This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The most dangerous falsehood of the past 20 years has finally been exploded. The idea that Anthony Blair's New Labour was 'moderate' and 'centrist', a sort of pink conservatism, still grips the minds of millions.

It certainly grips the minds of the monstrous regiment of political journalists, a vast gossip factory, few of whose toilers understand politics or care about the future of the country.

But one of the authors of the Blairite project has openly confessed the dangerous truth. Peter Hyman, once Blair's chief speechwriter and strategist, has blurted it out.

The Blair project, he declared, was 'infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy Corbyn'.

Yes, you have heard this from me already, last October, when I wrote here: 'Our political media never understood that the Blairites were in fact far more Left-wing than Jeremy Corbyn.'

But now you needn't take my word for it.

Let Mr Hyman explain. He says New Labour was devised 'to take and hold the levers of power... winning power and locking out the Tories to ensure that the 21st Century was a Labour century with Labour values'.

The scale of that ambition was 'breathtaking'.

He explained: 'If Labour could be in power for a serious amount of time, then the country would, we believed, change for good; not a burst of socialism for one time (if that), but changed institutions and values that could shape the country for all time.'

As you may have noticed, this was to involve a gigantic increase in spending and taxation, an imposition of radical Leftist dogma in the name of 'equality', the smashing up of the House of Lords and the impartial civil service, plus a sexual revolution – not to mention the growing domination of the EU and open borders.

Some of this remains unspoken, though fairly obvious because of the visible results. Some of it doesn't.

Another New Labour apparatchik, Andrew Neather, famously revealed the driving purpose of mass immigration, 'to rub the Right's nose in diversity'.

The biggest triumph – in fact the main purpose of the Blairites – was to turn the Tory Party into the neutered Blairite clone it now is.

This it achieved, by utterly destroying William Hague (who never recovered from the experience) in the 2001 Election.

The veteran commentator Steve Richards, himself close to the Blair project, recalled that Blair and his entourage were often in 'an exasperated fury' during that contest.

He wrote that they would occasionally scream: 'You don't get it! The Election is a historic referendum on a Right-wing Conservative Party.

If we win a second landslide, we would kill off Right-wing Conservatism for good.' And so they did, starting the progressive collapse that ended with the election of the self-proclaimed 'Heir to Blair' as Tory leader.

There was only one problem. They were too successful. When the Tories seized the Blairite torch, they left the husk of the Labour Party behind, with no real purpose.

Its senior figures are indistinguishable from Mr Cameron's front bench.

They look and sound the same and believe the same things.

They even combined with Mr Cameron against their own leader and their own members.

I suppose they could all just join the Tories. They might as well.

But Mr Cameron wouldn't like that, as his remaining conservative-minded voters might then finally notice that their old party has now become a coalition of radical Leftists.

And that would never do.

Mess with Agatha if you must - but leave mighty Leo alone!

Should we care that the BBC sexes up Agatha Christie’s 1939 mystery And Then There Were None? Not much.

Since the book has, quite rightly, been renamed and partly rewritten to remove the N-word, it seems a shame that the Corporation has decided to include the F-word in dialogue (which few respectable people would have used in 1939, even while committing murder).

But Christie is hardly a classic. She was an entertainer, and her text isn’t sacred.

Tinkering with Leo Tolstoy’s mighty and profound War And Peace, on the other hand, is a bad mistake.

I’ve yet to see an adaptation of any book I liked by Andrew Davies that didn’t violate and misunderstand the original.

Tolstoy wasn’t trying to ‘appeal to modern sensibilities’. He was writing for all time.

Banks have created a sneaky new crimewave

Now we find that contactless credit and debit cards can still be used by thieves long after they have been reported stolen. It’s up to us to scan our statements to check.

When these sneaky things first came in, I warned (to the usual jeers) that they were risky.

I tried to refuse to have any – but while my bank rather grudgingly agreed to issue me a non-contactless card, American Express said I had no choice.

Do these people actually care if there is more crime? Or are they prepared to absorb the cost because of the money they make from lending too much to people to buy things they don’t need?

We used to be told that the free market gave us more choice. But I find this is less and less true. Small shops I liked keep closing because of high rents and taxes.

Big shops don’t stock things I like, because there’s ‘no call for them’. And card issuers positively urge me to use a type of card that I don’t want, and which is less secure than it was before.

Are Army generals' requirements of toughness being lowered on the pretext of 'equality'?

Strange that the Government should be talking about allowing women to serve as frontline combat soldiers just as the Army faces a severe recruitment crisis.

I don't doubt that some women can meet the fierce physical demands of hard fighting. Two American female soldiers recently passed a special forces course that would leave most men begging for mercy. The question of whether it is wise for them to fight alongside men is more complicated – Israel's army forbids it.

But I doubt this is the real issue. I suspect politicians and civil servants of planning to lower the Army's general requirements of toughness and fitness, on the irresistible pretext of 'equality'. The result won't be more women in the ranks. It will be more weedy men.

Government using threat of Islamic extremism to snoop on our private lives

The most subversive thing you can do in the conformist modern world is educate your children at home. In the USA this movement is now unstoppable and its products win major awards at Ivy League universities.

But here the Government, stuck with a 1944 law that still allows home education, and afraid to ban it outright, loathes the idea that anyone (apart from the super-rich) is escaping the indoctrination of the comprehensive classroom.

That's why they have resorted to the ridiculous smear, that home schooled children's minds are being poisoned with Islamic extremism.

This provides the pretext for more snooping on private lives. How dare anybody do anything without State permission! This country reminds me more and more of the USSR, which I saw collapse in 1991 and which is gradually reassembling itself here.