Were you, like me, one of those people who felt alarmed when the mob applauded Earl Spencer’s shameful speech at Princess Diana’s funeral? And were you, like me, one of those who felt betrayed and even more alarmed when the establishment congregation inside our great royal church crav enly joined in the clapping? If so, you may understand what I mean when I say that the twisted cult of Diana has now led to the even-more-twisted cult of Raoul Moat. And that Siobhan O’Dowd, originator of the Facebook tribute to Moat, is a direct inheritor of the wave of petulance and self-pity that sloshed stickily across this country after the Princess’s death in a car crash, leaving behind a smelly residue of resentment, candle grease and rotting bouquets that has never quite gone away since. The cultural revolution of the Sixties robbed the British poor of anything to believe in, or any reason to try to be good. Patriotism was derided and rejected. The Christian religion was mocked, marginalised and studied – if at all – as a weird curiosity. The stable two-parent families in which children learned manners and morals were more or less abolished, so that a household with two contin uously married parents is now a luxury item, as is an orderly classroom. The virtues of patience, stoicism, thrift, temperance, constancy and modesty were reclassified as ‘repression’ and ‘inhibition’ and all were encouraged to cast them off. And they did, so that on Friday and Sat urday nights it often seems as if half the young people of Britain have decided to dress as hookers, and the other half as convicts newly released from 19th Century hulks. We are nearly back to the days of William Hogarth’s Gin Lane, only without the high-minded evangelists trying to rescue the poor from wickedness. Anthony Blair rode the tide of slime after Diana’s death by pronouncing her The People’s Princess (or rather, by obeying Alastair Campbell’s instruction to do so). Mr Cameron, who wants to be the heir to Blair but is too intelligent to fake sincerity in the same way, claims to be shocked and baffled by the Facebook adulation of Moat. Really? Mr Cameron, apart from being head of PR for a trashy TV station, was once the director of Urbium, a company that owned a chain of early-hours bars selling sickly cocktails. His only significant action as a backbench MP was to endorse a criminally stupid report calling for weaker anti-drug laws. He famously declared that he likes Britain as it is. Well, that is the Britain in which Raoul Moat went unpunished by the law for years, before finally brutalising a girl of nine so badly that even an English court was prepared to jail him. So why should Mr Cameron be shocked to find that such a man has admirers and absurdly seek to suppress what is at least a genuine expression of public opinion? This is the nation that progressives like him have made. If they don’t like its steroid-swollen face, they should admit that they have been wrong, not try to censor the truth about it. Britain’s massed divisions of political journalists have fallen like starving men on Lord Mandelson’s tedious memoirs. They allow them to return to the only thing they are interested in, the meaningless quarrel between the louse Blair and the flea Brown. Almost none of these people ever knew what New Labour was really doing, or why it mattered. For the same reason they cannot grasp the enormous significance of an entirely smooth and harmonious coalition between a supposedly Left-wing party and a supposedly Right-wing one. The only interesting thing in the entire book is the account of Mr Blair’s meeting with ‘Sir’ Michael Jagger: ‘Tony summoned up his courage and went up to Mick. Looking him straight in the eye, he said, “I just want to say how much you’ve always meant to me.” He looked wistful, perhaps remembering his frustrated rock-star ambitions from his student days. For a moment, I thought he might ask for an autograph.’ David Cameron claims to be ‘terrified’ by the difficulty of finding a good secondary school for his children in London. This is, to put it mildly, exaggeration (like the constant use in modern Britain of the word ‘desperate’ to mean ‘slightly anxious’ or ‘mildly concerned’). The Premier is no doubt troubled by the political difficulty he is in. He has skilfully wangled his children into an exclusive, celebrity crammed Church of England primary totally unlike normal state schools. And he has got away with it, thanks to the media softness that also spared him over his immensely greedy expenses claims for his large country house. But he now sees that his new Liberal Conservative Party will expect him to keep his children in the state sector. So no Eton or St Paul’s for them. Yet almost all the state secondary schools in London are bog-standard comprehensives, which means that even the best ones are far short of private standards. He’s not (yet) a Roman Catholic, so no London Oratory either. I can help. First, he should buy a house in the tiny and very expensive catchment area of Camden Girls (heavily favoured by several New Labour bigshots who did exactly this). Then (he can afford it, especially with no fees to pay) he can buy another house in Gospel Oak (near Alastair Campbell) in the almost equally expensive catchment area of William Ellis boys’ school. Both these schools are in effect grammar schools, which Mr Cameron is against. But officially they are comprehensives, so it’s all right. This is how egalitarian hypocrites purchase good secondary schooling in London, and get away with it. All our hopes of leaving Afghanistan are now pinned on training the Afghan army to take over from us. But member of this 'army', and the even worse 'police', murder our troops. And still no frontbench politician will call for withdrawal and the end of this ridiculous, futile, bloody deployment.
18 July 2010 12:06 AM
Our shameful journey from Diana to the sick cult of Raoul Moat
Sunday, 18 July 2010
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
Of course, it is obvious now that the unleashed passions of the new underclass are pretty nasty. How could they not be? They have been brought up to be nasty, or at least nobody in our neon-lit, raucous Babylon has ever had any opportunity to persuade them to be anything else but nasty during their formative years.
Rock star Blair: The awful truth
And for a moment, the awful truth – that for ten years we had this Olympically ignorant, tickle-minded, empty vessel pretending to be Prime Minister while others pursued a great constitutional and cultural upheaval – is revealed.
Hypocrisy will save our ‘terrified’ PM
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