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This mugger-hugger knows the truth, just like the ‘all mouth and no truncheon’ phoney

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

I agree completely with that awful old wet liberal Ken Clarke. Talking about politicians and crime, he says ‘the failure of the past has been to use tough rhetoric and to avoid taking tough decisions that might prove unpopular’.

Quite. I would much rather have an honest, straightforward mugger-hugger like Ken in charge, weeping and snuffling about rehabilitation and similar rubbish, than a false friend of the people like that phoney hard man and closet liberal Michael Howard, all mouth and no truncheon.

That way, we all know from the start that we can expect no help from the State against the misery of modern Britain, and that – if we want such help – we will have to build a new political party which understands the problem and wants to put it right. This remains the most urgent task in this country.

What unites Michael Howard and Ken Clarke (and the Labour Party, and the Liberals) is that they wilfully don’t have a clue about crime or disorder. They wilfully know nothing about policing. They wilfully don’t understand what happens in prisons. They know that the truth is very Right-wing indeed, so they hide from it.

Deliberate ignorance is the essential qualification for all politicians, academics and ‘home affairs correspondents’, and civil servants in the Ministry of Injustice which Mr Clarke now heads. All the information is readily available to anyone who wants it. But it leads to conclusions which our elite can’t bear, mainly the need to rough up, punish and frighten the wicked. So they pretend it doesn’t exist.

You can tell how ill-informed politicians and media types are by a series of easy tests. Here are some. Do they refer to ‘bobbies on the beat’? This is a clear sign of a dunce on the subject. The modern generation of uniformed social workers, loaded down with stab-vests, retract able batons, handcuffs, frying pans, helmet videos, SatNavs, pepper sprays, homophobia detection devices and sociology books, cannot possibly be called ‘bobbies’ by anyone who understands the English language.

As for ‘the beat’, don’t these people know that there has been no such thing for 40 years?

The regular foot patrolling of the streets of this country by uniformed const ables was ordered to cease by the Home Office Police Advisory Board on December 7, 1966. Since then, foot patrols have only been sent out as an occasional special concession, or in some lucky city centres – when the police are not too busy driving their cars or filling in forms.

The next sign of criminological ineptitude is the wearisome claim that prison doesn’t work. The idea is spread that because so many ex-prisoners reoffend, this means jail isn’t a deterrent. But this leaves out the truth, which is that it is far harder to get into prison in modern Britain than it is to get into university. You have to try and try, and will be fobbed off for years with meaningless ‘cautions’, fines you don’t have to pay and ‘community service’ you can laugh at. Only hardened criminals (plus middle-class council tax rebels and people who defend their homes) ever actually get locked up.

No wonder they reoffend. If a second offence got law-breakers confined in austere gaols with exhausting hard labour, hard beds and sparse, tasteless food, without in-cell TVs or pool tables or phones (or drugs), and run by grim-jawed warders who took no nonsense, the reoffending rate would drop to near-zero in a week. What’s more, thousands of potential criminals would be scared into behaving themselves. That’s all the ‘rehabilitation’ this country needs, and the only kind that works.

But I’m sorry to say that this sort of unfashionable approach, while it hugely improved the lives of millions, would be deeply unpopular at the BBC, which is the only unpopularity Mr Clarke and his boss David Cameron really care about.

A beautiful achievement reduced to tat

I don’t suppose Sir Sidney Camm, Sir Stanley Hooker or Ralph Hooper ever regarded themselves as artists. But this trio, who designed the wonderful plane which became famous as the Harrier (and in which I once flew for a glorious, if queasy, 45 minutes), created a thing of great beauty.

Aeroplanes have to be beautiful or they wouldn’t fly, but I’ll leave it to you to work out why that might be. I would be interested to know how the self-styled ‘artist’ Fiona Banner can claim any real credit for the retired Sea Harrier hung by its tail from the ceiling of what I think in future must be called the Tat Gallery in London. Did she hoist it up there herself? Could she, sat alone in a room with a pencil and a sheet of paper, make a decent drawing of a Boeing 747 from memory? Yet this woman, hitherto famous for displaying a long-written description of a pornographic film on a wall, and calling that ‘art’, now receives sighs of praise from our cultural elite.

With fake profundity, Ms Banner asks how an object designed as a ‘killing machine’ can evoke such enthusiasm. Well, apart from the fact that it was designed above all to fly, it rather depends on whom it was meant to kill, and under what conditions. Maybe defending peaceful islanders against an illegal invasion doesn’t make Ms Banner enthusiastic, but I think it’s a pretty good use of human skill.

Finally, our children get an honest drugs guide

What is your child’s school saying about drugs? The chances are that teachers will be using material preaching the dangerous message of ‘harm reduction’, which encourages drug use by pretending it’s inevitable. If you want an alternative, which tells the truth about the dangers, ask your school to get hold of an excellent booklet on this subject by Mary Brett, an experienced science teacher who ran a successful anti-drugs programme for years. It is called ‘Drug Prevention Education’ and you – or your child’s school – can order it on the web by visiting www.cannabisskunksupport.com.

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Anthony Blair claimed he could not understand his law chief’s clear advice that an invasion of Iraq would be illegal. In the same way, today’s Cabinet seem unable to understand that our invasion of Afghanistan is pointless, and has been defeated. People will not see what they do not want to see. Well then, we must make them see it. They must be incessantly reminded that they are ordering the deaths and maimings of their fellow countrymen because they are too cowardly to admit that the intervention was a mistake. Which major figure in Parliament will win honour by being the first to tell them so?

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Those who doubt the deep-frozen totalitarian nature of the new China should note the creepy public confession made last week by a Tibetan monk recanting his protest after ‘patriotic re-education’, and being paraded before Western journalists in Lhasa. ‘I wasn’t beaten or tortured,’ said Norgye. ‘Through education about the law I realised that what we had done in the past was wrong.’ Stalin’s last statue may have been torn down last week, but his spirit still walks.

02 July 2010 5:18 PM

Let Me Explain...

...A little more about the point of the 'Finest Hour' argument, first taken up by 'Stan', and now by 'HM'. The posting by 'HM' suggests that my main purpose is still eluding some readers, who seek to give me motives and opinions I don't have rather than recognise what is at issue here.

I reproduce below what 'HM' wrote (1st July, 9.16 pm, on the 'Demetriou Conundrum' thread), interleaving my comments in rebuttal and explanation:

'HM' ‘Yes, the point is clear now. If it had not been for the Polish guarantee Britain could have continued its successful policy of appeasement, and we would all have been much better off.’

PH: This is just crude. 'HM' makes it plain that he has not paid much attention, and is prevented from giving my argument fair consideration by prejudice and dogma. I have nowhere argued that the policy of 'appeasement', such as it was, was 'successful'. On the contrary, I have mocked Neville Chamberlain for his delusions about Munich.

The thing that 'HM’ cannot cope with, because it shakes his moral universe (as it shakes that of 'Stan') is the idea that Britain had no substantial interest in maintaining the Versailles-imposed borders of Eastern Europe. Those borders, by the way, have now been wholly abolished under the Schengen agreement and Versailles has been wholly undone, without any protest from Britain, or any special loss on our part. Even at the time, British inter-war diplomacy was at least flexible on these matters, and British public opinion increasingly grew to believe that Versailles had been a foolish treaty.

In fact, we had no such interest. The French did, or thought they did, and we were in a sort of alliance with France, but for what purpose? The heart of this argument is that Britain's interests were global and imperial, and that we gained nothing and lost much by intervening in continental matters at this stage.

As for 'we would have been much better off', this is also a crude caricature. All I am saying is that, had we not gone uselessly to war in September 1939, we might have saved our empire and much else. We might not. But it is certain that the September 1939 declaration of war (caused directly by the May guarantee to Poland) led to our catastrophic national decline, and very nearly got us invaded and subjugated for the first time since 1066.

What is interesting, once again, is the scornful sarcasm contained in this misunderstanding by 'HM'. He cannot see the subject straight. The Churchill legend is too precious to him. Anyone who questions it must be some sort of Hitlerite apologist. Not so.

'HM' (quoting me) ’...”we must look elsewhere for the decisive moment ... I think a persuasive case has been made for the Polish guarantee.”

Persuasive indeed, if it had not been made and kept to, then no one would ever have taken us seriously again, and we could have given up on war for good.’

PH: But it was made, and it was not kept to. We did nothing to help Poland (and the French only undertook a symbolic and swift advance into the Saarland). We did not engage with the Germans on land until Churchill's disastrous and incompetent foray into Norway, months after Poland had been ploughed under by the USSR and the Third Reich. We did not engage with the Germans properly until they came down through Belgium, outflanked us and drove us into the sea. Who exactly did we want to take us seriously? Fiji? The only people whose opinion counted at the moment were the major European powers, Germany and the USSR. They treated us with contempt before the guarantee, after the guarantee, and again after we had failed to enforce it.

And why would giving a guarantee we couldn't enforce to a country we didn't in fact help make anyone take us seriously? This is diplomacy as melodrama, or soap opera. The conduct of Foreign Policy is not a job interview or a character test. By the way, who exactly has taken us seriously as a major power since then? Apart from Argentina, hardly a major power, what country have we been able to challenge and defeat on our own? We never again operated as an offensive military force after Dunkirk (leaving aside various imperial incursions in Iraq and Iran) except as an ally (and a dependent, bankrupt ally) of the USA.

The fact is that nobody would have taken Neville Chamberlain seriously again if he had done nothing after Hitler marched into Prague. And thanks to his wounded pride, vanity and weak political position, our country was hitched irrevocably to Poland's cart.

'HM' (quoting me) ‘ “But if this is the pivotal moment, then we went to war by mistake, for a cause already lost, rather than to save the world.”

Exactly. That we did actually save the world does nothing to excuse this, since it only happened by accident.‘

PH: In what way did 'we' 'save' 'the world'? Without the USA and the USSR, our accidental and far from sentimental allies of necessity, we would have had to make terms with the Germans in the end anyway. Without their military alliances, Germany would not have been defeated. And how 'saved' were Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria after the war was over? How saved, for that matter, were the people of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, or the peoples of the Soviet Empire in general, set to endure decades of show trials, death camps and despotism lasting for almost half a century after our world-saving victory? Did it make their lives better or worse that we went to war in 1939 and promptly bankrupted ourselves and lost our empire? I don't see how. It is no good 'HM' trying to wriggle out of facing this by what appears to me to be sarcasm.

'HM' (quoting me): ’ “The Churchill myth has arisen for several reasons. One, it is comforting ... Two, it fosters the weird belief that the Second World War was primarily a conflict over goodness between free, democratic Britain and wicked Nazi Germany...”

Precisely. Though Britain was free and democratic, and Nazi Germany was wicked, this was not the reason we went to war, so it’s something we can justifiably ignore.‘

PH: I am not sure what 'HM' is trying to say here. Is he admitting that we didn't go to war with Germany because of its regime (We didn't. Though it is hard to believe this in the light of the 'Finest Hour' interpretation of history)? If he is, then he must begin to ask why in that case *did* Britain go to war with Germany *when we did*. And here I must point out yet again that my case is not that we should never have gone to war with Hitler. It would probably have been necessary. It is that we shouldn't have done so in September 1939. And it is this uncomfortable question ‘Why, and why then?’ that I now refuse to shy away from.

HM (quoting me) ‘ “And if we were so keen on making war on wickedness, then why did we have wicked Stalin as our principal ally on land?”

Why indeed? Being forced to is no defence.’

PH. On the contrary, it is a perfectly good defence. There is none better. As Mr Churchill rightly said, 'If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable remark about the Devil in the House of Commons'. Countries often have to make unwelcome alliances of necessity to serve their own interests, among which are survival and independence. It would be foolish not to do so. But it is absurd to pretend, if you make such alliances, that you are also fighting a great war of principle. In which case, and here comes the really awkward part of the argument, the Soviet alliance is justified if it was necessary for our own interests. But in that case what were our interests in fighting Hitler in 1939, which then compelled us to seek this unwelcome ally? How did going to war in September 1939 make our continued independence and survival more likely than staying out? Why did we start a war in 1939, when we didn't need to? If it was all right for the USA to stay out of the war until 1941 (and most 'Finest Hour' adherents think it was, since they are convinced that the USA is our bestest friend) then why wasn't it all right for us to stay out for just as long?

'HM' (once again quoting me): ‘ “Likewise, if we were so much against appeasement in 1939, why did we appease Stalin at Yalta...”

We can have no excuse, even if we were exhausted, and out of money, and simply relieved to be at peace again.’

PH: Well, actually, we were not at peace yet during the Yalta conference, but let that go. If 'HM' accepts that Yalta was as bad a piece of appeasement as Munich (as it was) then why would it have been so wicked to push Poland into giving up Danzig and the corridor in 1939, or simply let Hitler take them? Why does HM not apply to Churchill at Yalta the strictures he applies to Chamberlain in May 1939? What 'HM' said about that was that ‘If [the Polish Guarantee] had not been made and kept to, then no one would ever have taken us seriously again, and we could have given up on war for good.’

So, having gone to war, mortgaged ourselves for generations, supposedly for the freedom of Poland, and expended untold lives, we then hand over Poland to Stalin, and 'HM' is quite happy and content, or at least willing to accept the cruel necessities of life. Or is he? Or is he, as it seems to me, trying to avoid the point? Does his moral hauteur apply only in 1939, when Hitler is involved, and fade mysteriously into real-politik in 1945, when we are dealing with Stalin?

HM (quoting me) ‘ “So the question still arises. Why did we go to war with Germany when we did?”

Why indeed? If only we’d waited a better opportunity would have been sure to arise. Or we could simply have left it too late, after which it would all have been out of our hands.’

PH. It is true that a better opportunity might have arisen, though of course he can only acknowledge that truth sarcastically (in fact, sarcasm seems to be his main way of acknowledging the truth of my position). But what does he mean by 'leaving it too late'? Too late for what? Since from June 1941 onwards it was all out of our hands anyway (and we were already broke, and committed to a war from which we could only depart either by final victory as a client ally, on American and Soviet terms, or through a humiliating peace with Hitler), what does he envisage by the term 'out of our hands'?

The next set of quotes from me arranged by 'HM' is as follows: ‘ “We would have done far better to do as the USA did, and calculate our intervention to suit our own needs. Who knows what that might have led to?”

No one.

“But it would be unlikely to have been worse than what we in fact faced...”

Sorry. No one except Peter Hitchens.

“...the loss of our empire and our power, plus a narrow escape from subjugation.”

Only the loss of our empire and our power, and a failure to escape subjugation would have been worse. And that couldn’t possible have happened, could it?’

PH: The level of wilful incomprehension here, mingled with the sarcastic bitterness of a man whose dreams have been trodden upon, is astonishing.

It might have happened. But 'HM' needs to explain the circumstances under which he thinks it would have happened. We know - because it did happen - that going to war over Poland in September 1939 cost us our empire and our standing as a major power. We know it nearly led to our subjugation. Why would staying out of the war, keeping our army intact and continuing to build up our forces have made it likely that the outcome would be worse? Does 'HM' think that if Hitler had truly wished to conquer this country he couldn't have done so in 1941, had he chosen to strike West instead of East? Yet he didn't, any more than he ever seriously intended to attack the USA. What does this (apart from all his published thoughts and writings) suggest about his actual priorities?

HM (quoting me): ‘ “We might also re-examine our own decayed, debauched national culture and realistically examine our standing with clear eyes, casting aside all sentimentality and self-delusion...”

Quite so. If only we could abandon any lingering pride over WWII and focus on hating ourselves and longing for our empire we would be much happier as a nation, and so much less deluded.’

PH. Once again a bitter, sarcastic parody of what I actually say. Where do I recommend that we 'hate ourselves' or long for our empire (that is actually what many sentimentalists and 'Finest Hour' adherents do? I do not. I know only too well that the empire is gone for good). One thing we might not do, if we faced the truth, is try to continue to behave as if we were a great power, when we are not, or to have a vast and bloated welfare state we can't afford, or to insist, year by year, on maintaining a standard of living we cannot afford, as if we still were what we long ago ceased to be. We might also recognise the urgent need to salvage our national independence, which, in a fog of Churchillian fake grandeur, we have given away to the EU.

30 June 2010 4:17 PM

The Last of the Wine

This posting won't all be about Mary Renault (who by the way did not pronounce her name like the French car, but so that the second syllable rhymed with 'fault'). But because several readers responded to my complaint that my postings on books did not seem much appreciated, part of it will be about her. The rest will be some general responses.

I have been meaning to read these books - mostly novels about classical Greece - for years, but never quite getting round to it. I began to do so thanks to the serendipity of second-hand bookshops in small market towns, visited on quiet afternoons. Seeing several of her books at bargain prices, I stuffed them in my backpack and began reading (as it happened) 'The King Must Die' as I waited for a delayed train on a country platform. I could not stop. Since then, I have read almost all the books she wrote about the classical world.

I'm not completely adrift there. I forced my way through the Odyssey as a child, missing nine tenths of the point but never quite shaking off a liking for wicked, tricky old Ulysses (and Tennyson's ringing, plangent poem of that name). I had a much easier time with Roger Lancelyn Green's 'Tales of the Greek Heroes' and 'The Tale of Troy', those wonderful improving books brought out by Puffin in the days when Penguin still felt they had a mission to edify and uplift children. Later in life I also read Simon Raven's 'Alms for Oblivion' series, packed with undisguised references to the Classical world which he plainly preferred to the Christian one, and also crammed with the sort of ruthless fates which befell its inhabitants. Raven was (like Mary Renault) a homosexual who lived largely outside the world into which he had been brought up. He liked the vengeful, spiteful capriciousness of the Greek Gods and often visited spectacularly cruel Nemesis on his characters.

But back to 'The King Must Die'. Here I was, seeing the legend of Theseus from inside the mind of Theseus himself. It took me a little while to realise that this was what was going on - not that this was a problem because the narrative flow is swift and powerful. Nor was I sure if I was meant to like or sympathise with the narrator, who is also the central character. For what Miss Renault has done is to make herself into a Greek pagan (and a man at that), to take on his character, his beliefs and his morals - many of which seem repulsive to us, but which in the pre-Christian world were perfectly normal. It is her ability to think herself into this state of mind which, I think, makes her writing so potent. I suspect she found a great deal of pleasure in the act of imagination. I also suspect that, like many who for one reason or another found the Christian world too confining, the classical world offered an escape, sunlit and thrilling, from the grey dutifulness all around them.

Much of this is admirable - the chivalry, the contempt for cowardice, the total respect for the binding power of oaths, the physical courage. Much of it is not - the extreme violence, the treatment of women in general as cyphers and third-class beings, the cruelty, the unquestioning acceptance of such things as slavery. Slavery, by the way, is here very well described, both as a horror to be expected by the conquered and defeated (avoid this, is the message), and as a state of life considered entirely normal and morally unproblematic by those who underwent it and by those who imposed it. I should point out that in the non-Christian world, and in the Christian world for much of its existence, this was the normal state of affairs. Christianity may have taken many centuries to realise that slavery was absolutely wrong, but it is rare in the moral systems of the world in having done so at all.

These things are combined with an almost total reverence (there are moments when one or two characters utter sceptical sentiments) for the Divine origins of the created world, and the unceasing need for man to acknowledge them - no important action done without a preceding sacrifice or libation, an unending cycle of festivals (some extremely debauched, violent and ugly, as Renault does not attempt to conceal), and a dreary hopelessness about death - belief in an afterlife combined with a gloomy melancholy about the wretched, flitting fate of the great majority of the dead.

One brief passage in 'The King Must Die' concerns the fate of a Jewish youth, captured by Cretan slavers in some back-country expedition on the Eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and forced to take part in the bullfighting rituals of Knossos. The utter, explosive conflict between this cosmically optimistic monotheist and the fatalistic, polytheist world of the Hellenes is austerely, briefly but very movingly described. He is like a time traveller. The Cretans simply do not understand how he could worship such a God as Jehovah. He cannot abide to be part of their rituals.

I was, at the same time, reading David Bentley Hart's 'Atheist Delusions, the Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies' in which he writes with fierce brilliance about the end of the Pagan world, what that world was like, how beautiful it was in many ways, how hopeless and melancholy it was, how it led many of its believers into a loathing of the human body, and how its beauty was often also extremely cruel. Hart is also interesting on how many of the common beliefs about the Pagan age (as I believe were advanced in the recent film 'Agora' about Hypatia, supposedly the murdered defender of scientific knowledge against Christian persecutors in Alexandria, but I have yet to find a cinema screening it) are at best dubious, at worst false. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in this controversy.

Miss Renault, to whom I now return, was homosexually-inclined. This fact is not irrelevant to the readers of her books, because it helped her to be sympathetic to one aspect of the classical world that seems extraordinarily distant to us - the ready acceptance in some mainstream literature of sexual relationships between men, not invariably associated with effeminacy. She also works a bit of Lesbianism into 'The King Must Die' and 'The Bull from the Sea'. I'm not sure quite how historically well-founded all of this is, but why argue? Heterosexual monogamy, considered as a virtue, comes from Mount Sinai and the Sea of Galilee, and from St Paul after Damascus, not from Mount Olympus. Civilisations have existed, do exist, without it. The question is not whether it is indispensable, or without difficulties, but about whether it is better. (There are, by the way, moments in 'The Last of the Wine' and in 'The Persian Boy' in which the author portrays some pagan sexual practices, particularly male prostitution involving the young, with unconcealed disgust, expressed by her characters but clearly her own as well.)

Miss Renault also wrote a couple of cult books which must mainly appeal to homosexuals, 'The Charioteer' and the wonderfully-titled 'The Friendly Young Ladies', but these were perhaps self-indulgent and don't tend to find their way into the major bookstores even now.

It would be a shame if Mary Renault's books were to be confined to some sort of cult. I don't think they will be. They have a far, far wider appeal than this - her trilogy about Alexander the Great does have its sexual side, but again its portrayal of Alexander's life, of that world, and of the gross magnificence of the Persian Court as well, is unstinting and uncompromising, and she has thought of wonderful devices to bring us close to the heart of events.

I'll leave it to classical scholars to dispute her theories about Theseus, Socrates, Demosthenes and Alexander. Wrong or right, she clothes these legendary figures in human flesh, and interests us again in a part of human history that will always be important to thinking people. There's a short episode in 'The Last of the Wine' in which the great importance of the rule of law, and our readiness to be seduced away from it for the best of reasons, is memorably portrayed. Later comes the realisation that by doing so we have lost an irrecoverable possession. I wish she had written many more books than she had time for.

The 'Demetriou' Conundrum and other topics

Mr 'Demetriou' complains that I classify him as one of the less thoughtful readers here. Why have I done this? Well, take for instance this comment from Mr 'Demetriou': ’It is sad to watch Hitchens founder as he tries desperately to comment with any competence on matters relating to economics and national or international finance.’ As it happens, I make no claims to expertise in economics. But if I have 'foundered', as he asserts (I think he intends to say 'flounder'), in my comments on the Budget, Mr 'Demetriou' does not explain how, or where, or in what I was so obviously mistaken. Nor does he demonstrate by his arguments that he possesses any expertise of his own in this subject. I doubt very much that he does. I remember, long ago, when he was in another of his automatically oppositional phases, that he (or was it his near-inseparable friend and co-thinker, Mr 'Boatang'?) denounced me for acknowledging the greatness of Maynard Keynes, irrespective of whether I agreed with what is nowadays called Keynesianism. Well, if Friedrich von Hayek can accept that Keynes had a great mind, which I believe he did, I don't see why I shouldn't do so. And I doubt that anyone truly versed in economics would deny that Keynes was a considerable man.

But mainly, of course, my decision was influenced by the extraordinary behaviour of Mr 'Demetriou' over the matter of 'Stan'. He posted an assertion that 'Stan' had had the better of the argument over the Polish guarantee. Once again, he saw no need to support this assertion with arguments (I had written thousands of words on the subject, 'Stan' many hundreds). Several contributors have since pointed out that the verdict of Mr 'Demetriou' is not universally shared by readers here, to put it as gently as possible.

Significantly, this intervention followed a direct appeal from me to readers, for their support in my argument with 'Stan'. I had hoped that such support might persuade 'Stan', since I plainly could not, whatever I did or said. Mr 'Demetriou' responded by providing the opposite of support. Had this been supported by any facts or logic, then it would have been all part of the hurly burly of debate. Since it wasn't, I took it as a trivial and silly piece of attention-seeking mischief, which I believe it to be. I hope he has enjoyed the attention.

Mr 'Demetriou' veers from almost sycophantic endorsement to almost contemptuous dismissal of my positions. There's no perceptible logic which can help the reader work out why he has chosen opposition in one case, and support in another. Hence my verdict. If he wants to be considered thoughtful, then he must behave as if he is.

The 'Stan' episode can now, I think, move on to more substantial matters. It seems to me that 'Stan' has acknowledged, if only by his recent silence, that he has been pretty thoroughly chewed up in this discussion. I hope he has not gone for good. I still long to study the famous Bletchley Park invasion documents of September 1939, so often cited, so totally irrelevant, so often asked for, so very much not produced.

I don't think I've quoted Winston Churchill out of context at all, in the matter of the reoccupation of the Rhineland and his support for the League of Nations route (for all I know, still proceeding in some forgotten committee room in Geneva). My point is and remains that if even Churchill wasn't calling for an immediate military response to expel Germany from the reoccupied Rhineland (which would, I am sure, have led to the fall of Hitler had it happened, but alas, alack, it was never likely to happen) then it is absurd to pretend that such a thing was a realistic possibility. In which case we must look elsewhere for the decisive moment in the long procession towards war between Britain and Germany. In which case, where? I think a persuasive case has been made for the Polish guarantee. Britain had the freedom to choose what to do. It chose wrongly. But if this is the pivotal moment, then we went to war by mistake, for a cause already lost, rather than to save the world. And that makes nonsense of the Churchill myth, in which we were compelled by historic duty to stand, as it were, at the Pass of Thermopylae, against the Barbarians, and save civilisation by our exertions. As it happens, we were more or less mugged on a squalid street corner of history, having wandered foolishly with a full wallet into a bad part of town, and thinking we could talk our way out of trouble. We were lucky to escape with our lives.

The Churchill myth has arisen for several reasons. One, it is comforting (like the belief that we are good at football summed up in the moronic lumpen chant 'Two World Wars and One World Cup') especially when we consider what a diminished country we now are (this is specially well-known to those who actually know anything about the state, and the standing, of Britain in 1939).

Two, it fosters the weird belief that the Second World War was primarily a conflict over goodness between free, democratic Britain and wicked Nazi Germany, from which France feebly dropped out early, and which the USA joined late. (The USSR, which does not quite fit this narrative, tends not to be mentioned in this version, well summed up in another lumpen football chant directed at the French 'If it wasn't for the English you'd be Krauts!’) This is epitomised in the way in which we tend to refer to the 'The Germans' as 'The Nazis' (though we do not refer to the USSR as 'The Communists') and to speak of a 'war against Fascism'. The second of these is specially interesting. If we are being completely specific, then we were at war with Mussolini's Fascist Italy from late 1940 until 1943 - though we had for many years sought an alliance with him. But if we are using 'Fascist' as a sort of generic term for vaguely conservative militaristic dictatorships, then what do we call the regime of General Metaxas, our gallant Greek ally against Mussolini in 1940-41? And how do we view Spain's General Franco, and his canny refusal to join Hitler in war against us, which probably saved the Mediterranean for British sea power? I don't think 'war against Fascism' works. Nor does 'war against Nazism' work very well. It was Germany we were at war with, something we confirmed once we committed ourselves to the unconditional surrender of Germany, which meant we no longer cared who was in power in Berlin. We also, as I sometimes remind readers, did nothing to save the murdered Jews, not even attempting to bomb the railway lines which took the victims to the death camps, and ignoring reports of those camps for years. Whereas we were quite willing to 'de-house' by bombing the German working class, who had voted till the end against Hitler and the Nazis.

Well, Britain and Germany were in that war, and fought each other, though Britain did not engage the main body of the Germans between 1940 and 1944 (and in both 1939-40 and 1944-45 did so as one army among allies. Some spoilsports might even say that the war in the West - even after D-Day and the Italian landings - was not the main theatre, which was the Russian Front from 1941 onwards).

And if we were so keen on making war on wickedness, then why did we have wicked Stalin as our principal ally on land?

Likewise, if we were so much against appeasement in 1939, why did we appease Stalin at Yalta, and act (as we had at Munich towards the Czechs) as the enforcers of a more powerful nation's desires?

Churchill told the Polish leader Stanislaw Mikolajczyk on October 1944 at the lovely British Embassy in Moscow (with its startling view of the Kremlin across the river) that he, Mikolajczyk, must accept the new borders of his country, ordered by Stalin, or ‘You are out of business forever. The Russians will sweep through your country and your people will be liquidated. You are on the verge of annihilation.’ This is more or less what Chamberlain had told Eduard Benes at Munich, substituting Czechoslovakia for Poland and Hitler for Stalin. Stalin kindly saw Churchill off from Moscow airport, waving his handkerchief.

You will have to read Patrick Buchanan's uncomfortable book to read the awful, self-deluding remark made by Churchill after Yalta, in which he compared his Yalta conduct favourably with Neville Chamberlain's Munich behaviour (plainly conscious that others might make a different, less kind comparison).

Britain didn't go to war with Germany because it was a wicked regime. No more did the USA or the USSR, who also liked (and still like) to pretend that this was so. Hitler was the aggressor (or at least the one who declared war) on both of them, and it is interesting to wonder how war between them would have come about otherwise. Nor was our involvement in the war at any point really central to German concerns, except after we had been thrown out of France and wouldn't make peace. I have said before that, by the time we had reached that point, Churchill was absolutely right. A Hitlerian peace, following military defeat, would have been worse than the long slow decline into unimportance and weakness we chose instead.

Germany did not (as has been pointed out) attempt to build a global navy before the war, nor take over the French Fleet when this might have altered the balance of naval power. No country seriously intending to challenge Britain could have done so without making huge naval and air war preparations. Even in its then decayed state, the Royal Navy could hold the Channel provided the RAF did not crack. Nor did the Luftwaffe ever develop a bombing force, or a heavy bomber equivalent to the Lancaster squadrons which we turned on Germany. The Blitz was misery for those who endured it, and unforgiveably barbaric, likewise the V1s and V2s, but small by comparison with the destruction we rained on Germany (Not, as I have mentioned elsewhere, that this destruction was either militarily effective or morally justified). Nor did Germany, at the height of its military power, make serious preparations to invade Britain. 'Sealion' was not much of a plan, and was never pursued with any zeal. Surely, if conquest and utter defeat of Britain had been at the heart of Hitler's purpose, he would have had the ships and planes and the plans to achieve it. Compare this with the awesome (in the proper use of the word) assembly of men and materiel which Hitler directed against his real objective, the USSR.

So the question still arises. Why did we go to war with Germany when we did? And no clear answer comes back. We would have done far better to do as the USA did, and calculate our intervention to suit our own needs. Who knows what that might have led to? But it would be unlikely to have been worse than what we in fact faced - the loss of our empire and our power, plus a narrow escape from subjugation.

On that basis we should judge present and future calls to go to war against 'evil dictators’ (Nasser, Milosevic, Saddam Hussein), all of which have produced severe unintended consequences. And we might remember that our most successful military alliance of the 20th century was the original NATO (not the absurd body which now goes under that name), which defeated the USSR not by engaging in emotive wars over Berlin in 1953, Budapest in 1956 or Berlin again in 1961, or Prague in 1968, or Poland in 1981, or any other Soviet outrage. But by remaining so strong that Moscow dared not attack it, and was unable to split it.

We might also re-examine our own decayed, debauched national culture and realistically examine our standing with clear eyes, casting aside all sentimentality and self-delusion, and particularly rejecting the soppy falsehood known as 'The Special Relationship'. It does not exist.

29 June 2010 3:10 AM

The History Boys

Please don't read this if you find history dull. It is not for you. You do not have to, nay, really ought not to, trouble with it. There is another item about football which you may well prefer. I received complaints last week for devoting some space to the arguments of 'Stan', and to the important controversy about the current received wisdom on the outbreak and origins of the Second World War.

I find this irritating. Our behaviour in the present is (or ought to be) governed by what we believe to be our experience of the past. The recent war in Iraq is a stark illustration of the enduring power of the Munich/Finest Hour myth. What if that myth is seriously misleading? He who controls the past, controls the future. If we misunderstand the past, mightn't we mess up the future?

This site is interested in history and in controversy. What else should I have been writing about that week? I intended to leave my comments on the Budget to my MoS column at the end of the week (and did so) and these as it happened attracted a rather small number of comments, including a lofty and dismissive one (but how did he get up there?) from that brilliant political economist, Mr 'Demetriou'.

Had I not written about the War controversy, I doubt if I should have posted anything else. And readers are under no obligation to read threads in which they are not interested. I have often found in the past that if I write (for instance) about books or cultural matters, there is very little response. So I tend not to bother, though I have recently been tempted to write about Mary Renault's novels about the classical world, which I am currently reading with much pleasure.

Then I was accused by some amateur Freudian of some sort of Silverback attempt to prove myself, exercising machismo through debate. Not so. I have not the slightest doubt that my arguments are correct, based upon demonstrable fact and sound logic. I think the various attempts, by 'Stan' and others, to counter this case, have been both feeble and obdurate. Yet 'Stan' still refuses to recognise that he has in any way been shown to be incorrect, even on the smallest fact. He still refuses to do so, using some football metaphor about Slough FC which I assume is meant to be dismissive. He also clings to his low ad hominem accusation against me, that my arguments somehow 'dishonour' those who fought in the Second World War. He either knows this is false, in which case he should be ashamed of himself. Or he doesn't, in which case he doesn't begin to understand what he is criticising.

In those circumstances, it is necessary for me to continue until the job is thoroughly finished. I accept that Mr 'Demetriou' and one or two others, would back an argumentative Chihuahua against me if it posted a contrary position. I have to put up with that sort of thing. My concern is with reasonable readers, and also to some extent with 'Stan' as well. If I can at least sow in his mind the suspicion that he might be mistaken, particularly about his nasty ad hominem slur against me, then it will have been worthwhile. But I am also seeking to establish the reason for this resistance. This is the immense and lasting power of the Churchill cult, which has dominated political thinking in Britain and the USA for 70 years, and is now at last due for serious revision. It will die hard. But it will die, having been disastrously wounded in Baghdad and Basra six years ago. We had better be sure that it is replaced by something better

'Stan' in particular has demonstrated by his replies (I note he has now gone back on his decision to withdraw from the debate) that on this subject he has no respect for evidence or historical fact, or any willingness to engage directly with a serious opponent. I respond, in great detail, to what he says. He ignores, fails to read or misrepresents what I say. I suspect that, in a debate on any other subject, he would behave quite differently. It is the power of the Churchill cult that impels him to behave in this odd fashion.

By the way, he needs to read 'The Rage Against God' before stating with certainty what I think this cult to be. I certainly don't imagine that it was deliberately created by anyone to replace the Christian religion. I do however think that it has in fact more or less replaced that religion as the belief underlying our national consciousness and indeed our great national ceremonies - as well as in the mistaken philosophy which underpins our dealings with the USA.

I should add here that some contributors seem to have concluded that my view in some way sympathises with or removes the stain and guilt from Adolf Hitler and National Socialist Germany. This is simply false. I have no such opinion. Nothing that I say contains any such implication. It is however true that the British belief, that we fought Hitler because of the vileness of his regime and because of his Judophobic fury, is not justified by the facts. Hitler's extermination of the Jews began some time after we declared war. I will not here go into the suggestion that he might not have attempted it without the cover of the war, but there are those who believe this to be true. We had endured his persecution of the Jews of Germany and then of Austria for six years without major complaint until 1939, signed treaties with him, communed with him and his henchmen at the highest level and in convivial occasions, and we took part in his awful 1936 Olympic Games without protest, and did precious little to provide refuge for his victims.

Our war with Hitler never had anything to do with the internal character of his regime. This justification was invented afterwards. If we had chosen our allies on the basis of their goodness, and our enemies on the basis of their badness, then we could hardly have been allied with Stalin for four hard years. In which case, why exactly did we fight Hitler's Germany and about what? And more especially, why did we fight it when and where we did?

If it was a simple balance of power question, as one contributor properly argues (while reaching the wrong conclusion from this), why shouldn't we have sought to balance the USSR against Germany, rather than rush into war with one of them while he was allied to the other? Did we in fact help create the Stalin-Hitler pact, thus actually wrecking the balance of power, by our guarantee to Poland? 'Stan' cannot even be interested in these questions, because pondering them makes his universe tremble. But I can be interested, and I am.

While he's by no means alone in standing up for facts and reason in this matter, I am particularly grateful to James Stenson and to Kris Fenton for their serious contributions to this discussion. They will have noted that 'Stan' has not actually responded to his highly-pertinent questions and information (or perhaps even grasped their purpose).

I was however struck by one of the emotive responses by 'Stan' to Mr Stenson. 'Stan' wrote: 'Why was our behaviour over the "Danzig" episode stupid? We had just been humiliated on the global stage by Hitler over the Munich agreement - what did you expect us to do? Roll over and play dead?'

This is the language of the 'Sun' editorial column, written as if war is, well, a football game. 'Humiliated on the global stage'. 'Roll over and play dead'. Diplomacy isn't (or shouldn't be) conducted on such foundations. The world is not, in fact, a stage, where the corpses get up after the play, and go for a drink and a laugh. It is a world of cruelty and blood, fire and war, hunger and slavery, loss and pain, where death is real, corpses rot in fly-infested heaps, the vaults of national banks are emptied of their gold by the enemy's army, wounds do not always heal and the dead stay forever dead, where great and famous cities and cultures centuries old can be dissolved and plundered to nothing in a week, where defeated millions can be marched off in chains to exhaustion and death, loving families torn apart forever in a minute of horror, happy homes reduced in seconds to blackened charnel houses full of screams, and civilised and gentle empires replaced in the twinkling of an eye by evil and rapacious successors or by chaos - a world in which the rulers of nations can by a single incautious false move, done often through bravado or wounded self-regard, lose forever the safety and peace of those whom they govern, and whose safety is their chief concern.

If mainland Britain did not share the miserable fate of France in 1940 (and never forget that the Channel Islands, in an incident we still prefer to keep rather quiet about, did share that fate, because the sea between them and the continent wasn't wide enough), it was no thanks to those who signed the guarantee to Poland.

A bit of humiliation is a small price for holding on to the Empire that pays for your freedom and prosperity. Rolling over and playing dead is often not at all a bad thing to do, if you have been struck to the ground by a ruthless blow from a stronger enemy, and are hoping that enemy will turn his wrath against someone else while you recover your wits and your breath.

People who write about war as an act of policy ought to see war, from time to time.

Some further problems with the arguments of 'Stan'

He has repeatedly failed to substantiate one claim in particular, a claim on which he heavily relies, that Hitler had always planned to invade France in 1939-40, whatever the outcome of events in Poland. He has produced precisely no proper evidence for this. The one piece of alleged evidence he has referred to is a supposed discovery by the fledgling Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park in autumn 1939 (Bletchley Park only began operation on 15th August that year, so this would have a been a major triumph worthy of record) of a German plan to invade France through the Low Countries at this date. There are two things wrong with this. One is that I cannot find any evidence that it exists, Stan has ignored repeated requests from me for a substantiation, and nobody else has so far confirmed its existence. It may exist. But I have no means of knowing, and if 'Stan' does, he is not sharing his means with me, or with anyone else here. Perhaps you need an Enigma machine to find this stuff.

The other is that, even if it did exist, such plans post-date by many months the Anglo-French guarantee to Poland, and Poland's consequent refusal to negotiate on Danzig and the corridor, and therefore have no bearing at all on the case. It may well be that Hitler decided to invade France in September 1939 rather than October 1939 (as records show he did). But if so he did so after Poland (which he had hoped to enrol in the anti-Comintern Pact and regarded as a possible ally until early 1939) refused any further negotiations on Danzig and the Corridor. And Poland did so after Britain and France gave their guarantees.

'Stan' behaves like this because he simply does not understand the case he is rejecting. He is, in my view, made incapable of doing so by dogma. He has it in his head, so firmly that I cannot dislodge it however many times I try to do so, that I am saying that the Anglo-French guarantees to Poland directly influenced Hitler's actions. On the contrary, Hitler regarded Britain and France as 'small worms' (the phrase he used to his intimates when discussing Chamberlain at Munich). It was his confidence that this was the case that enabled him to get what he wanted at Munich.

He thought the guarantees worthless. Poland, on the other hand, took them seriously, people and government alike. There is a pathetic photograph in existence of the people of Warsaw gathered outside the British Embassy after our declaration of war in 1939, cheering and waving approving banners. It took a few weeks before it dawned on them that no help was coming, and that they hadn't just lost Danzig and the Corridor, but their homes, their country and their happy lives. I'd be interested in any information anyone has from documents of the time about what Poland's political leadership really thought.

The British and French guarantees to Poland were among the gravest diplomatic mistakes (and among the most dishonourable false promises) ever made by either country.

Not only did they give Poland a false assurance of help, and encourage its government and people in what turned out to be a blood-soaked national suicide.

They also gave the Polish government the absolute right to determine when Britain and France entered the war against Germany. Even if you believe, as 'Stan' apparently does, that an Anglo-German war in 1939-40 was predestined and unavoidable, you must surely concede that the country which can choose precisely when and under what circumstances it goes to war is in a better position than the country which has ceded that decision to a despotic, erratic state on the far side of Europe.

Napoleon III's idiotic tumble into the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, thanks to cunning German propaganda provocations, seems to me to be the only modern episode in the same class of vainglorious dimwittedness. I think Patrick Buchanan's 'Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War' (which I suspect 'Stan' has not read, and urge him to obtain) shows beyond doubt that the conventional narrative of World War Two is simply unsustainable in the light of modern knowledge. Its poor reception arose partly out of the fact that, like all courageous history, it upset so many academic and political vested interests.

One of this book's most profound effects on me had nothing to do with the Polish guarantee. It was the realisation that my long-held view - that Britain and France should have acted against Hitler when he reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936 - was hopelessly unrealistic. I notice some other readers still cling to this idea. I warn them against this. Alas, it is a rotten branch, and will snap beneath their weight.

No significant political force at the time supported such action. Even Winston Churchill, who seems otherwise to have said and done nothing about the Rhineland, wrote in a newspaper column of 13th March 1936 that France had taken 'the proper and prescribed course of appealing to the League of Nations'. No fighting on the beaches there, eh? Another great anti-appeaser of a later period, Duff Cooper, told the German ambassador at the time that the British public 'did not care two hoots about the Germans reoccupying their own territory'. I don't doubt these were true reflections of British (and French) public opinion. Leaving aside growing dislike of Hitler's regime (which at that time was foul and cruel, lawless, tyrannous and murderous, but not systematically genocidal), Britain and its people had long thought that the Versailles Treaty had been unfair to Germany and were sympathetic to attempts to revise its harsher provisions.

Stanley Baldwin told the French that Britain was in no state to go to war, and told his own MPs he hoped to see Germany going to war with 'the Bolshies'. Lloyd-George, the great war leader of 1914-18, was against action and full of praise for Hitler.

Oh, and who said this?

'One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.'

Yes, it was 'the 'Last Lion', Winston Spencer Churchill, in 1937.

Thus the standard escape route, for those of us who wish it had happened otherwise, doesn't really work. You might as well wish that Britain (and Britain alone) had possessed the H-Bomb in 1914. Useful, but impossible. The collapse of the Stresa Front, thanks to the early exposure of the Hoare-Laval Pact in the French press, had ended all hopes of keeping Mussolini out of an alliance with Hitler. That led, ineluctably, to Hitler's takeover of Austria - Mussolini had been Austria's principal protector. Once he withdrew his protection, Anschluss was inevitable.

Next came the Czech issue. Whatever possessed Britain to think that she had any power or ability to intervene in this matter? It can certainly be argued that it was a better place to stand than over Poland in 1939. Czechoslovakia, for all its many faults, was a civilised law-governed democracy, which pre-war Poland wasn't. It had a large and reasonably well-trained army and modern border defences. It had inherited the great Skoda armaments works of the Austro-Hungarian empire. But the defences were in the wrong place, as any traveller in Europe who has travelled from Prague to Vienna can easily see to this day. With Austria now a province of the Reich, German land forces could simply bypass the mountain fortifications in the Erzgebirge, and planes based outside Vienna could be over Prague in an hour (and over Bratislava in minutes).

So if we had gone to war for Czechoslovakia, with our tiny broomstick army and our biplane air force in September 1938, we would probably have gone to the rescue of a defeated, occupied ruin. I have been visiting the Czech lands since 1978, I am moved by the Czech story and have much sympathy for that noble experiment, though I suspect all attempts to 'contain' Germany then or since were bound to fail, once Bismarck had achieved unification. But I still cannot for the life of me see what good it did the Czechs, or us, for us to take the Czech side in 1938. Still, at least we didn't 'save' them, the way we 'saved' Poland in 1939.

28 June 2010 3:27 PM

Is Football A Pagan Cult?

Those of us who watch with puzzlement and even amusement as the nation convulses itself over the World Cup should take this thing more seriously than we do.

Clearly football satisfies some deep human need.

Otherwise why do all these flags fly from vans and hang from windowsills, why do millions of people sit in front of their TV sets on a blazing summer afternoon watching a not-specially-exciting game, involving 22 men chasing a bladder around a field, thousands of miles away?

Why do they yell and swear and gasp as goals are scored or not scored, even when they have not been drinking too much?

It is a need I do not happen to share. But why is that? Do I lack something important that they have? Why don't I care?

When I was ten years old I was deeply engaged by the fortunes of Hampshire in the County Cricket Championship, scanning the 'Late News' in the Portsmouth evening paper for the most recent score - though I think in those days it was quite unusual for boys of the lower upper middle class (tiny snobs, ever concerned about our marginal position in the class system) to support a football team.

Now, this cricket enthusiasm is a mystery to me, a mystery whose code I can no longer break, like Leo Colston's inability to understand large parts of his schoolboy diary, found years later in a chilly attic, in that fine and haunting novel by L.P.Hartley, 'The Go-Between'.

I care about quite a few things, rather a lot, as readers of this site will know. Is it just an individual thing that I find the whole thing laughable, and actually quite want the English football team to lose, if only to bring home to these fanatics that this country is in fact in decline, and that its decay cannot be stopped by winning a football game - and that our inability to win tournaments in games we invented is a sign of that decline?

I am almost permanently furious that they can rush on to the streets to show 'patriotism' over a football game, but appear unmoved by the theft of our national independence, the rape of our countryside, the destruction of our culture and all the many real and lasting ways in which this country daily loses the Real World Cup of Nationhood.

Is it because I am one of the last living survivors of the public school era of compulsory sport and of semi-compulsory enthusiasm for it ('Stop slacking, get out there on the touchline and support your house, Hitchens!')

Perhaps it is, but if so, am I really worse than they are. I have marched in huge demonstrations and dissolved myself in crowds, and increasingly I regret having done so. I now prefer not to surrender to mass feelings, which are almost always wrong. More importantly, why do they care?

I do think a lot of people get pleasure from feeling they belong to something bigger than themselves. I also think there is a special satisfaction to be got from rituals, from unified chanting, and from the emotions of crowds.

The huge football stadiums of the 21st century are the pagan temples of today, in which we can take part in ceremonies of hero-worship, sing what pass for hymns, feel as one with our fellow-creatures and, if the thing is properly conducted, walk away afterwards with a feeling that life has been enhanced in some mysterious way.

People even wear special clothing for these occasions, the extraordinarily strange habit of dressing up in footballers' kit, with the name and number of a favourite player displayed on the torso.

I am told (but would like to know more) that the atmosphere and the pattern of major football matches is quite similar to those which would have been found at the great festivals of sacrifice which were held before enormous crowds in the temples of Ancient Greece and Rome.

If our civilisation were to be overcome by a volcanic disaster,as was Pompeii (which Heaven forfend), what would the archaeologists of 4010 make of football, if they had nothing to go on apart from the perfectly-preserved remains of the fans?

I think they would conclude that it had a religious purpose.

It is noticeable that the great growth of passion for football in this country has come at a time when the Christian religion's efforts to absorb and channel such forces to its own ends have pretty much run out of steam.

Before anyone points out that more people attend church each week than attend football matches in this country, I would retort that very few people watch church services on the TV.

And while there are major sporting occasions in the USA, where Christianity is still a major force, they are much more relaxed occasions, lacking the passionate and potentially violent character which lingers around British sporting venues.

26 June 2010 8:56 PM

These cuts are a con – we’ll soon be just like Greece (but without the lovely beaches)

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Anyone would think that the late General Pinochet, Chile’s ultra-conservative military dictator, had risen from his grave and was stalking Britain, slashing public spending with an axe and machine-gunning screaming public-service workers in football stadiums.

The exaggerated fuss over George Osborne’s Budget is crude spin.

Unlike proper, old-fashioned Budgets, which could not be leaked on pain of political death, this propaganda document was made public almost completely beforehand.

It may convince the gullible sheep-brained people who appear to control the stock markets and bond markets of the world, and who make their livings by dashing hither and thither shoving prices up and down on a whim. But should it convince us?

There’s such a mismatch between the scale of the national profligacy and what the Government can actually do that it’s necessary for the Chancellor to pretend that he is being more brutal than he truly is.

Likewise the Labour Party, which would have done more or less the same had it been in office, has to join in the same pretence.

False declarations of resolve are met with false howls of outrage.

The supposed core of the Osborne effort is a series of 25 per cent cuts in spending in most departments.

These cuts have yet to be specified, and will actually need to be much higher than 25 per cent, probably nearer 33 per cent, because the sacred NHS, the largest employer in Europe and a sink of bureaucracy and inefficiency, is to be spared the slasher’s knife. And so is the equally sacred budget for ‘Foreign Aid’.

Quite why this suspect activity – which so seldom actually reaches the suffering – is so untouchable, I do not know.

Once you realise that a sizeable chunk of it will be spent on aborting Third World babies, you begin to wonder where the rest is going.

The trumpeted cuts are polit ically impossible.

The screeching lobbies that stand behind the public sector and the welfare state have automatic access to the BBC, where their advocates are treated with reverence.

They have a similar direct line to large chunks of the Liberal Democrat Party, and the cultural elite in general.

Maybe if this were 1920 rather than 2010, Mr Osborne might hope to do as he promises.

But – as Michael Portillo has repeatedly warned, and he was once in charge of controlling spending – real cuts are extremely difficult to achieve.

So what will happen?

My guess is that the country will continue living beyond its means as it has done since Harold Macmillan began debauching the national finances to win popularity 50 years ago.

And we will pay the price in inflation and in a devalued currency, slowly slipping from second to third-class status, so that at the end we really are pretty much like Greece, instead of just pretending to be, hopelessly in debt and nothing working properly.

But without the Acropolis or the nice beaches.

The wrong Huhne got the chop

Heaven knows we all stumble in our lives, and the hard promises of marriage are among the most difficult we ever make.

But why is it that when a man’s marriage comes up against his political career, we all seem to assume that it is the marriage that has to go?

When Chris Huhne’s infidelity was discovered, nobody was surprised when his instant response was to sack Mrs Huhne, so taking the heat off the Government and the weird coalition that sustains it.

I think this is the wrong way round.

Compared with his transient job in charge of carpeting the country with futile windmills, Mr Huhne’s marriage and family are of far more lasting importance.

Shouldn’t he at least have paused to see if he could save it? Shouldn’t his friends and colleagues have done likewise?

One of the reasons marriage is disappearing so fast in our society, and why so many children must now grow up without both their own natural parents, is that our culture thinks that a break-up is the best answer to a crisis.

Well, for me, the break-up of anybody’s marriage, anywhere, is infinitely more grievous than the break-up of a government.

Each of these small, deep tragedies diminishes us all and takes another brick out of the arch of civilisation.

Sacrificed to feeble leadership

The self-serving twaddle oozing from David Cameron on Afghanistan is actually shocking. He is not stupid.

He must know talk of ‘building up the Afghans’ own security’ is a bitter joke. All attempts to create serious Afghan armed forces have flopped.

The ‘police’ are a corrupt, drug-riddled, undisciplined embarrassment.

Afghans all know we will leave soon, and those who support us will then be seen as traitors and have their heads sawn off.

As for his talk of a ‘military covenant’, the one our soldiers need is the only one they cannot get: an assurance they will only be asked to die or be maimed for good reason. There is no such good reason in Afghanistan. The Cabinet know this, but do nothing about it.

No more soldiers should be sent to die in a war already lost, a war Mr Cameron already knows to be lost.

We all pay a price for having weak, indecisive leaders. But none pays a price as high as the one our soldiers pay.

Our Government is not worthy of our Army.

Vince, trapped by the Eton tribe

How sorry I felt for Vince Cable as I sat a few feet from him on Question Time on Thursday night.

He seemed to be resorting to transcendental meditation to escape the horror of his position, defending a Government he never wanted to be in.

It’s not that he really disagrees with the Budget.

If he’d joined the coalition with Labour that he’d much have preferred, he’d have had to go through roughly the same performance.

It’s that he’s tribally much closer to Labour than to the Etonians, and feels as a football fan would if he were compelled to cheer for a team he’d hated since his youth.

That’s why the Tories put him, not one of their own, on TV to defend the Budget.

They wanted to make sure he was irreversibly committed.

They know that, at some point in the next four years, the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Party will split, and they want to make it impossible for Vince to be one of the defectors. Then they can move on to the next stage – the creation of the Liberal Conservative Party which David Cameron dreams of.

Yet more alleged statues by the alleged sculptor Antony Gormley are cropping up all over the country. There’s one perched on a rooftop in Oxford, looking like a man contemplating suicide.

Now a team of them has been deployed in Edinburgh. Any day now I expect to find one of them standing next to me in the gents’. Couldn’t someone cut spending on this?