This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

Do not underestimate Jeremy Corbyn. Labour’s Blairites lie dead and dying all over the place because they made that mistake. Tory Blairites such as David Cameron might be wise to learn from this, especially given last week’s dismal, shrinking manufacturing and export figures, which were pushed far away from front pages by other stories, but which cast doubt on the vaunted recovery.

If (like me) you have attended any of Mr Corbyn’s overflowing campaign meetings, you will have seen the hunger – among the under-30s and the over-50s especially – for principled, grown-up politics instead of public relations pap.

Do not underestimate Jeremy Corbyn. Labour’s Blairites lie dead and dying all over the place because they made that mistake

Mr Corbyn reminds mature people of the days when the big parties really differed. He impresses the young because he doesn’t patronise them, and obviously believes what he says. This desire for real politics isn’t just confined to the Left. Ken Livingstone is right to call Mr Corbyn Labour’s Nigel Farage. Ukip appeals to a similar impulse.

Millions are weary of being smarmed and lied to by people who actually are not that competent or impressive, and who have been picked because they look good on TV rather than because they have ideas or character.

Indeed, ideas or character are a disadvantage. Anything resembling a clear opinion is seized upon by the media’s inquisitors, and turned in to a ‘gaffe’ or an outrage.

Actually, I dislike many of Mr Corbyn’s opinions – his belief in egalitarianism and high taxation, his enthusiasm for comprehensive schools, his readiness to talk to terrorists and his support for the EU. Oddly enough, these are all policies he shares with the Tory Party.

But I like the honest way he states them, compared with the Tories’ slippery pretence of being what they’re not.

My hope, most unlikely to be realised, is that a patriotic, conservative and Christian equivalent of Mr Corbyn will emerge to take him on, and will demonstrate, by his or her strength of conviction, that there is an even greater demand for that cause than there is for old-fashioned leftism. In any case, I think any thoughtful British person should be at least a little pleased to see the PR men and the special advisers and the backstairs-crawlers of British politics so wonderfully wrong-footed by a bearded old bicyclist.

On Wednesday the BBC marked the moment when the Queen became our longest-reigning Monarch by broadcasting (on Radio 4’s The World Tonight) a weird, portentous three-minute republican diatribe by the idiosyncratic feminist Beatrix Campbell, who in 2009 accepted an OBE from what she called a ‘horrible imperial regime’.

The attack was personal as well as political, criticising the Queen as a parent and accusing her of ‘deceiving and disrespecting’ her daughters-in-law. No doubt Ms Campbell has a legitimate point of view which ought to be heard. But an uninterrupted harangue during a flagship news programme? How can the BBC claim to be impartial when it does this sort of thing?

Death by drone is not justice

I would cheerfully bring back the death penalty tomorrow, as long as it came with unanimous grown-up juries and a restored right to silence.

But I’d never seen David Cameron as an ally in this. When it comes to defending us against actual heinous murderers in Britain, Mr Cameron (like most politicians) is an excuse-making anti-gallows liberal softie.



How does he square this with his enthusiasm for executing people without trial in the middle of someone else’s desert, using a remote-controlled chunk of high-explosive?

No doubt the victims of this are not very nice, though nothing resembling evidence has been produced against them. But that shouldn’t blind us to the principle involved. If we think killing people we don’t like with drones in other countries is legal and OK, we have licensed everyone else to do the same, even to us, here.

It is all part of a confused and delusional policy towards Syria and ISIS. George Osborne, the Chancellor, still seems to want to attack Syria’s President Assad, whose army is now one of the main barriers against an ISIS victory.

Last week he said Parliament’s vote not to bomb Assad in 2013 was ‘one of the worst decisions the House of Commons has ever made’.

On the contrary, if we had bombed Assad then, we would have helped the people who soon afterwards became ISIS. Given this confusion at the highest level, Parliament should be very careful not to allow Mr Osborne and Mr Cameron to make the same mistake again.

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The people who want to make life coarser never, ever stop. A bookmaker has just got away with using a partly-asterisked F-word in a newspaper advertisement. The gutless, useless ‘Advertising Standards Authority’ rejected a complaint, saying it was ‘light-hearted’. It won’t be long now before the whole word is allowed, everywhere. Those of us who think that is a pity will be derided for caring. And so the cultural revolution goes on.

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At long last, feminism has found a wise voice

Feminism has many faces. Compare and contrast Charlotte Proudman, the censorious Thought Policewoman who publicly denounced an internet bore when she could have slapped him down in private, and the singer Chrissie Hynde.

Ms Hynde lived the entire dream and nightmare of 1960s liberation, and is impressively honest about the bitter depths to which this took her, and the sadness this caused her parents.

Last week she was questioned on this by the high priestess of po-faced British feminism, Jenni Murray. The exchange didn’t go quite as Ms Murray expected. Chrissie Hynde’s thoughts about feminism and knicker-displaying rock stars have been much publicised. But this was the bit that really impressed me: ‘I don’t think it’s liberating at all to think that you can behave like a man… When this false commodity of sexual liberation came along which made us think that we could act like them – actually women don’t act like men and they also respond emotionally very differently to men. It took me a long time to find out, and I don’t think it was any kind of liberation. I think it was more enslavement.’

Jenni Murray immediately changed the subject.