HOW I FEAR MY BOOK HAS BECOME AN OBITUARY of BRITAIN
Twenty-five years ago PETER HITCHENS wrote a bestseller which warned the pillars of our institutions were crumbling under New Labour. Of course the Left sneered, but who now can say he was wrong?
ONE beautiful June day in 1990, I got my heart’s desire and went to live in dirty, frightening Moscow, the capital of a country I hated. I went deliberately into the dark orbit of the Kremlin because I wanted to know, think and write about the Communist world which then still lay a few hundred miles from the Channel.
I was not disappointed.
I became familiar with that other looking-glass planet, its squalor and sadness, the courage of many of its people, the diet of lies on which they lived, and the true, ghastly aim of its wicked rulers.
I realised that our own comfortable country could easily have been like this.
I then witnessed that hideous strength rot and fail despite its power, as John le Carré said, ‘like a knight dying inside his armour’.
To be there in the midst of the thunderous collapse of one of the greatest empires the world had ever seen was like being taken up to the top of a high mountain and shown all the kingdoms of the world. You are not the same after you have witnessed such things.
But in that sinister orbit, I also became oddly weightless, separated quite painfully for the first time from the country I had lived in all my life and which I thought I knew well.
For, thanks to my privileged position as a Fleet Street journalist, I had been given a front seat at almost every major event available, and seen our society from top to bottom, from crawling through the thin seam of a nottinghamshire coal mine and spending a weekend in a Polaris submarine to attending briefings with Margaret Thatcher as she zipped round the world in her ancient RAF jet.
But my time in Russia changed my view of all that too. From then on, I could never again see anything in Britain with the same eyes. I was condemned to be an outsider in every argument.
When I eventually came back to live in england, I did not come directly.
First, I slipped out of the back door of Russia, across the Bering Strait into Alaska. Amusingly, I also went backwards in time, thanks to the International Date Line, leaving Siberia on Monday morning and arriving in Alaska the previous Sunday afternoon.
After some other travels, I lived for another two years in Washington DC. And I came home at last in 1995, after five years of exile, in a great Cunarder, the Qe2.
I thought such a journey was too important to be compressed into a few hours of featureless flight, ending with the wet whump of wheels on some dawn runway at Heathrow. I was right.
I remember being blinded by tears as we steamed in the September sunshine along england’s uniquely lovely south coast, to dock at last in Southampton. england, home and beauty. And yet how quickly the delight of homecoming withered. Again and again I felt that something did not sound or look right. I would experience some piece of stupid bureaucracy or unhelpfulness. I would read of lawabiding people betrayed by police or courts who were more interested in the supposed ‘rights’ of those who had attacked them.
The very language seemed to have been rewritten by sociologists.
I would despair at the obsession with pushing women away from the honourable task of raising the next generation and crammed instead into call centres and factories on wretched wages, while their children yearned for them in nurseries.
It was this pro-abortion, anti- marriage, anti- childbirth, ultimately anti-parent frenzy which especially troubled me. The state was supplanting the family.
This chilly tendency had been prophesied in 1980 by the contraceptive fanatic Lady Helen Brook in an unintentionally revealing letter to The Times: ‘ From birth till death it is now the privilege of the parental State to take major decisions — objective, unemotional, the State weighs up what is best for the child.’
That phrase, ‘ the parental State’ made me think of the single most horrible monument in Communist Moscow, set in a sad, weedy park in the district known as Red Presnya. This was a statue of the little horror Pavlik Morozov. Soviet children were actually brought up to admire this
treacherous creep for betraying his own parents to the secret police. Were we heading that way? It still seems to me that we were and are.
Or I would listen to some politician and I would ask myself: ‘Why is this bland dishonesty both unpleasant and familiar? Where have I experienced it before?’ It nagged at me a lot.
And then it came to me that what I was seeing, feeling and hearing was the quiet, weed-like growth, in Britain, of the ideas that had ruined Russia.
There were so many of these bad ideas, in law, education, morals, literature, broadcasting, TV dramas and children’s books.
MPs and parties represented the powerful to the people rather than the other way round. State bureaucracies treated loyal, patient taxpayers with contempt rather than respect. Trusted brands, banks and shops became infected with propaganda and political correctness, so that you could no longer advertise a new brand of sausage or a hairdryer unless you included some feminist or multicultural message.
THE police were becoming political and no longer seemed to care about their basic duties. It was increasingly wise to avoid contact with them, and to expect little of them, as it had been in Moscow.
A general dislike for every aspect of the Christian religion was increasingly obvious. And there were privileges for the elite which most people knew nothing about.
The 1997 funeral of Diana Spencer, sentimental and populist, contrasted so sharply with the 1965 funeral of Winston Churchill, restrained and patrician, that they might almost have taken place in different countries. There were, as in Moscow, schools where powerful Leftists could get their children a good education, which most children could not hope to enter.
Media, as in Moscow, served the government and inserted propaganda into what was supposed to be impartial news.
And in the midst of all this there was an unstoppable cultural revolution, sneering at those things and actions we used to admire, falsifying history to suit itself. I wrote about this sort of thing every week.
Until the Blair government took office, these ideas were shared by most of the elite, in education, media, the law and the schools — but not the state. Now they took over the whole state.
New Labour blurted in its manifesto that it was ‘the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole’. This was a rather sinister claim to be the only legitimate government and a warning more of us should have heeded. The Blairites did not respect Parliament or the constitution. And they were as unscrupulous as Russia’s Lenin.
In a TV broadcast, they lied flatly that the Tories would abolish the state pension. When they won the election, they crammed Downing Street (closed to the public for years) with fake spontaneous demonstrators waving Union Jacks.
These days it would be rainbow flags, but then they pretended to be patriots. The TV bulletins showed this North Korean charade as if it were a genuine event.
The future Sir Anthony Blair himself avoided any kind of questioning on the very telling gulf between the schooling he ordained for everyone else and his own children’s education.
I had direct personal experience of this almost despotic refusal to face legitimate questions, treated as a pariah at Blair Press conferences.
Because most people could not, in those days, see any coherent threat to their country or their way of life, it was like hacking away at a fogbank with a cutlass. Anyone who objected looked eccentric and got nowhere.
Friends advised me that, if I wanted to make any real impact on public debate, newspaper columns were just not enough. I should write a book.
So in the winter of 1998, I wrapped up warm and shut myself away in the freezing, crumbling garage of my suburban semi and set to work, using a primitive word processor, to pound out what would become The Abolition Of Britain.
And while I did so, I tried to find a publisher. I was very nearly too late. The eventual publication of the book was almost a miracle.
The first agent I approached, now a man of vast grandeur in the publishing world, took one look at the outline of the book and snootily refused to have anything more to do with me or it. Attempts to speak directly to publishers through personal contacts ended much the same way.
how dare I attack the things everyone else liked? The whole world of books seemed to have swallowed the Blairite agenda. eventually, the generous and open-minded agent David Miller, now alas no longer with us, cheerfully took on the task, saying the idea was good and that he had not yet failed to get a book published.
Six months later, by which time I had a complete manuscript, he was not so confident. ‘I have never had so much trouble getting a book published’ he confessed to me. ‘It is quite extraordinary.’
We had almost run out of hope when Naim Attallah, of Quartet Books, generously agreed to bring the book out, and so The Abolition Of Britain was born, nursed into existence by another open- minded gentleman of the old school, Piers Blofeld, nephew of the great cricket commentator henry.
I don’t suppose his association with such a wicked book did him much good in his chosen career.
I picked the title soon after reading C.S. Lewis’s superb The Abolition Of Man, in which he warns against the demoralisation of humanity as a whole.
BUT I also did feel that the country was being abolished, by stealth, all around us. Then it came out, in 1999, and it sold, and sold, and sold, even more so when it was serialised in The Mail On Sunday.
The Labour MP Gerald Kaufman said he felt he needed a cold shower after reading it. The Blairite spin- doctor Derek Draper compared me to King Canute.
The queen of Left- wing commentators, Polly Toynbee, kindly attacked it, but added that it was ‘a very useful book’ which ‘draws up the true battle lines of politics now far better than many of the attempts to summarise the slippery Third Way or the heart of Blairism’.
The paper I actually then wrote for, The Daily express, had itself fallen on hard times and been taken over by Blairites.
It would not have anything to do with my book.
The Abolition Of Britain has never since been out of print. It went on to be published in the USA. It has been accused by idiots of being an exercise in nostalgia for the alleged golden age of the 1950s, but they have not read it. It is no such thing.
I remember the 1950s, a glum, grey era of chilblains and sniffles when everyone smoked all the time. What I set out to show was that, in the collapse of the old patriotism and the old religion, a vacuum had come into being into which all sorts of dangerous and destructive ideas were rushing.
If we wanted to save the country, I thought then, we needed to build a new and tougher patriotism, a new and tougher Christianity which understood and fought their enemies instead of giving in to them for the sake of a quiet life, and in that way could keep alive a country which still more or less resembled the Britain we had inherited.
I was right, of course, which is why the book has now lasted 25 long years and why I will never revise it. But nobody in power listened, or listens, even now as its prophecies come true.
Will they ever listen — or will it in the end serve as an obituary for the country I vainly hoped to save?