The campaign to get rid of marriage has not gone away. Civil partnerships for heterosexuals were not thrown out by the Appeal Court last week, only put off till later. They will come.

In fact, after 20 years of New Labour government (some of it nominally Tory) we can now look back and survey the smoking ruins of marriage. It’s not that the New Labour radicals and their Tory imitators wrecked marriage on their own. It’s just that they have more or less finished it off.

The very words ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ have been erased from official forms and even from normal conversation. We all have partners now, whether we want to or not.

Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, after they lost their latest battle for the right to enter into a civil partnership this week

Divorce figures have fallen only because so many couples don’t get married in the first place. The marriage statistics show that more and more people simply aren’t bothering to make any sort of legal commitment at all before setting up home and starting a family.

As Lady Justice Hale, now tipped to be boss of the Supreme Court, said in 1982: ‘Family law now makes no attempt to buttress the stability of marriage or any other union,’ adding ‘the piecemeal erosion of the distinction between marriage and non-marital cohabitation may be expected to continue.’ And how.

Marriage has a strange, unique status in the courts. If you break a contract with your building society or a car leasing company, the law will come down against you.

If you break the marriage contract, the law will take your side and will eventually throw the other party out of the marital home if she or he insists on sticking to the original deal. Odd, eh? It’s amazing how many men, the usual victims of this strange arrangement, still get married at all.

I’d guess that marriage figures are artificially swollen each year by an unknown but large number of fake weddings, aimed at getting round immigration laws. Who can say? By their nature, such things aren’t always easy to detect.

The heterosexual couple fought for the right to enter into a civil partnership

But the liberal-thinking classes have for decades loathed and sought to undermine marriage. They hate it as a conservative, religious tradition which accepts that men and women are different, which is intensely private and gets in the way of the enlightened, paternal state they love so much.

The Left’s new allies, globalist commerce, also hate marriage (especially the sort where the mother stays at home) because it stops them from employing women as cheap, pliant labour and turning them into incessant consumers. This is a long campaign.

The radical Professor Edmund Leach, awarded the influential Reith lectures by the ‘impartial’ BBC, sneered back in 1967 that ‘the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents’.

He spoke of ‘parents and children huddled together in their loneliness’ and suggested children grow up in larger, more relaxed domestic groups, ‘something like an Israeli kibbutz, perhaps, or a Chinese commune’. Yes, he really said that.

Political radicals sympathised with this view, but in frontline politics they tended to get married. You’ll have to guess why, but I draw your attention to the marriage of Ed Miliband to the mother of his children, Justine, in May 2011, soon after he rather unexpectedly became leader of the Labour Party.

Compare and contrast them with New Labour’s true genius and mastermind, Alastair Campbell, and the mother of his children, Fiona Millar, the great apostle of comprehensive schools.

At the 2001 memorial service for Tony Benn’s wife Caroline, Fiona expressed delight at the singing of the Communist anthem, The Internationale, saying: ‘Great to hear language we aren’t allowed to use any longer.’

These two lifelong radicals have never married.

Nor, of course, have many similar sorts in the media and other areas of life where there is no pressure from spin doctors to do so. You must have noticed this.

It is a deliberate revolution, not an accident of nature.

I doubt most people ever even realised it was going on, but will we be better off when it is – as it soon will be – triumphant?

I did warn you about Ms Dick...

So the Chief Commissar of Political Correctness, Ms Cressida Dick, has overcome her unappealing record to be made Britain’s most senior police officer.

The media, who might have been expected to have reservations about her, swallowed them.

Jean Charles de Menezes’s family were left almost alone to worry about her role in his death in a botched police shooting.

Nobody seemed bothered about her liking for ludicrous, indefensible dawn raids on the homes of journalists, either. Oh well.

I told you so, long ago. On November 17, 2002, I wrote on this page: ‘Remember the name Cressida Dick. Commander Dick, I here predict, will be the first woman Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. She is the perfect politically correct copper.’

Don’t you ever wonder what force or power it is that propels such people unstoppably upwards?

UKIP, the Dad’s Army of British politics, marches rapidly backwards away from success.

Its mistakes are too many to list, but trying to attack Labour and giving up the assault on the real enemy, the Tories, may well have had something to do with it.

SS-GB NEEDS A DOSE OF GERMAN EFFICIENCY Barely credible: The naked resistance member wrapped in a Nazi flag in the drama It is time for a Campaign for Real Drama. Len Deighton’s clever book, SS-GB, would make a terrific TV series. Alas, the modern BBC isn’t capable of doing that. It isn’t just because it favours mumbling over talking. I could hardly hear what the actors were saying because my own teeth were grinding in rage and disapproval. But I listened to the whole thing again through some top-notch headphones, and gathered I hadn’t missed much. Sam Riley as Douglas Archer in the show It is just so slapdash. Deighton’s carefully researched and brilliantly imagined idea, a despairing London under German occupation after a shocking defeat, actually made me miserable when I first read it because it was so believable. But this lot can’t even get their own fictional details right. The central character, Douglas Archer, is called Inspector by a reporter, Chief Superintendent by himself and Superintendent by his German boss and a German journalist. His rank continues to veer wildly up and down. The SS chief who has supposedly handpicked him later calls him Inspector. In less than two minutes he has promoted him to Superintendent, but within 30 seconds he has demoted him back to Inspector. I thought these Nazis, with their Sturmbannfuhrers and Obergruppenfuhrers, were supposed to be sticklers for rank. I haven’t room to list all the incredible and unlikely moments. But the sheer terror of a country in which you could be shot for fiddling your fuel coupons, or deported to do slave labour at a moment’s notice, is simply not evoked. Sinister music, which often blots out the dialogue, is no substitute for real drama. Instead there is an extraordinarily stupid and incredible scene in which a supposedly passionate resistance member wraps her naked body in a Nazi flag and stands on a London hotel balcony in mid-November. There is also an exposed willy (how avant-garde!) and the tedious use of cigarettes (I counted 13 lit in an hour, despite tight rationing by the Nazis) to show we are in the past. What a missed opportunity. Advertisement

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