Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 333

Rebel Rabble, or A Punchline in the Guts

Regular readers here will know of my high opinion of Patrick Cockburn, one of the great foreign correspondents of our time. I don't know anything like as much as he does, but I know enough, and have seen enough for myself at first hand, to recognise that his reporting is first class. Anyone trying to understand the puzzle of the Arab world and theMiddle East may turn with confidence to Patrick - who is also, I should add, by no means on the same political wavelength as I am.

But so what? he doesn't let his opinions get in the way of the truth.

And I should particularly like to draw the attention of readers to an article of his in the Independent on Sunday of 3rd April, entitled 'The shady men backed by the West to displace Gaddafi'. It should be very easy to find on the web.

There is much in it that is quietly very funny, notably his explanation of how Colonel Gadaffi caused him to read the works of Jane Austen.

But even those who lack the time to turn to the article itself can learn much from the following passages :

'It must have become obvious to the rebel leaders in Benghazi that television pictures of their forces – essentially untrained gunmen in their pick-ups looking like extras from a Mad Max film – were damaging the credibility of the rebel cause in Europe and the US.'

'...The Libyan militiamen look like a rabble even by the lowly standards of militias in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan.'

Then there is this: 'The new military leadership, which Britain, France and to a decreasing extent the US, will be supporting, inspires even less confidence than their men. The careers of several make them sound like characters out of the more sinister Graham Greene novels. They include men such as Colonel Khalifa Haftar, former commander of the Libyan army in Chad who was captured and changed sides in 1988, setting up the anti-Gaddafi Libyan National Army reportedly with CIA and Saudi backing. For the last 20 years, he has been living quietly in Virginia before returning to Benghazi to lead the fight against Gaddafi. '

Not enough to worry you? Then try this gentleman:

'Even shadier is the background of Abdul Hakeen al-Hassadi, a Libyan who fought against the US in Afghanistan, was arrested in Pakistan, imprisoned probably at Bagram, Afghanistan, and then mysteriously released. The US Deputy Secretary of State, James Steinberg, told Congressmen he would speak of Mr Hassadi's career only in a closed session.'

And then the hard punchline, a punchline in the guts for British foreign policy:

'It is these characters, and others like them, whom Britain is now fighting to install in Tripoli to replace Col Gaddafi.'

Why are we doing that?

By the way, in answer to the contributor who seems to think I have it in for Islam, is he saying that the Benghazi rebels are not Muslims?Or denying that keen Islamist sympathies lie behind some of their actions? Or that Gadaffi has on occasion been the enemy of the Salafist Islamist factions in the Muslim world? I think this is a reasonable thin g to say, and contrast it with the British government's slightly hysterical view of Islamist sympathies everywhere else ( a view I don't particularly share).

We can protect a mob in Benghazi, so why not a little girl in Stockwell?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Why does the British Government care more about protecting civilians in Libya than it does about protecting them in Britain?

In this week alone a tiny little girl and an innocent shopkeeper have been shot and badly wounded in the London suburb of Stockwell, within sight of the Palace of Westminster.

They were caught in the crossfire of a gang war.

About 50 criminal gangs are said to be active in this area, and many of them are armed with guns, which our vaunted strict firearms laws have somehow failed to keep out of their hands.

And no help comes. The police sit on their fat backsides waiting for bad things to happen and then rush round too late. The courts strain to avoid sending wrongdoers to prison.

The prisons are run by the criminals, who get angry when warders try to deny them drugs and alcohol.

Ultra-violence and homicide are now so common that its perpetrators are often free after a few short years detained with a pool-table and lots of free methadone at the taxpayer's expense.

The idea of protecting us – the civilians of Britain – with a proper patrolling police force, severe justice and the effective deterrent of the death penalty is rejected with shuddering horror by the comically misnamed Conservative Party that dominates the Government.

And such suggestions are regarded as positively wicked by the Liberal Democrats who sustain the Coalition.

Even those of them who pretend to believe in the death penalty will say: 'But what if
an innocent person got killed by mistake?'

Yet when it comes to Libya the same people suddenly lose all their doubts.

They'll protect Libyan civilians by dropping tons of high explosive on anyone who attacks them. If innocent people are killed by mistake, and they have been and will be, that is 'collateral damage', sad but acceptable.

They have obviously discussed killing Colonel Gaddafi because of his undoubted crimes against humanity. But they won't hang a British murderer for his crimes against us.

Why do this miserable bunch of vain poseurs have to go to North Africa to do justice?

Why are they more interested in helping an Islamic mob in Benghazi than in protecting the British people who pay their huge wages? Why can't justice begin at home?


A snarling menace, let off the leash by liberal 'justice'

The liberal elite like to think that they have made Britain more civilised by being kinder to bad people. They think that the days of ugly mobs baying round the Tyburn gallows are over for good.

Let them examine the scenes in Swindon last week, as a man accused of a rather nasty murder, but not convicted of it, was brought to court. I lived and worked for some years in Swindon and still sometimes visit it. It is not specially worse than anywhere else in the New Britain, reasonably prosperous and certainly far more so than when I first knew it nearly 40 years ago.

But the inflamed crowd, with its tattooed faces and furious rage, was as close to a lynch mob as anything we have yet seen in the 21st Century. As I believe in justice rather than vengeance, in the presumption of innocence and the rule of law, I thought the crowd was frightening. I do not think it will be that long before such a mob gets hold of its victim and horrible things follow. I hope not. I will do what I can to prevent it. But I will not be surprised.

This scene would have been unthinkable in the early Seventies Swindon I knew. At that time, Britain had only recently begun on Roy Jenkins's great liberal experiment – divorce on demand, subsidised one-parent families, covert legalisation of drugs, vast ill-disciplined comprehensive schools, abolition of beat policing, abolition of the death penalty, relaxed prison regime, easy bail and the rest.

The trouble with this experiment is that the consequences are horrible, but only for the people who live in Swindon and not – yet – for those who still think it was all a jolly good idea. By the time the tattooed mobs are raging in their nice villages and comfy suburbs, it will be too late to put it right.

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According to the Sentencing Guidelines Council, you can now be found with a bag of dope big enough to pull your arm out of its socket and not be considered a serious criminal. Cue outrage.

But not from me. I do not understand why we treat drug-dealers as wicked, vicious criminals, while treating moronic, self-destructive drug-users as victims. It is users who bring misery to their families by wrecking their mental health. It is users who commit crime to pay for their pleasure. It is users who become a danger to their fellow creatures. If there were no users, there would be no dealers. Yet their numbers grow because possession of cannabis, cocaine and heroin is now effectively legal.

This is a limitlessly stupid and irresponsible policy, and the cause of endless misery and crime. The sooner we realise the extent of the Government's surrender to drugs, the sooner we may come to our senses and reverse it. But will we?

The senior levels of politics are full of people who have taken drugs, or have friends who take drugs. What would happen if a mid-level Minister were revealed as a recent user of cocaine, or a Cabinet Minister found to have attended a recent party where cocaine was openly snorted?

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Let us hope and pray that some good comes from the unbearable death of
ten-year-old Harry Hucknall, found hanged at his Cumbria home last September. Somebody had 'diagnosed' this little boy with clinical depression and 'ADHD' and had prescribed an anti-depressant and Ritalin. The poor child had been horribly bullied at school.

His parents were separated. He had moved home 14 times. It is hardly surprising that he was unhappy. Why on earth would anyone think that drugs were the answer?
West Cumbria Coroner Ian Smith said that Harry had been given 'two powerful, mind-altering drugs'. He urged doctors to be 'extremely careful in prescribing such medication'. I congratulate him on his understatement.

Harry's case became known because his cousin is a rock star. How many other tragedies like this are going unreported? We are long overdue for a proper inquiry into the prescribing of such drugs, especially to children. Let it come soon, please.

Fair Game, or not so fair?

Not all the critics liked the new film Fair Game starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. My Daily Mail colleague Christopher Tookey gave it a severe pasting, saying :'It received rave reviews from critics in the U.S., who claimed it to be not only a triumphant mixture of the Bourne films and All The President's Men, but also a key political document. It promptly bombed at the box office.

'The people were right. This is a turgid thriller, indifferently directed by Doug Liman and sanctimoniously written by British brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth. Not even a heartfelt central performance by Naomi Watts can hide its lack of action and suspense.

It is also, despite its title, unfair. The less you know about the facts behind it, the more likely you are to swallow its wildly dishonest message. This hectoring film purports to tell the "true" story of how, in 2003, the name of CIA analyst Valerie Plame Wilson was leaked by George W. Bush's White House team.

The chief villains are Bush adviser Karl Rove (Adam leFevre) and Lewis 'Scooter' Libby (David Andrews), Vice-President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, who — according to the film — colluded to discredit her noble husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, played by Sean Penn.

There are so many distortions within the movie, but space does not allow me to recount them here. Suffice to say, whenever the Hollywood Left tries to sell you a conspiracy theory, it is a good idea to check the facts out yourself.'

But the Mail on Sunday's Matthew Bond took a strikingly different view : 'Fair Game is an impressive dramatisation of a true story. Naomi Watts plays Valerie Plame, the CIA spy whose diplomat husband, Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), was dispatched to Niger in 2002 to find out if the poverty-stricken African country had sold so-called uranium "yellowcake", a vital precursor to a nuclear bomb, to Saddam Hussein's Baghdad regime. Wilson, a former ambassador to Niger, definitively concluded it had not.

'This unwelcome finding goes down badly with White House hawks desperate to justify the looming invasion of Iraq and so, when Wilson further angers them by going public with his claims, they 'accidentally' blow his wife's cover.

Suddenly, every would-be terrorist and misguided American patriot knows exactly where at least one CIA spy lives.

It's a complicated tale, the content and characters of which won't be particularly familiar to British audiences.

But with Watts on convincing form and with Bourne Identity director Doug Liman driving things along, Fair Game is worth catching, despite its passing resemblance to Paul Greengrass's Green Zone and the rather tiresome over-indulging of Penn and his radical politics in the closing third.'

Jenny McCartney, in the Sunday Telegraph, gave it an interesting review and four stars. Philip French in 'The Observer' said it was 'a riveting conspiracy thriller in the class of All the President's Men, which in many ways it resembles.' He concluded: 'Although the outline of this story is well known, Fair Game gives it dramatic shape and teases out the moral problems raised. We are drawn into considering urgent questions that involve our society, the world in which we live, and the conduct of those still active on the political scene and benefiting from their murky association with events that have caused so much chaos and so many deaths.'

When such distinguished critics disagree, I tend to think the thing to do is to go and see for myself.

But I cannot. (Not in the way that Mr 'Bunker' 'cannot' believe in God, by which he means he has decided not to, but because it is physically extremely difficult for me to do so).

Fair Game was shown briefly in a late-night slot at my local multiplex, but never at a time when we could get a baby-sitter. If it was on anywhere else nearby, I've missed it, though lots of other unwatchable, patronising tosh was available. I like thrillers set in Washington DC because I once lived there, and it's my kind of thing. I'm also (like many others) quite interested in the story of a female spy apparently exposed by the powerful as revenge for her husband's whistleblowing.

Many of you will have seen the arresting Vanity Fair picture of Valerie Plame and her husband sitting in an open car, looking mysterious. Friends of mine in DC thought that Plame had been very badly treated. I agree with Christopher Tookey that it's always wise to check the facts (how couldn't I?) but in any case I'd like to form my own opinion as to whether the film is honest.

And the fact that a film bombs at the box office doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. We're not all teens on dates (I'm told that cinemas in the U.S. make more money from their vast buckets of popcorn and vats of fizzy drinks than they do out of the ticket price, and this could explain the aiming of films at the teen market and the increasing trend for tickets to be sold at the popcorn stand).

I would have liked to see this film on a proper screen in a proper cinema. Now I'll have to wait for the DVD and watch it as it was never meant to be seen, on a TV screen.

What is a 'Front Line' police officer?

Here we go again. I have just watched a BBC report on the alleged threat to 'Front Line' police officers. We were shown a policewoman driving a car and speaking urgently into her radio, perhaps about to race at speed to an incident the police had failed to prevent, and could do little about when they got there. And we were told some stuff about 'Bobbies on the Beat'.

Look, for the nine millionth time, there are no 'Bobbies' and there is no 'Beat'. The 'Beat' was abolished by the Home Office in 1966. Despite immense increases in their numbers (only on show at demonstrations or football matches) the police have never been so absent from our midst.

The police officers we have today are not 'Bobbies' but sedentary bureaucrats who react to crime and disorder after it has happened. The occasional concessionary foot patrol (almost invariably in pairs, chatting to each other and oblivious to what is going on ten feet away) is exactly that, a temporary concession to public demand, viewed by Chief Constables as a diversion away from the real work of political correctness and managing crime . The use of the words 'Front Line' is pretentious and grandiose.

And wasn't the performance of the police during last Saturday's TUC demonstration rather feeble, given their macho self-description as a 'Front Line' and their dismissal of the rest of us as 'Civilians'?

Some 'Front Line'.

They certainly appeared to be backing away from demonstrators outside the Ritz Hotel. Several other rather obvious (and in some cases predicted) targets for exhibitionist vandals and show-offs (sorry, 'anti-capitalist protestors') seem to have been poorly and unintelligently defended.

And how did the plinth of the Achilles statue, in Hyde Park, where the peaceful demonstrators were congregated, come to be daubed with moronic spray-paint scribblings (which I saw being washed off on my way to an appointment in London on Monday morning)? Could neither the march stewards, nor the police, have prevented this expensive, moronic dirtying of one of the pleasanter parts of the capital? Judging by how much of it there was, it must have taken a long time to accomplish the damage. And it is a monument to the Duke Of Wellington's military victories, nothing whatever to do with the subject of the march. Not that these people will ever have heard of the Duke of Wellington. They just recognised it as a traditional work of art, and so instinctively identified it as a thing to be damaged and diminished.

PS, One or two contributors asked how I ever came to be a Trotskyist. My political history, such as it is, is described in some detail in 'The Cameron Delusion' and also in 'The Rage Against God'. The latter is very soon to be available in paperback, by the way.

A demonstration of powerlessness

In my Trotskyist days, I recall, one of our smarter senior comrades once sneered at elaborate plans we were all making for some demonstration. I think it was the TUC's enormous march against Ted Heath's industrial relations laws in (was it?) 1971, around the time the currency went decimal. We were all excitedly booking coaches, making placards, dreaming up slogans and generally getting ourselves into a state of heightened revolutionary fervour.

'Demonstrations are demonstrations of impotence', he intoned. 'If you need to show your support by shambling through central London for hours in the cold, then you plainly don't have any real power. You never see demonstrations by the British Road Federation (in those days the major lobby for motorway building) , do you? And when I do see such a demonstration, then I'll look out for a major expansion of the railways'.

His words spoiled the occasion for me, because they were so obviously true. But in those days I liked demonstrations for their own sake. They appeal to the boy scout in all of us, in the same way that muddy pop festivals do today. Togetherness, shared discomfort, a feeling of being a part of something bigger than yourself, are all rather enjoyable. Not to mention the self-righteous feeling of parading your certainties.

I'd been on lots - a rather small CND Easter march against the Bomb in 1966, a pale shadow of the original Aldermaston marches of the early sixties, an even smaller procession through drenching, freezing rain (I've never been so wet before or since) to the Polaris warhead factory at Burghfield outside Reading, several Vietnam War demonstrations, including the astonishingly violent and bitter one outside the American Embassy in March 1968, and the celebrity replay (do I recall Vanessa Redgrave in a headband, or is it my imagination?) in October of the same year. Then there was the protest against Enoch Powell in Oxford, where I led a charge against the Oxford constabulary outside the Town Hall, and was appalled and flummoxed when their line broke and the way into the hall was open. I didn't know what to do next - another telling realisation that helped me, ever so slowly, to think my way out of leftist politics. But that was also before I badly injured myself in a motorbike accident, an event that robbed me of much of the physical bravado I'd had before, and also began a long, long process of thought that eventually helped me grow up.

Then there was the protest against the Bloody Sunday massacre in York in 1972 - one of the few that I don't really regret. Our behaviour was a bit over the top, and I don't defend that, but the shooting of several fellow-subjects of the Queen by our own armed forces was a grave event( and a major political error , too). If we hadn't protested, we'd have been neglecting our civic duty. Not that it did any good.

Talk about governments killing their own people.

But I think the last I attended was a counter-march directed against the National Front in Leicester. They were trying to stir up trouble over the admission of Asian refugees, fleeing from racial bigotry in East Africa. We were trying to make left-wing capital out of that. It was thanks to that particular march that I found out what the words 'laughed off the stage' actually mean (just as,. years later,, I would understand the expression 'I wished the ground would swallow me up', but that's another story).

I made a speech at the York Students' Union in which I tried to link the Leicester affair with a dock strike we were then busily supporting ( If you held a strike of any kind in those days, you had to fight off eager Trotskyists coming to help you) .

There was no link at all (except our Bolshevik opportunism) and I stumbled. Someone called out accurately from the back of the room 'There are no docks in Leicester!', and I was , yes, laughed off the stage. Ouch. I can't recall going on any marches after that, but I think I've done my share.

Two things come to mind. One that in those days the media were pretty much universally hostile or indifferent. The crustier and more port-inflamed pundits of the Daily Telegraph would come out on to the balcony of their Fleet Street building to jeer as we went by, and we would merrily jeer back at them. Only the Communist 'Morning Star' (which nobody read and which we derisively referred to as 'the Daily Employee' because of its cowardly decision to stop calling itself 'The Daily Worker') would mention most of these things at all. TV might show a few seconds.

The sort of friendly, prominent and sympathetic coverage given to the TUC march by the BBC on Saturday would have been unthinkable.

Two, that most of the causes we marched for triumphed in the end, but not because we marched on the streets. They triumphed because the university generation of 1967-73 went on to work in the media, teaching, the law, the police, the church and the civil service, and marched instead through the institutions. And in many ways the less noise they had made in the raucous days of Grosvenor Square and Ho! Ho! Ho chi Minh!, the more effect they eventually had. I was amused to discover, a couple of years ago, that among my fellow-marchers on March 17 1968, protesting against America's conservative war in Vietnam, was one John Scarlett, who would become the head of MI6 and be central to Britain's liberal war on Iraq. I find this a very telling fact.

Bunker mentality

I'd like if possible to move the discussion which began on 'A Hunk of Read Meat' to this new thread. 'Red Meat' is now so far down the archive that it takes quite a while to reach it, and there are at the last count 303 comments upon it, many of them a dialogue between me and Mr 'Bunker', if dialogue it can be called.

Of course, this may attract no interest. The titanic struggle between me and Mr 'Bunker' (now also involving the Norse Thunder God, Thor) may appear to some readers as being as thrilling as the death grapple between Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty on the lip of the Reichenbach Falls. Others may see it as more like two people dressed as the Michelin Man biffing each other with foam-rubber cudgels at the end of a seaside pier. Now that Thor is involved, can we soon look forward to appearances by Baal , Ashtaroth and Moloch? Perhaps we just need some new (human) participants.

 

Blue Labour

I thought this phrase referred to David Cameron's eviscerated Tory Party. But I learned last night on BBC Radio 4 that it is also applies now to a group of Labour Party thinkers who want their movement to stop ignoring the British working class on such subjects as mass immigration and sexual politics - concentrating instead on the conditions of the working poor.

This was discussed at length by David Goodhart on the Analysis programme, which I think is available on iPlayer (as is my appearance last Friday with David Aaronovitch on the TV programme The Daily Politics, which some of you may enjoy).

If such a tendency took off, it could revolutionise the political battle in this country, putting Labour on the side of social conservatism and leaving all the green and pink stuff to the Tories.

Set it alongside an interesting article by Martin Ivens in yesterday's Sunday Times, in which Mr Ivens argues that in many ways the Coalition is now to the left of Labour. (He mentions taxation, inflation, forced egalitarianism in the universities, law and order and foreign aid).

Commenting on the moment when Nicholas Clegg admitted he had no disagreements with Mr Cameron any more, Mr Ivens says :'It actually implies that the Prime Minister has so diluted core Conservatve beliefs that he is acceptable to the Lib Dem leader'.

And he says (correctly) that 'Fleet Street's hounds are led off the scent by the privileged background of the government's leaders.'

I wonder if the things I explained in my book 'The Cameron Delusion' last year are at last beginning to penetrate the world of conventional commentary. I do hope so.

Another wrong war . . . and another PM who treats Parliament like a neutered chihuahua

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

David Cameron war of personal vanity still rages on, its aim and its end unknown. Our ludicrous Libyan allies – who may in fact be our enemies – fight each other as we protect their so-called army from Colonel Gaddafi. If we don't send weapons and troops to help them, they have no hope of winning.

Will we? Or will we, in desperation, wink at an assassination of the Colonel, an action that will take us close to his moral level?

Or will we, by then, be too busy bombing our way to the Big Society in Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Zimbabwe, China and anywhere else where government doesn't reach our leader's alleged high ethical standards? Nobody knows.

Ministers, apparently with no idea of the forces they have unleashed, drawl that it's as long as a piece of string.

Ho ho. Or maybe it's as long as the rope needed to hang themselves. Yet the House of Commons endorses this leap in the dark with a vote so overwhelming that you wonder if they put something in the water, or whatever it is they drink. What are all these costly people for?

Last year we worried about their expenses. This year we should be worried about their salaries. We hired them to question and watch the Government, not to do what the Prime Minister tells them. Aren't we still recovering from the gullibility of MPs (and the media) over Saddam Hussein? Do we learn nothing from experience? Are too many of us, and them, just too thick to be in charge of a small nuclear power? It seems so.

MPs should be reminded they are not the employees of Downing Street, but of us.

I am quite sure that a huge number of British people do not want this war, and for good reasons. It is not in our national interests. We can't even protect old ladies from rapists in our own country, and perhaps we should sort that out before reforming Africa.

They correctly think it is not our affair. After being told that we can't even afford public libraries, they have to watch Liam Fox burning great mounds of banknotes (provided by us) as he rains costly munitions on Tripoli.

They are baffled to see the remains of our naval power towed surreptitiously to a Turkish scrapyard, because we allegedly cannot afford it. And meanwhile, an obscure public relations man who has never fought in a war poses as the saviour of Benghazi.

Where was the British people's voice in the Commons on Monday? I don't care much what the UN, that rabble of torturers and tyrants, thinks. I would cheerfully see it abolished. I have no idea why we still need Nato 20 years after the threat it was formed to face vanished for ever. The fact that it has endorsed Mr Cameron's adventure doesn't comfort me.

What really troubles me is that Parliament wasn't asked its opinion until after the missiles were launched. It was treated, contemptuously, like a neutered chihuahua, a pitiful yapping thing to be pushed about by the Premier's polished toecap, and patted as long as it fawned. And if it doesn't now revolt against this treatment, then that is what it will have proved itself to be.

I believe that the Government knew by Friday, March 18 that it was more or less certain it would begin military action on the evening of Saturday, March 19. There was time to call a special session of the Commons. And there was a precedent – the Falklands.

The first motion before the House on Monday should have been a censure of the Government for launching a war of choice without seeking Parliamentary approval.

Yet, while the whole engine of British diplomacy was devoted to getting Mr Cameron's war past the UN, Nato and (of course) our ultimate rulers in the EU, Westminster was forgotten. And so were we.

This is wrong. Those involved should not get away with it. Later on, I shall say I told you so. Just now, I'm telling you so.

The BBC won't rest until we're all talking filth

In the superb recent remake of True Grit, I don't think there was a single four-letter word.

Yet it was a perfectly credible portrayal of the lives of fierce and often violent men in a cruel, half-civilised time.

In fact, half the pleasure of the film was the almost biblical English, spoken naturally by everyone – slower, clearer and a hundred times more powerful than the slurred, jerky newspeak of our day.

But don't expect the BBC, that propaganda organisation for avant-garde muck, to learn any lessons from that.

Fresh from ruining Winifred Holtby's thoughtful classic South Riding on TV, the Corporation now plans to insert four-letter words into a dramatisation of Wuthering Heights on Radio 3.

Partly this is attention-seeking, and I know they are hoping for condemnation from people such as me. But that is because they are immoral and cheap.

Many people still loathe swearing and are made unhappy by it. For instance,
a grandparent trying to listen to this classic with a grandchild could not do so without great embarrassment.

The BBC knows this, thanks to the many complaints it gets about on-air swearing. It still does it because it is biased against the older Britain where swearing was done only under strict rules.

Its executives and journalists use four-letter words in front of their own children, and think it fine to use them in front of yours, too. They think you're backward and repressed for not doing it yourself.

The same impulse lay behind the needless four-letter scene in that overrated film The King's Speech. Fashionable liberals despise restraint and take special delight in debauching innocent and kindly things.

It is quite important that this dramatisation fails and is seen to fail, and that it receives a large number of complaints when it is aired. If they can get away with Wuthering ****ing Heights, it won't be long before we have David ****ing Copperfield, Vanity ****ing Fair, Romeo And ****ing Juliet, Paradise ****ing Lost, Gray's ****ing Elegy written in a ****ing Country Churchyard, Tennyson's In ****ing Memoriam, Brave New ****ing World and, before you know where you are, Alice In ****ing Wonderland, Lord Of The ****ing Rings and (of course) Harry Potter And The ****ing Goblet Of Fire.

For goodness sake, we already have Martin Amis if you want this sort of stuff.

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Once again the banks are urged to put fivers in their cash machines. Once again they won't, because it means extra work refilling them. Yet most people want fivers. If market forces are really so powerful, why can't we get them?

Unrepentant

I have mentioned an argument that has been going on in another part of the forest, and various people here have wanted to know more about it. Well, we've held our own discussion here on second hand smoking, which was my reason for intervening on a hostile and critical site. I defended my doubts here and there. Others are able to judge if I did so successfully. I don't link to such sites for legal reasons. But they are not hard to find.

But an important secondary discussion arose out of my statement some months ago that our political class were incapable of acting effectively against illegal drugs, one of the major causes of crime in our society. I said "So many of our leaders now are unrepentant illegal drug-takers themselves that they shouldn't be trusted near the making of laws."

This was misrepresented as 'most of our elected leaders are "unrepentant illegal drug-takers" ', wholly changing its meaning and import, and derided on the basis that , had I said what I was misquoted as saying, I would have said something stupid. Which I would have, had I said it. But I hadn't.

Now, since the site's host has rightly and honourably apologised for this severe and illegitimate distortion, my prejudiced critics ( who would in general oppose anything I favoured, and favour anything I opposed) have begun to say that the undoctored statement is itself absurd. Is it, though?

Let me waft readers back, past days, weeks, months and years gone by - to the sleepy seaside town of Bournemouth in October 2000. William Hague is leader of the Tory Party, slowly climbing out of the ditch after the car-crash of 1997. Ann Widdecombe, one of the party's few recognisable national figures, then Shadow Home Secretary, has just made a fierce speech calling for the laws against drugs (especially cannabis) to be properly enforced, which you might have thought was a Conservative policy.

Now read on, the account of what happened written by my former colleague Jonathan Oliver, then political reporter for the Mail on Sunday:

'It was the small hours of Thursday morning and the bar of the Swallow Highcliff hotel was heaving. MPs and activists queued six deep to buy beer at £2.80 a pint and wine at £4 a glass to toast the final night of the Tory conference.

Some noisily voiced their views on the leader's upcoming speech which would bring the Bournemouth conference to a close while others sealed plans to travel home together later. But for one or two the week's business was far from over.

A senior party aide had a message to impart.

Placing his glass of champagne on the bar, he leaned forward and quietly explained how half the Shadow Cabinet were furious at the controversial plan by Shadow Home Secretary Ann Widdecombe to target cannabis smokers.

'Ask some of them whether they smoked dope when they were younger. I promise you will receive some fascinating responses,' he murmured before disappearing into the crowd.

Later that morning, The Mail on Sunday, acting on his suggestion, set about contacting William Hague's frontbench team.

The result was astonishing. Over the next 36 hours there followed the most extraordinary series of revelations, which could tear the Tory Party apart and have major implications for Britain's drugs policies.

Shadow Foreign Secretary Francis Maude is the bluest of the present Tory bloodline. A merchant banker, he is the son of former Minister Angus Maude, one of Margaret Thatcher's closest confidantes. The use of drugs, even marijuana, would be intolerable in such a dynasty, and such matters would have been a taboo subject for public discussion. Until now.

Yet Maude, 47, although initially uneasy with the question, told The Mail on Sunday that he had taken the drug: 'I suspect like many people of my generation, it was quite hard to go through Cambridge University in the Seventies without doing it a few times. It was an extremely long time ago.' The MP for Horsham said he stopped smoking cannabis before he entered Tory politics as a Westminster City councillor at the age of 25.

Maude studied history at Corpus Christi College between 1972 and 1976 and said his days there were 'a lot of fun'. His Cambridge contemporaries included fellow Shadow Cabinet members Michael Portillo and Archie Norman.

Maude served as a Treasury Minister in the last Tory government and would be a front-runner for the leadership if Hague quit.

His admission was hardly one of wild drug abuse. Yet within the hierarchy of the Tory Party, even today, it is something of a bombshell. Such a statement could be a disaster in a party whose membership is predominantly over 60 and who find drug use anathema.

It is not the first time Maude's personal circumstances have had a profound effect on his politics. Two years ago his gay brother Charles died of AIDS, prompting the father of five to call for more tolerance for homosexuals.

Shadow Transport Minister Bernard Jenkin was the next to come clean. Jenkin, 41, is another member of a long-established political clan: his father Patrick, now Lord Jenkin, was Environment Secretary under Margaret Thatcher.

'I really only used cannabis a couple of times,' said Jenkin. 'I would not want to give the impression I was doing it all the time. It was in my early 20s. It was miles before politics. I was working at the Ford Motor Company in Essex at their Brentwood head office.

'If the enforcement policy had been more rigorous maybe the temptation would not have come my way. I have children and I don't want them to try it.' Coincidentally, Mr Jenkin also went to Corpus Christi, Cambridge, but he insists he never took drugs while he was a student.

Within hours other members of the Shadow Cabinet were opening up about their drug experiences. They denied colluding, but as they talked more freely to The Mail on Sunday it became obvious that this was more than just a chance to get a bit of youthful excess out in the open.

Personal reputations and political career prospects were being laid on the line as well as possible opprobrium from the party faithful, friends and even family.

But such was the feeling of deep antagonism against 53-year-old Widdecombe and the way she had proselytised on the need to clamp down on those who use cannabis that these senior party members were willing to admit that they had broken the law - albeit some three decades ago.

The rebels, while giving their individual stories of cannabis use, were singing from the same song sheet. All are Right-wing monetarists to a man with no-nonsense views on the need for low taxation and prudent spending, but libertarians on issues effecting individual conduct.

Widdecombe's plan to fine cannabis users infuriated the group who saw it as dangerously undermining the party's attempts to move towards a softer stance on social issues needed to win back support among younger voters.

Their decision to speak out now is a way of mocking a woman they consider out of touch. More seriously it is a challenge by a third of the Shadow Cabinet to Mr Hague, forcing him to choose between them or Widdecombe who they now want removed from the law and order job.

The third Shadow Cabinet member to speak out on the issue was Archie Norman, 44, the Tory spokesman on the environment, transport and the regions.

He went to Charterhouse and said he took cannabis while a student at Cambridge, Harvard and the University of Minnesota in the United States.

Norman, who made his name as chief of the Asda supermarket chain, said: 'I don't regret having done it. It didn't do much for me. I turned to drink instead.

I was just a normal student like anyone else. It was fairly commonplace.' 'It doesn't worry me at all what people think. I think you expect human beings to explore and experiment. If you don't you haven't been young.' Peter Ainsworth, 43, the Shadow Culture Secretary, described how he tried cannabis and the chemical 'upper' amyl nitrate at Oxford University parties in the Seventies.

'There were lots of parties,' recalled Mr Ainsworth. 'I wasn't majorly involved in a set that was taking drugs heavily. But from time to time, actually very infrequently, these things would come round at a party. I didn't want to live my life without discovering what it was like.' He went on: 'It did nothing for me at all. It made me feel slightly sick. Someone once stuffed a handkerchief drenched in amyl nitrate in my face. I thought I was going to die.' But he said he had no regrets. 'The fact is that young people are going to experiment. But it is potentially dangerous. A great friend of mine died from drugs some years later.

It was one of those awful accidents.

I would advise everybody to steer well clear.' Social Security spokesman David Willetts, 44, nicknamed 'Two Brains' by his colleagues for his fearsome intellect, admitted trying marijuana. 'I was once offered cannabis at university,' he said. 'I had two puffs. I didn't like it and I have never had any experience of drugs since then.' Lord Strathclyde, 40, party leader in the Upper House, who is also a member of the shadow team, admitted to experimenting with cannabis. 'I tried it when I was at the University of East Anglia 20 years ago,' he said. 'I haven't done it for two decades.' Rising star Old Etonian Oliver Letwin, 44, a former Thatcher aide promoted to the Shadow Cabinet two weeks ago, said he had smoked pot - but only by accident.

'At Cambridge I was a very pretentious student,' he said. 'I grew a beard and took up a pipe. On one occasion some friends put some dope in a pipe I was smoking.

It had absolutely no effect on me at all. I don't inhale pipes or cigars. When I discovered I was extremely angry.' Of the 14 other Shadow Cabinet members, nine denied they had tried drugs, two were unavailable and three - Shadow Chancellor Michael Portillo, Shadow Agriculture Secretary Tim Yeo and Ulster spokesman Andrew Mackay - refused to answer.

'I think I have given enough information about my younger days. Don't you?' Portillo said.

Yeo said: 'It's very kind of you to ask, but I don't participate in Shadow Cabinet surveys because they rarely reflect well on those that participate.' Mackay said: 'I don't answer surveys.' The openness displayed by such senior political figures on their drug-taking pasts will shock some Tories. Traditionally they have boasted of being the party of law and order but these 'confessions' indicate the way social issues dominate today.

Hague seems to have brought most of the party together in opposing the euro for the immediate future. Now it is issues of behaviour and morality that are threatening to tear the it apart.

The Tory leader recently admitted to heavy drinking as a teenager but has denied taking drugs, while Portillo has talked about his homosexual experiences as a young man.

But the Shadow Cabinet's collective confession about their drugs past is far more political than either of these. The response to The Mail on Sunday's blunt questioning on cannabis goes against the norm. Ministers have been asked about personal drug use ever since President Clinton responded that he had 'smoked but did not inhale'. Labour's response is to decline to answer surveys with only Mo Mowlam, the outgoing Cabinet Minister, ever admitting taking cannabis.

The concerted anger at Widdecombe - an Oxford graduate - is also due to the view that she nearly wrecked the Tories' most successful conference for years while the Shadow Cabinet is miffed at not being consulted over the cannabis policy.

'If we were told about it, we could have pointed out the flaws straight away,' said one. 'It would never have seen the light of day.

We all know that the big problem is the hardcore addicts not the millions who have the occasional joint.' But behind the row lies a bungled attempt by Widdecombe to dominate the conference and undermine Portillo, her arch rival.

On Tuesday afternoon the Shadow Chancellor gave a barnstorming performance leaving Widdecombe furious. Portillo was set to dominate the headlines and eclipse her own speech the following day.

Drastic action was required.

Minutes after the Shadow Chancellor sat down, Widdecombe waddled into the cramped Press area and began briefing the drugs policy to selected journalists - to the consternation of Central Office spin doctors who had not been consulted.

But the next morning her strategy unravelled with alarming speed. The police immediately condemned her plan for fixed penalty fines for cannabis users.

Peter Williams, secretary of the Police Superintendents' Association, said: 'Our priority is not to punish people for possession but to divert them from drugs.' That afternoon Widdecombe returned to the Press room where, standing alone and surrounded by around 40 journalists, she struggled to defend her crumbling position to the delight of a small group of Portillistas.

As the sun set behind Bournemouth pier, Hague's plan to show the Tories as a united party fit for government was in tatters.

He now faces the biggest test of his leadership. He can hardly sack the seven members of his frontbench team who admitted taking drugs, immediately after the Tories promised to impose tougher penalties on drug users.

On the other hand how can he possibly order a U-turn? It would amount to personal humiliation for him and almost certainly provoke the resignation of Widdecombe.

This may well be what the seven drugs rebels want.'

That's the end of Jonathan's interesting, thorough, enterprising ( and widely followed) report. But it's not the end of the matter. Note not just what was said here, but also the manner in which it was said, the official encouragement of the reporter (such things are seldom revealed, though not unknown) and the remarkable willingness of MPs to discuss tricky questions.

Now, this is the most comprehensive survey of the kind ever done. But I think many of us can recall similar confessions, seldom particularly repentant, from many other politicians of (I think) all major parties in the years since. Though the MoS survey actually made the Labour Party (where I guess drug use among MPs is certainly no less than among the Tories) rather nervous of talking about the subject.

I'll see how many I can locate over the next few weeks. Not all of those quoted in this survey are wholly unrepentant. But some certainly are. The Prime Minister notably refuses to discuss his own past drug use (though as a member of the Commons Home Affairs Committee in 2002-3 he voted - though another Tory MP on the committee did not - for a highly radical report which bought all the arguments of the drugs liberalisers and called for the relaxation of the drug laws).

I certainly think it quite wrong to suggest that my use of the words 'so many' in this case was unfounded or absurd. I am, in fact, unrepentant.

A Few Occasions for Praise and Thanks

My thanks to Andrew Platt, who has honourably apologised for and withdrawn his suggestion that I 'regularly dismiss' scientific evidence. We would all be saved a lot of time and trouble if some other contributors here were as willing to admit faults and say sorry for them. it takes some courage to do so, and should be applauded.

Incidentally, events in another part of the electronic forest have also taken a pleasing turn. A site devoted to lofty, self-righteous attacks on conservative mid-market newspapers and their journalists recently launched a rather virulent and cocky assault on me. In the course of it, the site's host repeated and intensified a claim he had made some time ago, that I had said something which I hadn't actually said, about the influence of politicians who are themselves unrepentant former drug takers. He placed the distortion inside inverted commas and attributed it directly and unequivocally to me. After a period of claiming that this was legitimate, he eventually acknowledged that it wasn't. Good for him.

(I may have cause to discuss the actual subject of this soon, with reference to an interesting incident involving Ann Widdecombe and the then Shadow Cabinet when she bravely tried to stand against the drug legalisation current.)

I'm working on it.

 

 

Anyway, compare and contrast these two postings by this person, separated by three days:

March 19th
'Funny, isn't it Peter, how everybody who engages with you seems to "misrepresent" what you write, when all they are really doing is quoting you (word-for-word) and commenting.'

March 22nd
'I apologise, unconditionally for copying and pasting what I did and introducing the whole quote as if you had said every word. That was careless and misleading.'

So not 'word-for-word' after all, then?

I'm grateful for the apology and have forgiven the person involved, though I note that in all other respects he and his followers continue to treat me as I were some kind of monster. Well, let them. It obviously gives them pleasure, and in this rough old world who'd deny them that. A man must have some enemies, and these are the ones I've got.

But the third cause for rejoicing is far greater than these. It is an article by George Monbiot in Tuesday's Guardian, in which - with considerable guts - he follows the logic of his own position. Mr Monbiot believes that the burning of fossil fuels is endangering the planet. I think him mistaken, but I respect the learning, passion, coherence and persistence of his position (we once discussed this amid a forest of whirling windmills in mid-Wales, in a conversation in which I found him to be engaging, intelligent and not without humour).

The logic of this position, it seems to me, must be that we embark on a major programme of building nuclear power stations. But the self same people who get into a passion about man-made global warming tend to have a near-superstitious fear of nuclear power. This superstition is encouraged (for example) by the alarmist coverage of the recent Japanese nuclear problems. These are plainly serious for those working there and living nearby ( as is the case with the many coalmine disasters which plague China each year), but any sensible person can see that the fact that this rather old station was hit successively by a giant earthquake, and a huge tsunami, and that the consequences were as limited as they have been, speaks well for the safety of nuclear power.

Mr Monbiot begins:'You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.

'A c****y old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.'

And he concludes : 'Yes, I still loathe the liars who run the nuclear industry. Yes, I would prefer to see the entire sector shut down, if there were harmless alternatives. But there are no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.'

I think this is intellectual courage and honesty of a high order, and we could all do with more of it. We must learn to challenge our friends and allies when we think they are mistaken, and to value changes of mind, and admissions of error, far more highly than we do. If we don't, we are probably finished. I apologise to Mr Monbiot because I know my support will not help him at all with his Green allies, but in fact do him harm. But it needs saying, despite the costs.