This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column



By far the most important event of the week is the attempt to conceal the truth – that the leadership of the Tory Party hate their members and their voters.



I explain in the piece at the bottom of this page why the sad and cruel murder of a soldier in London does not deserve the attention it is still getting. I also show why the media have, as usual, failed to see what is in front of their noses.



The media flock, bleating in unison as always, have also missed the point of the ‘swivel-eyed loons’ episode.

Political journalists have known for years that senior political figures in all parties despise their own supporters, while seeking their votes and money.

They don’t say much about it, because they are themselves part of the establishment. Ministers pretend to be their friends, and they pretend back, often over expensive restaurant tables. They advance each other’s careers.

It really is not done to blab about private conversations over lunch and dinner. So what happened when Mr or Mrs X, high in the Tory Party, complained that Conservative Party members were annoying lunatics?



To you, this would be an interesting revelation about British politics. After all, if Gerald Ratner could pretty much destroy a business by saying some of its products were ‘c***’, also at a private occasion, surely a political party whose chiefs feel this way about their supporters is also rightly doomed?



And so it is quite urgent news, in my view the biggest political story of the year so far. It ought to mean a complete revolution in national politics.



It is absolute confirmation of what I have been trying to tell you for years about the blatant fraud that is the Tory Party, which, if it were a commercial organisation, would long ago have been bankrupt or worse.



Yet it took two days to get into the papers, and even then the name of the person involved was kept secret.

I cannot help you, not having been there. But I would draw your attention to the statement issued by the Downing Street press office, a taxpayer-financed outfit committed by Civil Service rules to strict truthfulness.It says: ‘It is categorically untrue that anyone in Downing Street made the comments about the Conservative party associations and activists reported in the Times and the Telegraph.’

Read it very carefully and you will see that this is what we in my sordid trade call a ‘non-denial denial’.

The word ‘anyone’ is followed by the phrase ‘in Downing Street’.



Gentle readers, this means that it is just conceivably possible that somebody did say it, but not somebody who lives or works in Downing Street. That’s quite a lot of people, isn’t it?



In the meantime, if you have worked for, supported, donated to, or voted for the Tory Party, I can assure you that its leaders laugh and sneer at you when they think they are safe to do so.



If I were you, I should repay them in kind, and leave them in the lurch for ever. It’s the only revenge they’d understand.





Drugs, a bigger threat than Al Qaeda



Michael Adebolajo's life changed in his teens when he began taking drugs, especially cannabis



When a soldier was murdered on the streets of London, what use was it to anyone that the Prime Minister flew back from Paris?



What use was the fatuous committee, grandiosely called COBRA (SLOW-WORM would be a better name), that gathered portentously in a bunker, as if the Blitz was still on?



This is just street theatre – a bunch of powerless people pretending they can protect us from the wholly unpredictable.



What use are the expensive spooks who track, snoop and file, who want the power to lock us up for weeks and to peer even more deeply into our lives? They failed to prevent this, though they knew all about the suspects.



As for the police, living on a reputation they won decades ago and no longer deserve, wouldn’t a constable on old-fashioned foot patrol have been more help on this occasion than the squadrons of armed militia who appeared long after the event, blazing away in the street?



The police force in this country is now bigger than our shrunken Army, but it is extraordinary how its members are never, ever there, except to protect the powerful.



Too busy patrolling Twitter, perhaps.



Now look at the suspects. Oceans of piffle have been written (as usual) about the mythical bogey of ‘Al Qaeda’. We are in yet another frenzy about the ‘hate preachers’ who are the inevitable result of 40 years of state multiculturalism.



The English Defence League (even stupider than the liberal elite) is ‘defending our way of life’ by throwing bottles at the police.



But nobody has seen any significance in the fact that Michael Adebolajo’s life changed utterly when, as a teenager, he began taking drugs, especially cannabis.



Use of this drug, particularly when young, is closely correlated with irreversible mental illness. That’s also when he embraced the barmy version of Islam that seems to have him in its grip.



There are plenty of other young drug-users roaming our streets. Most of them couldn’t even spell ‘Al Qaeda’ and won’t embrace Islam.



But many of them will become mental patients. Some of them, alas, will be ‘released into the community’ to commit awful acts of unhinged violence that barely make the local TV news.



No Prime Ministers will fly back from Paris. No Whitehall committees will meet. No noble statements of defiance will be made.



And yet, if we strengthened and enforced our drug laws, instead of watering them down to nothingness as we have done, much of this would be preventable.





A 'tough' PM with a VERY short memory



The Prime Minister says that we never buckle to terror. Why does he get away with this? The British State buckled pathetically to terror in 1998 when it surrendered to the IRA.



Has he forgotten the mass release of terrorist prisoners? Has he forgotten the dismantling of the Army’s security apparatus in return for a completely unconfirmed ‘decommissioning’ of IRA weapons?



Has he somehow not noticed that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are now in office, and the Union Flag can’t be flown every day any more in Northern Ireland?



Come to that, what about our sucking up to Yasser Arafat of the PLO? Or our craven release of the hijacker Leila Khaled? I could go on.



Terrorism flourishes precisely because we keep giving in to it. These fake statements of resolve should be met with raspberries and laughter, not respectful silence.





Newly opened records reveal that Stalin and Churchill drank deep into the night during a Kremlin meeting, but Churchill managed to avoid a ‘pretty savage’ Georgian spirit that the Soviet leader pressed on him.



I think I know what this was, as Stalin’s grandson, Yevgeny, once persuaded me to drink several generous glasses of Caucasus firewater during an interview.



It didn’t taste that bad, but I was barely able to stand and Yevgeny was so worried about me that he later phoned me at home to make sure I had got back safely.



His grandpa wouldn’t have done that.



Gatsby may be Great, but the story is pretty lousy



I suspect quite a lot of women are going to see the new film of The Great Gatsby to look at the frocks and the dancing, rather than because they care about the story.



They aren’t worried that the critics are pretty sniffy about the film itself. I don’t blame them.



‘Gatsby’ isn’t a particularly good book. That’s partly why nobody has ever managed to make a decent film of it.



It survives because it is on a lot of school and college reading lists, mainly because it is short.



I often wonder how many really good books are never published or promoted, because of the cruel fickleness of fashion.

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