Peter Hitchens

How strange it is that an obscure Tsarist prison warder in Odessa is commemorated forever in thousands of tiny, irritable revolutionary sects. But that is who the real Trotsky was, and that is all we know about him. The future leader of the 1917 Petrograd putsch, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, hurriedly scribbled his former jailer’s name in a false passport as he fled from Siberian exile in 1902, hidden in a haywain. He later complained that he had no idea he would be stuck with being ‘Trotsky’ for the rest of his life. But would this enduring movement, as persistent in the world as the measles, have survived so long under its founder’s real name? I doubt it.

The Church of England has produced a lot of good men and women, but very few great ones. It is in its modest, cautious nature that it should be so. Greatness requires a lonely, single-minded strength that does not sit easily with Anglicanism’s gentle compromise. And I suspect the Church has always been hesitant and embarrassed about the one undeniably great figure it produced in the 20th century. To this day, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester from 1929 to 1958, is an uncomfortable, disturbing person, like a grim obelisk set in a bleak landscape. Many British people still disapprove of his lonely public denunciation of Winston Churchill’s deliberate bombing of German civilians in their homes.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/putin-s-empire-building/media.mp3" title="Peter Hitchens and Ben Judah debate Putin's empire building" startat=33] Listen [/audioplayer]Just for once, let us try this argument with an open mind, employing arithmetic and geography and going easy on the adjectives. Two great land powers face each other. One of these powers, Russia, has given up control over 700,000 square miles of valuable territory. The other, the European Union, has gained control over 400,000 of those square miles. Which of these powers is expanding? There remain 300,000 neutral square miles between the two, mostly in Ukraine. From Moscow’s point of view, this is already a grievous, irretrievable loss.

How thrilling it is when someone finally stages a demonstration against you. All right, it was a very small protest (one person), and it was in Southampton on a wet Sunday morning. But it was all mine. Stretched by the roadside was a dank bedsheet bearing the words ‘Peter Hitchens is a hypocritical racist alcoholic. Spread your bile elsewhere. No one cares what you have to say.’ I don’t accept this as entirely accurate, but, under the circumstances, why quibble? Also, it made me think. Standing beside it, smirking, was a person in a woolly hat and sunglasses. He had a striking pallor, the sort you might get from spending many months in a basement with a computer, converting sugary drinks into lard.

The proposal to change Britain’s clocks has returned, this time with tacit government support. It makes no sense — except perhaps in Brussels Since the day I flew backwards across the International Date Line I have known that you should not mess around with time. On that occasion I left Siberia on Monday morning and arrived in Alaska the previous Sunday afternoon in time for lunch. This was and remains confusing, though it offers disproof of the old cliché that you cannot put the clock back. Though I have been to North Korea and Bhutan, I still count it among the most startling journeys I have ever taken. It lasted about an hour.

What a pity it is that all the hate and slime now directed against the Pope’s visit is not aimed instead at the Church of England. Why do God-haters and militant secularists have to turn on a pensionable German theology professor and head of a Rome-based religious multinational organisation, when they want to condemn the steadfast defence of Christian morality? For at least some Anglicans, the savaging of the Bishop of Rome will give rise to sinful pangs of envy. We would like Richard Dawkins, Philip Pullman — and, I am rather compelled to mention, my brother Christopher — to be hurling their fiery darts at Thomas Cranmer’s church instead. But these professional scoffers unkindly refuse to scoff at our texts and formularies.