This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The terror threat is an excuse for our Government to get above itself. It does so in many ways, but I will cite here my own personal experience of dealing with the British state.

For dull but sensible reasons, I needed to go to Her Majesty’s Passport Office in person, to get a new passport. A charming official had explained to me on the phone what I needed to do, in some detail.

The only hard part was the fee – about what I might expect to pay for a celebratory dinner at a good restaurant, or a tough morning at the dentist.

Both restaurant and dentist would have taken care to treat me nicely – a courteous welcome, somewhere comfortable to sit, a general feeling that they wanted my business.



Not so HMPO. I had imagined, at this price, a quiet visit to a pleasant office, a swift handover of documents and a return a few hours later to collect my passport.

Cautious as ever, I arrived early. That was when I began to get the picture.

I could not even get into the building unless I went through something similar to airport security – that is, a procedure rather like reception at a prison.

A haggard queue of defeated, passive people curled round a bleak ante-room. An official told me I was too early to join it. Come back later.

So I did. Fifteen minutes before my appointment (I had been told I would lose my large fee if I failed to show), I was motionless in that haggard queue.

The minutes ticked by. There was nobody to ask what was going on. Nothing happened.

At last, in a sudden unexplained rush, I was at the scanner.

‘Take off your belt!’ instructed a stern person.

My belt? This is an office block, not an aeroplane.

Trousers slipping, I shuffled into the next room trying to gather together my possessions and documents, and keeping my rage to myself lest I was flung out for having a bad attitude, and deprived of my costly slot.

Then there was some chaos caused by a computer glitch. And finally, trousers fully re-secured, I was at a desk. I no longer had any idea what time it was.

The official glared at my photos, taken three days before by London’s best and longest-established passport photographers.

‘I’m not sure these meet the requirement,’ she snapped, but declined to explain why.

There was a nervous period while she went away to check with higher authority. The same thing happened with a letter of support written to the exact dictation of an HMPO official.

‘The wording on this isn’t right,’ she complained.

In the end, the objections vanished. And four hours later, I collected the passport – not the elegant, understated symbol of a free man’s liberty to travel that it used to be, but an odd, frivolous booklet whose pages are decorated with tourist sights, multicultural stuff, inventions, historical figures and emblems of the clapped-out ‘Cool Britannia’ era.

Perhaps it was the humourlessness that was worst of all, the lack of any kind of recognition that it is absurd to order people to unfasten their trousers to apply for a passport.

During the whole procedure I had been presumed guilty, treated as an object rather than a subject. Maybe the description on my passport should say ‘British Object’.

There was no real justification for any of it, just the general official fear of ‘terror’, which you must never, ever mock or question.

Their claim to protect us from that is about the only source of authority they have left, I suppose.

Yes, yes, Blair fooled us into a war. What about those trying to do the same thing now?



I see Sir John Chilcot has noticed that A. Blair was perhaps not wholly straight with the country about Iraq. Oh, get over it. Most of those who were fooled by the ludicrous smirking Blair puppet were taken in because they wanted to be. That’s why they’re so angry with him now. They can’t arrest themselves for war crimes, so they want to do it to somebody else.

Here’s a suggestion. The time to spot you’re being fooled is when you are being fooled. That way, you can stop it happening. And currently Mr Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson is fooling you like anything, this time over Syria. He recently supported Donald Trump’s wholly illegal missile attack on that country, claiming to be speaking on your behalf. It’s WMD all over again, you wait and see. The Make War Not Love Faction in the West are currently working very hard to entangle us in a Syrian conflict.

France’s grand new President, whom I think of as Napoleon the Fourth, wants to join in the next attack. Britain probably doesn’t have the kit to take part, but promises to cheer as the bombs fall.

Mr Johnson remarked last week: ‘As I have said previously, the UK’s assessment is that the Assad regime almost certainly carried out this abominable attack’ – by which he means an alleged poison gas attack on the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun. The Foreign Office have no proof for this claim. A new report by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is incredibly cautious about what happened (its scientists couldn’t go to the site, which is controlled by jihadis). It doesn’t allocate blame. It just suits people like Mr Johnson to believe it was Syria, because they want a war.

Sir Geoffrey Adams, our man at the OPCW, said last week that ‘there is no evidence to suggest that any party to the conflict in Syria, other than the Syrian government, has access to a complex nerve agent such as sarin’.

There is such evidence. Mokhtar Lamani, the distinguished diplomat and academic, helped investigate a sarin gas attack in Khan al-Assal, Syria, in March 2013. He reported to the UN serious evidence that the Islamist fanatics of the Nusra Front might have possessed poison gas products. I put this as cautiously as I can.

In May of that year, several Nusra operatives were arrested in Turkey. Turkey’s government is sympathetic to Nusra and, like the USA and Britain, hostile to the Syrian government. To begin with, the Nusra men were accused of possessing sarin, but the charge was later dropped. Two Turkish opposition MPs have since claimed their government is soft-pedalling the probe.

Reminded of this, the FO changed their position, saying instead there is ‘no serious evidence’. Why are they so anxious to believe their Nusra friends don’t have poison gas, yet so frantic to believe that Syria is using poison gas? We can’t know. That’s exactly the point. As in Iraq, our leaders have begun to believe what they want to believe. And when the inquiry into the disastrous, yet-to-happen Syria war is held, I hope someone notices this.

Olympic Sex; Neolithic Language



I recall clearly from almost 50 years ago the nightly sing-song promotions on our newly activated 625-line TV set: ‘This is the Year of the Sex Olympics! Sex Olympics Year!’ They were plugging a BBC2 play by Quatermass author Nigel Kneale, about a future world in which the masses are passive watchers, manipulated and kept under control by a small, cynical minority. In this hell, people watch sex, but don’t do it. This was 1968, peak Sixties, before people started to pull back a bit. Almost everything was possible. But sex on TV? No. A ludicrous joke.

But 49 years on, we have it, in the form of Love Island. Yes, I’ve watched it. Once. No, I won’t do it again. It’s not the sex that puts me off so much as the moronic dialogue, as if centuries of literature, poetry and culture had never happened, and in the richest society in history, we are forgetting how to speak.

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