I write this in ignorance of the result of the London mayoral election – votes are still being cast as I type. Were I asked to guess the result, and it would be dull not to try, I would say it was quite possible that Ken Livingstone will win, floated to victory on a general Labour surge, and further aided by a general Tory sag. But this is not in truth a Labour versus Tory election. London is increasingly a Presidential republic, a province of the EU in its own right, separate in almost all ways from the rest of the barely-United Kingdom. Ken Livingstone does not really speak for Labour, but for a wholly new, multicultural, globalist rainbow coalition which he himself prophetically invented 30 years ago. Livingstone, whom I have known slightly for many years (and for whom I once very reluctantly campaigned, when he stood as Labour candidate for Hampstead in 1979) is a very clever, cunning and far-sighted man. I campaigned for him, despite having voted against his selection as candidate at the Hampstead General Management Committee. This was in the days when Hampstead Labour Party used to hold its meetings in the beautiful headquarters of the train-drivers’ union ASLEF, in Arkwright Road NW3, a short walk from Frognal, where Hugh Gaitskell had once lived. It had been the house of the great conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, who was always said to have inherited a fortune from his family, who had made it through selling Beecham’s pills – hence the large marble ‘pill’ which decorated the bannisters of the house. But I digress. I had some idea, carried over from my days of Trotskyist ‘Democratic Centralism’, when majority votes were binding on all, that party loyalty obliged me to support him even if I didn’t agree with him. Anyway, he hadn’t a hope of winning in the Hampstead of those days, so it made no practical difference, and I used to enjoy knocking on doors and handing out leaflets high on the airy hill of Hampstead in the fine spring weather. I suspect it is exactly because of his powerful individual force that, when he did make into the House of Commons, for another seat, he was a failure. He also suffered by being ahead of his time. In those days, the mainstream of the media, and of conventional wisdom, laughed at his politically correct attitudes, his support for British surrender in Northern Ireland and his keen appetite for the sexual and cultural revolution. They also underestimated his personal appeal, and his organising skills. And they foolishly scorned his undogmatic understanding that a lot of people don’t, can’t or won’t drive cars, and want good, cheap, well-co-ordinated public transport, and will vote for it if offered the chance. But London, where multiculturalism and the sexual revolution were so much more successful than in the rest of the country, was a different matter. And the London mayoralty, a republican presidential-style post which actually demands a show-off individualist rather than a clubbable parliamentary collective-responsibility type, might have been designed for him. I have been amused, over the past few years, by the way in which the ‘respectable’ left have turned on Ken Livingstone, their most successful and coherent figure. I suspect that this is because, like Caliban looking in the glass, they don’t much like seeing themselves so clearly and uncompromisingly depicted. They particularly dislike his appeal (much like George Galloway’s) to the Muslim vote. Well, too bad. If you are a multiculturalist who believes in open borders, as the ‘respectable’ neo-con-influenced left do, then you are, sooner or later, going to have to make an accommodation with the Muslim vote. Ken Livingstone, just as he did with his other clever, ahead-of-their-time positions, has seen this and has no problem with it. Why should he? He is a serious Leftist. Those on the left who do have a problem with it have a simple solution. They should abandon the Left. That is what the Left is like. That is why I abandoned it – not least because I understood long ago that Ken Livingstone wasn’t a joke figure, but a prophet of what the Left would become. So, can Londoners (and I haven’t been one of those for more than a quarter of a century) counteract this by voting for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson? Would a defeat for Mr Johnson be a blow for the forces of righteousness? Or should we just rejoice at any failure by the Supposedly Conservative and Allegedly Unionist Party? Well, Mr Johnson is, like Mr Livingstone, an enjoyable figure. I barely know him. I’ve not spent much time with him. My world, in general, is not his. I don’t think he’s as funny as some people think he is, and can get irritated listening to besotted Tory audiences guffawing helplessly at Mr Johnson’s rather over-stretched sub-Wodehousian I Say Old Bean How Spiffing performances. And I am, I must admit, deeply, deeply jealous of the huge booster rocket given to his career by his multiple appearances on ‘Have I Got News for You’. (Yes, I was on it once, and there’s a long story, if you like, for a cold, wet winter evening, long after most of those involved are dead). Still, I can see why, in the mental desert of their party, Tories reach out to anyone who can make a speech at all, let alone one with jokes in it. I once debated on the same side as him at the Oxford Union, though can’t remember for the life of me what the topic was. He arrived late for the pre-debate dinner, and spent most of the remaining time before the debate scribbling notes in a state of what looked to me like some anxiety. I think, like many first-rate performers, he is extremely, needlessly nervous before he takes the stage (Harold Macmillan, one of the smoothest performers Westminster has ever seen, is said always to have been violently sick before Prime Minister’s Questions). And I was once on the opposing team in the first-ever University Challenge non-student contest -‘Broadsheets’ versus ‘Tabloids’, in which the despised ‘Tabloids’ won, mainly thanks to a storming performance from Tony Parsons, whose reaction speed made the average panther look lethargic. Mr Johnson was also friendly and helpful to me while he was editor of the ‘Spectator’, for which I shall always be grateful, and it was with his very strong encouragement that I launched my mischievous, foredoomed bid for the Tory nomination in Kensington and Chelsea, to annoy and discomfit Michael Portillo, and to publicise my then newly-released book ‘the Abolition of Britain’. We had an amusing chat during the last elections, when I explained to him that I hoped he’d lose because I hoped the Tories would collapse, a point of view he found quite understandable, and absorbed equably, though his Australian spin-doctor Lynton Crosby, without whom Boris would not have won in my view, wasn’t as taken with it. For years I thought of Mr Johnson (his family call him ‘Al’, not ‘Boris’, in case you didn’t know) as more or less an ally in the major causes of our time. But I have, bit by bit, come to suspect that this is probably a misapprehension. He’s amusing, well-read and clever, characteristics that are good in themselves. But he’s not particularly conservative. Sonia Purnell’s interesting biography suggests strongly that his apparent doubts about the EU are nothing like as strong as they appear. I don’t think Mr Johnson has any very strong political convictions, and I think his time as London’s Mayor has tended to emphasise this. The Mayor doesn’t have very much actual power, being , as I say, a sort of mini-President with a pulpit from which to speak and have influence. But he has also been influenced by the post, which corrals in one voting district the biggest concentration of moral and cultural radicalism in the country, and hasn’t had a small-c conservative majority for decades. If he loses the election, he is more or less bound to re-enter national politics, a development which would not make David Cameron happy. So that might be a reason for proper conservatives to hope for his defeat, as would be any setback, external or internal, for the Useless Tories. But I wonder if, like Ken Livingstone, Bois Johnson is not too big and too original a character, and too much of an individual, to succeed in the Commons. Then again, he might make a very enjoyable and effective Leader of the Opposition, the post that the next Tory leader will have to occupy for some years after 2015, if things carry on as they are doing ( and a post that David Cameron will not fancy one bit). Reports suggest that Anthony Blair may be planning a return to British domestic politics, perhaps as a member of the new, elected (ie Party Machine-selected and controlled) Senate. I can only assume that this is because of the undiluted success of his mission to the Middle East, which has clogged up the best rooms in the pleasantest hotel in Jerusalem for ages, if nothing else. Can this possibly be? Could he even return to mainstream politics? He ruined everything he touched, demeaned public life, bankrupted the country, did direct and severe damage to English liberty and repeatedly started grandiose wars. Yet somehow he has never been as hated and despised as he might have been expected to be. All that loathing, mysteriously was directed at Gordon Brown, who performed the role of the Portrait in the (unwritten) novella ‘The Picture of Anthony Blair’, which perhaps I should write, in pastiche of the over-rated Mr Wilde. Odder things have happened in life than a Blair return. Few of my generation believed that Harold Wilson would ever come back after his defeat in 1970 (Wilson himself probably couldn’t believe it himself) and yet he did, four years after he had been written off. Michael Heseltine came within inches of seizing Downing Street, long after he had walked out of the cabinet over the Westland affair. Chris Patten, that soppy liberal of soppy liberals, has had many incarnations. Winston Churchill, zig-zagging from one party to another and back again, had even more ( and his example should eb recalled by all those who jeer at MPs who change sides. If it’s so wrong, then it was wrong for Churchill too). Sir Alec Douglas-Home, after what was generally counted a failed stint as Prime Minister (though I’m not so sure it was so bad, really) returned later to be an admired and liked Foreign Secretary. In a way this was his second return. As Lord Dunglass, he had been Neville Chamberlain’s bag-carrier and understrapper during the Munich affair of 1938. Roy Jenkins came back from being an EU Commissioner to become a leader of the SDP, an entirely new career, though he wasn’t much more loved by his colleagues in his new role than he had been in the past. I’ve often wished that Denis Healey could make a comeback, as one of the few grown-ups in British politics, but it’s too late now. Abroad, General de Gaulle returned from political extinction. But all these people are far more considerable than the Blair creature, whose role is being quite adequately filled by his self-proclaimed heir, Mr Cameron. I’ve always been amazed by the way that Mr Blair’s showbusiness, Diana-like sparkle bypassed the normal mental faculties of voters – basic intelligence, reason, caution, experience, common sense. I knew him (slightly) before he was famous, and while I could see that his shiny blandness was an electoral asset, I never liked it or imagined that it betokened a real change. When I managed to speak to him (or when I talked to others who had spent longer with him), it was always amazing to find how incoherent, ill-informed and relaxed he was, as if his political career was swirling around him, leaving him personally untouched. It was happening to him, like unexpected stardom, not controlled or particularly desired by him. It wasn’t that he didn’t like it. He liked it a lot, but more in the way of a successful actor ( as I believe he was) than of a man committed to the struggle for the highest office. Unlike most politicians, whose first interest is power, and who are often bored by luxury, Mr Blair always seemed to be more interested in the fun, glamour and first-class travel side of the political world. I wonder if, like so many people who have enjoyed fame, he just misses it so much that he wants it back. Fame and prominence are like stimulant drugs to many, making their eyes brighter, compelling them to stand up straighter and live more intensely. My brother once arranged an interview of Sir Oswald Mosley for a pilot programme (not usually shown) of a current affairs series on which he worked, back in the 1970s. He always remembered how the old monster came shuffling into the studio, rheumy-eyed and stooping, a nearly-decrepit man in the twilight of his days. But as they fussed round him, testing the lights and microphones and applying the make-up, Sir Oswald asked if there was any possibility that the interview might actually be shown. There wasn’t, but my brother thought it sensible to pretend that it might be. But he had had his little hour of hope. The real political changes of the past 25 years or so have not taken place at general elections, but within the political parties. First, there was the destruction of ‘Old Labour’ in the early 1980s by the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and the Labour Co-ordinating Committee. These bodies, using such tactics as mandatory reselection, got rid of or drove into the SDP many Labour MPs who were morally and socially conservative. At national level, left-wing factions in the big trades unions, marshalled by the Communist party’s skilled and well-connected industrial organisation, won victories on policy (particularly defence and foreign policy) out of all proportion to the number of Communists and Communist sympathisers in the union movement. So, in the years following Jim Callaghan’s general election defeat in 1979, the Labour Party was transformed, permanently, from top to bottom. Much of this was the work of Communist sympathisers, who had since the days of Lenin supported Labour ‘as the rope supports the hanged man’, and encouraged sympathisers to join Labour and stay out of the CP, the better to penetrate the Labour Party at the highest and lowest levels. Much less was the work of various kinds of Trotyskyists, but the media were obsessed with the insignificant role of the ‘Militant Tendency’ a front organisation and code name for tiny Trotskyist sect called the Revolutionary Socialist League, mainly concentrated in Liverpool. A major Communist Party, of the kind which operated in France and Italy, was not what Lenin and the Comintern wanted. They had long sought to take over the Labour Party instead. Old labour knew all about this, and the party’s organisation until the 1970s was well-trained in detecting and frustrating Communist party infiltration. William Rodgers’s Campaign for Democratic Socialism successfully defeated attempts to win Labour for the (pro-Soviet) cause of unilateral nuclear disarmamament. Ex-Communists, such as the Electricians’ Union leader Frank Chapple (he left over the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956) had no illusions at all about the CP’s methods and fought them without mercy (the CP never forgave him for exposing pro-Communist ballot-rigging in the union). But these forces were weakening by the early 1980s, and the New Left of the CLPD and the LCC bypassed the old defences. There were also the new ‘Euro-Communists’, of ‘Marxism Today’, Communist Party members who had forsaken the rigid Stalinism of the old party and argued instead for a flexible, post Soviet, Gramscian approach – cultural and social revolution, not Bolshevism. Some of the cleverer Trotskyists had found their way to the same place. These became the nucleus of Blairism, which was never ‘Right-Wing’ at all. Labour’s Right Wing was by then completely dead. The New Left were bitterly hostile to the noisier, less subtle Trotskyists (such as Militant) and were happy to see Militant crushed by Neil Kinnock, a victory for the classical, subtle left over the radical, honest left. Fleet Street, in its usual idiotic way, portrayed Neil Kinnock’s crushing of Militant as the end of the Left in the Labour Party. This ludicrous myth, the opposite of the truth, is still widely believed. Ha ha. Actually, the whole of British politics would as a result shift decisively to the Left as a result. The transformation of the Tory Party was less intentional. By bypassing the party organisation, wooing big donors and using the Murdoch Press and Saatchis to appeal directly to the electorate, and by creating a ‘leader’ who was a national semi-Presidential figure, Mrs Thatcher and her allies created a vacuum where traditional Toryism had been. The party machine atrophied. The power and significance of the leader hugely increased. But if the leader was weak, he was vulnerable. John Major became the prisoner of Michael Heseltine because of his weakness. As for the even weaker Iain Duncan Smith, it was astonishingly easy for the media to ally with Michael Howard to overthrow IDS . Mr Howard then began a process of centralising the party, and delayed the election of his success for long enough to give David Cameron the edge over David Davis, which he would never have done in a quick contest, and - as exemplified by his action against Howard Flight for remarks made at a private meeting – sought to end the control which local associations had over candidate selection. Now we see (as reported in ‘The Guardian’ on Monday 30th April) that a group of Tory MPs have magically teamed up to remove old-fashioned, traditional Tory MPs, such as Christopher Chope and Peter Bone, from the leadership of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers. As the Guardian’s Nicholas Watt puts it: ‘A conversation among a couple of colleagues mushroomed into the 301 Group – the number of parliamentary seats needed to secure a majority in the next parliament – which attracted 135 Tory MPs to a meeting in January. ‘The group will on Monday show it is reshaping the Conservative parliamentary party when it takes the distinctly un-Tory step of publishing a slate of candidates for the elections to the executive of the 1922 committee. Candidates of all ages and intakes will be put forward to modernise the "antique" backbench committee, which has a hierarchical structure whereby new MPs have to defer to longer-serving colleagues in the weekly meetings. ‘ "Quite often, certainly senior members of the 1922 have seen the prime minister and the government as the opposition," says Hopkins, who is driving the changes but is not standing for election. "That is not the way to go about it. They should be challenged.’ Or, as I might put it, the remaining conservatives in the Conservative Party are to be marginalised. Will the voters notice? Some will, but millions, I fear, will continue to vote for a party that hates them, just as millions of Labour voters have been doing since the 1980s. And the enxt general election like the last four, will be a non-contest among parties which have no serious differences among them.
All the pillars of the Cameron delusion have now collapsed
02 May 2012 4:57 PM
The Undead in British Politics
30 April 2012 5:12 PM
How Politics Really Happens – another internal putsch
Sunday, 6 May 2012
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
That's settled, then. We shall have an openly declared Labour government again by 2015, instead of a Labour government in all but name, as we have now. The Tories cannot possibly win the next Election, just as they never had a hope of winning the last one.
But in 2015 it will be even worse for them. In 2010 they fanned a wild, unhinged hatred of Gordon Brown to get their failing vote out, despite having no policies to offer.
Their attempts to engineer a similar scorn for Edward Miliband have failed. Voters are now so weary of the Coalition that they don’t really care if the Opposition is led by a goofy Marxoid teenager.
You won’t notice much difference when Labour take over, except that no Labour government would have dared to smash up our Armed Forces as Mr Cameron has done. They would have been too scared of being accused of national treachery.
Political correctness will rule over all, as it does now. Crime and disorder will flourish, as they do now. Mass immigration will carry on, as it does now. The EU will continue to steal our independence, as it does now. The married family will continue to be besieged and undermined by laws and the active promotion of fatherless homes, as is the case now.
The welfare state will continue to swell far beyond our ability to pay for it, and children will carry on emerging from 11 years of alleged education barely able to read and count. New grammar schools will be illegal, as they are now.
The one good thing is that the Cameron delusion ought now to reach an end. But will it? Or will Britain’s conservativeminded people carry on voting stupidly and pointlessly for the Tory Party, which hates and despises them and everything they care for? All the pillars of the Cameron delusion have now collapsed. The Tory Party cannot win a majority by any method. Nobody trusts it, and it stands for nothing except getting posh boys into office.
Mr Cameron is not a secret patriot waiting for the chance to rip off his expensive tailoring and reveal his inner Thatcher. He is exactly what he looks like, an unprincipled chancer with limited skills in public relations. He likes being in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats because he agrees with them.
George Osborne is not an iron Chancellor with a severe plan to save the economy. His cuts don’t exist; he’s as wedded to the big-spending welfare state as Ed Balls or Gordon Brown are. On top of that, he’s not very good at his job.
Because so many people foolishly trusted Mr Cameron in 2010, we have wasted several precious years. But we can bring about the collapse of the useless Tories in 2015 by refusing to vote for them any more.
If you must vote at the next Election (I shan’t), vote for the absurd Dad’s Army of UKIP if you want to. At least it does no harm. But the real business of constructing a new pro-British party to speak for all the abandoned, honest, patriotic, gentle people of this Disunited Kingdom can begin only when we have chucked the Tories into a suitably stout wheelie bin and slammed the lid down on top of them.
Was Sylvia a victim of these 'suicide pills'?
If you won’t take it from me, will you take it from Ted Hughes? I get into great trouble for warning that ‘antidepressant’ pills may actually make people worse. Well, the renowned Poet Laureate believed that it was an ‘antidepressant’ that led to the otherwise inexplicable suicide of his beautiful, talented wife Sylvia Plath. This sort of thing is still going on. Time for an inquiry, I think.
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You might have got the impression from some reports that Speaker John Bercow is a wicked baddie, and Mr Slippery, our leader, a gentleman of the old school. Normally, I’d let this go, but this week it’s the opposite of the truth. Mr Bercow is doing what a Speaker ought to do, and making sure that Ministers in trouble come to Parliament and face hard questioning. Whatever his politics or his past, or the foolishnesses of his wife, Mr Bercow is upholding our constitution and liberties, and good for him.
Mr Cameron, meanwhile, has taken to delivering cowardly and disrespectful verbal rabbit-punches to older MPs who dare to tease him. When Dennis Skinner, 80 but still very sharp, made a perfectly justifiable comment, Mr Slippery hit back crudely: ‘He has the right to take his pension and I advise him to do so.’ And when David Winnick teased him lightly, Mr Slippery snapped: ‘I think Russell Brand got it just about right yesterday.’
Brand, the odious alleged comedian, had sneered about Mr Winnick’s age, at a committee hearing on drugs. Interesting that Mr Slippery identifies with this very nasty, coarse person. I think it tells us a lot about him.
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The more ferocious border controls are, the more futile they tend to be. I have held a US visa for years, and obtaining the last one involved hours of form-filling, acres of personal information, a criminal record check and an interview. They know more about me than I can currently remember.
Yet I must still queue for ages at US immigration, and be photographed and fingerprinted, before I can get in. Well, it’s their country, and they can do what they like, but for the past 20 years or so millions of Central Americans have got into the US, founded families and settled into jobs there, by sprinting from Tijuana into San Diego, or wading the Rio Grande. It’s the same with us. For years and years, our border officials feebly admitted thousands of people with tenuous claims to be refugees, and failed even to record the names of those caught being smuggled into the country in lorries. And then they let the EU force us to admit uncounted legions of migrants from Eastern Europe, including former Soviet republics, who now – absurdly – have the same legal right to be here as you or I.
And then they have the nerve to claim that they are making us wait hours to get back into our own country for our own good.
Plucked from the ranks of our ineffectual, excuse-making chief constables, Border Force chief Brian Moore quickly showed us what he was made of. He droned, in the zombie tones of modern inflexible bureaucracy, that if there were four-hour passport queues during the Olympics ‘then so be it. We will not compromise on safety’.
Oh, it’s for our safety, is it? No, it’s not. If we were serious about that we wouldn’t have staged the stupid Olympics in the first place. It’s because, if we behaved like an independent country and opened up passport lines marked ‘British subjects only’, the EU would fine us for breaking European law. And we’d pathetically pay the fine.
Almost instantly, Mosley shrugged off a couple of decades of age, sat up straighter, reacted more quickly. His eyes began to shine, his voice and mind to sharpen. He gave a cogent interview.
When it was all over, he sagged back into his original self and shuffled off into the South Bank drizzle and the obscurity he had long ago earned.
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