A Parting Shot

I have carefully studied Mr Everett's attempt to respond to this post, and I am afraid he seems to have missed the point so completely that I wonder if he has joined our old friend Tim Lemon, viewing the world through a dented telescope from one of the Moons of Jupiter. In fact, I find his stance so frustrating that I will rescind my promise not to post anything else for a fortnight, just to say the following.

One or two points. He says: 'I've yet to see Peter Hitchens ever, ever accept someone else has an alternative valid point to his own (even when it's factually true, such as the time I informed him of Paul 'Bono' Hewson's devout Christianity, which he wasn't aware of, but then continued to churlishly doubt).'

I don't recall doubting the Great and Sainted Dog Biscuit's adherence to a church. Nor do I. I believe he is a member of the Church of Ireland. No more do I doubt Anthony Blair's membership of the RC church. But I shouldn't be at all surprised if, in both cases, those involved didn't turn out to espouse the sort of modern welfare Christianity, which mainly worships state intervention and foreign aid, and is a bit woolly about some of the sterner doctrines of the faith.

And my whole life (see my books 'The Broken Compass' - or its revised paperback edition 'The Cameron Delusion' and 'The Rage Against God') has been a process - which I have described in unusual detail - of accepting that others have valid points of view, and changing my mind as a result. I would say (though I am, of course biased here) that this whole blog is constant evidence of my willingness to engage, with facts and logic, with any serious and civilised opponent who is ready to argue with me. The fact that I usually come off better in such engagements may stem from the fact that I have been through most of these positions myself, and so know their flaws better than those who now hold them. Who knows?

Mr Everett - who wishes to apply my strictures against the political journalists' clique to myself - seems not to see the importance of the difference between openly expressed commitment to a cause or belief (on which I have spent so much time above) and covert propagation of an unstated but urgent agenda. In fact it's this simple point to which he seems wholly closed. Once again, if only he'd read 'The Cameron Delusion', he'd save me a great deal of effort. And I'm tempted to tell him not to return to this argument until he has done so. However, I fear he won't read it and that, even if he does, he will (see below) emerge with his view unaltered.

Nor does he seem able to tell the difference between one person (operating openly with a declared aim) and a group of people, operating under a false flag of impartiality, whose aim is undeclared.

Nor does he grasp my essential point about the weird unanimity of a supposedly competitive and diverse group of media.

I certainly hope that what I say has some influence. And I would love to believe that my words may have helped deprive the Tories of a majority. But he doesn't listen much, does he? Half my case, for several years before the poll, was that the Tories would not and could not get such a majority at the 2010 general election (nor will they get one in future, unless and until they change the constituency boundaries, and even then it will be tough). This was not an opinion, or something I was urging, but a fact, available to any unbiased and informed reader of opinion polls (see my long ago posting 'How to Read an Opinion Poll' among others). One of the main activities of the media clique was to deny this fact, by wilfully misunderstanding polls which all pointed in the same direction. Wilful misunderstanding (again see below) is generally the result of a fixed opinion, not of deliberate dishonesty.

What I was arguing was this: that the large number of people who planned to vote Tory to 'get Labour out', despite their general disappointment with that party, were in fact misguided. They could not do this. The Tories could not win. In which case they had nothing to lose, and everything to gain, by abstaining in large numbers, or at least voting for non-Tory candidates, and so sending the Tory Party to such a defeat that it would collapse and make it possible for real conservatives to seek to replace it with something better.

Thus, I can say with absolute conviction that a) my assessment was right and b) my advice was ignored. What I said *would* happen, happened. What I urged people to do, they did not do.

I was at fault in not thinking more seriously about the possibility of a Lib-Con pact, which I thought was excluded by the militantly anti-Liberal rhetoric of the Tory leadership - all the more militant because the differences between the two parties were so small.

It is my suspicion that Mr Cameron and his close advisers realised long before the election both that they could not win it alone and that such a pact might be possible, and I will not be surprised if, in memoirs yet to be written, we find that there were contacts between the two party leaderships well before the election.

But Mr Everett's claim that I somehow cost the Tories the election is, alas for me, not borne out by any facts.

I still cannot understand how a principled person can offer an alternative opinion to his own stated one, arrived and stated consistently over years. Either I have an opinion, or I don't. If I do, I can't simultaneously have another one. It's kind of him to concede that I don't *have to* offer two contradictory opinions on one page under my name. But he seems quite unable to see how ludicrous such an act would have been. Again, this hilarious inability to descry the blazingly obvious stems from the problem I shall deal with at the end.

Mr Everett more reasonably says that the Mail on Sunday should have offered an alternative opinion to mine. And so it did, both in its main opinion column, which urged a Conservative vote, and in many columns by Lord Rees-Mogg, who was repeatedly supportive of Mr Cameron and his project, and continues to be.

Conveniently for Mr Everett, he ignores my mention of the MoS opinion column. He does so, once more, because to acknowledge it would be to admit that his argument is bunkum. But he cannot do that (see the end).

Fairness does not consist of one person speaking opposite ideas simultaneously out of either side of his mouth. It consists of giving competing points of view proper space in which to be heard - something the MoS always does, notably by having a columnist of the Right, and a columnist of the Left, occupying prominent positions in the paper.

As to his scheme, he says: 'He cannot say that he did not think of this, as I requested it in the week before on this blog, as I suspected what he was about to do. (Not that "my" requests/opinion counts for anything, I just think that would have been fairer if they'd done it..)'

Nor do I say that I did not think of it. I just say that it would have been silly, and the problem was more than adequately dealt with by the opinion column and by Lord Rees-Mogg.

Continuing not to pay attention, Mr Everett says: 'On to another point - Peter Hitchens says that this (sheep-like) tiny clique "…are all agreed that the key qualification for being in office is that you must agree with them". Not at all like Mr Hitchens then, hey?'

Well no, actually, not at all. I am open in my partiality. They are not. I am alone. They are many. They have guaranteed access to the airwaves without being required to declare any partiality. I have episodic, occasional, brief access to the airways - in which I am always clearly identified as having a stated position.

Mr Everett: 'However, Mr Hitchens does not tell us who these "tiny clique" are – other than they are "political writers and broadcasters".'

I assume that, having been alerted, people can watch out for this sort of thing themselves. It is very easy to see.

Mr Everett: 'Presumably some of these people in this "tiny clique" are openly biased columnists such as himself – in which case they're the same as him.'

No, actually, by definition they cannot be. Open declarations of bias by, say, BBC correspondents and presenters, or by lobby journalists on national newspapers, would make this behaviour impossible (except in the bizarre cases of some openly biased columnists who then become 'impartial' presenters of BBC programmes, their former views apparently forgotten, discussed in my book. This is a process not available to me, as I know in detail, having responded to a BBC executive's public urgings to conservative journalists to apply for a presenter's slot, and got precisely nowhere). Again, this is blazingly obvious from all I say. If Mr Everett spent the time he uses up on these repetitive and unresponsive complaints, reading my book on the subject, he would by now understand the point which most readers of this site long ago grasped.

No, I am not going to respond to his urgings to start naming the people involved. As I say, readers, viewers and listeners, once alerted, can easily spot it for themselves. Mr Everett could do, if he so chose. I am confident they will observe the truth of what I say, which is evident to me, morning, noon and night. But I do not have the research and record-keeping facilities, or the time, to bandy names about. Any individual I accused of this would perforce have to deny it, and then I would have to spend most of my life watching many years of old videotapes and combing through recordings and cuttings substantiating my case. I've no doubt I could do so, if I devoted my whole waking life to it, and if I were granted the facilities. But I prefer to live as a human being, columnist, blogger, author, cyclist, reader of books etc, who occasionally eats, sleeps and even wanders round a cathedral. And, contrary to the beliefs of many, I don't have some vast 'staff' working for me. There are some things I am willing to do for Everett. This posting is one of them. But there are others I'm not.

Oh, and what's the explanation? The one that always applies in cases where people don't get it, even when it's in plain view. There is none so blind as he that *will* not see. The real question is why Mr Everett is so determined to cling to a political party whose leadership loathes and despises him, has always betrayed him and always will. I'd understand it better if Mr Everett were a keen supporter of the EU taking over Britain, of bad schools, lax law-enforcement, uncontrolled mass immigration and systematic undermining of the married family. But I don't think he is these things. The Tory Party, on the other hand, is.

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