This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday colum n

Politicians start the wars which ordinary men then have to finish. They should be made to dig and tend the graves they cause, not be allowed to preen themselves over the sacrifices of others.



It was not the politicians who, shaking with fear and green with sea-sickness, had to leap into freezing, churning waves and be torn to pieces by machine gun bullets. They are seldom present for these moments.



Who, having seen it, can forget Philip Zec’s great cartoon (I apologise for originally calling him Donald, another distinguished Zec) published on VE Day at the end of the last war? It depicts a soldier, with one badly wounded arm in a sling and his head bandaged, his face haggard and exhausted, climbing up from a landscape of ruins and corpses beneath a menacing sky.

He holds a wreath labelled ‘Victory And Peace In Europe’ and he says, like a father to thoughtless children, ‘Here you are. Don’t lose it again!’



It annoyed me when I first saw it in the 1960s. I had not then seen what bullets and bombs can do. I was still full of the idealised picture of war with which my blessed, safe generation grew up. I hadn’t even noticed my own father’s grumpy unwillingness to say much about the face of battle, which he had seen – the enemy survivors left to drown, the relentless fear and squalor of convoy work. I know now.



But as I watched the 75th anniversary of D-Day unfold, it angered me more and more that it provided a stage on which political leaders could parade. One of these, President Trump, obtained a medical exemption which kept him out of the Vietnam War.



Another, Mrs Theresa May, has followed policies in Syria (as has Mr Trump) which could yet drag this country into a new interminable Middle East conflict, on the basis of dubious and unproven claims.

She is keen on unproven claims, having also voted consistently for the mad Iraq War in 2003. Whatever were they doing in Normandy, where thousands of dutiful men died or were horribly wounded, simply to win back what should never have been lost in the first place? Only our deluded and vain political class could have created such a mess.



Oh, and one other thing. Alongside the modest and self-effacing survivors of that battle, we should have invited a few dozen veterans of the Red Army whose sacrifices were, if anything, even greater (and whose political leaders were, and are, even less appealing than ours).



When I lived in Moscow it was my privilege, on Victory Day each May, to see these grizzled, barrel-chested old men who had fought all the way to Berlin, getting their medals out, and having a little more vodka than might have been good for them.



There must be a few of them left, though Russian lifespans are harsher and shorter than ours. It would not have taken much trouble or expense to convey them to Bayeux to stand alongside their British and American equivalents.



It was stupid of us to forget them, as it is stupid of us to forget the titanic battles they fought, battles which broke the German Army and which were larger and fiercer even than the Normandy landings.



Vladimir Putin is not their fault, any more than Theresa May is the fault of the men of D-Day.

Peddling propaganda on primetime TV

Complaining to the politically correct Ofcom regulator about the politically correct BBC is bit like asking Cherie Booth QC to prosecute Anthony Blair WMD for war crimes.

Even so, and with no very great hope of success, I have gone to Ofcom about the BBC’s unbalanced promotion of pro-abortion arguments in its supposedly cosy drama Call The Midwife, most recently in an episode last February, set in 1964.



Over months of correspondence with the Corporation, I have realised that it is not even bothering to pretend that the programme was fair or balanced. Its first argument is that bias matters less in fiction than in current affairs. This is plainly the opposite of the truth. Everyone remembers 1960s propaganda dramas like Cathy Come Home. The documentaries of the time are forgotten.



Its second point is that balance does not have to be achieved in a single episode. Well, all right. But I have repeatedly asked for any example of a BBC drama (or indeed anything else on the BBC) in which the anti-abortion case has been made with the same force. No reply has come.



But, as it happens, there was another pro-abortion storyline in Call The Midwife in February 2013. Both episodes accepted the view that killing the unborn child was the only solution to an unwanted baby, as if adoption had never been heard of. Both seemed ignorant of the fact that ‘therapeutic’ abortion was, in fact, legal in England under strict conditions before the current law came into force in 1967.



Their position also isn’t helped by the fact that the veteran campaigner for liberalised abortion, Diane Munday, has revealed in the Guardian that the episode’s makers sought her advice. I have established that they did not consult any opponent of liberalisation. A group of pro-abortion organisations are also embarrassingly pleased with the series, in a way that makes it impossible to pretend that it is fair or impartial.



They wrote to the BBC to say:‘Call The Midwife has repeatedly handled this issue extremely sensitively and courageously.’ And the Left-wing magazine Private Eye noted: ‘Call The Midwife has lately… become a series of liberal editorials on medical and social issues.’ I suspect the BBC has decided that, in Britain, abortion simply is not a controversy any more, and those who are uncomfortable about its widespread use as a form of contraception are marginal and forgotten.

Given what is happening in the USA just now, I wonder how long that belief can survive. Over to you, Ofcom.

Did Donald's double hobnob with Her Majesty?

I have written before about the possibility that Donald Trump uses body doubles for meetings with British political figures. Why attend all these boring functions if you’d rather be at home watching Fox News?



The tie-less Trump in a famous pose with Nigel Farage didn’t look quite like the real thing to me. And why would he bother? Given that the President often speaks out of the back of his neck and says things that later have to be, er, adjusted, the double can say what he likes, too.



Now another curious event has backed up my suspicions. The Tory leadership candidate Michael Gove, interviewed Mr Trump for a whole hour for an unpopular newspaper back in 2017. He was also reintroduced to him, wearing a kilt, at the Buckingham Palace banquet on Monday. But Mr Trump, asked on Tuesday for his views of Tory leadership campaigners, said vaguely, ‘I don’t know Michael. Would he do a good job?’



It may be that Mr Gove has met the real Trump, and it is the body double who gives the press conferences and dines on halibut with the Queen, while the President snaffles a cheeseburger elsewhere.

For the first time in many years, the BBC’s Reith Lectures are an event rather than a failed publicity stunt. The retired Supreme Court Judge Jonathan Sumption is witty and bitingly intelligent, understands how the world really works and, on Tuesday, delivered a tremendous attack on the operation of the human rights industry and the way it has given ‘a priestly caste’ of unaccountable judges far too much arbitrary power to impose their liberal opinions on the rest of us.



It is a huge bomb under the whole thing. Coming from such a person, it ought to be devastating. But will anyone act?

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