This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Is there anyone left alive who does not know that the Blair creature and his political commissar, Alastair Campbell, fooled Britain into war in Iraq? Of course it’s ridiculous that the Chilcot Report (which may just confirm this blazingly obvious truth) is jammed in some Whitehall sump.

But the real question is why so many people allowed themselves to be misled by this pair, who had the strategic grasp of Noddy and Big Ears.

I can say this because I was clearly against the war at the time and laughed at the absurd pretexts given for it. Almost everyone in the media or politics, and many others besides, now also claim to have been against it when they weren’t.

I can recall listening with amazement as people I previously thought of as intelligent began mouthing the Government’s slogans, as if they’d been given some sort of political equivalent of Rohypnol.

Worst of all were Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, whose relentless support for war after war after war has been far more obscene than The Sun’s teenage, catchpenny display of female nipples.

Now everyone claims to have been against it. Many actually believe they were, when they weren’t.

But I know, because I recall how lonely it was to be anti-war – unless you were on the pacifist Left, which opposes all wars, good or bad, except when they are attacks on Israel.

I still remember being assailed by normally supportive readers for opposing the Kosovo war, the dress rehearsal for Iraq in which ‘our’ side bombed Belgrade and killed (among other civilians) Jelica Munitlak, 27, the make-up lady at Serbian TV. The Blair creature shamelessly said this attack was ‘entirely justified’.

Now, as pressure builds for a war with Russia, I am once again feeling lonely. All the same techniques are being used. Vladimir Putin (like Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Saddam Hussein of Iraq, not to mention Bashar Assad of Syria) is being ludicrously compared to Hitler. The BBC has lost all sense of proportion and utterly forgotten its duty to be impartial. Those who oppose the conflict are falsely accused of being apologists of the many undoubtedly bad features of the Putin government.

And if you try (as I have done) to oppose this conformist tide in open debate, people look at you blankly, as if you have stated the world is flat. Why is this? Because brainwashing works. Modern techniques of propaganda are far cleverer than those used by Joseph Goebbels or Stalin’s brilliant spin doctor Willi Muenzenberg.

Edward Bernays (nephew of the pioneering psychiatrist Sigmund Freud) wrote the brainwashers’ handbook ‘Propaganda’ in 1928.

His main technique was known as ‘engineering consent’, subtly pushing people into agreeing to things they would never otherwise put up with. He persuaded women to start smoking by getting them to believe the habit was liberating and their cigarettes were ‘torches of freedom’.

In the book he explained how ‘the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society’. He said there was an ‘invisible government’ which ‘pulls the wires which control the public mind’.

And so there is. It’s working on you now. You oughtn’t to need the Chilcot Report to realise that. Perhaps, in future, we could have a rule that war, like cigarettes, should only be sold in plain packets.

Alicia's got the looks, but that's not enough

How I wish I had liked the new film of Vera Brittain’s moving memoir Testament Of Youth.

Alicia Vikander, as Vera, is very beautiful. But I just don’t think modern young actors can begin to understand the depth and scale of the convulsion that war caused in Britain in 1914.

Uniforms, trains, clothes are as usual carefully recreated – but not the way people actually talked or thought.

Alicia Vikander plays Vera in the moving film Testament of Youth, but can an actress as young as her understand the effect the First World War had on Britain?

Christian nurse Victoria Wasteney, 37, claims she was sacked after praying for a Muslim colleague

Christianity's hidden enemies

The louder they squawk about ‘Islamism’ and ‘radicalisation’, the more the British state seek to crush Christianity in this country. And once it’s crushed, what do you think will take its place?

A Christian JP is suspended and ordered to undergo re-education after daring to speak in favour of traditional Christian marriage. A Christian nurse is accused of ‘bullying and harassment’ for praying for a Muslim colleague. And now, in a development that seems quite scandalous to me, that horrible Stalinist organisation Ofsted (which permits the continued existence of hundreds of the worst schools in the advanced world) has turned its fury on, yes, a Christian school in Sunderland.

You know the one, where Ofsted apparatchiks asked puzzled children what lesbians did. Well, it’s much worse than that.

Soon after the inspection (on November 26 and 27 last year), and well before the resulting report was published, Grindon Hall Christian School’s head, Chris Gray, wrote to Ofsted. He complained that the tenor of the inspection was negative and hostile at every stage, ‘as if the data collected had to fit a pre-determined outcome’.

He referred to ‘intrusive and deeply personal questioning of children’. Positive comments by children were ignored. One sixth-former complained the inspector ‘seemed very negative’, adding: ‘Most of the questions that were asked were related to bullying/homophobia/racism/extremism… She seemed to have the view that since we are a Christian school we don’t respect other religions and views.’

And a few weeks later, out came the report which, as Mr Gray described it, ‘grades the best performing secondary state-funded school in Sunderland (latest published GCSE results) as the worst’.

All of this material, as well as the report, is displayed on the school’s website. All I can say is that, while the Home Secretary claims to be defending us against Islamist extremism, another equally dangerous anti-Christian extremism has infiltrated much of the British state, where it rules unchallenged.

It’s odd that bishops, so vocal on the welfare state and other Leftist topics, do not seem interested in defending their faith against this sort of thing.

BBC spend a fortune making Mantel book look interesting

Hilary Mantel is now a sort of Leftist saint thanks to her trivial short story about a middle-class woman helping an IRA killer murder Margaret Thatcher. Her very putdownable book about the horrible Thomas Cromwell (I couldn’t pick it up again) is praised and bought (though not, I suspect, read) all over Guardianland.

And now the BBC have spent a fortune on brocade, furniture and fine actors, trying to make this stuff look interesting. It made me laugh. The Duke of Norfolk and Duke of Suffolk burst into Cardinal Wolsey’s home (this is meant to be 1529) and shout ‘You’re out!’ at the Prince of the Church. I half expected them to add: ‘Get yer trousers on! You’re nicked!’

They needn’t have bothered with all the Shakespearean thespians. Ray Winstone would have done just as well, especially for the usual gratuitous use of the F-word.

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