PETER HITCHENS: Stop worshipping MI5, a Blairite secret police force

How very odd it is that we pay so much attention to MI5 and its chief Ken McCallum, warning us last week of all the perils supposedly stalking the land, which just so happen to justify his enormous budget. Have you ever heard the head of a tax-funded organisation pleading for fewer resources, or downplaying his importance? No, nor have I.

Well, you may believe all this if you wish. But first ask yourself what MI5 is. The answer is disturbing, and doesn’t really fit with my idea of what sort of country this is.

Many people wrongly refer to it as a spy service, and to its boss as a ‘spy chief’. But it is not. It works entirely at home. It is in fact a secret police force which once quite justifiably kept an eye on Nazi and Communist sympathisers, who were in many cases actively working for our national enemies during the Second World War and the Cold War. This was probably necessary, even if the idea is pretty repellent.

The great novelist John le Carre, for instance, snooped on his fellow students at Oxford in pretty underhand ways, searching for Communists, before rather unusually switching to the overseas intelligence organisation MI6. This experience of pretending to be someone’s friend, so as to win his trust, helped to make him such a good writer. But it wasn’t very nice, and led to some bitter breaches when his targets found out what he had been up to, years later.

When I was a revolutionary Marxist in the 1960s and early 1970s, MI5 undoubtedly spied on me, too. I expected it, and thought it quite funny, and a few years ago, in the early years of New Labour, I tried to get hold of my MI5 file. A minister had said that this should now be possible. It wasn’t. Even after taking my case to something called the Information Tribunal, I got nowhere. And I am now convinced that I could not see my dossier because it no longer exists. My file, along with thousands of others from the same era, has been chucked into some secret furnace and is lost forever. 

I suspect this happened when the Blair government, crammed as it was with Sixties Marxists from Blair downwards, came to power. I believe a purge of records of ‘subversives’ was ordered, and mine went into the bonfire along with those of Blair and about a quarter of his Cabinet. 

Since then, MI5, like the rest of the establishment, has become a Left-wing organisation. You can see that it yearns above all to uncover nests of ‘Far Right Extremists’, and it will only take a few more shifts to the Left in our political system to turn ordinary patriotic conservatives into surveillance subjects. I suppose we probably need some such organisation, though it is very hard to check whether the boastful claims it makes for its own effectiveness are true.

But we should be careful not to let it get too big for its boots. Its chief shouldn’t be making political speeches. On the whole, I preferred it when we were a bit embarrassed even to have such a body and pretended it didn’t exist.

Kate and Lee share the hunger 

I sometimes wonder if the Second World War has now been milked quite enough by the film industry. But I was surprised to find myself moved and absorbed by Lee, Kate Winslet’s new film about the war photographer Lee Miller, a normally trivial person, living a rackety life who found, in that war, what the poet Philip Larkin called ‘a hunger in [herself] to be more serious’. Kate Winslet is turning into a great actress, ready to make her age a virtue, instead of being afraid of it. 

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PETER HITCHENS: Lucy Letby's case MUST be re-examined

It is now 509 days since Lucy Letby was told she would die in prison. 

The last place on earth where everyone still believes her conviction is safe seems to be the ridiculous Thirlwall Inquiry, which has stopped its ears to the enormous amount of expert evidence suggesting that there is something seriously wrong. 

If Ms Letby has been wrongly convicted, then every extra day she spends in prison is a disgrace. The establishment will, sooner or later, have to reopen the case. Why not just get on with it?  

Dump HS2 before it swallows all our money

And still our leaders refuse to give up on High Speed Two (HS2 for short), the crazed, ultra-expensive scheme to build a high-speed railway from London to Birmingham.

Apparently, if it is ever finished, much of the journey will be in a tunnel. Apart from the fact that what this country actually needs is the reopening of the medium-speed rail network madly closed in the 1960s, we are no good at the continental style Grand Projects. They are always decades late and billions over budget, and then don’t work properly.

Meanwhile, my own home town, Oxford, has been blighted for long months by what I shall call Low Speed One, a project to build a few hundred yards of track, a wider bridge and a new platform at the city’s decrepit, leaking railway station. The works, a perpetual morass of wet mud snaking with tubes and wires and full of dump trucks and vehicles incessantly squawking ‘Reversing!’, has closed the main east-west road through Oxford and forced pedestrians into a narrow, dismal Berlin-style checkpoint between the two halves of the town. It never seems to get anywhere near completion.

Its main target dates were recently cancelled and nobody knows when it will be finished.

We live in a world of delusion, convinced we are richer and more competent than we are. It is amusing, as I age, to wonder how many of the great building schemes I see about me will still be going on after I am dead.

Come on, Johnson, what are you afraid of? I’ve been asking you for months now to debate the Ukraine issue. People are still dying because those such as you don’t understand what’s going on or know what to do. You might at least learn something.   

Let’s give thanks first...

I found Marks & Spencer advertising Christmas in their central Oxford store on October 8. I tend to think this is commercial desperation rather than sacrilege. And it has something to do with the fact that we have no equivalent of the enjoyable American and Canadian festivals of Thanksgiving in late November, a pleasing break and an excuse for shopping. 

We have much to be thankful for, and I suggest the inauguration of a British Thanksgiving each year on the Thursday closest to November 30, Winston Churchill’s birthday.