Daily Mail, September 30 2002

There was a point, in the middle of Edwina Currie's tearful and self-serving interview with the Times on the revelation of her affair with John Major, when she suddenly sprang back into vehement and self-confident life.

What their four year liaison showed above all, she said, was the fatuity of the Tories' ill starred 'back to basics' campaign. It was not for politicians to preach morality to the public when they themselves were all too flawed.

Anti-family wreckers on the left have leapt upon Ms Currie's revelations with glee. For she has not merely enabled them to revisit the Tories' most infamous débâcle and bury the party all over again. In showing how John Major kept a staggeringly risky secret, she has bolstered the claim that any policy promoting marriage or traditional family values is bogus.

For the cardinal sin for the sexual amoralists of both left and right is not cheating on one's spouse. It is hypocrisy. Indeed, the cheater actually goes up in their estimation. No more grey man, eh, commentators have been saying admiringly of this latest recruit to the sexual profligacy club.

Adultery, they inform us, is even an essential safety valve for marriage. Major has suddenly turned into a more interesting and rounded person. On this logic, personal treachery becomes a social virtue and Ms Currie is its patron saint.

If ever there were an excuse for politicians behaving badly, this is it. It is an utterly amoral credo.

It rests on a fundamental confusion at the heart of the debate about public and private morality – an upside-down reasoning in which public and private are separated where they should in fact be linked, and muddled together where they should be kept apart.

They should be linked because how politicians behave in private matters to us. This is because we trust them to look after our interests. They persuade us to do so on the explicit understanding that we can trust their characters. This is why their behaviour is scrutinised more heavily than other public officials, such as civil servants.

Character matters; and character is indivisible. So if politicians betray and deceive their spouses, it matters. If they behave recklessly with their own or other peoples' lives, it matters. If they wilfully cause pain or do harm to others, it matters.

And even in our current sexual free-for-all, adultery matters because cheating on the most solemn promise we can make is still regarded as destructive and wrong.

This is not, however, some absolute doctrine, to be applied with no regard to circumstances or context. If such behaviour took place a long time ago, or if the marriage had all but ended already, a sense of proportion requires us to give that person the benefit of the doubt.

So we don't, for example, hound Lord Chancellor Derry Irvine out of office on the grounds that many years ago he made off with Donald Dewar's wife. By contrast, Robin Cook's decision to dump his former wife for his mistress while remaining Foreign Secretary left a permanent bad taste.

Major's redeeming feature is that he stayed married, sought forgiveness and feels ashamed. We are all frail, and no-one is expected to behave like a saint.

And traditional family policy doesn't expect this either. Back to basics was a fiasco because the Tories never thought it through – indeed, it was originally no more than a vague restatement of a common-sense approach to a number of issues. The Tories never grasped, let alone articulated, the crucial distinction that a responsible family policy should embody.

This is that what people do in their private sexual lives is their own business, in which the political class certainly should not interfere. But politicians also have a duty to protect the public interest. That means prod ucing pragmatic policies based on sound evidence of what is likely to improve society and diminish harm.

And the destruction of family life is causing enormous harm. Epidemic fatherlessness is abandoning children to educational under-achievement, depression and crime. Abandoned or isolated women and men suffer poor mental and physical health. Adults who cohabit or have serial partners are more

likely than married people to suffer physical violence. Children are at far greater risk of being abused or killed by a non-biological parent than by their own flesh and blood.

These aren't private issues. They represent vast and unsustainable costs to both the Exchequer and the social fabric. That's why the state has a role in family law and policy. Either it uses that role to improve society -- or to knock away its props. Over the past twenty years and more, it has

unfortunately chosen the latter course through adopting the destructive, 'non-judgmental' approach that all lifestyles are equally valuable.

But those who connive at this erosion of traditional values merely endorse the doctrine that 'there is no such thing as society'. It is no coincidence that the Tory libertine 'modernisers' tend to hold an undimmed candle to the

extreme Thatcherite philosophy of individual freedom. And yet ironically, they stand shoulder to shoulder with those on the new left whose attack on the family is rooted in their desire to impose state control over private attitudes and behaviour.

This is all intimately bound up with the loss of moral sense in general by the whole political class. There seems no limit to the sheer shamelessness with which politicians now duck responsibility -- from foot and mouth to the A-level shambles, from rigged hospital waiting-list figures to the Martin

Sixsmith affair -- through evasiveness, dissembling and lies.

The real hypocrites are those who shed crocodile tears over dishonesty in public life and the breakdown of trust in the political process, while endorsing current amoral behaviour by unrepentant public figures.

But, splutter politicians, taking a moral stance would constantly expose us to the risk of scandal and ruin. Well, yes; if you believe in restoring trust in the political class, this is precisely what it means.

The alternative is to take Ms Currie's position. Her response to the higher expectations of politicians was 'not to tell my constituents how to live their private lives' and campaign for alternative sexual lifestyles instead.

So to justify her right to compromise someone else's marriage, it seems, she would simply shrug off all responsibility to try to ameliorate one of the principal causes of social breakdown. Keeping out of private lives is emphatically not the same as campaigning for a sexual free-for-all, which

destroys the rules of behaviour which protect all of us.

The fact is that ministers in Major's administration were indeed a sleazy bunch. The difference between them and the Blairites is that New Labour ministers are without shame, having turned sexual licence into a policy objective. They have thus made themselves immune from the deadly charge of hypocrisy.

But hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. Without the moral codes that make hypocrisy possible, there can be no virtue either. Hypocrisy is the price we pay for morality in public life – a morality which is now being sacrificed in Whitehall corridors draughty with expediency, cynicism and

deceit.

Daily Mail, September 27 2002

Over the past couple of weeks, as the A-level results degenerated into chaos and scandal, there have been many black days for education. But none, surely, plumbed quite the depths reached yesterday – and today might be little better.

Indeed, for a while it seemed as if the report of the Tomlinson inquiry into the A-level débâcle – to be published this morning -- was never going to see the light of day, due to a last-minute attempt to derail it by the man widely expected to take the blame.

Sir William Stubbs, the chairman of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), yesterday accused Education Secretary Estelle Morris of pre-empting the inquiry by discussing with the exam boards two days ago the re-grading of all A-level results. Miss Morris insists she was merely laying down contingency plans.

By claiming she had prejudiced the inquiry, Stubbs was trying to destroy its credibility and prevent himself from becoming its fall-guy. In fact, correspondence he has released shows that the QCA was indeed instrumental in the scandal.

But crucially, it also reveals that during the marking process, both Miss Morris and the Schools Minister David Miliband were told there was a crisis over an explosion of A-level successes which would need to be dealt with.

It is inconceivable that they or their officials played no part in discussing how this crisis was to be resolved. And the way it was eventually tackled was to cheat thousands of pupils out of their rightful grades.

But while this scandal is essentially about the dashed hopes of these young people, those who should be taking responsibility are mounting instead an unedifying fight for their own survival.

The charge is that the exam boards were pressured into arbitrarily and unfairly slashing the A-level results to avoid the accusation of grade inflation.

Justice would require these papers to be regraded according to the standards that had been set before the goalposts were moved. This is what Miss Morris got her officials to discuss with the boards.

In doing so, she displayed quite staggering ineptitude. Not only did she hand Stubbs ammunition to undermine the inquiry she had set up. At a stroke, she also demolished her own protestation of clean hands in the scandal.

The government has insisted that it would have been quite improper for ministers to be involved in grade-setting in any way. Yet this is precisely what Miss Morris’s officials were doing this week.

It’s no use saying they were only doing so because a crisis needed to be addressed. After all, if they are involved in moving grade boundaries now in response to a crisis, they might have done the same thing when the problem emerged.

For thanks to what Stubbs has made public, we now know that he told ministers during the marking process that a crisis was looming over the leap in the results. To understand the panic this would have instilled, it is necessary to understand why soaring grades create such a problem.

AS level, introduced last year, is easier than A-level but nevertheless forms half of the A-level exam. This led to claims that A-level was being devalued. The government, desperate to maintain the fiction that it was raising education standards, insisted that the ‘gold standard’ of A-level would be upheld.

But it knew that a huge, implausible upsurge in good results would finally prove that the A-level had been compromised. This is exactly what happened.

It was political dynamite. So Stubbs duly warned Miss Morris of what was looming. On July 29, he told her there had been a sharp rise in A-level pass rates, and suggested that an inquiry would be needed to reassure everyone that standards had not slipped.

On August 6, Stubbs being on holiday, his deputy Beverly Evans wrote to Schools Minister Miliband to warn him that the results were even higher than Stubbs had first indicated.

Neither minister replied. But given the acute political embarrassment in the offing, it is unimaginable that the Education Department would have done nothing. This is not to say ministers would have told the QCA to tell the exam boards to doctor the grades. That’s not the way Whitehall works.

However it was to be achieved, ministers and officials would have agreed that this summer’s A-level results had to be broadly comparable to the previous year’s. And the only way to achieve that – although the words may not have sullied their lips -- was to doctor the grades.

Moreover, Miliband met Stubbs several times during this period. The minister has strenuously denied leaning on the QCA. But he didn’t have to. Stubbs had already sounded the alarm. Are we really supposed to believe that Miliband did not ask him what he intended to do about the crisis he had identified? And that Miliband did not discuss this urgent problem with Miss Morris?

The exam boards protested that Stubbs was pressuring them into doctoring the grades. He told them he was alarmed they had received this impression. Nevertheless, he added: ‘I do expect last year’s A-level results to provide a very strong guide to this year’s outcomes’.

He appears to believe this clears him of any wrongdoing. But in fact, it surely points the gun at his own head. For since he had effectively told the boards the results had to be comparable, and since they patently were not, the only way his requirement could be met was indeed by doctoring them.

Stubbs should be sacked. But Miss Morris and David Miliband are also in an unsustainable position. Thousands of pupils have had their career expectations dashed by a fraud to which these ministers were at the very least silently acquiescent.

Indeed, this may even go higher than Estelle Morris. For in this most centralised of governments, little moves in education without the Downing Street policy unit being involved.

For the moment, the buck stops with her, and she should go. From the moment she was appointed, she has appeared to be out of her depth. It is a depressing fact that minister after minister in this government appears to be thoroughly incompetent.

It is not just an issue of grey matter; after all, Miliband is reputed to boast a brain the size of a planet. It is more that by a mysterious reverse alchemy, incompetence appears to rise to the top in the British political system.

If Stubbs alone takes the rap today, the Tomlinson inquiry will have lived up to fears of a whitewash. The rot beneath this scandal is very deep, and goes all the way to the top.

Daily Mail, September 23 2002

When something of great value is harmed, our reaction is to try to repair the damage. Some of our deepest instincts lie in conserving what is precious, because we know that what makes us prize such things – whether it’s a box of love letters, a gallery full of Old Masters, or the natural environment -- is unique and can never be replaced.

Yet strangely, we don’t apply these instincts to important areas of our national life. Instead, we allow them to be neglected, eroded and injured. Then we conclude that they have now fallen into disrepute and so should be replaced altogether by something entirely different – with the implication that what we once esteemed was never really valuable in the first place.

This is now happening in the great A-level row. In the wake of the scandal over the doctored grades, there is growing pressure to replace A-level by the International Baccalaureate (IB). This is because A-level is now said to have been discredited by both grade inflation and the taint of mass swindling.

The IB, by contrast, is administered by a body beyond the reaches of political chicanery and its standard remains unsullied. This has given the Department for Uneducation – which has long had the ‘élitist’ A-level in its sights – its chance, with its mouthpiece Estelle Morris yesterday discovering the advantageous ‘breadth’ of the IB over the depth of A-level.

But the fact is that A-level was better than the continental IB because depth, which produces rigour, is more valuable than breadth, which delivers dilettantes. The greater depth of A-level meant that those who couldn’t manage a university degree were weeded out so that most students stayed the course, unlike European universities with their high drop-out rates.

That is why the undoubted erosion of A-level and its collapse of credibility are so appalling. Surely that means we should be rescuing it, not tossing it aside? Surely we should be hauling ministers to account and demanding that this invaluable guarantor of educational excellence be restored to its former probity?

But this is only the latest in a long line of similar attacks on national assets followed by changes that institutionalise the damage. Take our drug laws. Our society decided that drugs were so dangerous that it made their possession and distribution illegal. But because the authorities mistakenly decided to throw the book at drug dealers while treating users as victims instead of criminals, demand exploded and supply followed suit.

Swamped by hard drugs, the police and customs officers effectively gave up on cannabis. This was a failure of drug law enforcement. But instead, the law itself was said to be at fault. So instead of working out ways to make drug law more effective, we are now salami-slicing it out of existence altogether, destroying any protection for society.

The destructive trajectory of divorce followed the same pattern of self-fulfilling prophecy. From the 1940s onwards, reformers claimed that divorce law had to be brought into line with changes in behaviour. But behaviour changed every time the law was modified, when divorces shot up as a result.

The increasing acceptance of divorce which developed led the courts to relax their implementation of the law, a slide which in turn caused people to clamour for the law to be changed to be brought into line with reality – fuelling more rises in the divorce rate. This spiral has now made marriage itself increasingly meaningless. So instead of protecting an institution which is the bedrock of society, we actually institutionalised the attack upon it.

A similar remorseless process now threatens the concept of public service broadcasting. The BBC has badly lost the moral and intellectual plot. Standards on its mainstream TV channels are lamentable, having exchanged quality, interest and creativity for tackiness, mindlessness and sadism.

The declining standards of its TV news bulletins, and its decision to axe respected political programmes in favour of less demanding fare, are lamentable. The proposed BBC 3 channel threatens to further grovel to a ‘youth market’ defined as brainless and amoral. The strategy of competing for ratings in the marketplace means that it is fragmenting its audiences among unwatched digital channels.

In all these ways, the BBC is taking an axe to its public service remit. So it is hardly surprising that a clamour is growing to abolish the licence fee. Why should we be forced to pay a tax for a public service that (radio honourably apart) no longer exists?

But public service broadcasting was a noble and wonderful concept. It elevated the cultural standards of the nation. So why do we not fight to restore the concept? Why are we sliding instead towards endorsing and sealing this process of cultural vandalism?

Why, indeed, are we content to destroy what we once held most dear? Why are depth and intellectual rigour at A-level no longer viewed as essential? Why do we no longer value the protection of the law against society-shattering drugs? Why are we so complacent about the undermining of marriage?

Much of this damage is being inflicted by an élite class with an agenda to create their dream of utopia. They are doing so through propounding a doctrine which holds that everyone must be equal, both in their attainments and in their ability to take decisions for themselves without anyone passing judgement upon them.

This means that consumer choice must trump everything else. Anything that interferes with an individual’s choice of behaviour is bad. So is anything that differentiates between attainments. Therefore any hierarchies that distinguish between anyone or anything on the basis of merit, or any rules that interfere with freedom of choice, have to go.

At the core of the BBC’s public service remit was the belief in elevating popular taste. But that whole concept is now held to be unforgivably élitist. Instead, we are now supposed to worship at the shrine of the lowest common denominator, the very philistinism that the BBC was supposed to be against.

Similarly, the idea that A-levels should play the role of gatekeeper to ensure the excellence of university intakes is an anathema against the dominant egalitarian dogma which holds that half the population must gain university degrees –with the inevitable destruction of standards having to be concealed from the public, as the current scandal demonstrates.

And as for laws prohibiting drug use or underpinning marriage -- well, plainly they have to go to allow a free market in behaviour. The resulting social harm will be airbrushed out of the picture through censorship, ridicule, distortion and lies.

For nothing can stand in the way of ‘modernisation’, the slash-and-burn doctrine that says all change is good and all tradition is bad. And there is no more cynical and effective way to achieve this than to undermine valuable institutions and then conclude that they must be abolished to keep pace with the changing times.

Just watch those A-levels disappear -- and watch yet another valuable seam in our social fabric become unpicked.

Daily Mail, September 19 2002

The extraordinary scandal over the doctored A-level grades has finally exposed the appalling corruption at the heart of our education system, a rot that goes all the way to the top.

The chief executive of the Oxford, Cambridge and RSA (OCR) exam board, Dr Ron McLone, has been required to explain to the government’s exam watchdog, the Qualification and Curriculum Authority, why he personally tampered with many A–level marks to lower the grades his board was awarding.

But the QCA already knows the answer. For McLone had told them exactly what he was doing. Indeed, astounding as it may seem, McLone, the QCA and the other exam boards had actually agreed that the highest achievers would be marked down.

What McLone did – admitted in a leaked letter to a school -- was so shocking it beggars belief. He discovered that his board’s top A-level grades were in danger of going through the roof when this year’s exam results were combined with last year’s AS level grades to construct the final A-level score.

Because of the intense controversy over the new AS level, with repeated claims that its lower standard had made the overall A-level easier, McLone knew his political masters expected him to ensure that overall A-level scores were not significantly higher than last year.

So after the candidates’ work had been marked, McLone simply overrode his examiners and arbitrarily raised the mark expected for each grade. The result was that candidates who had otherwise scored top grades suddenly found that their coursework, which had been previously assessed by their teachers, had been marked down by the examiners as a fail, as were certain exam papers too.

The result has been that untold numbers of candidates have been swindled and cheated out of their university places and their careers put in jeopardy.

The government has said the disputed papers will be re-marked. What then? How can those candidates regain university places which have gone?

This is not just a deepening shambles. It is hard to envisage a more blatant and outrageous betrayal of trust, one which deals a deadly blow to public confidence in the whole examination system.

For McLone is not some rogue official. This was done, according to his own admission, with the connivance of the QCA, the very body that is now grotesquely sitting in judgment over the whole affair. And it appears from schools that another exam board, the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance, was up to similar tricks too.

A proper independent inquiry is absolutely essential. The QCA itself should be in the dock here. And such an inquiry should not stop there either. For the Education Department is in this up to its neck, too.

It is not a matter of whether explicit instructions were issued to doctor the marks (although who knows --they may have been). This scandal is the direct result of the government’s education policies.

At the core of the débâcle is the AS-level. It was introduced as an incentive to get less able students to stay on at school. So its standard is lower than A-level. But since it also accounts for half of the A-level itself, it follows that it must depress the overall standard of that exam.

The government insisted, however, that it would not and that the A-level ‘gold standard’ would not be compromised. The final proof that this was a fiction arrived with the marks that struck such panic into Ron McLone.

But the rot goes far deeper. For although the AS-level in its present form is new, the exam boards are put under political pressure every year by government attempts to manipulate the system to deceive the public into thinking that more pupils are achieving greater success.

Its driving impulse is to get more and more pupils into higher education. Now, it is blindingly obvious that this cannot be done without lowering standards. But the government refuses to accept this. Indeed, the Schools Minister David Miliband has sneered that those who warn ‘more means worse’ are elitist snobs who want to stop poor, able children from getting on.

The monstrous reality of this idiotic and infantile political posturing is that children from all walks of life are being betrayed. Standards are being eroded and examination results being made meaningless as the exam boards connive at the lie.

This is entirely due to the government’s hijacking of education for the purposes of social engineering. In its attempt to bring about ‘equality’, it is actually imposing a deadening homogeneity. Academic and non-academic qualifications are being merged into a meaningless mish-mash. Examinations have dumped originality for a tick-box mentality.

The ‘all must have prizes’ approach means that colleges are admitting students who are not up to it, so lowering the standard of their degrees. It is no surprise to find the OCR board, traditionally favoured by the independent schools, at the centre of a punitive action against excellence. For the independent schools are constantly singled out by a system which penalises the brightest in the name of equality.

Indeed, it now appears that if you are a less able candidate the doors of academe will swing wide open, but if you are a more able candidate you may lose your university place.

The root of the problem is the government’s grip on the education system. It is that control which lets it pursue its half-baked ideological experiments on our schoolchildren. It is that control which has let it undermine, weaken and corrupt the exam system. It is that control which has turned education into a massive lie, with fiddled results from SATS to university degrees.

The solution is to set the whole system free. It is not enough for the wretched McLone to be thrown to the wolves (as he should). The exam boards’ real crime lies in providing cover for failed government policy.

The QCA should be abolished. It has presided for years over a corrupt examination system, and serves only to allow ministers to avoid taking the responsibility that is properly theirs for the degeneration of education.

The exam boards should be freed so that they can once again consist of disinterested educators setting standards and marking papers with no political interference. League tables, which have played their own part in driving down exam standards since they cause schools to shop around for the easiest exams to boost their standing, should be abolished.

The disastrous AS-level should be junked, and a deeper lesson learned from that particular fiasco: that the government simply has no place mucking about with the education system for its dubious ideological ends.

The system must be liberated from the terrible incubus of political control. True, there are still serious problems with what and how teachers teach. But these problems have been hugely exacerbated by political interference over decades.

Now these chickens have come home to roost. The immediate victims of this egregious dishonesty and cynicism are hard-working pupils who have been cheated out of their rightful entitlement. The long-term casualties are the discredited exam system -- and the very idea of an educated nation, which has now been put in peril.

Daily Mail, September 16 2002

The single greatest problem of our time is the progressive disintegration of the family, an unprecedented calamity which is not only causing a rising tide of misery and harm but is undermining some of our society’s most important values.

So what is the response when Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith highlights the scourge of fatherlessness, the risks to children from their mothers’ transient boyfriends and the crying need for politicians not to take refuge in moral ‘neutrality’ over the family? Why, John Humphrys attacks him on the Today programme over his party’s position on repeal of Section 28, the law prohibiting councils from promoting homosexuality.

Er, hello? Are we really supposed to think that with an illegitimacy rate of some 40 per cent, the single most important question for the nation is whether or not councils should promote a gay lifestyle?

Despite the impression given by the media, the proportion of gay people in our society is minute. The crisis over the family is overwhelmingly a crisis of heterosexual behaviour.

As a pamphlet published today by Civitas, the independent institute for the study of civil society, makes clear, the disintegration of the family is taking a terrible toll on children.

In general, children from single-parent households are more likely than those in intact families to suffer deprivation and ill-health, to get into trouble at school, suffer physical and sexual abuse, drink, take drugs and commit crime, contract sexually transmitted diseases and become teenage parents.

Adults suffer too. Lone parents are poorer, more depressed and more unhealthy, and separated fathers have higher death rates, drink more heavily and have more unsafe sex.

Nevertheless, ministers have indicated that they will try again to repeal Section 28. The cynical purpose is to expose the profound divisions in the Tory party between those who propound a heartless, manipulative and utterly destructive libertinism, and those who are developing a concept of social justice that helps protect and liberate the vulnerable rather than do them more harm.

Duncan Smith belongs firmly to the latter camp. These decent, principled instincts are leading him to resolve the problem of articulating a moral position without appearing harsh or shrill.

His speech last Friday, in which he updated William Beveridge’s five giant social evils, was an intelligent and even audacious attempt to reposition his party on the moral and compassionate high ground.

For Duncan Smith has understood two things: that this ground is vacant; and that the social libertines in his party, despite their claims to ‘social inclusion’, would in fact turn society into an even harsher, more self-centred and amoral place.

The territory is vacant because Labour has simply abandoned the vulnerable. The old are turfed out of care homes that are forced to close. The sick cannot find a hospital bed. Children are running wild through the breakdown of family life.

Family and society are indissolubly linked. If there is to be such a thing as society, the family has to be defended.

Faced, however, with many constituents in the leafy shires who may be divorced, or who have children who are cohabiting or are lone parents, many Tories don’t know what to say to them.

But the fact remains that most people yearn to make attachments that endure. They want not to be alone. They want to do the best for their children. The pressures of today’s society are making achieving this more and more difficult.

The political path through this minefield is to avoid blame, and to emphasise instead how to help improve people’s lives. To find ways to tackle fatherlessness. To make it easier for people to stay together, both financially and emotionally. To address above all the sexual precocity and exploitation of young children.

Foolish people high up in the Tory party think that by going along with lifestyle choice, they will make themselves relevant, modern and electable. But they have fundamentally misunderstood both why they lost the last two elections, and the basis of Tony Blair’s appeal.

He was elected not because people wanted more family disintegration. Quite the opposite: people believed society was broken and he would repair it.

He has failed to do so. Indeed, the fractures have notably deepened in those areas that connect us to each other: the public services and family life. His government has conducted a remorseless vendetta against the two-parent family. And it is beyond belief that he is presiding over a relaxation of the drugs laws, which will cause untold harm and ruin thousands of young lives.

In this socially destructive and amoral vacuum has risen the politics of self, with more and more interest groups pressing their rights agendas.

Which brings us back to Section 28. If another attempt is made to repeal it, Duncan Smith should turn it into a political boomerang.

The Tories have said they are thinking about redrafting it so that it no longer offensively singles out gay people. Very good. It is indeed an anachronism. There is a far wider and graver issue to be addressed: the sexual promiscuity of the young in general.

Section 28 should therefore be replaced by a requirement not to promote or encourage sexual activity by any kind of schoolchildren, regardless of their sexual proclivities.

After all, is it not extraordinary that a society apparently so obsessed with paedophilia should nevertheless actively connive, through so-called public health education programmes, at equipping children for grotesquely premature, harmful and destructive sexual activity?

Is it not a disgrace that under-age children are prescribed contraceptives without their parents’ knowledge of this tacit encouragement to juvenile sexual behaviour? Are we to continue to allow the promotion of activity leading to the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Europe?

If the Tories went down this route, it would be fascinating to discover whether the government would fight to defend the right of public authorities to promote the general sexual activity of schoolchildren.

It would also enable Duncan Smith to make explicit that gay people are both welcome and valued in his party, but that gay rights do not define either society’s problems or its solutions.

Conservatism is quintessentially a defence system against a perceived threat. When the threat of socialism disappeared, Conservatives found they didn’t know what they should be defending any more. As a result, their shallower members have concluded they must go with the Blairite flow.

Apart from the moral bankruptcy of such a position, it is a tactical error of the first magnitude. For it is quite clear that they should be defending society against a political programme which is unravelling the social bonds of attachment and care, and casting the vulnerable to the wolves.

The Prime Minister, whose whole belief system rests on his delusion that he is repairing society, is deeply vulnerable to such an attack. Duncan Smith has the right agenda. What he painfully lacks is the confidence to trounce both his ludicrous libertines and the sneering amoralists of the liberal media.

But if he learns to raise the political temperature by pressing home his attack with boldness and passion, he may yet have the last laugh over those who have written off both him and his party.

Daily Mail, September 12 2002

The mourning in Britain for the victims of September 11 has been as heartfelt– if not as anguished -- as it is in America. But unlike the US, many in Britain and Europe do not agree that the next step is war against Iraq.

Yes, we know Saddam Hussein is a monster, goes this argument, and a threat to the world and all that. But we knew that before September 11. There’s no evidence he was involved in that atrocity. So what’s changed?

What changed was that on that dreadful day, American eyes were suddenly opened both to the implacable reality of the Islamist terrorist threat to the West, and to the equally terrible fact that this had been allowed to develop through astonishing complacency, ignorance and idiocy about that threat – similar to what is now on display in Britain and Europe.

After all, some 800 Americans had been killed by Islamist terrorism in the twenty years up to 2001. On September 11 President George W Bush suddenly grasped that the old order, in which acts of terrorism were merely followed by token reprisals and then business as usual with the terror regimes, was over. Instead for the first time, terror would be faced down.

But, wail the fainthearts, Bush hasn’t even finished off Al Q’aeda yet. Well, come on, guys; get real. Did anyone seriously think Al Q’aeda would be destroyed cleanly by getting rid of the Taleban? Since Al Q’aeda has a whole series of Arab terrorist godfathers, this was always going to be a long, difficult process.

War on Saddam is not revenge for September 11. It is rather a recognition that al Q’aeda is part of an axis of terror involving many Arab states, a web of interconnected terrorist groups and their sponsors in which Saddam plays a key role as chief bully.

His agents tried to murder the Emir of Kuwait. He sponsors Palestinian terrorism. He pays Palestinian families blood money to carry out homicide bombings.

And as for Al Q’aeda, western diplomats are reported to believe Saddam murdered the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal in Baghdad this summer after he refused Saddam’s demand to train groups of Al-Q’aeda terrorists who had moved to northern Iraq from Afghanistan.

But, cry the nay-sayers, Saddam has no known intention to attack the West. Come again? This is a man whose terrorists tried to kill the first President Bush, and who were involved in the previous plot to blow up the World Trade Centre. A few days ago, an editorial in the Iraqi weekly Al-Iqtisadi, owned by Saddam’s eldest son, called for the formation of suicide squads against the US, which it compared to Hitler and Nazism.

The reason we fought the Gulf War was that by invading Kuwait Saddam threatened the West’s oil supplies. The reason weapons inspection was made a condition of the cease-fire was precisely because his development of weapons of mass destruction was considered such a grave threat to us.

So why do we now pretend he is not a threat to the West, when for four years he has refused to let us verify that he is indeed destroying those terrible weapons rather than adding to them? Does anyone seriously believe that during that time he has been turning his stocks of nerve gas and chemical agents towards mushroom farming instead?

The former UN chief weapons inspector Richard Butler has said there is evidence that Saddam has ‘reinvigorated’ his nuclear weapons programme in the inspection-free years. You bet he has.

The Institute of Strategic Studies says Saddam could develop a nuclear bomb in months if he buys or steals weapons-grade fissile material.

Defectors say he has been building biological and chemical weapons in eight locations, and will have three to five nuclear weapons by 2005. And who knows what other intelligence there is that cannot be revealed without compromising agents still in place?

People say he would never use these weapons for fear of retaliation. The naivety makes one weep. Why is it his core objective to acquire them if not to use them? Anthrax can be sent anonymously through the post; a biological suitcase bomb can be delivered by proxies. Who would retaliate against a man who leaves no fingerprints?

Saddam has a declared ambition to become the leader of the Arab world, another Saladin. He has already tried to invade Iran and Kuwait, and attacked Saudi Arabia and Israel.

If a nuclear Saddam attacked Kuwait or Saudi Arabia again, the West would be paralysed and he would have his hand on our energy windpipe.

In such a position, he would then become a magnet for Islamists in their jihad against the West. Saddam is a Ba’athist – his political party is secular rather than spiritual. But, as leader of the Arab world, he would inevitably become leader of the Islamist movement – and with the most terrible weapons at its disposal.

Those like the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who say pre-emptive action against Saddam is evil, are effectively saying they are prepared to sit and wait for this monstrous situation to arise. Since when is it moral to deliberately expose millions to the likely threat of nuclear, biological or chemical blackmail or attack?

People say we can’t topple Saddam unless we know who to put in his place. This is utterly ridiculous. We need to protect ourselves by removing a threat -- period. It is not for us to dictate to the Arab world how to govern itself.

Any new regime in Iraq must fulfil only one criterion for us: that it will not pose a threat to the rest of the world. And the same goes for the other countries in Bush’s axis of terror: Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. The US hopes that sorting Saddam will deliver to these other states the simple message: unless you desist from terror, you’re next.

If these states don’t put their houses in order, then the west has a moral duty to act against them too if the world is not to be held to ransom for ever. Those who say war with Iraq threatens the stability of the whole region need a reality check again. The whole point is to upset the stability of the region, because the region has bankrolled, armed and trained terrorists for decades.

People in Britain say Bush wants war because he is opportunistic or stupid, and that Tony Blair is his poodle. But why on earth should either of them want to take such a terrible risk with the lives of their people and with their own political future unless they believed there really was no alternative?

I have opposed Blair over many issues. But in his crisis he has taken his political life in his hands. In facing down his morally and intellectually challenged party, and in attempting to persuade Europe of the necessity of war, he is showing a very high level of courage and statesmanship.

Yes, war with Iraq poses terrible risks for all of us. But doing nothing poses a risk that is far worse.