If you had asked me for a national watchword in my childhood, it would have been along the lines of: 'Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, or close the wall up with our English dead,' or perhaps: 'We shall fight on the beaches,' or possibly: 'England expects that every man will do his duty.'

I suppose, with a sigh, that such things have now passed out of the national mind.

But how miserable that the motto we are now being advised to adopt, when under terrorist attack, is the ghastly police advice of 'Run! Hide! Tell!'

Not only do I feel faintly nauseated by the suggestion that I should run and hide when confronted by evil (I may actually do so, but I will be ashamed of myself if I do) but I also think it is bad advice.

At times of great danger, what you need most of all is calm. It makes you more use, and it stops you infecting other people with panic, or of being infected by it.

How miserable that our current anti-terror slogan is 'Run! Hide! Tell' when we see something not quite right in a public place, says Peter Hitchens

I was worried by one recent episode of real terror when a schoolboy was injured not by the bomb but by the crowd fleeing afterwards.

Did this really fit with our self-congratulation about the Blitz spirit prevailing yet again?

Possibly, calm may even give you the resolve needed to hit back. When authority is squawking at you to run away, it is hard to be calm.

Panic leads to stampedes, and quite often to greater danger than you already face.

Don't we still, in fact, admire those who hit or grab or trip up terrorists, rather than fleeing from them?

Won't we be safer if terrorists know that we might stand up to them? And is headlong flight wise?

If fire breaks out in a building, are we told to run? On the contrary, we are urged to leave in an orderly way.

I was struck by the report in this newspaper of what happened last weekend in London when a car roared into crowds outside the Natural History Museum. We now know this was an accident.

People nearby, quite reasonably, reacted as if it might be terrorism. And they didn't run and hide, to their great credit.

It's not just Corbyn's advisers who have communist links Former MI5 chief Stella Rimington is exercised about Marxist advisers to Jeremy Corbyn, who in the 1980s wanted to destroy democracy. No doubt. But did she not notice that Tony Blair himself was a student Trotskyist (a fact he's now finally admitted), Peter Mandelson was a Young Communist, Blair's Defence Secretary John Reid was an Old Communist, and four other Blair Cabinet Ministers have neither denied nor regretted reliable reports of Marxist pasts? I'd guess there are at least a dozen more we don't know about. Did MI5? Advertisement

The driver was seized and held before police arrived. Then, one witness recounted: 'The police charged at us shouting, 'Get out of here! Run and don't stop running.'

These police obviously thought the threat had escalated. People started running for their lives.'

Another described how 'there were all these people on Exhibition Road running… people were just panicking and running'.

I am still wondering how much this panicking and running were caused not by the incident, but by the shouted police advice to flee.

You might say that there could have been a bomb, but there wasn't. People could also have been badly hurt in the panic.

We have to get this into proportion, and we have to remember that terrorism is called 'terrorism' because its whole aim is to scare us.

Terror will always surprise us, and it is horrible, but actually it does a very small amount of damage compared with conventional war.

It will not destroy our economy or starve us to death. It only wins if it forces us to change our way of life out of fear of it. We should not do so.

Snap that defines our fake nation

Why is this picture of a Life Guard with a wire in his ear so upsetting?

I think it is because of the contrast between the 18th Century grandeur of the uniform and the dreary modern banality of the headphones, and the noise trickling through them.

By the way, I have checked and it is definitely not some clever new military gadget.

This guard was spotted on duty holding a sword with his headphones in

Royal London, like much of British life, is an illusion, a living museum of a civilisation that has largely vanished. Most of us know this, if we stop to think about it.

But we continue to wish that we were still the country we once were. It hurts to have it rammed home, like this, that we are not. Even five years ago, no trained soldier would have done such a thing.

Which word springs to mind when you look at this number plate, circled above, displayed on a Lamborghini in a London showroom?

Almost everyone I have shown it to says 'Heroin'. But the garage owners, H. R. Owen, say it refers to their name and offered no answer when I asked if it had ever occurred to them that some people might think it was a drug reference.

This sort of thing reinforces my view that we don't really disapprove of drugs any more.

Peter Hitchens slams garage owners H.R. Owen for their customised number plate that reads like the word 'heroin'

Riddle of the shadowy assassins The word 'conspiracy' makes people think of men in Guy Fawkes hats and cloaks, whispering theatrically in a dark tavern. So it is easy to dismiss any suggestion that actions are privately planned as a 'conspiracy theory'. Most people will immediately feel embarrassed that they believed something so silly. This is a mistake. People do meet privately so that they can co-operate in pursuing a shared aim without revealing their connections with each other. It is more effective if it does not look planned. In modern Britain this is called 'lunch', and it happens many times every day. Those involved wear ordinary suits and keep their voices down, but they do not whisper. We know that Chancellor Philip Hammond has been lunching with George Osborne. I also suspect there have been other lunches involved in the current wave of attacks on Mr Hammond. I don't have any special liking for Mr Hammond, rather the opposite, but I thought you might be interested to know that he has not suddenly become so unpopular by accident, or through telepathy. By the way, a word to the former Chancellor Lord Lawson, a man for whom I do have great respect, and who no doubt decided to attack Mr Hammond without any prompting from anyone. He should know better than to use terms such as 'sabotage' about the man who now holds the post he once occupied. It is a frantic, totalitarian expression – Stalin used to use it a lot. And he should also remember the wretched period 30 years ago when he joined with Sir Geoffrey Howe to strong-arm Margaret Thatcher into the disastrous Exchange Rate Mechanism. She was right, and he was wrong, it seems to me. Such experiences should surely make those involved less sure of themselves, not more so. I find it harder and harder to be sure about how to handle the EU issue. Advertisement

Officialdom is still baffled by the Las Vegas mass murders. That’s because they’re only interested in standard explanations.

Almost all such killings are committed by people who have been using legal or illegal mind-altering drugs – eg ‘antidepressants’, steroids or cannabis.

And we know that the killer Stephen Paddock had been taking diazepam (whose side effects include rage and violence, especially if the person is an abuser of other drugs).

It really is time this connection was examined.

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