This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

So, Mr Slippery has finally slipped away, just before he was found out. I wish David Cameron lots of money in his future life, so much of it that he at last begins to wonder if that is what he really wanted.

But can we pause for a moment and ask how it was that this charming but pointless person rose to such prominence in our country?

His single most important action was to lend Western air forces and other assistance to Islamist fanatics in Libya. Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee last week explained just how clueless and irresponsible this was, though it is a pity that so many of the MPs on this committee supported the Libya folly at the time.

The same goes for much of the media, which reported the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi more or less as if it was a sporting event, and the fanatical rebels were our team. They also gullibly repeated the most ridiculous atrocity propaganda, something any knowledgeable journalist is trained to treat with suspicion.

I have checked my own writing and broadcasting at the time and find I warned clearly against it, for example this from March 2011: 'Who are the Libyan rebels? What do they want? Why do we love them so? I've no idea, and nor has Mr Cameron… Some of the longest wars in history started with small-scale intervention, for a purpose that looked good and achievable, and ended up ruining millions of lives.

'The Soviet takeover of Afghanistan in 1979 ended with countless innocents driven into refugee camps, and the collapse of the Soviet state itself. It also left Afghanistan as a worse snake pit than before.'

I did not know the half of it. David Cameron's war created the appalling, unstoppable crisis of mass migration across the Mediterranean from Africa, a gigantic movement of people unknown in previous history, which will in the long run transform the economic and political fortunes of our continent.

This catastrophe was his most notable act. He ought to be remembered for it. Many of you will be able to think of others, some deliberate (such as his daft energy, education, migration, economic and aid policies), others exploding cigars, such as his incompetent and contemptuous handling of the European Union issue.

He was one of the worst prime ministers we have ever had, but have we – have you – learned from this experience? Will you continue to turn to the smooth, the well-spun, the expensively suited and rehearsed, the ones endorsed by the same media who gushed over the Blair creature?

Already the forces that put David Cameron in power are uniting in a dishonest spasm of hatred against Theresa May's grammar school policy and the referendum result.

Will you be fooled by them again? Or will you learn that there is no such thing as 'the centre' and that those who claim to stand there are driven by nothing but personal ambition and vanity? And that they do not offer safety, but danger?

*****

Late last year a strange new law came into force in this country, making it a crime, punishable by prison, to use repeated ‘controlling or coercive behaviour’ in the home.

You might think there’s nothing wrong with that.

But what if it becomes one of the many offences in family law where social workers, police and courts assume that the accused is guilty, and he or she has to prove his innocence?

The growing numbers who have fallen into this pit simply do not get fair trials. No doubt some of them are guilty. But in many cases this simply is not proved beyond reasonable doubt. They lose homes, families, children, livelihoods, reputations and – sometimes – liberty.

And if we stop caring if they’ve been properly tried, we forge a weapon that may one day be used against us.

That’s why I really dislike the great fuss recently made about the BBC Radio 4 soap opera ‘The Archers’.

In this programme - which I have many times explained is openly intended as propaganda for ‘progressive’ ideas - two actors pretended to be a married couple. This long drama got under way as the new law came into force.

For months, the male actor pretended to be a perfect example of the ‘coercive control’ which extreme feminists claim is so common. Again and again he bullied and belittled the female actor, as if he were a Victorian squire who had her imprisoned in a cottage miles from civilization.

She submitted to it meekly for months in a way I doubt any modern woman would do for more than about five minutes. Then, in a bizarre and incredible scene, the male actor pretended to goad the female actor into pretending to stab him.

There was then a pretend arrest, and a pretend trial. There was even a pretend jury, made up of celebrity actors. And the nation was supposed to be terribly engaged, anxiously hoping that the fictional jury would pretend to acquit the female actor, so she could pretend to go back to her fictional home.

This rubbish had two propaganda aims. The first was to make more people willing to believe that this kind of thing is common, when we have no way of knowing.

The second was to give the audience information it never normally has, in any proper courtroom drama. Listeners thought they already ‘knew’ what had ‘really happened’. They ‘knew’ the male actor was ‘guilty’. Actually, they didn’t. They just knew what the scriptwriters had decided to portray, a fictional wicked man, fictionally coercing and controlling, and fictionally trying to get away with it.

But in any real trial on this charge, without solid evidence, and where the only two witnesses disagree, I am sure that some real jurors’ minds will be influenced, by this programme, towards convicting. As a result, an innocent defendant might go to prison for years. I think the BBC has done a wrong and shameful thing.

******

The story of the Prague assassination of the SS monster Reinhard Heydrich is a thrilling and bitter one, and has now been made into a major film, for the second time, or perhaps the fourth, if you count 'Hangmen also Die' and the Czech film 'Atentat' The new version ‘Anthropoid’, which stars Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan, gets closer than before to the savage horror of the Nazi reprisals, and made me wonder, yet again, if this sort of assassination was justified.

The evil of the Third Reich continued all too efficiently without Heydrich. But the torture and collective punishment visited on the Czechs (whose subjugation we couldn’t and didn’t prevent) were frightful. Was any good really achieved? I grow less sure year by year.

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Why do suckers always fall for the claims of ‘medical cannabis’? Its advocates are invariably mixed up with the lobby for general legalisation. America’s leading campaigner for legal dope, Keith Stroup, said in a candid moment in 1979 that he was using medical cannabis as ‘a red herring to give marijuana a good name.’ Cannabis may make some people feel better, but so did Thalidomide. A drug correlated with severe mental illness may just not be the ideal miracle cure.

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