PETER HITCHENS: Did our leaders have to pass a stupidity exam to get into Westminster?

 In 30 years it will be much easier to say this, but this must be the stupidest era there has ever been in British politics.

Oh yes, some modern politicians can make classical allusions or dance nimbly about when interviewed, but they do not really know anything, or understand anything.

They live entirely in the present. They know little of other countries and less about the pastThey idolise Winston Churchill but are in fact ignorant about him or his era and the huge price in power and wealth which he rightly paid for our survival in 1940.

Worse still, they think they are clever. This has something to do with the way we pick our leaders.

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Wimborne Militia entertain the crowd by firing their muskets in Wimborne an English historical re-enactment group

I have long suspected that they have to pass an examination in stupidity before being allowed into Westminster. But in fact the selection procedures of the major parties achieve the same thing.

They demand servile conformity with the idiotic beliefs which now govern our country.

Show the slightest sign of spirit or independent thought, on any topic, and you are out.

So here we are, fresh from six months of determined self-harm and illiterate panic over the virus, on the brink of making it even worse.

Anyone who knew anything about the EU issue said years ago (as I did) that our best way out of Brussels rule was to copy Norway – stay in the Single Market and get rid of all the political and legal baggage.

Zealots, who treasure the delusions that Britain is still a major power with a thriving economy, derided this. No, they said, we must have a total breach, and then we will soar free, our Victorian greatness restored.

Few of them ever grasped what it will mean to leave the Single Market, into which our economy has been totally integrated for decades, but they will shortly have a fascinating lesson in that.

The trouble is, the rest of us will have to have that lesson too.

And it is hardly surprising that France, which has so long resented our standing in Europe and the world, sees this as an opportunity to take us down a peg or two. But before complaining, remember that we gave them this chance.

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It is hardly surprising that France, which has so long resented our standing in Europe and the world, sees this as an opportunity to take us down a peg or two. But before complaining, remember that we gave them this chance (pictured: Emmanuel Macron at Saturday's climate summit)

It means trade with our nearest neighbours suddenly becomes far more complicated, expensive and difficult. The snaggled knot of Great Britain's new relations with Northern Ireland gives some hint of the problem, but only a small one. Dover is going to be quite an interesting place for some time to come.

What interests me about this, as a powerless spectator, is that – as with the Covid crisis – there has never been any opportunity for sensible thinking to find its way into Westminster and Whitehall.

The debate has always been between hard-leavers and hard-remainers. The whole idea of intelligent compromise has been drowned by militant, angry passion. And here I am, dismissed as an extremist or worse by much of our culture and by the BBC, and presumably as a 'traitor' by many on my own side.

Well, I did try to tell you. 

 

Shot down by Facebook's idiot censors

I have been given Facebook's seal of disapproval for saying something they disliked about Covid muzzles (a major experiment shows they're useless, and Facebook don't like that getting out).

So my sympathy goes out to the Wimborne Militia, a harmless and picturesque historical re-enactment society in Dorset, who had their accounts disabled by Facebook's witless censors, who seem to have thought they were a band of US white supremacists.

A moment's research would have shown that the action was ridiculous, but Facebook is now so powerful and self-righteous that it feels no need to make such checks. Censor first and ask questions afterwards. The power of such bodies, if not checked, will stifle freedom very quickly.

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I have been given Facebook's seal of disapproval for saying something they disliked about Covid muzzles (a major experiment shows they're useless, and Facebook don't like that getting out)

 

Manhattan upstages Matilda 

Sorry if you haven't seen the last episode of The Undoing, the whodunnit starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant and the impossibly sultry Matilda de Angelis.

Everyone is talking about it. I'm not sure why, given the idiotic, rather boring ending which required emergency character transplants for so many of the cast. It was quite obvious to me that Donald Sutherland (or rather, the character he played, Franklin Reinhardt) had done it.

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The Undoing's Elena Alves (Matilda De Angelis)

But as so often nowadays, the real star of the show was Manhattan, now a reliably evil, menacing background of cruel, Babylonian towers, never free of the electronic mourning of police and ambulance sirens.

Yet look at the same city portrayed in 1959 in that great film North By Northwest and you see a cheerful, prosperous place in which normal people still lived. And I was recently shown a startling picture taken in December 1956, showing several of its great towers with their lights switched on to display the Christian cross. Wouldn't happen now. It is interesting that, as it has grown richer, New York has also grown grimmer and more cruel.

 

The red-tape trap

My colleague Keeba Critchlow and her junior-doctor husband Ben are still being forced – by stupidity and bureaucracy – to pay for two homes. They had to move so that Ben could take up his new hospital duties. They cannot afford this.

They are among many trapped by ridiculous demands for a form proving the cladding on their old home is safe. But although it is safe, they can do nothing to speed up the issue of this form. And so they cannot sell their London flat to willing buyers. And every week of delay hurries them towards bankruptcy.

This procedure, born out of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, has become a monster. Robert Jenrick, the Cabinet Minister responsible, must know all about it. His officials certainly do, because I have told them. A word from him would unjam this mess. Perhaps he might speak that word as a Christmas present for all those suffering the unintended consequences of his own Government. .