This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Do the Government want to lose the Falkland Islands again? They seem to be planning hard for this, or another military humiliation. I am astonished at the lack of outrage and protest over the current vandalism being visited on our Armed Forces.

This sort of behaviour always leads to bad and even tragic results.

Last Sunday my colleague Mark Nicol drew attention to an especially crazy aspect of this, affecting the Royal Navy. I have pointed out here before that the Navy is in a tragic state.

But the latest move is quite straightforwardly mad. HMS Ocean, the current fleet flagship, is so central to the Navy’s operations that the Prime Minister paid a visit to her in the Gulf last December, and spoke warmly to the ship’s company.

She said: ‘Here on HMS Ocean all of you are a vital part of Britain’s global mission… and you can be very proud of everything you are doing.’

All I can say to the Navy is hold on to your tin hats if the PM ever says anything nice to you again. She would have been more honest if she’d just said: ‘Goodbye!’

For, four months after this flag-brandishing oration, Mrs May’s Government put the ‘vital’ HMS Ocean up for sale.

The Brazilian Navy revealed in April that it is close to buying her for about £80 million.

In return for that – a ripple in Whitehall’s ocean of debt – we will lose the only ship we have which can mount a large-scale amphibious operation.

Just how ridiculous is this? In current values, the huge and versatile helicopter carrier cost about £300 million when she was launched from a British shipyard in 1995.

She is not worn out or ancient. In 2014 she completed an 18-month refit costing another £71 million of your money. I am sure the Brazilian Navy will be very grateful that we have taken such good care of her for them. Only weeks ago she was doing useful work in hurricane relief.

I rang the Ministry of Defence. Their once-mighty press office now repels callers by diverting them to an answering machine which takes no messages and cuts you off.

But with much persistence I got through, and asked this simple question: ‘Are you mad?’ I got no proper answer to this query, only some strange bureaucratic babble.

Iam reminded irresistibly of John Nott’s 1981 Defence Review, in which the carrier Invincible was to be flogged off to Australia and the carrier Hermes, along with the assault ships Fearless and Intrepid, were to be scrapped. The patrol ship Endurance was to be withdrawn from the South Atlantic.

If the Argentines had the sense to wait for us to complete this money-grubbing scheme, most of the Task Force used to retake the Falklands would have been sold or scrapped, and the Argentine flag would fly over Port Stanley to this day.

I wouldn’t mind so much if the Tories didn’t pretend to be patriotic. You’d understand it if Jeremy Corbyn or Ken Livingstone wanted to do this sort of thing. It would be just as wrong, but it wouldn’t be so creepily dishonest.

Next time you hear Mrs May or any of her Ministers thumping the patriotic tub, think of HMS Ocean.

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Leftist sexual revolutionaries don’t like the fact that the horrible Playboy founder Hugh Hefner thought he was their friend.

But that’s too bad.

Because they fed off each other. Our coarse, gross, pornified world has liberated sleazy men more than it has liberated anyone else.

But the Left jeered at the traditional Christians who were that liberation’s only real opponents.

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The full story of poor, ‘fatherless’ Emily

I have long wanted to settle an old score with Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry but didn’t bother because she seemed to be such a minor figure.

Some years ago, on BBC’s Question Time, she exploded into a purple mist of phoney outrage, claiming falsely that I had stigmatised her as coming from a ‘problem family’.

She announced loudly on TV that she had been raised in a fatherless family on a council estate by a mother on benefits. She implied that her mother had been single. To wild applause, she demanded of me: ‘How dare you say that single parents living in council estates are by definition problem families?’

You may watch the exchange here :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W8-z30j8I8

I’d said no such thing. But I left it at that. But now Ms Thornberry, right, is beginning to loom and swell a bit on the political stage. She could shortly be a Cabinet Minister if the Tories continue to destroy themselves. So we need to know a bit more about her. She thinks so, too, and last week she elaborated on her misery memoir in a Left-wing newspaper.

She didn’t quite say she had to hop to school because she only had one clog. But she did say the Thornberrys were so broke that they had to put down their cats. This is undoubtedly very sad, especially for the cats.

But then, at last, she slipped out the truth about her so-called ‘fatherless family’. It was anything but fatherless. Ms Thornberry’s mother was anything but single.

Little Emily’s tragedy was not the fault of the wicked Tories or of cruel capitalists. It was the work of a bloviating, high-principled human rights obsessive, pro-immigration lobbyist and equality fanatic, Ms Thornberry’s parent, Cedric.

In 1966, two years before deserting his wife and three small children, Cedric Thornberry tried (and failed) to become Labour MP for Guildford. In his campaign leaflet, he posed in front of a marble fireplace, boasting of his family, his Cambridge degree, his legal career and his work for the Foreign Office.

But within a few short months, Cedric Thornberry had betrayed his wife and young children, and fathered a child by another woman. He left them penniless and skedaddled abroad to avoid being forced to take responsibility.

He ended up in a top job at the UN.

In his long absence doing more important things, the council rehoused his family, and Ms Thornberry’s mother Sallie became a much-loved mayor of Guildford. Whatever misfortunes befell young Emily were entirely her father’s doing.

My point is this. Ms Thornberry misleadingly used her misfortune to make cheap propaganda, and she should stop doing that.

And her father brilliantly typifies a certain type of socialist, who thinks he is virtuous because he says all the right things, and who is terribly concerned about the rights of immigrants, but who dumps his own wife and children on the state’s doorstep because he thinks he is too wonderful to bother with the simple task of keeping his promises.

We can all learn from that, whatever our politics are.

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Letting off crooks... it’s our new national sport

And still we miss the point about Oxford student Lavinia Woodward, who did not go to prison after stabbing her boyfriend.

She wasn’t let off for being posh. She was let off because everyone is let off, all the time.

If Lavinia, pictured left, had been called Kayleigh and been studying GNVQs in Batley, she’d still have been let off.

A brief internet search for the words ‘knife attack’ and ‘spared jail’ found a Burnley ‘alcoholic’ who knifed her partner in the back during a row; it also found a Tyneside mother of five, maddened by cannabis, who stabbed her partner.

And there was a Sheffield man who ‘snapped and lost control’ during a feud with a neighbour, and chased him with a knife.

All were ‘spared jail’. None was posh. In fact, if you just look for the words ‘spared jail’, you’ll be amazed at what you can do and stay free.

But because people believe what they want to, nobody gets the point or does anything.

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