Leo McKinstry

When I visited the National Archives at Kew last week the place was full of them, scurrying about with their plastic wallets in hand, a look of eager concentration on their faces. It was impossible to escape their busy presence as they whispered noisily to relatives or whooped over the discovery of some new piece of information. These were the followers of one of Britain’s fastest-growing craze, the mania for researching family history. Studying bloodlines and tracing ancestral roots was once the preserve of the aristocracy. Today, as I saw at the National Archives, it has become a favourite activity of the British public. We are becoming a nation of obsessive genealogists.

In the post-war history of English cricket, there have been few more universally respected figures than John Lever, the Essex left-arm bowler. Modest, friendly and hard-working, he was regarded by both colleagues and cricket followers as the ideal professional. But when he made his debut for England during a tour of India in 1976, he found himself embroiled in the kind of ball-tampering row which brought the last Test to a farcical conclusion and plunged the sport of cricket into a major crisis. Unaccustomed to the sweltering heat of Delhi, Lever came up with the unorthodox idea of attaching a number of gauze strips to his forehead to stop the sweat running into his eyes.

When it comes to sex, Britain now seems to be gripped by a dangerous form of schizophrenia. On the one hand, there is mounting panic over the issue of paedophilia, where a media-driven climate of hysteria means that even the mere allegation of child abuse can be enough to destroy careers and wreck lives. Yet, on the other hand, we have a youth culture that is obsessed with sex. In the relentless promotion of adolescent sexual freedom, all moral boundaries have disappeared, pornography has been brought into the mainstream and the law on the age of consent is derided or ignored. It is this grotesque double standard which makes the witch hunt against the Education Secretary Ruth Kelly so sickening.

Lazy, ignorant, shallow and irresponsible, more interested in taking drugs than in proper study, too apathetic to make it to the polling station but not to an ecstasy-fuelled rave: those are the images often associated with young people in modern Britain. Survey after survey shows widespread illiteracy and innumeracy among teenagers. At the ever-expanding universities, it is said that terror of placing too heavy an intellectual burden on students has resulted in remorseless grade inflation and undemanding degree courses like media studies and golf-course management. The anxiety about youth is graphically reflected in the current hysteria about binge drinking.

An insidious paradox lies at the heart of the modern thrust for disability rights. This agenda is supposed to promote equality and fair treatment, goals to which no one could object. Yet the official definition of disability is now so wide, so all-embracing, that it includes the feckless, the antisocial, even the criminal. In the madhouse of today’s Britain, even the crack addict and the violent thug can be classified as disabled under anti-discrimination regulations. Such absurdities have arisen because of the influence of the psychiatric profession, which has decided that almost any selfish or dangerous conduct can now be categorised as mental illness.

Apart from the weather, the food and the landscape, one of the great joys of visiting France is to witness the behaviour of the children there, which is in such contrast to the noisy, aggressive, defiant, whingeing, tiresome selfishness of all too many British youngsters. Even when surrounded by families in a French restaurant, you can still hold a conversation without being constantly interrupted by puerile screeching, crying, charging and table-thumping. And whenever I reach the Channel Tunnel terminal at Calais on the return leg of a trip to France, I know from the din of temper tantrums that I am once more approaching the land of the spoilt brat. Yet, according to influential psychiatric opinion, the badly behaved child here deserves our sympathy rather than our condemnation.

As I waded through page after page of interminable dogma and municipal jargon, one statement suddenly leapt out at me: ‘Some 50 per cent of people being approved of as adoptive parents in Brighton and Hove are from the lesbian, gay and bisexual community.’ Those words — from a policy document entitled ‘Sexuality — the New Agenda’, published this month by the Local Government Association (LGA), the umbrella body for local authorities — were followed by another disturbing sentence: ‘Brighton and Hove Council has also shown that it is committed to taking rigorous action against homophobia, including, in one instance, de-registering foster carers who stated that they opposed lesbians being parents.

In Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie described the bed that the ‘rampageous’ boys made for themselves in their magical primitive home in Neverland: ‘It filled nearly half the room and all the boys slept in it, lying like sardines in a tin.’ Today, the sleeping arrangements at a modern version of this fantastic place have led to one of the most explosive prosecutions in recent criminal history. The singer Michael Jackson, who so loves the Peter Pan story that he named his own Californian ranch ‘Neverland’, is awaiting trial on charges of molesting a 12-year-old boy, Gavin Arvizo, who has cancer, and of using an ‘intoxicating agent’ to facilitate sexual contact. The case is due to come to court this month, and the outlook is bleak for Jackson.

Just after David Hill’s appointment as the new Downing Street press chief, I wrote a profile of him for the Daily Mail. In this article, I revealed that Hill was a superb amateur rock vocalist, who had not only sung in several major venues across London, but had also appeared in the musical Hair. But, even in the face of such revelations, by far the most startling fact about Hill remains his 20 years of service as an aide to Roy Hattersley, the former deputy leader of the Labour party. Even murderers rarely have to endure sentences of more than 15 years, yet Hill was shackled to this charmless figure of epic mediocrity from 1971 to 1991. As one former Labour press officer, who worked with Hill in the early Nineties, said to me last week, ‘David has a great sense of humour.

The British tourism industry appears to be gripped by a form of schizophrenia. On the one hand, we are told that holidaying in Britain has never been more fashionable, with hotels and resorts enjoying a boom this summer. 'Suddenly our seaside towns are the places to be. Santorini is out. Scarborough is in,' gushed the Sunday Times last weekend. On the other hand, it is barely a month since we were warned that domestic tourism was facing its deepest ever crisis. Overseas bookings were plummeting, down 15 per cent in April compared with the same period in 2002, revenue was falling and the government was urged to bail out the beleaguered industry.

Whether we like it or not, says Leo McKinstry, regional government is already here – and it is expensive, absurd and undemocratic Expanding bureaucracy is the hallmark of the government. Since the 1997 election, there has been a deluge of expensive new bodies, from the Scottish Parliament to the General Teaching Council. Thanks to Labour, Britain is awash with publicly funded apparatchiks and well-heeled paper-shufflers. We are drowning in action plans, strategy documents, task forces, co-ordination units, forums, commissions, programmes, tsars and mayors. But perhaps the most wasteful, offensive – and ultimately sinister – aspect of Labour's mania for organisational growth appears not at Westminster, but at a regional level.