This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

If your car breaks down and won’t go, do you think you will solve the problem by giving it a new coat of paint? Not unless you are very stupid. So why does anyone think that ditching Theresa May and replacing her with Al ‘Boris’ Johnson will make any important difference?

Why should you listen to me on this subject? Because I told you many times, long ago, that Theresa May was useless, often against a strong tide of majority opinion which praised and endorsed her.

More than six years ago, on March 17, 2013, Mrs May’s spin doctors were trying to turn her into a potential premier. I had watched her for years and met her. I thought the idea absurd and warned that the Tories were looking for a new delusion to cling to.

I said: ‘Some are beguiled by Alexander (alias “Boris”) Johnson.

They don’t even know his real name, and have also failed to notice that he is politically correct, pro-EU and, while he is cleverer than his schoolmate and fellow Bullingdon hearty, Mr Slippery [David Cameron], he is the same sort of thing.

But dafter even than that is the cult of Theresa May, now being hawked about as the New Iron Lady. Oh, come on. Theresa May is the Marshmallow Lady.’

Yes, I did say that Mr Johnson was pro-EU. I here repeat it. He is. He later adopted the opposite view out of cynical calculation. He could just as easily go into reverse.

Tory Remainers are already starting to predict that, if he becomes Prime Minister, he will be the only person strong enough to cancel our departure from the EU.

They may well be right. Those who cheer for him now may be cursing him sooner than they think.

I repeatedly pointed out that Mrs May shares much of her politics with the New Labour commissar of political correctness, Harriet Harman. In July 2016, I said her supposed achievements as Home Secretary were ‘ludicrously over-rated’.

I also warned, in October 2016, against what I called her ‘inexplicable breezy confidence about leaving the EU’.

I said: ‘It makes me shudder, and I am a veteran campaigner for national independence. I wouldn’t dream of activating Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which starts the two-year clock for our exit, because it places all the negotiating power in the hands of our continental rivals.

And they, especially Germany, hope to scare all the other EU nations into staying in. The last thing they want to do is to make an exit easy for us. I’d insist on getting all the talking done before taking this dangerous step.’

I added: ‘If anyone thinks that the Bad Losers’ Party has given up its dream of rerunning the referendum, just wait and see. They will fight this in the courts, in the Commons, in the Lords, in the civil service and in the BBC.’ Right again. You’d think after rightly opposing the referendum, correctly predicting its outcome and immediately and accurately prophesying a constitutional crisis, I’d get tired of being right. But no, what I get tired of is that hardly anyone listens to me when I am right, or in time to do anything.

The Tory Party is finished and done for, whoever it picks as its leader. No person exists who can save it. If we had got rid of it in 2010, as I urged, we might not have wasted the past decade and left all our national crises unaddressed. But we did.

I fear it is too late to replace the Tory Party with something better. I hope I am wrong but I sense everyone is too angry to think, and too ready to fall into the cynical hands of Mr Johnson or Mr Farage. If we do that, we will replace the Tory Party with something even worse, if you can imagine that. Just don’t ask me to applaud when this happens.

The day Oxford University signed its death warrant

Oxford University last week committed suicide. A century from now, tourists will still come to admire its lovely buildings, but the guides will astonish them when they say that it was once considered the equal of the great universities of North America.

The reason is simple. Oxford’s vice-chancellor, Louise Richardson, thinks the way to help children from poor homes get into good universities is to patronise them and lower standards. This will, of course, lower the standards of teaching, lower the standards of attainment, and drive away the best teachers, who don’t want to run remedial courses. In the end, Oxford (and Cambridge, too, if it follows the same mad course) will become comprehensive universities, crawling along at the pace of the slowest.

Not all that long ago, I was at a grand Oxford dinner where I discussed this with Professor Richardson. I wrote to her afterwards telling her where she could find, in the University’s own archives, details of a better way of helping bright children from poor homes get into great universities.

In 1966, the Franks Report into Oxford University showed that, during the grammar school era, which began in 1944, the proportion of state and direct-grant pupils entering Oxford rose rapidly. Such schools had won 32 per cent of places in 1938-39. By 1958-59, they won 45 per cent and by 1964-65, 49 per cent.

If academic selection had continued, there is every reason to think those numbers would have kept on growing. Pupils were given no special concessions. Their academic standards were as high as those of their private school fellow students.

Who were they? Well, in 1954 the Gurney-Dixon Report recorded that 64 per cent of pupils at state grammar schools were working-class. Which allegedly ‘good’ comprehensive could claim this today?

I know the story of one of them, Michael Tanner, who has written a fascinating memoir (From PoW Camp To Oxford University) of how, having grown up in the Nissen huts of a recycled prisoner-of-war camp and then in one of the city’s rougher council estates, he won a place at Oxford, thanks to inspirational teaching at a small, far-from-rich grammar school in the midst of a working-class area. The school was destroyed soon after he achieved this.

Those who came after him were denied the opportunity, and so it will be forever, unless the Louise Richardsons of this world stop patronising the poor and start helping them instead.

Cinemas shoot themselves in the foot

I can still remember the explosive effect of the film Bonnie and Clyde more than 50 years ago. The violence, now normal, was deeply shocking, the suggestion of sympathy for two rather sordid gangsters was subversive.

So when I heard of The Highwaymen, a film telling the story from the side of the lawmen who hunted the pair, I was anxious to see it at the cinema. Alas, it never made it. I was forced to watch it at home on a subscription service.

I thought it rather good. The depiction of Depression America and the ghastly scenes when the two dead criminals are put on display are especially worth seeing.

But it has no superheroes or special effects, so someone somewhere assumed it would not be good box office. A pity, and can our cinemas survive long with such an attitude?

They didn't run, or hide

Isn’t the evidence from the inquest into the London Bridge murders inspiring and moving? So many people did not follow the absurd, shameful police advice to ‘run, hide, tell’, but rushed into unequal battle with armed killers, or hurried into danger to aid their fellow-creatures. I am wary of optimism, but it is heartening to see how many of us have more courage than the government thinks we have, or wants us to have.

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