This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

How odd it would be to actually watch Oxford beat Cambridge by a mile in the boat race, and then open the papers next morning and read that Cambridge had won.

Last week was a bit like that for me. I watched the Tory conference carefully. And then I read the papers, and it was all plain wrong.

Take this quotation, from a Tory document, describing the ‘key objectives’ of their planned new bill on ‘Human Rights’.

One of them is to ‘put the text of the original Human Rights convention into primary legislation’. In other words, the Tories plan to make Human Rights a permanent part of our constitution. Is that what you thought they were doing?

It goes on to say: ‘There is nothing wrong with that original document.’ Is that what you thought they thought? Because it is.

The only way to escape the ‘Human Rights’ curse is to abolish it entirely, and rely (as we did when we were truly free and independent) on our own well-tried laws, forged in centuries of constitutional battle.

Canada, which has its own homegrown ‘Charter Of Rights And Freedoms’, modelled on the European one, is just as entangled in liberal drivel as we are. It’s not where the Charter comes from that’s the problem. It’s what it is.

You have deliberately been given a wholly false impression of what is planned – and, alas, much of the media has joined in the deception.

There are other falsehoods. Perhaps the worst and most wounding for a British patriot is Mrs Theresa May’s plan to ban ‘extremists’ from the airwaves and the internet. What is an extremist? Why, anyone the Government says is one. I might be one. You might be one.

What joy this idea must have given the Chinese despots currently resisting peaceful demands for more freedom in Hong Kong.

I can just imagine the glee with which they will throw back any British protests at repression, by saying how much they admire Mrs May’s reintroduction of medieval tyranny into our penal code. For this disgraceful outburst, Mrs May was praised as a possible future premier by choirs of sycophants.

But then we must come to that great streak of snake-oil and hair gel, the Prime Minister’s speech in Birmingham on Wednesday. I confess I swore at the TV set several times, enraged by his sheer nerve.

His ostentatious wearing of a Help For Heroes wristband after needlessly prolonging the peril of British troops in Afghanistan was particularly repulsive to me.

I hope his endorsement did not harm that excellent charity too much, though I have never understood why wounded soldiers should need to rely upon charity for their care.

IT WAS full of what I will politely call terminological inexactitudes. Of these the greatest was his pretence that he hates being in coalition with Liberal Democrats. All the rest flowed from this falsehood.

Let me remind you of what he said on September 20, 2009, long before he was allegedly ‘forced’ into this arrangement: ‘On so many progressive issues, there is strong agreement between our parties.’ By ‘progressive’, he means left-wing.

The next greatest falsehood was his pretence that he fears Labour more than he fears Ukip. The opposite is true. His Blairite project would be quite safe under Labour.

Only a Ukip breakthrough offers the poor, betrayed British people any hope of real change. The others must lie, because they know their real aims are hateful to us.

No happy ending for story time

How sad to hear that BBC radio is ending its last children’s programme – because its audience is mostly made up of over-60s.

For me, the words ‘It’s a quarter to two’ and ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’, which began the old programme Listen With Mother, are still infused with magic. I actually did listen to it with my mother, and there were plenty of others who did the same.

We make a lot of fuss about how adults should read to children, but I’m not sure we really do very much about it. It’s difficult. Children are incredibly sensitive to the atmosphere around them, and our age is too noisy and frantic to listen to stories.

It only works if you can see the story unfolding in your head. And modern children face so many distractions – and have their imaginations hoovered out of their heads by TV and computer games at incredibly early ages.

And language gets cruder and coarser every year. I was enraptured when teachers read Conan Doyle’s great historical romances to us on dark afternoons, and John Masefield’s The Box Of Delights. But how many eight-year-olds can cope these days with their richly embroidered English?

A brave attempt to revive the lost art is being made in Oxford now, by the extraordinary new Story Museum, which should get more attention. It has a real wardrobe, through which you can reach a snowy forest, and many other wonders and surprises.

But above all it is devoted to the idea that children who know stories will grow up happier and richer in spirit than those who don’t.

My homebound train slowed, then halted meaninglessly in the middle of some post-industrial wasteland. Late again. In fact, at least a dozen trains were held up by about half an hour, on a major line.

This happens so often that I wouldn’t mention it, except that the delay was blamed on a mysterious ‘object’ on the line, which announcers were careful not to name.

My mind raced. What could it be that was so bad they couldn’t mention it? A dead sheep? A lavatory? A coffin? A Human Right?

By diligent enquiry, I found in the end that it was... a solitary plastic traffic cone. Instead of hooking it off the track with a pole, or jumping down and picking it up, or just letting trains biff it out of the way, now legally perilous, those in charge launched a major alert, as signals switched to red for miles around.

Of course they knew it was silly – that’s why they wouldn’t reveal what the object was. But this is the state of our country since the Thatcher and Major Governments allowed no-win-no-fee lawyers to operate – in the full knowledge of the misery and stupidity they had already brought to the USA. Next time I’ll ring the Cones Hotline – if it still exists.

The Prime Minister says he prefers pounds, pints, yards and miles to litres and metres. Perhaps he does, or perhaps he is just saying that because he knows it plays well with people like me.

If he really means it, then he can do something about it. For many years, the Government – and increasingly the BBC – have acted as if Parliament abolished our traditional measurements.

It never did. Nor was it ever discussed at a General Election. What’s more, these measures are still used in the USA, a successful and efficient country with which we do a lot of trade.

Yet schools and officials act as if feet and inches, yards and acres are antiquated and subversive, coldly refusing to use them. There’s no warrant for this. Mr Cameron has the power to stop it. Everyone in this country should know how many inches make a foot, and how many pounds there are in a stone.

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