By PETER HITCHENS Standing ovations are almost always demonstrations of insincerity. No sane human being really thinks that a politician’s speech is so good they want to stand and simper, batting their palms together for several minutes, at the end. Often the applause is all the longer when the party involved is rallying round somebody it hates or mistrusts, for the sake of its image. People who complain that we show too much deference to Royalty really should witness one of these treacly displays of fake admiration, as heartfelt as the wreaths at a gangster funeral. Forced smiles: Samantha Cameron is paraded through the Tory throng by her husband This sort of applause has to be organised, and also carefully signalled in the speech with gestures and changes in pace. These tricks are actually known as ‘clap traps’, hence the word. I feel sorry for those who are so easily manipulated with devices that wouldn’t fool an averagely intelligent Berkshire pig. But what I don’t understand is why my media colleagues, who are supposed to be independent and to reflect many different views, have now joined in such ovations, in print and on the air. David Cameron’s speech on Thursday was a wasteland, empty of original thought, bare of serious policy, punctuated only by rather revolting appeals to gross sentimentality. I watched Mrs Cameron afterwards, as she was conducted through the falsely ecstatic throng. Her pretty, intelligent face was an extraordinary picture of honesty battling against loyalty. She would force a smile, for the sake of her husband. But after a second or so, it faded away into a blank, embarrassed expression. Then she forced another smile. Then that, too, faded away. And so on, several times. She simply couldn’t keep smiling, as she knew she ought to. And why should she? Why should anyone? I watched, and read, a lot of the speeches at this conference. I talked privately with a number of leading participants. And I noticed a very important thing. The Tory Party has grasped that conservative newspaper columnists, even this one, are voicing concerns that are genuinely felt by the people of Britain. So many of these speeches were – to begin with – quite like such columns. We had Mr Cameron and Christopher Grayling and Dominic Grieve producing individual cases of misery caused by our feeble criminal justice system or our unhinged welfare state. We had William Hague complaining about the European Union. We had Michael Gove mocking the pathetic examinations which ask children about sausages instead of science. The problem is that these disasters are largely the Tory Party’s fault. It was the Tories, in 1991, who introduced dishonest prison sentences, actually half as long as they looked, and automatic early release. Earlier, in 1984, they passed the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, a liberal And they too are responsible for the creation of the GCSE exam, the one which asks questions about sausages. Also for the destruction of most of the grammar schools, which provided the sort of state education Mr Gove’s do-it-yourself ‘free schools’ will fail to offer, if any of them actually get opened. In 18 years of government, they didn’t have the guts to end the subsidies which continue to create fatherless families each year by the thousand, the real, central threat to marriage, the family, social stability, morality and order. They took us into the EU in the first place, then into the Single European Act, then into Maastricht. Now, their contortions over the EU constitution are a device to hide the fact that, much as they like to bang on about Europe in Opposition, they will be its None of this has actually changed. They won’t apologise for or renounce any of these errors. It is the same party. They are the same people. In fact, they are actually more Left-wing than they used to be. I am told there are more ex-members of David Owen’s Social Democrat Party in the Shadow Cabinet than there are on the Liberal Democrat front bench, not that they talk much about it. And this is our hope of liberation from socialism, bureaucracy and the liberal elite? Pull the other one. No wonder the conference backdrop was composed Manchester was the gateway to cloud cuckoo land. Those present at both party conferences had to endure glutinous video-screen lectures from the Irish millionaire popular singer with the surgically attached sunglasses who bizarrely calls himself after a well-known dog biscuit. If this sort of thing continues, especially after the lunch interval, they are going to have put sick bags out in the hall. But I think his presence and endorsement at both gatherings tells an important truth about modern British politics. The growing millions of us who loathe the pretensions of rock-music moralists and everything they stand for are completely unrepresented at Westminster. Tory and Labour alike are in the grip of some sort of endless Age of Aquarius, where the only music is guitar music, the only good opinion is a belief in man-made global warming, the only religion egalitarianism and the only orthodoxy is multiculturalism and sexual liberation. Let’s have a new party where videos of Mr Dog Biscuit are shown only so they can be heartily booed, and everyone can laugh at him. Good for Stella McCartney for putting her child down for a private school. Her funky father famously thought it was somehow better to inflict comprehensive education on her, a judgment she obviously doesn’t agree with. I wonder if people like Paul McCartney, whose beautifully written class composition about the Coronation was published recently, simply haven’t a clue what modern state schools are like. __________________________________________________________________ And, as they were having great difficulty in finding anyone else to support Britain’s immediate withdrawal, would I please, please, please take part? I said yes. Several days later, the same functionary called me and said they had now found a ‘female person’ to do the job instead – as if that person’s femaleness was a clinching argument. Curious, I asked who this ‘female person’ was. ‘Erm, Lindsey someone,’ she replied. I’m still not sure if she was embarrassed or genuinely didn’t know who she had hired. It turned out my replacement was Lindsey German, until a few months ago a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers’ Party, a revolutionary Bolshevik organisation. Does a Marxist Leninist Trotskyist really represent the 57 per cent of the British population who are against this daft intervention better than I do? The BBC thinks so.The Tory Party is racing to cloud cuckoo land.. via Manchester
Last updated at 2:08 AM on 11th October 2009
anti-police measure whose codes of practice are the origin of most of the red tape they claim now to be against.
keen enforcers in government.
of endlessly shifting clouds. The laughable Mr Dog Biscuit
A lesson Stella had to learn the hard way
Here, I believe, is proof that the BBC is institutionally biased against male conservatives. Not long ago, I received a call from a BBC Radio 4 person. It was not very flattering. They were having a big debate about Afghanistan.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1219488/PETER-HITCHENS-The-Tory-Party-racing-cloud-cuckoo-land--Manchester.html#ixzz0TbYgh2Fr
Sunday 11 October 2009
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