Benedict Condoms
I am amazed at the weird obtuseness of those contributors who cannot see that the document about the Pope's visit was more than just a bit of fun or a private joke, and their contention that it isn't symptomatic of an (undoubted) hostility to principled Christianity in the new British establishment.
Leave aside the pathetic feebleness of the supposed humour, which would not have survived for a second among properly educated and responsible diplomats. It was circulated far too widely, and at far too high a level, for it to be dismissed as a little game by some unimportant juniors.
The Foreign Office has at least had the sense to realise this, and to apologise accordingly. I am reminded that I asked, in a posting on 21st February 2009, why Gordon Brown's anti-Christian government had invited the Pope in the first place. And I said (was I wrong?):
‘The country’s sick, and mainly sick at the top. Millions of honest, hardworking citizens do what they can to be good, to stay out of debt and pay their way, but are dumped into bankruptcy by a ruling elite that laughs at these good old notions of right and wrong.
‘Here’s a thought. You’ll have noticed that openly Christian citizens are the ones who increasingly get the rough end of this society. The cultural elite jeers at them, militant atheists denounce religious education as a form of child abuse, people are threatened for doing or saying Christian things.
‘I think there’s a reason for this. The types who run our country and its culture actively hate the idea that there’s an absolute right and wrong because it gets in their way. They think they are so good that they can do what they like. They loathe the thought that there’s a law above them, however high they get. And here, in our post-Christian, post-democratic society, we begin to see what this means in detail.’
Borne out? Or not.
The Tories
Among other strange things, W. Smith tells me: ’Peter Hitchens has an immense and baffling faith in the Conservative Party's strategists to draw the right conclusion and act upon it.‘
I cannot conceive of a more total misunderstanding of my view. My view (stated here not above one million times) is that nothing can, or should, save the Tory Party, that it cannot be reformed and must be replaced by a new and genuinely pro-British Party; that this will not happen until the Tories split and collapse; that, if the Tories fail to win this election, the Tory party will split and collapse. Therefore, as a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for this to happen, I hope and work for the collapse and splitting of the Tory Party.
I have no faith whatever in the Tory Party's strategists. I do not know how anyone could think that I have, unless (like the ignorant, spiteful and nasty comments on me on the Guardian web site, in a discussion there about my book launched by blogger Mark Vernon) they are among that large group which thinks that it knows what I think, knows it doesn't like it (or me) and so doesn't think it necessary to read what I actually say.
Let me repeat that I made all the informal efforts I could to persuade and engage those senior Tories to whom I had access. It was in the course of doing so that I grasped that they were not just slightly less militant versions of me but were (and are increasingly) actively opposed to what I believed in, and were (and are) in fact of the left. The common idea that the Tory Party will at least win us half the loaf is simply wrong. You might as well try to run a computer off the gas, as expect the Tory Party to pursue conservative policies.
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