PETER HITCHENS: Laugh while you can at these lumpy stormtroopers – one day they could be in charge

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the lumpy stormtroopers deployed on our streets (including the street outside our offices) last week by the new national figure ‘Tommo’. It would also be hard not to cackle at Kent Police’s description of their carefully-planned appearance on Dover streets last weekend as ‘spontaneous’.

Tommo is a retired kidnapper, who failed at that ancient trade, and also (so we are told) a born-again Christian. I am tickled by the idea of ‘Tommo’, real name Daniel Thomas, trilling ‘Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam’ in whatever Church, chapel or tent he worships at. I await the moving publicity video with sanctified soundtrack.

Did you notice his black-clad followers wear shorts rather than grown-up trousers? This is very odd. Having had a private education, can Mr Thomas be unaware of a previous (but fictional) organisation called the Black Shorts, a fascistic 1930s militia headed by the ludicrous Roderick Spode.

This was the invention of the comic genius PG Wodehouse, also known for creating Jeeves and Wooster. Wodehouse wrote of Spode that he looked ‘as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla and had changed its mind at the last moment’, but Spode’s ferocious, glowering image was undermined by his secret life as a purveyor of frilly ladies’ underwear.

Should we also not laugh at people who no doubt growl that we should ‘ban the burqa’ – while themselves wearing a garment which is rather like a burqa, the balaclava helmet?

But dare we laugh? The accelerating collapse of the conventional parties, especially over immigration, makes it almost certain that people of this sort will grow closer to actual power in the years to come. In France, the dubious National Rally edges towards office. In Germany the AfD, which has some creepy connections, does the same. In the USA, the increasingly erratic Mr Trump continues to stomp wildly across the country and the planet like a giant with a sore head. The problem is that, just like the conventional parties, these movements will fail. Mass immigration has already happened. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, who posed as the scourge of migrants and so won office, has almost entirely failed to do anything to solve the problem.

These movements are like miracle cures which we buy in the hope they will work, then discard and replace with new, allegedly more powerful remedies.

Until eventually we realise there is no cure, or that the cure will be much worse than the disease.

Meanwhile our political system rots and loses confidence. Poverty, disorder and a strong intolerant state grow daily more likely. The governments of the last 30 years have much to answer for.

BBC can’t face the truth about grammar schools

Isn’t it inspiring that Diane Reay, the rather Left-wing Emeritus Professor of Education at Cambridge University, began life as a coalminer’s daughter on a Leicestershire council estate?

I think so. It rejoices my heart that her talents were discovered and nurtured, instead of being ignored and wasted in some disorderly, bog-standard comp.

What is not so wonderful is that it can never happen again. The girls’ state grammar school where Professor Reay studied in the 1960s, and from which by dedicated hard work she won a place at university, was abolished in 1972. How odd then that Professor Reay’s moving achievement wasn’t even mentioned in a recent BBC Radio 4 documentary on the comprehensive school revolution, even though she appeared in it.

Don’t tell me, by the way, that this was especially rare in those days. In 1954 the Gurney-Dixon report noted that almost 65 per cent of grammar school pupils came from working class homes.

The BBC programme was very odd. I tried to get an advance recording but could not do so.

It mistakenly suggested that the Left’s war of destruction on grammar schools dates from 1976, when it really got under way in 1965.

It interviewed plenty of supporters of comps, not least my former colleague Fiona Millar (another grammar school product), who is the mother of Alastair Campbell’s children.

But it did not interview a single supporter of selection by ability at 11.

Note to the BBC, I am such a supporter, I’ve written a book about it and am easily contacted. I have made several rather good documentaries on TV and radio.

If you want to have another go at this very important subject, I am your man.

But you’ll be comforted to know that, despite my unpopular Right-wing opinions, I do still get some offers of broadcast appearances. Last week I was invited to take part in a Channel 4 Unreality Show called ‘Handcuffed’, in which (if I were fool enough to accept) I would be chained for the day to some other minor celebrity (chosen to be as different from me as possible). 

If this were not bad enough, it would involve being superintended by the ghastly Jonathan Ross, embodiment of all that is wrong with today’s culture. Just so you know people do turn these things down, I can reveal here that I said ‘no thanks’.