This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

If you know something damaging about a major political figure, then, in a democracy, it is surely your duty to tell the voters before they go to the polls.

So I am puzzled by Lord Ashcroft’s motives for emptying a huge bucket of slurry over David Cameron’s head just after the Prime Minister has safely survived a fiercely-contested general election.

I have met Lord Ashcroft briefly a couple of times. He gives off an enjoyably sinister whiff of brimstone. He has a smile like the winter sun glinting on a coffin-plate. You wouldn’t be surprised to find he had steel teeth.

He was known in his years of influence as ‘The Man Who Bought the Tory Party’, or alternatively as ‘Blofeld’, and I don’t imagine he minded. I was never sure what he wanted in return for all his money.

Was it just a ministerial red box? Well, he didn’t get it and now he’s annoyed, and who can blame him? If they hadn’t planned to give him anything in return, the Tories shouldn’t have taken his cash. The same applies to those who bankrolled their 2015 victory.

I wrongly thought the Tory Party was impossible to save, a task as hopeless and morally wrong as reviving the popularity of Capstan Full Strength cigarettes. I still think we’d all be better off if it collapsed and died.

But money and lies eventually revived the ghastly old monster. Alas for Lord Ashcroft, it was somebody else’s money. He’d been five years too soon.

So what good came of his expensively-compiled book in the end? I’ve never doubted that Mr Cameron, like most of his generation, was disastrously soft on drug abusers, but that’s true of all the major parties, the media, the legal profession and the police, and he took this view openly. I don’t believe the story about the pig.

One important thing remains. Mr Cameron is not fit to be in charge of our foreign policy. His performance over Libya and Syria, the two biggest reasons for the mass migration crisis now menacing all Europe, was historically, politically and militarily illiterate. In a serious country he should resign and vanish into obscurity.

Yet he survives undamaged, which is the true scandal, that is never pursued and will never be punished.

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I don’t at all mind George Osborne sucking up to the ghastly old waxworks who run the increasingly aggressive and sensitive Chinese police state.

And it is a police state. Peaceable professors, such as Ilham Tohti, are locked up and mistreated after lawless show trials.

Communist activists have recently torn the crosses from 1,200 churches across the People’s Republic, claiming with cynical grins that they are acting to preserve ‘safety and beauty’. People disappear into the night and fog of a vast Gulag. Human rights lawyers are arrested for defending dissidents.

I don’t mind us canoodling with this awful regime because I can’t afford to. Thanks to the batty self-defeating foreign policy we have followed since 1914, we are a minor debtor nation in danger of turning into a beggar nation.

Well, this is the sort of country we are now. It’s a shame, and a warning against joining wars when you don’t need to, the root of our fall from power and wealth to our current status.

Talking of which, let us examine anew Mr Osborne’s righteous wrath against the Assad government in Syria. Recently Mr Osborne said Parliament had been wrong to veto the planned attack on Syria two years ago. He seems to want to try again.

This can only mean that he still thinks we should have bombed President Assad’s forces in 2013, an action which would have hugely bolstered the factions which soon afterwards became the Islamic State. Given our furious hostility to IS, this seems to me to be very nearly clinically mad.

Indeed, the Cameron-Osborne policy towards Assad has from the start been based on a righteous condemnation of that regime. How can these two men spend so much time seeking favour from the cruel, intolerant despots of China, and imagine that they have any moral right of any kind to condemn Syria? It is a nonsense, and they should grow out of it. We certainly aren’t the world’s policeman any more, and we’re not the world’s vicar either.

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Do good books die when nobody can understand them any more? Today’s children would never stand for most of the Victorian and Edwardian books I loved (and still love). The world in which they were written has gone forever.

But how strange to see this happening to a 20th century classic, ‘The Go-Between’. I was amazed by the favourable reviews of a dreadful BBC TV adaptation of this bitter, brilliant little book. I don’t think the makers or the reviewers can properly have understood it at all.

Apart from the silly, cheap decision to portray one of the main characters naked (when the book makes it quite clear he wasn’t),the main problem was (as it so often is) the faces.

The two lovers looked like models, aching for their smartphones, with nothing going on behind their eyes. It was impossible to see these people as the Victorians they were supposed to be.

Instead, they were modernised. A needless bit of class-war resentment (about a handkerchief!) was inserted. And the child at the centre of the drama, son of a bank manager and book-collector from Wiltshire, was given a northern accent and asked ‘can I get a cup of tea’, as he would never have done.

Look, people, manners, customs, belief and language were all different then. Which bit of ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’ don’t you understand?

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I don’t normally mention my daily struggles with the railways, as most train commuters have it far worse than I do. But I did laugh when the company which tows me back and forth each day, ‘First Great Western’, tired of being called (with much justice) ‘Worst Late Western’ and grandiosely changed its name to ‘Great Western Railway’, after Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s matchless enterprise of superb engineering and inventiveness.

On the very day of the fanfared change, I was of course held up for ages behind a ‘broken down train’ (You never actually see these, but like ‘signal failures’ and ‘track circuit failures’ you are told about them a lot. Great Western indeed.