September 1 • 2019 The Mail on Sunday^
T
he enraged denunciations
of Al Johnson’s suspension
of Parliament are so daft
that sensible people may
make the mistake of think-
ing it doesn’t matter. Actu-
ally, it does matter.
It’s not the suppression of democ-
racy or a military takeover. But it
is an unfair use of power, and it has
created a nasty precedent which
somebody like Mr Corbyn may find
useful in future.
Our beautiful, finely balanced
constitution only works if those
in charge handle it with care.
When we were still governed by
grown-ups, nobody would have
acted like this.
But the grown-ups vanished
years ago. And what keen support-
ers of Mr Johnson have yet to
realise is that he is not what they
think he is. he is a multi-culti
radical revolutionary, at least as
bad as the Blair creature.
In fact, his takeover of Downing
Street and Whitehall, with his ruth-
less, hard-to-love chief commissar
Dominic Cummings at his side,
is astonishingly like Blair’s 1997
putsch, with his gruff, grim enforcer
Alastair Campbell at his side.
You may remember that the
Blairite machine flooded Downing
Street with a fake crowd of Labour
Party employees (all of whom
would have been happier with
Red Flags) waving Union Jacks.
It was the signal. In the days
and weeks afterwards, New Labour
raped the constitution, strangled
Civil Service neutrality, sidelined
the monarchy and turned the
Cabinet into a vacuous committee
of servile nobodies. The British
State has never recovered.
All this makes it much easier
for Mr Johnson to act in the same
sort of way. But what is Al John-
son’s aim? he is not, like Blair
and his circle, an unrepentant
1960s Marxist.
I
ThINk his suspension of
Parliament is tricky and cyni-
cal, and is an abuse of that
power, but it is not the putsch
that the liberal establishment
claim. But why be surprised
if he behaves like this? he
is not, as I keep pointing out, who
or what you think he is.
I don’t know if he was ever a
conservative. I very much doubt it.
Crafty Boris is taking
shocking liberties
A deadly error... committed by cops
It’s the way things cease to be
shocking that is so fascinating.
If, even 30 years ago, a police
force had proposed to let off
drug dealers and give them
free driving lessons and gym
memberships, the Chief
Constable involved would have
had to resign in about two hours.
Now, when Avon and somerset
Police announce this mad
scheme, there’s barely a tremor.
to me, the interesting thing here
is that those targeted for this
crime-rewarding programme are
drug dealers. For years, police
have excused their cowardly,lawless and disastrous failure to
pursue criminal drug users by
saying this would free them to
catch the evil dealers.
I knew they never really
meant it. UK police forces long
ago ceased to be police as we
understand the term. they
are just armed and uniformed
social workers, full of excuses
for crime and utterly opposed
to the idea of punishing
responsible wrongdoers.
As evidence has piled up that
marijuana is one of the most
dangerous drugs known to man,
its use linked with mental illnessand violence, they have thick-
headedly reduced their already
feeble efforts to combat its use.
this particular outfit announced
in 2004 that it had given up
arresting marijuana users.
In 2016, it became the fifth
police district in the country to
say openly that it just wasn’t
interested in acting against
possession of this dangerous
drug, which lies behind so
much of the severe violence
which now pollutes our streets.
It admitted to me last week that
it would be ‘very unusual’ for it
to act against this crime whichstill carries a maximum sentence
of five years in prison.
By what right or power do they
decide to ignore laws passed
by Parliament?
But the truth is that this police
district is not really exceptional.
I suspect that it just has better
PR than most of the others.
A reputation for being soft on
crime, and especially on
marijuana, is what gets you
promotion in today’s Britain.
I will never understand why
more people are not more angry
about this great screaming
scandal in our midst.Peter Hitchens
Read Peter’s blog at hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk and follow him on Twitter @clarkemicah25
Don’t be fooled by the patrician
voice. Many of the worst revolu-
tionaries have been aristocrats.
But he certainly wasn’t a conserva-
tive by the time he became Mayorof London, a city whose electorate
is miles to the Left of the rest of
the country.
And it was there that he made
the acquaintance of one of his otherkey aides, the head of his policy
unit, Munira Mirza. She was
then his ‘cultural adviser’, what-
ever that is. Ms Mirza has a
fascinating political past. She ismixed up with a strange outfit,
originally Living Marxism, then
rebranded as LM. Nowadays
they are gathered round the
‘libertarian’ website Spiked Online
and various other bodies such as
the Manifesto Club.
It may or may not help you to
know that LM, before Ms Mirza
got mixed up with it, began life as
a body called the Revolutionary
Communist Party.
The RCP’s most famous contri-
bution to British political debate
was back in 1993, just after the
IRA had murdered 12-year-old
Tim Parry and three-year-old
Johnathan Ball in Warrington, and
injured 56 others.
The RCP, at that time, defended
‘the right of the Irish people to take
whatever measures necessary in
their struggle for freedom’.
No doubt they don’t feel that way
now, and Ms Mirza wasn’t one of
them then. But shouldn’t it have
put her off since?
I suspect they were just trying
to sound boldly radical, as they still
like to do, and merely succeeded in
sounding disgusting.
And as a very former 1960s revo-
lutionary myself, I know that peo-
ple can change their minds.B
UT the point is that Ms
Mirza (whose husband
was once an organiser
of rather startling sex
parties) is still closely
connected with these
ultra-radical weirdos.
And she was chosen by Mr Johnson
for a vital job. She is believed to be
one of his five closest confidantes
in Downing Street.
What’s going on here? Where
did these people come from? What
do they want? Well, it certainly
has nothing to do with my desire to
protect and strengthen Britain’s
ancient law and liberties or to make
Britain less PC and more conser-
vative (my main reasons for want-
ing to leave the eU).
I think it’s much closer to a
rather wild plan to revolutionise
this country with unrestricted
free trade, perhaps made easier to
bear by plenty of sex parties and
drug decriminalisation.
Am I supposed to like this, just
because I don’t like Jeremy Corbyn
or Angela Merkel?
Well, sorry, I don’t.but they’re nothing to do
with shutting Parliament
I hAve no great love for Jane Austen. I once
tried to make myself read her much-lauded
classic Pride And Prejudice in ideal conditions
of peace and comfort. Within five minutes
my eye had slid off the page and I was
reading the small print on a nearby
beer-bottle label, which had suddenly
become interesting by comparison.
But I still can’t see why Itv’s
bonnet-festooned new series
sanditon – based on a novel she
never finished – couldn’t just
have been invented out of
nothing. there are a lot of things
in it, from hints of incest to racial
tension, which Austen would never
have written about. For most tv
watchers now, Andrew Davies is a
big enough name in his own right,
and no longer needs to smuggle his
throbbing plots on to tv under
the skirts of grander authors.Hey presto! Classic
Austen magicked
up out of thin air
FANCIFUL
PLOT: Rose
Williams and
Crystal Clarke
in SanditonITVV1