This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column



What if David Cameron had never been Prime Minister? What if you’d listened to me and kept this disastrous politician out of office in 2010?

This thought springs to mind after the recent revelation by Donald Tusk, president of the European Council.

Mr Tusk says Mr Cameron confessed to him he only called the EU referendum because he thought it would never happen.

And it was this childish, irresponsible trickery (typical of Mr Cameron) which put us where we are now – a constitutional crisis with no obvious end, a chaotic, ill-managed exit from the EU which will satisfy nobody and almost certainly hurt quite a few innocent bystanders.

Mr Tusk recalled that the Tory leader had told him he felt safe in promising a referendum because his coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, would block the idea.

Well, I had always assumed this was so, but it was good to get it from such a powerful source – reinforced when it was officially denied, always the best sort of confirmation.

Mr Cameron’s whole aim in life was to save the Tory Party from a well-deserved doom. Why bother?

By 2010, the Tory Party obviously hated its own supporters, and was physically dying. Its real membership was so small and old that it could only fight elections by expensively bussing large numbers of apolitical but ambitious young men and women into marginal seats to do the donkey work.

Big donors were wondering if it was worth their while financing it any more.

One more proper defeat, and the Tory Party would have split and collapsed, not before time.

Far from being a bad thing, this would have left the way open for a new party that actually was conservative, patriotic, against crime, in favour of good schools, friendly to the married family.

It might even have devised a coherent plan for leaving the EU, and won a parliamentary majority for that policy.

After all, we already have plenty of political parties which speak for political correctness, Brussels rule, stupid foreign wars, unmarried families, concreting over the countryside, dreadful schools and letting criminals off.

It would have made a change to have one that took a different line. Would it have been so bad to have endured a few extra years of Gordon Brown to win that prize?

His government wouldn’t have differed much from a mis-named ‘Conservative’ government. Actually, it might even have been better than the Coalition we got.

George Osborne didn’t fix the economy, as he keeps claiming. Anything but, as everyone outside the South East knows all too well. And I doubt Mr Brown (chastened by the Iraq War) would have been mad enough to intervene in Libya.

And what a great difference that would have made. For it was Mr Cameron’s mad, thoughtless overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi that launched the current phase of mass migration into Europe and Britain. This disaster is still out of control and has caused insoluble migration crises all across the continent, not to mention much misery for the migrants themselves.

If Mr Brown had won in 2010, I suspect the country would be in better shape by far than it is now, while Jeremy Corbyn would still be quietly growing marrows in his North London allotment, a forgotten fringe figure.

And people like me might be able to go into politics and do some good, instead of being kept out of it by a trio of ultra-liberal party machines. As it is, just look at it. You should have listened to me. It’s too late now.

***

ADHD: The riddle of the missing facts

The troubled celebrity Ant McPartlin announced last week that he has been ‘diagnosed’ with ‘ADHD’. Why the inverted commas?

Well, these things may not be quite as hard and fast as you might believe.

You’d think from the way ‘ADHD’ supporters go on about it that it was an actual disease, though they’re careful not to use the word.

But the fact they want to hide is that it isn’t. It’s just a collection of tick-box opinions, quite unsupported by hard, objective science.

Yet children, often very young, are dosed with powerful amphetamines (normally a Class A illegal drug) or very similar pills, on this cloudy basis. But here’s an astonishing fact you’d struggle to know if you weren’t very alert.

Some doctors, especially in the USA where the ‘ADHD’ industry is far older and bigger than here, fiercely challenge the very existence of the complaint.

Perhaps in the hope of getting them to shut up, the US government’s mighty National Institutes of Health (NIH) held a special conference in 1998 to try to reach a consensus between the enthusiasts and the doubters. It failed.

Instead, a statement was issued with a lot of soothing, optimistic waffle about ADHD, but containing the cold, hard verdict, forced into the wording by the doubters: ‘We do not have an independent, valid test for ADHD and there are no data to indicate that ADHD is due to a brain malfunction.’

You can see how devastating these few words are. How can you give children powerful drugs if you have no physical diagnosis?

The words are still true, by the way, 20 years later. Despite endless efforts to find an objective test, ‘ADHD’ is still ‘diagnosed’ only by subjective opinion.

A copy of the original document survives by accident in an obscure corner of the internet. It is also quoted in a number of scientific journals and newspapers from the time. There is no doubt of its authenticity.

But in the NIH’s official website version of the 1998 document, the vital words are not there any more. Was the removal official? If so, who decided and why? I can’t get a clear explanation.

This is the sort of thing you might expect in Orwell’s 1984 where the past was constantly being rewritten to suit those in power. But in a major Western country, it seems to me to be more than a little worrying.

***

There's something serious about Mary

Sometimes I am quite baffled by the verdicts of professional reviewers. The new movie about Mary Queen of Scots, starring Saoirse Ronan, is far better than I’d been led to expect.

There’s some political correctness, some silly sex, some liberties taken with the facts – but it’s mainly a serious and sometimes rather beautiful attempt to portray one of the great stories of history.

Unlike the absurdly overpraised The Favourite, which is drivel.

The new movie about Mary Queen of Scots, starring Saoirse Ronan, pictured above, is far better than I’d been led to expect

***

Last week the Church of England’s second attempt to smear the reputation of one of its greatest figures, the late George Bell, collapsed utterly.

Its first try was revealed as a sloppy, deeply prejudiced kangaroo court, which wrongly assumed Bishop Bell’s guilt from the start, like some Stalinist tribunal. You might have thought Justin Welby would admit defeat.

But no, he opened yet another inquiry into so-called ‘new allegations’ of sexual abuse which were revealed on Thursday to be an embarrassing rubbish-heap of twaddle, not remotely resembling real evidence.

The police took a few weeks to dismiss them. Mr Welby’s apparatus, petulantly unwilling to admit they had been wrong in the first case, dragged it out for a year.

He has sort of apologised, grudgingly, as railway companies and children do. But he still seems to think there is an ‘impossible dilemma’. I can assure him there isn’t.

All we need is an Archbishop of Canterbury who understands the principles of justice (not him), and there’ll be no dilemma at all.

He knows what he can do. Until he does it, a cloud will hang over the C of E.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down