Tony Blair has informed his countrymen that they face “an existential threat” from terror; and that is, of course, precisely what they want us to think, because they are determined to rush through all sorts of “anti-terror” legislation, such as ID cards and the end of habeas corpus

That is why it was so wonderful to read the truth on the front of yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, that the world is getting safer and safer, and that there are 40 per cent fewer conflicts than in the 1990s, and that terrorism is certainly not the greatest threat to humanity.

The MMR is safe – what other scare stories are nonsense?

Continue reading MMR Scare →

Hewitt and her appointees are bad news for our hospitals and health

My temperament is so generally peaceable that some mornings I wake up and think I have no enemies in the world. I rub my eyes, and stretch, and wonder what it is I am fighting for, and who it is I am fighting against.

And then I open the paper, and I behold the visage of Patricia Hewitt, and it all comes flooding back. I see the Health Secretary, and I see her spectacles glittering with the sheen of politically correct triumphalism. I hear her on the radio, with her bossy Aussie twang. I listen to her set out her latest jargon-laden agenda for interfering in the lives and habits of British families, and after a few paragraphs of Hewitt I am afraid I am fit to be tied.

Continue reading Quangos →

Cameron knows how to balance compassion with Conservatism

Over the past few months I have lost count of the number of people who have asked me – satirically – why I am not standing in the current Tory leadership contest; and after I have bumbled out some reply, they have always said, oh well, who are you backing? “David Cameron,” I have said, quick as a flash, and for the most part this answer has so far drawn a look of anxious blankness, the look you see when people are sure that they ought to have read some classic work, and are in two minds whether to bluff it out or admit ignorance. “Oh yes,” they say, mentally noting that they ought to get to grips with the subject of David Cameron, along with Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.

Continue reading Cameron →

Not only is Gordon Brown a chippy, high-taxing, gloomadon-popping, nannying old socialist, he is also a Scot. He sits for a Scottish seat, called Motherclyde or something. By Boris Johnson

I can’t believe it. They really are going to do it. The Labour Party seems to think it can just plonk Gordon Brown on the English public and that we are all going to swallow it. It’s an outrage. Not only is Gordon Brown a chippy, high-taxing, gloomadon-popping nannying old socialist, he is also a Scot. He sits for a Scottish seat, called Motherclyde or something, and he is presuming to tell us, the English, how to order our affairs, and to accept his diktat on controversial questions concerning healthcare and admission to our schools and universities (on which matter Gordon demonstrated not only his hysterical resentment of Oxbridge but also his lust to intervene). We English MPs have no corresponding say on those questions in so far as they affect people in Scotland and – here is the crowning absurdity – neither does he, Gordon, sitting for Motherclyde, on the health and education of his own constituents. It is a constitutional abomination, aggravated by the injustice that 8.1 million English voters went for the Tories, when 8.04 million English voters went for Labour, and we still have a socking Labour majority in England alone. In the circumstances, does Labour sincerely think it can win the next election, without reform and with a Scottish MP leader? I say bring it on.

Continue reading Diary in the New Statesman →

A Scottish streak of tapioca as prime minister – bring it on!

Are they serious? Are they really going to do it? If I understand the events at Brighton this week, the Labour Party has finally decided that at some stage in the next four years they are going to make Gordon Brown Prime Minister.

Continue reading Bring on Brown as PM →

The war in Iraq was based on a lie – and policing Basra is an illusion

What a shambles. What chaos. And how quickly it all seems to be getting worse. Looking at those pictures of a Basra jail, pulverised by the British Army, it seems hard to believe that it was only six months ago that the very same British Army took me to see a jail in the very same city.

I was there with a couple of Labour MPs, and a leading Welsh Nat, and we inspected the premises in our best Duke-of-Edinburgh way, smiles stitched tightly on, hands behind backs, and we all agreed that it was really rather impressive. I am not suggesting that a Basra jail is exactly a Mark Warner holiday – I remember the terrible fug and the black hole full of 34 juvenile offenders, some of them in for rape and murder, and the way they clutched at my legs and begged for “forgiveness”.

Continue reading Life in Basra →

Male vanity is vital – to win the Ashes and for human survival
Daily Telegraph column

There comes a point in all our lives when we realise that we are hopelessly out of our depth, and it happened to me yesterday as I was trying, for the purposes of television, to interview an Italian politician.

Since we had earlier had some success in striking up conversations in the street I was having a go in Italian. Except this guy wasn’t speaking the sweet, slow Italian, in which every consonant is enunciated. He was speaking in a curious accent and so fast that the words were winging over my head like a flock of supersonic pheasants above a drunken shooter.

Continue reading In Defence of the Male Sex →

It is always nice to get back and find you haven’t been burgled. The locks were secure, the windows intact, and with a song in my heart I opened my bank statement. It all seemed pretty satisfactory, if a tiny bit emaciated, and for a second or two I let my eye run down the list of outgoings. Funny, I thought. What was this ‘payment to Egg’? I seemed to have been making all sorts of payments to something called Egg. In fact, Egg had received several grand from me. I looked closer, the beginnings of suspicion frosting my heart.

Continue reading Visit to Uzbekistan →

Britain still has a global reputation – based largely on the BBC – as the home of free speech

The only sign of life from Labour has been from the maverick former Europe minister, Denis MacShane, who was himself whacked by Blair for being too free in speaking his mind.

Humphrys spoke the truth: that’s why Labour got itself in a spin

You know I sometimes wonder what kind of country we really are. We think of ourselves as a happy jabbering bazaar of free speech. Yet when a notoriously cantankerous broadcaster utters the round unvarnished truth, he receives a rebuke from the top of the BBC that is so sinister, and so plainly the result of internal wrangling, that it can have been inspired only by the Labour Government itself.

What was so “misguided and inappropriate” in the remarks of John Humphrys? There is nothing controversial in saying that Gordon Brown is on the dull side in debate. The Chancellor prides himself on his dullness. If anything, Humphrys was too mild. Most of us who have endured Gord’s Budget speeches would happily pay Humphrys’s exorbitant after-dinner rate not to hear another word from the man, and as for the suggestion that John Prescott is difficult to understand, it is as blindingly uncontroversial as saying that Tony Blair has a simpering grin.

What enraged the Labour Party was nothing to do with Brown or Prescott. The reason they are persecuting Humphrys is that they still cannot face the reality that the BBC was right about Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair, and the sexed-up dossier about Saddam’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Continue reading Freedom of BBC Journalists : WMD : Turkey and EU →

Let me assert this as powerfully as I can: we do not need to fear the Chinese. China will not dominate the globe.

Getting our knickers in a twist over China

Quite often on a Wednesday lunchtime I find myself conferring with my friend Rudi the sandwich man about the madness of Ken Livingstone, and his latest monstrous scheme for London. Rudi blames the congestion charge for pushing up his costs. I can’t stand the evil frankfurter buses that crush cyclists to the kerb.

This week, however, the newt-fancier has exceeded our wildest fantasies. Do you know how he has chosen to spend £1 million of our congestion charge cash? That crazy old Trot has bought in 100,000 doses of anti chicken flu medication, to be distributed, presumably, so that his key workers can continue to clamp cars and impose their poxy charges while the rest of us are expiring during the approaching epidemic.

It is a ludicrous waste of taxpayers’ money, and before you dismiss it as another case of Red Ken-ery, you should know that the madness has infected the Department of Health. They have drawn up a list of “elite” figures, mainly government ministers and BBC high-ups, who would be required to keep the country going in the event of the chicken plague, and who must therefore receive free doses of the wonderdrug.

Continue reading China as a world economy →