This is Peter's column from the Mail on Sunday If we dare to travel abroad, we are terrorist suspects on the way out, to be poked and humiliated, and serfs on the way back in, herded, hectored and corralled. If we try to pay our taxes honestly and on time, we are held on the phone for half an hour. Happy families are torn apart in secret courts, where guilt is presumed and a fair hearing impossible. The state school system pretends to offer us ‘choice’ while imposing a wretched low standard on all, from which only the wealthy can escape. If we dare to grow old and ill, our savings are plundered and stripped, or we die in our own filth in callous hospital wards. But fight and rob your way into one of our prisons, which generally involves at least a dozen quite serious criminal convictions, and the attitude is entirely different. Suddenly they want to be nice to you. Pasted up in an Oxfordshire byway, I found extraordinary proof of what most of us have long suspected and what politicians always try to deny (above). We are now so soft on wrong-doing that the wicked must be laughing at us. It is a recruiting poster for prison officers. Beneath a picture of two smiling, kindly types in uniform sharing a jolly moment are the words: ‘Father figures. Agony Aunts. When you’re the closest to family anyone’s experienced in a long while, it becomes less of a job and more of a calling. Prison officers. People officers by nature.’ It continues: ‘Gaining the respect of offenders isn’t a skill you can learn. It’s something you need to have in you already: that ability to build rapport with a broad range of characters and ultimately make a breakthrough.’ The Ministry of Injustice, whose name and superscription are on the poster, have confirmed to me that it is really theirs. There you have it. For the worst people in the country, we hire ‘agony aunts’ and ‘father figures’ whose job is to ‘gain the respect’ of people who have repeatedly trampled on the rights and freedoms of their neighbours. For the rest of us, death and taxes, indifference, inefficiency, scorn and an array of decrepit, slovenly ‘services’, which grow worse the more we pay for them. Why, exactly, do you vote for the people who are responsible for this? I’d love to know. It's pompous pagan piffle Is it compulsory to be enthusiastic about the Olympics? Too bad, if so. I laughed and laughed when the Olympic flame, an ‘ancient tradition’ in fact invented by the Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, was blown out by the wind. I see no reason to look forward to this flatulent festival of cheating, whose authenticity was long ago destroyed by drugs. I certainly don’t look forward to paying for it. Surely only a totalitarian maniac could want it in his capital? What free country desires or needs the silly pagan panoply, the absurd, grandiose buildings, and the pompous self-importance of the IOC who want special lanes for their cars, like the old Soviet Politburo? -------------------------------------------------------- War on Drugs latest. The fiction that we have stern prohibition of drugs in this country is still seriously believed by some people. How do they keep it up? As Paragraph 6.65 of the Independent Chief Inspector’s report on Border Control at Gatwick records, passengers arriving with cannabis ‘for personal use’ who should have been arrested were let off with a warning. The only mystery is why they bothered to import it, when cannabis farms are Britain’s only boom industry. -------------------------------------------------------- Why 650,000 children are using mind-altering drugs A powerful stimulant drug, methylphenidate hydrochloride, is being widely taken by British schoolchildren. At the last count, more than 650,000 young people, some very young indeed, were believed to be regular users. This emerged last week from a Parliamentary question. The use of this potent pill has increased fourfold since it first became common in 1999. And its users are taking stronger and stronger doses, as they grow tolerant. The drug has a long list of adverse effects including chest pain, hair loss, palpitations, stunted growth, insomnia, rapid heart rate, skin rashes, dizziness and anxiety. It has been linked to suicide. If those involved were teenagers in nightclubs, and they were buying it from the usual evil dealers, I expect there would be a big media fuss, and rightly so, especially about the three-year-old users. But there isn’t, because the other name for methylphenidate hydro-chloride is Ritalin, and legions of parents, teachers, doctors and social workers have somehow been persuaded that this powerful mind- altering substance is actually good for children. You and I, meanwhile, are paying for it on the NHS. By the time our sluggish nation realises that this is a horrifying national scandal, the damage will have been done. On a rare visit to W H Smith, the shop where good books go to die, I find that this once-staid chain has a huge stack of what I believe is known as Mommy Porn right by the checkout. And once I have swerved round the bondage and whipping department, the next thing I see is a special communications booth, by which I can get into instant touch with a law firm. And people tell me I should be optimistic. -------------------------------------------------------- Mr Slippery proclaims that there are lots of proper conservative things he longs to do, if only it wasn’t for those horrid Liberal Democrats. Not only does Old Slippery do this in the same week that he appears with Nick Clegg in a comical Renewal of Coalition Vows in a tractor factory. He also doesn’t seem to realise that it is completely incredible. The Liberal Democrats have been rubbing their eyes in wonder since 2010 because of the happy willingness of the Tories to give in to all their demands. And the Prime Minister has strong conservative instincts in the same way that hamsters are famed for their feral aggression. It’s the political equivalent of ‘the cheque is in the post’ or ‘the van broke down’ or ‘the dog ate my homework’. The fact that he doesn’t seem remotely ashamed of it suggests that he is actually beginning to turn into the true Heir to Blair, a man who has so successfully faked sincerity that he no longer knows or cares when he is lying. At the beginning of Arthur Koestler’s extraordinary book ‘The Scum of the Earth’ he ponders on what was - in 1939 - the great unsolved problem of Europe. How could France, a country of bread and wine, co-exist next door to Germany, a nation of blood and iron? Germany must surely dominate, thanks to its greater population and its industrial and economic might. The war of 1871, and French defeat by Prussia, had shown how powerful Germany was. The costly victory of 1918 had shown just how much blood France would have to shed to stay out of Germany’s shadow. Yet France was still, in 1939, not willing to accept German domination of Europe. Koestler, a Communist ex-spy and journalist, a Hungarian national and general troublemaker, was rounded up by the French Republic on the outbreak of war and put into a grim prison camp for subversive aliens, at Le Vernet in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Somehow, he got out again, just in time to be caught in Paris as the Germans arrived, and to be rounded up again. The story of his escape, quite possibly mendacious, is at the heart of this neglected book, and is a great evocation of the absurdities, terrors, miseries and hilarities of a great nation collapsing. I have never been one of the ‘cheese-eating surrender monkey’ mockers of France. France is a martial nation and its people know how to fight, as I should have thought Verdun proved beyond any doubt (that’s if you had forgotten Austerlitz, Marengo, Jena and a dozen other Napoleonic triumphs, and the awkward fact that England lost the Hundred Years War – plus the even more annoying fact, for those who jeer about there being no French military victories, that the decisive American triumph over Britain at Yorktown was really the work of the French Admiral de Grasse, and of French army officers such as Lafayette. French soldiers fought on long after British troops had left via Dunkirk, and the garrison of one part of the Maginot Line refused to surrender to the Germans until personally ordered to do so by the Minister of Defence). The story of the final days of an independent France, the last meeting of a Free National Assembly, the last editions of free newspapers, is a bitterly sad one, and I see no reason to believe things would have been much different if the Germans had been able to get their army on to our Island. So then we come to Vichy, that very curious episode, disowned by modern France but organically connected to it. Vichy was an anomaly, and like all anomalies it is very instructive. We’ve almost all seen the film ‘Casablanca’ and its ambiguous villain-cum-hero Captain Renault is by far the most interesting person in it (By the way, as far as I can discover, ‘the ‘Marseillaise’ remained the French national anthem under Vichy, which makes a bit of a nonsense of the ‘duel of the anthems’ scene in which singing it is shown as an act of rebellion). Reflecting that ambiguity, the USA and Canada both had diplomatic relations with the officially neutral Petain regime until well into the war (The US Ambassador, Admiral Leahy, was recalled in the summer of 1942). The USSR recognised Petain until June 1941, when Vichy supported Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. By contrast, British troops and airmen, especially in the Middle east, were several times in direct and often rather bitter combat with Vichy military units. The British attack on the French Fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in 1940 had provided the foundation for a lasting enmity. A recent interesting book (‘England’s last war Against France’ by Colin Smith describes this rather sad conflict). Just as the French resistance has been magnified in later years, the extent of French acceptance of the German New Order has been minimised. After Charles de Gaulle, who by sheer force of personality revived France as a major country and maintained its independence of action within the European Union (as it then was not), the most important French politician of recent times was Francois Mitterrand, the last Socialist president of that country. There is still what is called ‘controversy’ about exactly what Francois Mitterrand was doing in the Vichy era. His modern supporters make out that, even if he appeared to be working for the Vichy regime (as he did appear to be) he was in reality toiling under cover for the Resistance. He is even supposed to have accepted a medal from the Petain state, the Francisque, because he had been ordered to accept it for the purposes of maintaining his Resistance cover. Well, maybe. When the award of the Francisque to Mitterrrand was originally revealed in post-war France, he denied having received it at all. Why do that if he had accepted it as cover for some noble act of courage in the resistance? Then there was the odd story of his arranging to have a wreath laid annually on the grave of Marshal Petain (the Vichy head of state). My guess is that , like many intelligent Frenchmen of the time, he was facing both ways, waiting to see who won. Maybe he continued to face both ways, just a little, and perhaps to feel that he had good excuses for doing so. We have to remember that until the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1942, most people on the European continent were resigned to living under Berlin domination for the foreseeable future. Typical of these was the interesting (and ultimately repellent and disgraceful) Pierre Laval, an originally socialist politician of some significance and intelligence, who concluded in 1940 that the future was German and acted accordingly, so ending his days in front of a firing squad after a pretty wretched parody of a trial. I wonder who his British equivalent would have been, had the situation arisen? But to return to Mitterrand, he was President of France when German diplomatic power once again became irresistibly dominant on the European landmass, after reunification of Germany in 1989. And it was under his Presidency that France participated in the accelerated integration of Europe pushed through by another French socialist, Jacques Delors, and the European Community became the embryo state now known as the European Union. It is my theory that this EU, though not as some say a ‘Fourth Reich’ does attempt to deal with Koestler’s conundrum – how can France, proud, patriotic, independent-minded, co-exist with Germany without losing her dignity? The French, confronted with the horrible choice between the two ‘V’s, Verdun or Vichy, can hardly be blamed if instead they choose Brussels. Nor can the Low Countries and Denmark, who have well understood since 1940 that their sovereignty is conditional upon German goodwill (by the way, the model occupation of Denmark by Germany is a historical episode which has had far too little attention. Denmark had a Social Democratic government and a functioning Parliament until the end of 1941, though it was under Berlin control at the time). As for Italy, well, that’s still more complicated. This isn’t the occasion for a re-examination of the Hoare-Laval Pact, but I wonder what would have happened if it had gone ahead. Yes, it was the same Pierre Laval. For France (whose dreams of independent power perished, as did ours, at Suez in 1956), the EU has been a clever arrangement to provide grandeur and soothe feelings in a time of decline. I have discussed elsewhere the Elysee Treaty of 1963, under which France long ago agreed to share domination of Europe with Germany. The bargain has been very fruitful for France because of the Common Agricultural Policy, because of France’s unchallenged seat on the United Nations Security Council, because of France’s continued maintenance of a nuclear strike force and of some of the most significant conventional armed forces in the world, not to mention maintaining its equivalent of the British Commonwealth, the ‘Francophonie’. Germany, meanwhile, has been able to get on quietly with becoming the industrial and economic superpower of Europe, the chief power in the European Central Bank, using the Euro as a means to devalue the Deutschemark and so aid its exports to non-EU countries. It has also been able to resume, peacefully, the diplomatic directions which it has been seeking since 1871 – domination of the Balkans and the Baltic states, also of Poland, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, Carpathia and the Western Ukraine (look at the 1917 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk for a map of pre-Hitler German aims in the east, plainly stated, and see how many of them have now been achieved under the banner of the EU). I do not think a new president in France will really be able to challenge this arrangement, or much want to, whatever the election rhetoric may have been. The whole EU seems to me to be an admission that it simply is not worth anyone trying to question German pre-eminence any more. That is what pro-EU apologists mean when they say that the EU has ‘prevented war in Europe since 1945’. It has prevented it by bringing about longstanding German foreign policy aims, by consent and peacefully, and without the national humiliation and bankruptcy attendant on war and subjugation. By the way, these German aims pre-existed Hitler and were held to by democratic and respectable German statesmen, including some of the July plotters who sought to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazi state. They should not be confused with the National Socialist polices of extermination and racial murder with which they became entangled after 1933. This seldom mentioned but often remembered period of modern European history, the period of unquestioned German dominance between Dunkirk and Stalingrad, is one of the many reasons why Britain, which was not militarily defeated or occupied, and did not suffer a tyranny of its own making before 1945, simply is not suited to EU membership. I mention it because of claims that Francois Hollande will challenge Angela Merkel over aspects of EU rule. I honestly doubt it. That conflict is over. The wider question, of whether the poorer, smaller countries at the fringes of Europe are prepared to stay inside the Eurozone to suit German aims, is a different one. Unlike the central part of the European project, which is ugly but conforms to the facts of life and power, the relationship between the northern and southern European countries looks to me to be unsustainable. Spain, Greece and Portugal badly need to devalue, which means leaving the Eurozone. I am not sure how this can be avoided for much longer, though the current awful situation has endured long after many believed it would collapse.
13 May 2012 12:39 AM
Agony aunts for criminals - and scorn for the rest of us
08 May 2012 3:57 PM
Tony or Anthony?
Blood and Iron versus Bread and Wine, the Sad Fate of France in a German Europe
Did I Have News for You?
Sunday, 13 May 2012
The British State treats us, the good, kind and law-abiding, with officious scorn. We have learned, when we are the victims of crime or disorder, that the police don’t need us, and they expect the same in return.
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My habit of referring to our former Prime Minister as ‘Anthony Blair’ has a strange power to annoy people (though not as much as my former practice of calling him ‘Princess Tony’, which I did as punishment for his claim - scripted by Alastair Campbell - that Princess Diana was ‘the People’s Princess’. And also because it seemed to me that he was in so many ways the New Diana. I abandoned ‘Princess Tony’ after he took to bombing civilians from the air, and it seemed too frivolous a jeer at a man who was actively doing violent harm).
But, while it is sometimes a pleasure to annoy certain sorts of people, it is simply a statement of fact. Anthony is his name. At least, it was his name when his wife, Cherie, mentioned him in her election leaflet when she stood for Parliament in Thanet North in 1983. Not merely did she call him ‘The barrister, Anthony Blair’. She later spoke at a large meeting in Margate, at which her father, Tony Booth, and her then hero, Tony Benn, were on the platform (and her husband was humbly seated in the audience) of the ‘two Tonys’ who had influenced her in her path to socialism, or some such phrase. The two Tonys were Benn and Booth. Her husband was in any case an Anthony. So she knew the difference between ‘Tony’ and ‘Anthony’, and must presumably have asked him how he’d like to be described in her leaflet. One day I’ll tell the story of my struggle to get hold of that leaflet, during which I discovered that Mrs Blair/Ms Booth had apparently stood for parliament *in private* and it was quite wicked and rude of me to make enquiries about her campaign
When Cherie was selected for Thanet North, her husband hadn’t been picked by any constituency anywhere and, according to the official myth, which is so full of holes you could use it as a colander, had almost despaired of getting a seat. He then, amazingly, was selected for one of the safest seats in the country at the last minute, effortlessly defeating that consummate in-fighter Les Huckfield, a former Minister, despite himself being a privately-educated no-account lawyer with no connections at all with Sedgefield, who had polled so badly I think he lost his deposit in the only by-election he had ever fought (see below).
If you believe that version of his selection, you will believe anything, and you will demonstrate that you know nothing whatever about the Labour party and how it works, but it remains the official version, in both major biographies, trotted out by political journalists as if it were gospel.
For in 1982 he had fought, and spectacularly failed to win, the safe Tory seat of Beaconsfield in a by-election. I have just got out the cuttings. In some reports he is referred to as ‘Anthony Blair” and in others as ‘Tony’. The Times Guide to the House of Commons, in its summary of by-elections during that Parliament, lists him simply as ‘A.Blair’. I would be interested to see any of his election leaflets from that time. He was cruelly picked on by the Daily Telegraph’s waspish sketch-writer Godfrey Barker, who describes him making a huge fool of himself over strikes by health service workers, and calls him ‘Anthony’ throughout. Mr Barker also spotted something interesting about him, and called him ‘mysterious’ . Which he was, and is, and will be till a proper critical biography is eventually written.
What is interesting is that whenever the Blair machine wanted to get a favoured candidate into Parliament via a safe seat, they always parachuted him into the constituency at the very last minute. I wonder where they got that idea from?
I have been asked for more details of my long-ago, solitary appearance on ‘Have I got News for You?’. To this day, I cannot give a full account of what happened, except to say that the show is pre-recorded, that great swaths of recorded material are not broadcast, and that on this occasion a particular allegation was made against a major public figure, and that the discussion of this took up a lot of time and energy; and that I, being familiar with the laws of defamation, took no part in it at all, which perhaps didn’t help my cause.
I gathered from the programme makers that I had been invited on because they were, at that time, having great difficulty getting right-wing politicians to take part. This didn’t bother them as such, but they were worried about the impartiality rules which govern British broadcasting, and under which they might have got into trouble. I think their later decision to make Boris Johnson a sort of semi-permanent star got them out of this difficulty. He was officially a Tory, after all.
So I was asked on as a sort of Quota Reactionary. The pay was good – a thousand pounds for an evening. I already knew, from Boris Johnson’s original expose in the Daily Telegraph, that the programme’s apparent spontaneity was not entirely genuine. It is, or was, pre-recorded. Large parts of it were plainly rehearsed.
I made two reasonable spontaneous, unscripted, unrehearsed jokes, one about Apache helicopters, supposedly being used to stop ethnic cleansing, being named after a people who had been ethnically cleansed by the US Cavalry (Tony Benn later used the same joke, though whether he thought of it himself or copied it from me I cannot say), and another about Anthony Blair’s inability to find time for soundbites, while the hand of history was on his shoulder. Both got reasonable audience laughs, but the second one was edited out of the final cut while by contrast a silly episode where I was confronted with a plate of melons in a vaguely lubricious context was left in at length (the idea had obviously been to embarrass me).
My fellow-guest, Clarissa Dickson Wright, one of the ‘fat ladies’ who in those days had a TV cookery programme, was perhaps more anxious than I was to push herself forward on every occasion, which may have rather cramped my style.
But my real problem was that I am so out of sympathy with the programme’s heart and soul. This is the ‘Private Eye’ view of the world, in which satire is basically left-liberal, aimed at ‘stuffiness’ and ‘pomposity’ and the ‘establishment’ and Jeffrey Archer, whereas mine is much more along the lines of the late Peter Simple, aimed at the twittering pretentiousness of the new elite, atheist bishops, vainglorious, pious rock stars, left-wing Tories and Polly Toynbee.
What they revere, I mock. What they mock, I often revere. It could never have worked. But the celebrity effect of even one appearance was astonishing. I already experienced a small amount of street recognition. After being on HIGNFY, it was immensely greater. Had I been on several times, I would have passed a sort of sound barrier into full-scale fame, politically useful if personally costly.
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