Peter Hitchens

Even Horace Rumpole could not have secured an acquittal for Lucy Letby. The more I look at this case, the more I suspect that there could never have been any other outcome than a conviction. I think a great cloud of emotion hung over that courtroom during the whole trial. I think that cloud spread outwards into the public mind before and during the long months of the trial. In my view, the actual prosecution of Ms Letby began on Thursday 5 July 2018, two days after she was arrested for the first time, and more than four years before she finally sat in the dock. The prosecution knew throughout that they had no objective proof of their case, large or small On that day, police officers dug up her tiny garden in a Chester suburb.

I confess I never expected to see myself going to the lavatory on prime-time national TV. In fact, the expedition was a failure. Sharing a cell, especially with a young man with a record for GBH, is a very constipating experience. But when I accepted Shine TV’s proposal that I should submit to living alongside a large number of former prisoners, in a real but decommissioned jail, I had agreed to almost anything that might happen. Including that. Dozens of cameras covered us the whole time from every angle. We wore microphones around our necks. It is impossible to guard your tongue the whole time, and so my exclamation of ‘at last!’ slipped out. And I can see why they used it.

BBC Four announced this morning that 'The Roads to Freedom' will play on the BBC for the first time since the 1970s on Wednesday 27 July. In May, Peter Hitchens asked why the BBC had kept it in the archive...  If someone had managed to bottle the essence of the 1960s – the exciting, adventurous bits – wouldn’t you want to take at least one deep draught? I certainly would. I sometimes long for the power to recreate that odd, dangerous, thrilling time, if only to see if I have got it right in my memory. In fact, they did bottle it. But nobody is allowed to taste the vintage. Well, almost nobody, as we shall see. The BBC possesses, beyond doubt, a full recording of its 13-part 1970 dramatisation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Roads to Freedom trilogy.

It was on Christmas morning in Moscow in 1990 that my daughter, then aged seven, realised that Santa Claus was not to be trusted. She had made the usual elaborate suggestions to him in a letter to Lapland (perhaps hoping that, being posted from a frozen region, it would get through more readily). But when she came to rip open her gifts, the parcels did not contain the things she had hoped for. Instead, they were full of pale, oddly coloured and sometimes faintly dangerous Soviet products, breathing the last enchantments of the 1930s. Mrs Hitchens had queued fiercely to buy these delights in the colossal ‘Children’s World’ department store which stood just across the road from KGB headquarters. Christmas in the Evil Empire was different, you see, though not always worse.

Only a dictator can save Oxford now. Local government simply cannot grasp how precious this marvellous, unrivalled city is, and how easy it will be to erode it into bare, dispiriting bleakness and ugliness. Any fool can see that the ancient colleges of the university must be preserved, but the setting in which they stand has no reliable defenders. It is true that a plan to put a bypass through the ancient pastures of Christ Church meadow was defeated in 1968. But that was after 27 years of wrangling, during which this hideous megalo-maniac scheme was actually described as ‘indispensable’. In the half century during which I have lived in Oxford, with a few breaks, the nibbling of developers and expanders has continued without cease.

Rod Liddle once actually said to me the immortal words ‘You were right and I was wrong’ at a Spectator summer party. This is a moment I shall treasure till the hour of my death. But even so, I was disappointed. For the subject was only Theresa May. I had predicted she would be a terrible premier. Rod had believed she would be good at the job. A year later, it was obvious who was correct. For one brief shining moment I had hoped that Rod had changed his mind about something much more important. I wish he and a lot of conservatives would shift their opinions about the role of mental illness in rampage killing all over the world. And, once they have done that, I wish they would be willing to examine the role of certain illegal and legal drugs in creating such mental illness.

Late one soft summer night in 1966, my brother Christopher slipped out of our north Oxford house and bicycled to the centre of the city. There he spent a worryingly long time with a spraypaint can, inscribing the words ‘Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?’ on a long builders’ hoarding outside Trinity College in Broad Street. You will have to work out for yourselves how I know this, but I do. The punctuation was perfect, and a handwriting expert could easily have told it was him. The slogan endured for months and even appeared in a TV drama filmed in the city some months later. This was how we felt then. There was no other cause so great. Even on its own terms, the Vietnam war was a terrible error and multitudes did indeed die for a mistake.

Any day now I shall be frogmarched, or at least very firmly escorted, out of a blood donor centre in London. I know this is going to happen because I made the appointment weeks ago and I intend to keep it. But when I signed up to donate my pint of blood to the public good, I was not required to wear a muzzle during my donation. Now I am. I do not intend to do so. I find the idea of donning one of these face-nappies physically repulsive, and dislike the mouthless, submissive appearance they create in all their wearers. I also believe them to be futile. I know the government believes this too, because it was saying so only eight weeks ago, and there has been no great scientific discovery since then. But above all, I am severely distressed by the obligation.

Douglas Murray says he has no idea whether I am right or wrong about whether the government has acted correctly over the coronavirus. Why on earth not? I have not endured having a hundred buckets of slime tipped over my head over the past few weeks to provide a sort of sporting spectacle for Douglas or anyone else to enjoy. I do not argue for the sake of it. I loathe the abuse and the solitude as much as anyone might expect me to. I see my country in danger of grave and lasting threats to its freedom and its prosperity. I fear a future of over-mighty officials and police displaying the unbridled insolence of office, a dead political consensus, combined with confiscatory tax, shrivelled savings and pensions, lower wages and standards of living, and diminished hopes for the young.