Picture this: it is well past midnight in the deeply grim Soviet city of Sverdlovsk. In a squalid communist-era hotel, the bedside phone rings for the fifth time.

My friend and colleague Rachel answers wearily.

She knows who is on the line. It is the same prostitute who has called her four times before, asking for Mr Hitchens.

I loathe and mistrust Donald Trump. I think he is an oaf and a yahoo who has gravely damaged the standards of public life, writes Peter Hitchens

‘Look,’ Rachel explains in her perfect Russian. ‘I am not the person you want. He is alone and asleep in room 362. This is room 243. I am alone and awake in it. I do not want your services.’

‘Not possible,’ replies the prostitute in bored tones. ‘Mr Hitchens was allocated room 243. I was ordered to call room 243. So I am calling it.’ Room 243 must have been the one with the camera.

Such, in those days, was Soviet bureaucracy. It was unimaginable that we would defy the plan in this way. The tart was following her orders to the letter. By swapping rooms, Rachel and I had sabotaged weeks of scheming by the Sverdlovsk KGB.

This went on all night, while I slept undisturbed. So far as I know, it was the KGB’s only attempt to lure me into a honey-trap during my years as a correspondent in the USSR.

They did send an attractive middle-aged woman to travel in a neighbouring sleeper on the Ostend- to-Moscow Express, as I made my way to set up home in the Soviet capital. But that wasn’t, I think, about sex.

Romance failed to blossom, anyway. They hoped (correctly) that I would hire this brisk but shady lady as my assistant, a job she was very good at.

She disappeared as soon as the KGB worked out, through close observation of my private life, that I could not possibly be a spy. As a parting gift, they rather clumsily installed a microphone in my car, in case they were wrong.

At almost exactly the same moment, the now-famous spymaster Christopher Steele was arriving in Moscow, under diplomatic cover as a second secretary at the British Embassy, but actually working for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).

I was an icy Cold Warrior, consumed with loathing of the Evil Empire and all in favour of British nuclear weapons, whereas Mr Steele had recently left Cambridge, where he is said to have been ‘an avowedly Left-wing student with CND credentials’, and a ‘confirmed socialist’. Isn’t MI6 an odd organisation?

I was an icy Cold Warrior, consumed with loathing of the Evil Empire and all in favour of British nuclear weapons, whereas Mr Steele had recently left Cambridge, writes Peter Hitchens

But in any case, I think I can claim to have some knowledge of the strange world of bugged rooms, naughty ladies and blackmail of which we have heard so much this week.

I’ve also kept in touch with Moscow and Russia, places utterly transformed since the 1990s, whereas, it is said, Mr Steele hasn’t been back for 20 years.

And I must say I am deeply unimpressed with the document in which extraordinary, sordid claims are made against Donald Trump. Nameless sources, said without evidence to be reliable (‘a trusted compatriot’), repeatedly make vague, untestable claims. It is padded with general political statements to make it look grander than it is.

The most convincing bits in it are the blacked-out sections. These at least cannot be shown to be wrong – unlike the claim that Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, met Kremlin officials in Prague in August 2016. Mr Cohen says he has never even been to Prague.

I loathe and mistrust Donald Trump. I think he is an oaf and a yahoo who has gravely damaged the standards of public life. I fear what he may do. But that does not mean I lose all sense of proportion.

Like it or not, he has been duly and lawfully elected as the head of state and government of the USA. If we believe in either democracy or law, or both at once, we must respect this fact. We cannot approve of, or help, attempts to topple him by scandal and smear, before he has even sworn the oath of office.

We should also stop being so pious. Far better men than Mr Trump, such as Jimmy Carter, have been disasters in office. John F. Kennedy, now revered as a sort of saint, had a private life which in this age would have brought him down in weeks.

And maybe the Russians did try to influence the American elections. I think it likely but unproven. But President Obama openly sought to influence our EU referendum, and it is now proven that the CIA tried to get us to join the Common Market at the start in the 1950s.

Around the same time, the CIA was (quite rightly in my view) spending a fortune defeating the communists in Italian elections. And we and the USA engineered and paid for a violent putsch against the elected government in Iran, for which we are still bitterly resented there.

Once you slip beyond the curtain of public relations into the real, cold world, as I have been lucky enough to do, life turns out to be a good deal more incredible than you thought it was. But there are still some things that it’s wiser not to believe.

Although he didn’t see or hear her deliver it, Oxford professor Joshua Silver got hold of a draft of Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s Tory conference speech, presumably so that he could be properly offended by it.

She had made a typically empty Tory pledge to make it harder for British companies to employ migrants and to ensure foreign workers ‘were not taking jobs British workers could do’.

Although he didn’t see or hear her deliver it, Oxford professor Joshua Silver got hold of a draft of Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s Tory conference speech

Nothing, of course, actually happened. But Prof Silver, right, complained to the police, who have recorded it as a ‘non-crime hate incident’.

Laugh or fume as much as you like, this is now the law of England. And it will get worse.

A few years hence, anyone who says any such thing will face arrest and prosecution. Wait and see.

Great film Rachel... shame about the slip up

Here comes that rare thing – an intelligent and entertaining film. It’s called Denial and it is about the London libel trial that destroyed the reputation of the ghastly David Irving, who claims that Hitler did not industrially mass-murder Europe’s Jews. The best thing about it is that the decisive courtroom scenes are word-for-word true.

Tom Wilkinson, one of the great actors of our age, beautifully portrays the cool, restrained disgust with which Richard Rampton QC cross-examined Irving. He destroyed him not with histrionics, but on the facts. Irving was shown beyond doubt to be a hateful bigot who purposely told untruths.

Of course, it’s a film, so there are embellishments. Irving (who is quite good-looking) is played by Timothy Spall, doing his impression of a disgruntled codfish (or me, if you prefer).

Deborah Lipstadt, who fought the Irving case and looks, well, like an American professor, is portrayed in Denial by the glamorous Rachel Weisz

Deborah Lipstadt, who fought the case and looks, well, like an American professor, is portrayed by the glamorous Rachel Weisz. And I’m not sure the makers fully understand how English law works.

But one thing cheeses me off. At the end of the trial, Prof Lipstadt is shown listing a number of things which everyone knows to be true. The Holocaust happened. The Earth is round. Elvis is dead. Slavery happened. Yup, so far, so good. Then we get: ‘The ice caps are melting.’

Sorry, but this is a category error. Apart from the curious fact that sea ice has actually been expanding at the South Pole in recent years, the man-made global warming thing remains a belief and an opinion.

It may be true. It may not be. Those who dispute it are not evil or bigots. To compare their doubts to Irving’s lies is plain wrong, especially in a film about a trial that hinged on absolute truth.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens click here.