This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column



How clever of the Defence Ministry to tell Chancellor Philip Hammond to pay his overdue bills if he wants to carry on flying in RAF planes.

The only problem with the plan is that Mr Hammond will simply whisk the cash out of your pocket and mine, and carry on as before, sinking into the leather seats of Her Majesty’s executive jets and avoiding the normal horrors of travel.

I have never understood why politicians get these privileges. The excuse of ‘security’ is in reality very thin. The risk to them isn’t all that great. Most are so obscure that they could pass unrecognised in any high street.

As far as I know, even Prime Ministers did not get government cars until the 1930s. In 1924, Ramsay MacDonald used to travel to Downing Street by Underground train from his modest North London home.

Quite right, too. If you claim to represent and speak for the people, and they are forced to pay your salary, you have a duty to experience life as near as possible to the way others live it.

So let them all travel by train and bus, paying their own fares unless it’s on official business. Close the parliamentary car park for ever. If MPs want to drive cars in congested London, that is fine by me, even though I think it mad, but let them do it just like everyone else, searching for parking spaces and paying for them.

If they can’t reopen all those lost village and suburban post offices, then they should also close Par

liament’s own post office. Why should they keep what they have withdrawn from the rest of us?

Let their computer broadband speed be no higher than the slowest in the country. Close most of the Westminster bars. What other workplace has an open-all-hours bar on the premises?

And why should politicians, of all people, have special protection, when the police largely ignore the rest of us? If they reintroduce proper police foot patrols, then they can have a police presence at Westminster. Not otherwise.

They should also be forced, as we all are, to be treated like criminals, searched, photographed, compelled to remove coats and belts before they can get inside the many security cordons they have imposed on us. Every time. They should go through the same procedure at airports, too. And in that I most definitely include Cabinet Ministers, right up to the top. In a supposedly free and equal country, there is no excuse for our rulers having VIP treatment. On the contrary, there is every reason for them to get what we get, hot and strong.

The worst country I ever lived in, the old USSR, was crammed with privileges for the political elite. They had their own hospital, their own shops, country houses and blocks of flats, special lanes on the streets so they could bypass the traffic in their special cars. They had their own holiday homes, their own waiting rooms at stations and airports, their own planes and reserved carriages. It was a wonderful life – for them.

But they became completely unaware of what was going on in the rest of the country, and by the time they realised it was headed for catastrophe, it was far too late.

Christine Keeler’s night in my bed (I bet that woke you up)

Christine Keeler once slept in my bed. There, I’ve got your attention. The story, though perfectly true, is completely unimportant and dull. I was hundreds of miles away at the time (the bed was in Moscow, and she spent a chaste night there).

But the very words ‘Christine Keeler’ or ‘Profumo’ still have the power to make people sit up and listen. This is such a pity.

The Profumo affair, one of the few bits of recent history anyone knows, was among the biggest non-events of all time. Poor Miss Keeler, God rest her soul, was only interested in clothes and make-up and couldn’t have told a nuclear secret from the formula for knicker elastic.

I once also met Captain Eugene Ivanov, the Soviet spy to whom she was supposed to have whispered what she had learned from Profumo, the Minister for War. I beg leave to doubt this. The two barely had a common language. Supposed ‘experts’ nowadays claim that Ivanov revealed later in life that he had done serious spying, photographing secret documents. Well, the Ivanov I met at this time (weirdly, in the middle of a park in the Soviet capital, with everyone involved looking over their shoulders) was a pathetic husk, his memory filled with fog, babbling vaguely about long-ago diplomatic parties. Believe what you want. I know what I think.

There were far bigger scandals at the time that we ought to care about, including the shocking Marples affair. This was a grave disgrace. The Transport Minister who wrecked the railways, a policy now universally known to be a disaster, was the boss of a motorway building firm. Such a coincidence.

Hardly anyone knows that Ernest Marples ended up skipping the country (on a train, ironically) to escape an enormous tax bill. And don’t get me started on the scandal of the grammar schools, smashed up on an ignorant whim by expensively educated idiots.

But I’ve already lost your attention again. Important things are doomed to be boring.

*****

Former Tory Minister Crispin Blunt, his career stalled, has begun calling for the decriminalisation and ‘regulation’ of marijuana. Immediately, the BBC had him on to talk about it.

What are these people thinking? Tobacco is decriminalised, yet criminal gangs still smuggle cigarettes. And it is ‘regulated’ and yet it still kills.

Above all, being on open sale, it is far more widely used than any illegal drug. Drug liberalisers can get away with any old rubbish on the BBC. Why ever is that?

The real scandal about ‘Marxist’ Milburn

The BBC and the Left-wing media made a huge fuss about the resignation of Alan Milburn as ‘Social Mobility Tsar’. But why do we have a ‘Social Mobility Tsar’ anyway, and who is Alan Milburn?

‘Social mobility’ in this case means stirring up prejudice against supposedly ‘posh’ children whose parents have in many cases near-bankrupted themselves to pay school fees to ensure their offspring get a reasonable education. This results in quotas which mainly benefit children from rich Left-wing homes, where the parents have bought expensive houses in the catchment areas of the minority of good state schools. All ‘egalitarian’ systems have this fiddle built into them.

Mr Milburn, who refuses to tell me where his own children went to school, is – like me, Anthony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Stephen Byers, John Reid, Bob Ainsworth and Alistair Darling – a former revolutionary Marxist. I am the odd one out in this group for three reasons.

First, I was never a Labour Cabinet Minister. Second, I am always entirely open about my past. Third, I publicly regret and reject my former views.

Whenever Mr Milburn pops up, I wonder two things. Why do people think New Labour was Right wing and why did a nominally Tory government give an important public post to such a man?

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