This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Well, hurrah. After almost a decade of fooling around, chaos, waste and confusion, we have finally saved the Tory Party from richly deserved doom.

The Conservatives have now replaced Blairite New Labour as the main Left-wing party in the country. This is great for everyone who loves the Blair programme of fervent, intolerant political correctness, a continuing war on what’s left of the married family, useless egalitarian state schools and gigantic public spending and borrowing.

Why people make such a fuss about Jeremy Corbyn, while putting up with the more subtle Trotskyism of the Blairites, I have never understood. But maybe you need to be (as I am) an ex-Marxist to understand modern politics.

Just look at Al ‘Boris’ Johnson’s victory speech on Friday morning. Anthony Blair or Gordon Brown could have made it. There’s a red-green pledge of ‘carbon-neutrality’ by 2050. This means pointlessly strangling the economy by destroying efficient power generation, while making you pay for windmills through higher gas and electricity bills. Meanwhile, China sensibly continues to depend on cheap, reliable coal.

There’s a promise of ‘colossal new investments in infrastructure’. This means huge, inefficient projects such as HS2, which do no good, cost billions and hugely overrun their budgets and timetables – again at your expense.

There’s a promise of a ‘long-term NHS budget enshrined in law, 650 million pounds extra every week’. This is a crude submission to the lobby that imagines that the only thing wrong with the NHS is its budget. In truth, we could spend every penny the country has on it and it still would not work as it is supposed to.

And there’s the usual thoughtless, ignorant rubbish about police numbers. Please. The problem with the police is not how many of them there are. It is the fact that they spend their time doing the wrong things, and refuse to return to the simple, solitary foot patrol, which is the reason for their existence.

Mr Johnson’s mind is not conservative. He is a North London bohemian, a social liberal who can barely understand the arguments for lifelong marriage. He is rich enough to have no idea how bad, and how crammed with indoctrination, state schools actually are. Like all senior politicians he is secluded from crime and disorder. Since he was Mayor of London he has surrounded himself with aides who encourage funky Leftish thinking. One of his closest advisers, Danny Kruger – now Tory MP for the deluded people of Devizes – is a keen enthusiast for legalising the dangerous poison marijuana.

What did you think it meant when Mr Johnson appeared standing in front of a backdrop inscribed with the words ‘The People’s Government’, a phrase that could have been concocted by Blair’s mental valet, Alastair Campbell? What did it mean when he then said: ‘In winning this Election we have won the votes and the trust of people who have never voted Conservative before and people who have always voted for other parties.

Those people want change. We cannot, must not, must not, let them down. And in delivering change we must change too. We must recognise the incredible reality that we now speak as a one-nation Conservative Party literally for everyone from Woking to Workington.’

What he meant was that he has engineered a reverse takeover of the Tories by New Labour. This was the project pursued by David Cameron, who proclaimed himself the ‘Heir to Blair’ but who ran aground on the reefs of Brussels. He couldn’t get his own party to like the European Union.

This was because so many British people had come to identify the EU with two things they greatly disliked. One was the abolition of the country they had grown up in, and its replacement by a slick, glossy new society they did not much like.

The other was the arrival of migrants in numbers too vast to integrate.

I don’t think anyone really worried very much about trade deals or tariffs. About one person in a million could tell the Single Market from the customs union. And so the great referendum vote of 2016 was a welling up of discontents that the Tory Party could not handle. It liked open borders. It liked the sexual and cultural revolution.

Mr Cameron hoped the 2016 vote would be a safety valve, a great blowing off of steam – after which he could carry on with his Left-liberal project. But it went wrong. And the past three years have been an attempt by the Tory Party – at the expense of the country – to wriggle out of the resulting mess.

When they say they’ll ‘get Brexit done’, they don’t actually mean that the great immigration wave will be undone or reversed.

And don’t expect the rolling back of the cultural revolution that has swept away so much of what was specifically British about our customs and laws.

They’re mainly talking about technical trading matters, and the detailed resolution of those will last for years to come. But they will be able to say that we have left, which is after all what the referendum said we were voting for.

And those who hoped to get their country back will be left staring around them and seeing the same old mess. Yes, we’ve saved the Tories. But we have sacrificed the country to do it. I’d have preferred it the other way round.

I confess! I swipe the hotel soap

I sympathise with hotels whose rooms are plundered by guests. I am sure they dream of following the culprits home, banging on their front doors and asking for their towelling bathrobes back. But then again, I usually take the soap. Should I not? I think there has to be a certain amount of trust, or life becomes miserable.

If you stay in Chinese provincial hotels, they delay you at check-out while a staff member goes upstairs to make sure that you have not helped yourself to the fixtures and fittings. It’s a rather insulting presumption of guilt, which is what you get in all societies where people have forgotten how to behave.

Two Popes. One dangerous lie

The film The Two Popes, starring Anthony Hopkins as the mordantly conservative Benedict XVI and Jonathan Pryce as his slippery liberal successor Pope Francis, is a joy. I can recommend it as a drama. It is witty, fast-moving, slickly filmed and Hopkins is marvellous to watch. Alas, it is yet another example of fiction posing as fact. Even the Sistine Chapel shown in the movie is a brilliant fake.

All this – including the depictions of the two old priests sharing pizza together or bonding with beer in front of a Germany-Argentina World Cup game on the Papal TV – is harmless.

But the heart of the plot – a claim that the hardline Benedict actually chose the flexible Francis as his successor, and that they have become friends since the old conservative’s retirement – is a nonsense.

This matters. The film is having a moderate success in cinemas and will soon be streamed on Netflix. And I guarantee that soon after that you will be meeting lots of people who will tell you with absolute confidence that the two Popes are secretly great friends, and that ‘everybody knows’ this. If you make dramas about real living people, they must be true. Portraying fiction as reality destroys the very idea of truth.

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