting the funky. Still it would be non-sectarian. This fading way of Royal and Angliocan symbols is an interesting sign of the fading of the UK in this part of the world. Oddly, Northern Irish ambulances, and hospital entrances, do not seem to vary the initials ‘NHS’. And look at the emblem of the Police Service of Northern Ireland and you will see that the Crown of St Edward, which ought to be at the top, symbolising the origin of authority in our Kingdom(and in Canada too), has been relegated to a supporting position, below and to the left of the scales of justice. Look very carefully and it’s not St Edward’s Crown after all, but just ‘ a crown’ , more of a souvenir than a symbol of sovereignty. The Irish Harp sits in the corresponding spot on the right, meaning who knows what.Various other bits and pieces, a torch, perhaps left over from the old Labour Party symbol of torch, pen and shovel, an olive branch and a shamrock, make it look more like the Zodiac than a police cap badge.

 

But here we are in seven-eighths empty St Columb’s, with its tombs of 17th century gentlemen and its faded battle standards hanging from the ceiling, listening to the ancient rhythms of Thomas Cranmer, rooted in the Sarum Rite and Cranmer’s own English Midlands upbringing, within sight of the Bogside (and of the Irish border) and a whole different tradition of thought and worship. If you walk along the walls you quickly see that history may have solidified in some places, but is still molten and red-hot in others. The walls are just a pleasant perambulation and a picturesque glory, all the more so because they withstood an actual siege and are not just some toy or ornament. But step down from them into the defiant and increasingly isolated Protestant Unionist enclave called the Fountain, and you will find wall paintings referring to this tiny district as ‘the West Bank’ and declaring that it is still under siege. The kerbstones are painted red white and blue, and a gable end is decorated with symbols of old Protestant military and police units, many now disbanded. And instead of 17th-century walls, an unpicturesque 18-foot mesh fence guards the western edge of the estate, facing towards the Roman Catholic estates of the Bogside. There’s also an interesting arrangement of mesh netting on the city walls, just next to the Apprentice Boys Hall, the headquarters of old-fashioned militant Unionism in the city. Is it there to stop rocket attacks?

 

In this part of Ireland, it’s never really clear who’s in charge. Not only is there the unending battle between the two different names of the city, (ornamental columns at its entrances call it ‘the Walled City’, deftly avoiding the controversy). In newsagents’ shops you can buy (for example) the Irish Daily Mail, priced in Euros and full of news and controversy about the Republic, or the British version, priced in Sterling. You are in as much danger of being run over by a car with Donegal numberplates as you are of being run over by a UK-registered vehicle. As for the Bogside itself, it is moving and troubling for any British person to study the raw and rather angry memorials that stand just under the city walls. Some, commemorating IRA men or the H-Block prisoners, still grate with me. I don’t doubt that there was dreadful injustice in the old Northern Ireland, but for me that will never justify the resort to bloody violence by the IRA. As in Cuba, where the wickedness of Batista does not justify the excesses of Castro, the fact that Sinn Fein were the victors does not mean that theirs were the only means which might have been used to right ancient wrongs. But I said a penitent prayer at the Bloody Sunday memorial, because I am now quite sure that what we did there on that day was wrong, and that human civilisation is advanced by admitting it. To do so as the light thickens towards evening, on the spot where the horrible thing happened, a place in the British isles not very unlike the places in which I grew up and have always lived, is to understand even better how important it is to recognise how wrong this was.

How do we resolve this? I never get the impression, when I stroll round Northern Irish towns, that the old hostilities have gone away. No amount of peace bridges and reconciliation memorials can get past the fact that, wherever Unionists lord it over Nationalists, and wherever Nationalists lord it over Unionists, there will be bitterness, conflict and grief. I still hope for some way of achieving a fair and prosperous Ireland united, more loosely than before, but united anyway, under a British crown, where neither community needs or seeks to dominate the other. This hope flickered back into life during the Queen’s tremendous and moving visit to Dublin, which most Irish people of both traditions understood as a huge change in the relations between and among our peoples.

Perhaps, once we’ve shaken off the EU, all four British peoples can find a new constitutional arrangement in which nobody’s pride is trampled on. I doubt it. But it is worth thinking about and a good deal more achievable than a united Europe or a world without borders. Looking up in the twilight towards St Columb’s Cathedral behind its walls, I can see the window in the Bishop’s house where Fanny Alexander, wife of the Bishop of Derry (yes, I wrote ‘Derry’ deliberately) looked out on the green hill far away, without a city wall and on the purple-headed mountains of Donegal, and wrote the hymns everyone remembers. If anybody was both English and Irish, she was. Less well-known than her children’s hymns is her majestic version of ‘St Patrick’s Breastplate’, a fierce invocation of the Trinity and a love poem to Ireland itself, plainly deeply felt. We British should spend more time in Ireland, getting to know, appreciate and respect our closest neighbours, Protestant and Roman Catholic, and turning them into our friends. This stupid quarrel has gone on long enough, has been exploited by the worst to the grievous loss of the best, and benefits none of us.

The Guardian interviews me. And some Thoughts in Passing on Cuba and DNA

Readers here may not be regular students of the Guardian newspaper (I’m told this works both ways) so they may be interested in this interview of me by Decca Aitkenhead, which can be found here

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/21/peter-hitchens-addiction-drugs-war?newsfeed=true

I much enjoyed meeting Decca Aitkenhead, and will post some thoughts about the encounter here later this week.

 A couple of points from the weekend. Now that it is plain that the Castro tyranny was and is an indefensible political slum, I am now asked if I am ,by attacking it, defending the Batista government which preceded it. Obviously not. Why should I? One thing is fairly plain from that era, which is that Batista was nearing the end of his time in power, and was likely to be displaced anyway. Though I would ask any fair-minded person to compare the conditions of Fidel Castro’s imprisonment, after his armed revolt against Batista at the Moncada barracks, and Castro’s treatment of those who did no more than speak critically of him. I’d also mention that Cuba before Castro was a relatively advanced economy, and that many of the claims of the Castro revolution, notably to have made huge improvements in medical care, are not what they are cracked up to be. Medical care and education in Castro’s Cuba are by no means as great as the propaganda claim, and the Communist elite have privileged access to both schooling and medical care, which would surely be needless if things were as good as we are told. 

No more do I defend the Tsarist autocracy which ruled Russia before the Bolshevik revolution.

The logic of such questions is that the revolution which they support or defend was the only possible resolution of the problems of the country. I do not think that this was, or generally is, the case. If Russia had had only the February Revolution of 1917, and not the October putsch,  it would have been saved from a long nightmare. If Castro had been what the USA believed he was when he was in the Sierras, a democratic rebel, then Cuba might likewise have been saved from much.

 I am reasonably chided for disparaging the accuracy of DNA in one post, and saying that DNA evidence is a useful safeguard(though not the only one, nor a wholly reliable one) agianst wrongful conviction in murder trials. I don't think this is inconsistent. DNA seems to me to be more useul in acquitting than it is in convicting. That's why its existence is soreassuring, and another reason why a general DNA register is objectionable. Let it be taken when an accusation is made - that's in our tradition. And destroyed if tere is no cinviction. That too is our tradition.

But in any case, like all evidence, it cannot be separtd from vital traditional protections suchas the presumption of innocence, jury trial (with majority verdicts)and a free press.

 

 

 

Out of Europe? No, Dave's just leading us up the garden path

The Tory Party will not take this country out of the EU. They a

re playing a cruel game by pretending that they might.

As our Prime Minister, Mr Slippery, told a Brazilian newspaper only the other day: ‘I believe that Britain should be in the EU.’

He says something like this every few months. On July 19 he also said, quite clearly: ‘I don’t think we should leave the EU.’ For once, nobody could accuse him of keeping his real views a secret.

True, he hides his shameful love of Brussels behind a wall of piffle about access to the single market. Any fool knows that we would keep this access if we left, and pay less for it than we do now. Why would the EU stop selling us its goods?

Even so, he loves to promise referendums, like the ‘cast-iron’ guarantee of a vote on the Lisbon Treaty. Cast-iron, as sensible people know, is a brittle material, easily broken by unprincipled persons.

But hardly any of the referendums promised by British leaders over the past few decades ever seem to happen. The Scots can have them. The Welsh can have them. Northern Ireland can have them (and you haven’t heard the last of that).
 
But somehow or other, the British people as a whole get referendums tomorrow, but not today.

Not that I care much. I promise you that if we ever do get another vote on the EU, most of you will be scared and bamboozled into voting to stay in, as happened in 1975.

Then there’s the strange delusion that we can somehow win back lost powers from the EU. This is a straightforward lie.

With the one startling exception of the law and justice changes, which we were given special permission to exit at Lisbon – an offer which the Coalition isn’t all that keen to take up – the EU never gives back anything it takes away. That is what ‘ever-closer union’ means. It means ever-closer union. It’s always seemed quite clear to me.

As Roy Jenkins, who knew more about the EU than any other British politician, said back in 1999: ‘There are only two coherent British attitudes to Europe. One is to participate fully, and to endeavour to exercise as much influence and gain as much benefit as possible from the inside.

‘The other is to recognise that Britain’s history, national psychology and political culture may be such that we can never be anything but a foot-dragging and constantly complaining member, and that it would be better, and would certainly produce less friction, to accept this and to move towards an orderly, and if possible, reasonably amicable separation.’

This is quite right. Threats to leave ‘if’ the EU doesn’t make concessions (which it won’t make) are posturing for a gullible domestic audience.

So I think Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, is being even more cynical than his chief by ‘letting it be known’ that he would vote to leave the EU in a referendum.

Point one: there is no referendum in which he can vote. Point two: Mr Gove has never actually said this in public, but slipped it into the open through the weird semaphore system politicians use to advance their careers and sniff the air for danger. If pressed, he can say he was misunderstood, or simply deny it.

I challenge him to make a televised speech in which he declares that he thinks we should leave.

As he knows, if he dared to say this in public he would be destroyed for ever within a few months, as Margaret Thatcher was destroyed as soon as she finally woke up to what the EU really is.

The fact that his off-the-record rebellion has not been met with an off-the-record rebuke tells you that nobody in the Cabinet takes it seriously.

Nor should you. Mr Slippery is trying to save his flank from attack by the dogged Dad’s Army that is UKIP. Mr Gove increasingly fancies Mr Slippery’s job. That is all.


A sword-wielding salute to arrogance

I have always liked the monster statues of an angry sword-waving Motherland that stand guard over old Soviet battlefields. They are not art. In fact, they are strikingly ugly, the solid equivalent of a long, deep moan of pain and loss.

But their ugliness is excused by the fact that they recall huge and terrible events.

The only terrible event that has befallen the blameless town of Ilfracombe is that the unlovable Damien Hirst has moved in nearby.

I would hate to have to see the horrible Hirst 'sculpture' of a pregnant woman every day. It looks like a murder victim on a pathologists’ slab, literally obscene in that it is the sort of thing that should normally be kept out of sight.

Nothing justifies its enormous scale, or its imposition on the people of  a pretty seaside town.

Once again, an arrogant, vain elite force their will on a powerless population. The more you dislike it, the happier these intellectual snobs are.

Hardly a month goes by without some new ‘independent’ report, or TV programme, demanding that we make it even easier for people to wreck their lives, and their families’ lives, by taking drugs.

This stuff – which always includes the claim that ‘the war on drugs has failed’ – is then swallowed uncritically by the BBC and almost all the newspapers.

It is tripe. There has been no war on drugs in this country for 40 years.

There is, as it happens, another view. I and many others take it. Yet that view is abused and denied airtime. I’ll leave it to you to work out why that might be.

It's now 18 days since I asked Edward Miliband’s office if the Labour leader received private tuition while at his comprehensive school. Surely they must have been able to find out by now.



Cops bristling with Tasers and scorn

I’ve never doubted that former Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell behaved badly during the incident of the Downing Street gate.

My point was that the police behaved badly too. Much like politicians, they have got above themselves, and regard the rest of us with scorn.

I think the Tasering of blind Colin Farmer, in the back, by a Lancashire police officer underlines this point. A proper old-fashioned constable could never have made such a mistake. Such men knew they served the law.

But our new shaven-headed, tattooed, jargon-infested, big-booted, baseball-capped, swaggering robocops think they are the law.

Only someone suffering from a seriously swollen head could have mistaken a white stick for a samurai sword and then handcuffed a whimpering, badly shocked 61-year-old as he lay on the ground.

There’s no escape from these facts. They happened. They’re much more serious than the Mitchell incident.

Sentimental praise for our supposedly wonderful police is misplaced. They’ve gone badly wrong, and won’t be reformed until we all admit it.

From Havana to Munich, some thoughts about history

First of all, I was amazed to be challenged by a contributor who doubted my description of Fidel Castro as a ‘torturer’ . Let’s get this over with quickly. Castro is mainly a murderer, his regime having put to death, after appalling summary trials (in some of which ‘not guilty’ verdicts were actually reversed on the spot with the aid of the mob) or no trials at all, scores of opponents in its early years. The revolting Ernesto Guevara was much-involved in that bloodstained era. Visitors to Havana can still see the bullet scars in the walls of the great prison fortress above the city, where the murders were carried out while Guevara lounged on the walls smoking cigars.

And the recent death of the noble and peaceful dissenter Oswaldo Paya in a peculiar road accident seems to me to be a bit suspicious. Castro (or ‘Fidel’ as the Left matily insist on calling him) has also been known to lock people up in ‘drawer’ cells, a form of torture in itself which I will not describe here.  Look it up.

But the single best-documented instance of torture under Castro is that inflicted on Castro’s former comrade Huber Matos, who sought to resign from that regime in protest at Communist influence. He was imprisoned  for ‘treason and sedition’ for 20 years  in 1959. No remission for him. As he recounted, after his release into exile in 1979 ‘prison was a long agony from which I emerged alive because of God's will. I had to go on hunger strikes, mount other types of protests. Terrible. On and off, I spent a total of sixteen years in solitary confinement, constantly being told that I was never going to get out alive, that I had been sentenced to die in prison. They were very cruel, to the fullest extent of the word... I was tortured on several occasions, I was subjected to all kinds of horrors, all kinds, including the puncturing of my genitals. Once during a hunger strike a prison guard tried to crush my stomach with his boot... Terrible things.’

Enough? I’m amazed at the free pass that Castro still gets from so many people. Anyone wanting more should look up the treatment given to the poet Armando Valladares, by the funky Cuban maximum leader. .

Now, on to Munich and the book by John Charmley,  ‘Neville Chamberlain and the Lost Peace’. I think several things emerge from this.

One of the most interesting is that in 1936, Duff Cooper , then a junior war minister, urged that Britain should create a continental-sized army. His idea was over-ruled. At least in this matter Cooper was consistent. The policy which he and the anti-appeasers later followed would have made sense had Britain possessed a large conscript army by 1938. Such an army  (though there would always have been a difficulty in getting it on to the continent) was essential if any country wanted to play a serious part in the power politics of the European landmass.

The national government , much influenced by Chamberlain’s own tight management of limited funds, chose otherwise. From the beginning of rearmament in 1934, up till the arrival of war in 1939, Chamberlain strongly favoured the Air Force, and to a lesser extent the Navy.  There simply wasn’t enough money for all three. I should add, though Charmley doesn’t go into this, that the Labour Party largely opposed rearmament during this period, claiming to believe that such weapons would be used against the USSR, though it is hard to see how, why or where that might then have happened.

Most British strategists relied completely on the huge and supposedly excellent French Army (in fact a shell, rotten, ill-equipped and badly led, and over-committed to the fatally incomplete Maginot line, which ran out exactly where it was most needed, thanks to the sudden decision of Belgium to become neutral. The theory ran that the French Army stood as an immovable barrier to German attack, and would certainly hold Germany off for long enough for Britain to create a wartime army if needed.  Britain didn’t introduce military conscription till Spring 1939, a move once again opposed by Labour.

Britain, meanwhile, had its own complete and functioning Maginot Line, known as the English Channel, a defence which proved crucial in the war, and which worked perfectly in deterring attempts to invade our territory.

Chamberlain and his allies chose this course because they saw the main purpose of armed forces as being to protect us from attack, and to defend the Empire in any global conflict.

They didn’t envisage a continental war, and they didn’t want one. And they were doubtful about the old Eyre Crowe theory (very influential in 1914, to disastrous effect) of the ‘Balance of Power’ . This idea, often treated by contributors here as a fact, or a gospel, was and remains a theory, that Britain needed a balance of power on the Continent to be secure in herself. Is this true? I am not sure.

Certainly, our efforts to maintain such a balance in 1939 ended up by creating first one wholly unbalanced Europe under Hitler, and then another almost as unbalanced one in which the USSR was only kept in check by US intervention, and we had to hand over our balancing instruments to Washington.

Now we have the German domination which poor dear ‘Bert’ is unable to perceive, because there isn’t a big sign on top of the Berlaymont Building in Brussels saying ‘German Empire’. Well, so there isn’t. But if he looks at the history of the Bismarckian Empire, which was less tactful about its existence,  he’ll see that it too was constructed through customs and currency union, by centralisation and standardisation (including standardisation of time, NB)  and by regulation.

Back to Mr Charmley. I’m pleased to see that he punctures the absurd myth of Anthony Eden, that terribly over-rated man, who is always given a free pass by standard histories, as if he was in the forefront of the anti-appeasement battle. He wasn’t, and was much more concerned about Mussolini than about Hitler . I’m of the opinion that if we had not been scared out of the Hoare-Laval Pact, we might have kept Mussolini from getting too close to Hitler, and so changed the course of events quite a lot. The Anschluss with Austria might have been much delayed. We might not have need to fight for the Mediterranean.   But Eden had a sort of ‘principled’ objection to dealing with such a nasty man.

Like all those who were terribly principled in the 1930s, notably Winston Churchill, he ended up appeasing Stalin instead. And not just appeasing him but being ordered about and humiliated by him.

What Charmley skates over a bit (and which few people discussing the era ever bother to record) is the curious episode of May 1938, when Czechoslovakia claimed that Germany was about to invade her. Then, when no invasion happened, the Czechoslovak President Eduard Benes boasted to the world that he had forced Hitler to back down. Pat Buchanan, in his fascinating ‘Churchill, Hitler and the unnecessary War’ argues, that Hitler was so enraged by this very public humiliation that he then and there resolved to destroy the Czechoslovak state.

Charmley refers to this event, but nothing like as much as Buchanan does. He does, however, make Chamberlain’s behaviour seem a good deal more rational than most historians do, and produces documents to back this up. What was Britain’s interest in preserving the artificial and increasingly unstable Czechoslovak state.  Was France willing to fight for Prague? No. When Daladier and Bonnet came to London, they were very shifty indeed about what they would do. It was a relic of a French foreign policy dreamed up in more spacious days. Was Moscow willing to fight for Prague? Unlikely. The red Army had just been purged, and the USSR was so hated by Poland and the other East European states that they would never grant the Red Army the right of passage.

It’s hard to see what Britain could have done. We had nothing much to fight with, the French were shaky, by the time we’d acted, the Germans would have seized the Czech lands anyway, much as happened after we ‘defended’ and ‘went to war for‘ Poland a year later.

It would just have been 1939 a year earlier, probably with a neutral USSR. Who knows how it would have ended up, but I can’t see how we could have acquitted ourselves particularly well. The anti-appeasers, on the other hand , all manage to look very noble. But in Cabinet discussions, they didn’t really have much to offer by way of an alternative. We had armed forces suitable for a defensive war, or for retaliation against air attacks (or so we thought – the bombing planes and tactics turned out to be hopeless when the time came, though the fighters, luckily, were much better) and for holding on to the Empire – but not for a war in Europe. Even then, the navy was stretched far beyond its ability, quite unable to defend our Far Eastern possessions and the home islands at the same time.

As far as I can make out ( and I’m still roaming through specialist volumes on the Polish guarantee) it was Lord Halifax, Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary, who became emotional and sentimental about national pride and standing up to dictators, and who drove the guarantee forward after Hitler’s seizure of Prague.

But whichever way you look at it, whoever’s account you read, it is impossible to doubt that the Polish guarantee either emboldened Poland into refusing to make concessions on Danzig, or convinced Hitler that war with Poland, rather than negotiation,  was the only way to get what he wanted (and that by implication, a partition of Poland with Stalin would be a neat solution). In my view it did both, so hastening the war and ensuring that we would be dragged into it at the worst possible moment. By the way, it also seems pretty clear that the British talks with the USSR were doomed from the start, as we weren’t prepared to let Stalin have the Baltic states. No appeasement, there then. I wonder, if we had been ready to do so, whether he would have preferred our offer to Ribbentrop’s.

Even worse, we were lashed to France, which wasn’t remotely ready to face the revived German army, despite the clear warnings of German tactics provided by the Polish war.  The September 1939 declaration of war still looks like a bad mess to me, and one we need to confront, whereas Roosevelt’s restraint and delay appears sensible and well-considered.

Yet to this day we laugh at and scorn Chamberlain and his umbrella, and refuse to see that he might have been wiser than we thought.  As I have said before, once the floor gives way beneath you, it goes on giving way, again and again until you finally reach the bottom, a disconsolate and bruised bundle covered in splinters and plaster dust, compelled to think thoughts you hate. How much easier it is to refuse to think, and fall back on the Finest Hour or even ‘Two World Wars and One World Cup’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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