This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I’m sorry to break this to you but it looks as if we’ll have to endure not one but two EU referendum campaigns.

The second one, by the way, will definitely end in a vote to stay in.

The ‘exit’ campaign was last week cunningly taken over by Tories who don’t want to leave the Superstate and will use a vote to leave (if it happens) as the basis for yet another round of negotiations with Brussels.

Boris Johnson and Michael Howard are ancient liberal Europhiles, who have learned how to seduce the Tory Party with speeches that sound Right-wing but aren’t really. It is painful to see this cynical seduction technique at work, and watch the old ladies fall for it.

Neither is what he seems. Lord Howard led a Left-liberal putsch against the genuine EU opponent Iain Duncan Smith in 2003. Mr Johnson is an act, not a politician. He is a keen Europhile, and to conceal it from his fans he will do so many U-turns between now and referendum day that they will look like a series of S-bends.

Both men’s weird declarations of support for Brexit were cunningly hedged.

And the London Mayor was careful to state: ‘I will be advocating vote “leave”... because I want a better deal for the people of this country to save them money and to take back control.’

Read this carefully (as you always should) and you will realise there’s no clear declaration that he wants our national independence back. But there is a desire for a ‘deal’. Likewise his supposed reversal last Saturday wasn’t really as clear as it looked. Be assured. If there is a majority to leave there will be a second poll and a search for a new deal.

What sort of deal? Lord Howard was more specific. In an article which was lazily reported as a ‘blow for David Cameron’, he explicitly said that he saw a vote to leave as a way of restarting negotiations on how to stay in: ‘There is only one thing that just might shake Europe’s leaders out of their complacency: the shock of a vote by the British people to leave.’

He added: ‘We would be sorely missed. If the UK voted to leave, there would be a significant chance that they would ask us to think again. When Ireland and Denmark voted to reject EU proposals, the EU offered them more concessions and, second time round, got the result they wanted.’

Lord Howard went on to explain how happy he would be for Britain to be a semi-detached part of a two-tier EU – something very much on the cards as the EU moves into its next phase of integration, two or three years hence. ‘We – and others – could say to the integrationists, “We don’t want to stop you doing what you want to do as long as you don’t make us do what we don’t want to do.” ’

You read it first here. The EU is like the Hotel California. You can check out. But you can never leave.

This referendum, which was never supposed to happen at all, is a sham for which I refuse to fall.

What sort of hero condemns women to death?

The BBC’s new thriller The Night Manager must be one of the strangest things ever broadcast. Its apparent hero, played by Tom Hiddleston, is portrayed as a tower of moral purity. Yet the first thing he does is to betray a living, breathing woman (who trusted him with her life because of his honest British appearance) in pursuit of an abstract ideal. Apparently, he hates arms traders so much, this is the sort of thing he does.

Predictably, the woman, played by Aure Atika, is barbarously murdered (in the book, I’m sorry to say, her dog is murdered too, a detail the BBC spared us). The arms dealer, equally predictably, gets away with it.

This skewed moral system in which people claim to be virtuous by having severe, righteous views about foreign countries, seems horribly common among our cultural elite. Is this why our foreign policy keeps getting its head stuck up its own fundament?

Again and again, in pursuit of some supposedly noble goal, we plunge entire countries into lakes of fire and blood, and then stand about looking puzzled and claiming it wasn’t our fault.

Inscribed in stone, above the doors of all government buildings, should be William Blake’s bitterly true maxim: ‘He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars: general good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.’

Country dwellers are often mystified by the appearance of strange little dumps of used fertiliser pellets, which appear now all over the place by night. I can explain. These are left by the owners of urban cannabis farms (Britain’s most successful and profitable agricultural sector) who dare not use their own bins for fear that even the British police – among the most relaxed in the world on the dope question – might notice and take action against them.

Education that doesn't add up

The reports flood in, as they do almost weekly. The standards of mathematics teaching have plunged disastrously. The professions are dominated by private school products, two years ahead of their state school contemporaries.

Yet nobody ever reaches the obvious conclusion – that we should return to selection by ability in the state system and reopen the great private schools to the taxpayer-funded Direct Grant system which lifted so many poor children to success.

Why are our elite so prejudiced against this obvious remedy? Even on their own terms, their position makes no sense.

Every week I hear more alarming things about our prisons, especially the almost universal availability of mindbending drugs, whose users often become violent. These are now flown into cells, through broken windows, by drones. The authorities seem powerless to stop this.

No surprise there. As we make no effort to stop drugtaking outside prison, it is hardly surprising prisons themselves are even more lawless. Alongside these cases are alarming numbers of mentally ill people, cast out into the non-existent ‘community’ by the wicked decision to close most mental hospitals.

Older, experienced staff are quietly disappearing and turnover among new staff is unsurprisingly high. Huge jails are often left overnight in the charge of tiny numbers of officers.

I predict a major catastrophe soon. And it will be the direct result of decades of liberal penal policy, which uses prison only as a last resort and so ensures that a large number of inmates are hardened criminals, incapable of reform, before they ever get there.

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