PETER HITCHENS: Could Starmer not spot he was in a Police State?

Yes, I remember Cheb, the grim rail frontier crossing point between free West Germany and gloomy, oppressed Communist Czechoslovakia.

It all came back to me when I read that Sir Keir Starmer had passed that way on a trip behind the Iron Curtain back in 1986.

I remember the train rolling into no-man’s-land amid great masses of barbed wire, and the sudden swarm of grey-clad, hard-faced border troops climbing all over it and under it. They searched the Czech passengers right down to the fillings in their teeth, but left my wife and me alone because a British passport still counted for something then.

Locals sit on top holding a sign of a Soviet tank in Prague in August 1968

A 23-year-old Sir Keir Starmer pictured in his Visa to join a work camp in Communist Czechoslovakia

I remember trundling down the tracks towards Prague, ever deeper into the dark orbit of the Kremlin. You couldn’t mistake it for a normal country: the physical neglect, the downtrodden look of the people, the red banners with moronic slogans in the grey streets, the wonky goods in dingy shop windows.

Within 20 minutes of boarding our first tram from Wenceslas Square, we were approached by a man who turned out to be a very ill-disguised operative of the secret police. For the next few days we strove to evade him, sometimes succeeding.

At one point a Czech friend urgently silenced me when I began to talk about politics in a public place. ‘Fool!’ he hissed. ‘You cannot do that here.’ After 48 hours of this I was so nervous that I nearly jumped out of my skin when my sleeve was seized (on another tram) by a grim-faced gent with a red-and-gold badge of authority. He turned out to be the ticket inspector. Phew. I had my ticket.

You couldn’t go to Prague in the Cold War without realising it was a particularly nasty tyranny. So I was fascinated to see that Sir Keir had been travelling in Communist Czechoslovakia in the frozen 1980s. And I still am. Maybe someone will tell me how he ended up on his strange camping tour, renovating an anti-Nazi memorial with a small number of other foreigners from all over Europe. Who invited him? Who organised it? Didn’t anything about it make him suspicious?

Let me tell you about Czech ‘anti-Nazism’ in those days. A diplomat at the British Embassy in Prague tried to keep in contact with the surviving Czech Battle Of Britain pilots. He told me those magnificent old men would squeeze into their 1940s RAF uniforms and travel each year to a small park where they would commemorate their fallen comrades.

They were recalling the days when they redeemed the honour of their nation, looking the Third Reich in the eye and shooting down its planes.

But their very existence was an embarrassment to a state which pretended that Moscow had been the only real enemy of Hitler. So secret police louts would turn up to jostle them, harass them and aggressively film them.

Under Communism, even the simple issue of opposition to Nazism was never straightforward. I have been almost alone in the British media in stressing how very peculiar Sir Keir is.

There’s his adult belief as an actual lawyer that ‘property is theft’. Then there is his involvement with the ultra-strange revolutionary sect called Pabloism. And there is the stint as an officer of the Haldane Society, an organisation of Left-wing lawyers which was at that time rather friendly to the actual pro-Soviet Communist Party of Great Britain.

I think Sir Keir, even now, remains far to the Left of most in British politics. His admission last week that he doesn’t regard those with savings as ‘working people’ was another giveaway.

There is a strong possibility that Britain is about to get its most militantly Left-wing prime minister ever. And nobody seems worried. As an ex-Leftist myself, I’d say that you should be worried.

Mass delusion with Labour will see us all fall into a world of pain

I had expected to be most appalled by the crime itself – a husband who deliberately sabotaged his wife’s parachutes so that she would fall 4,000ft to a terrible death. But by far the most shocking thing in Channel 4’s drama about Victoria Cilliers is her refusal to believe her husband had twice tried to kill her.

You will recall the case, first reported by The Mail on Sunday, of the experienced parachutist who fell into a newly ploughed field and, amazingly, survived. That is astounding, I agree.

So was the fact that both her parachutes had failed to open – an event so unlikely as to be nearly impossible.

But the thing which made me shout out in protest was the courtroom scene in which Victoria, played by MyAnna Buring, suddenly pulls back from blaming her revolting, murderous spouse, Emile, even though she must know in her heart that he has tried to destroy her.

There she is, in the witness box, and her resolve fails.

Emile had first tried to blow her and her children to eternity by causing a gas leak in the family home. He had then used one of those children as cover while he sabotaged both her parachutes.

Victoria’s an intelligent person, and we know she is unquestionably brave. But she just did not want to believe she could be so hated and despised – that everything her husband has ever said to her was a lie.

Fortunately he was convicted despite her faltering, and she now knows the truth. But her overpowering, self-harming delusion seems to me to be a rather good metaphor for the current mass political delusion in this country.

It is amazing what people can believe, and what they cannot see. Millions of us seem to think that this poll is a kind of game show, in which they get to punish the outgoing government without changing anything. Actually, this is one of the most important elections in modern history. A Labour victory will change Britain deeply and for ever in ways which will hurt traditional patriotic conservatives in every aspect of their lives.

Those who hope to punish the Tories will end up punishing themselves, for many years to come. Please, wake up in time.

There is not much to laugh about at the moment, but as I forced myself through the Labour manifesto, a wasteland of slogans and cliches written by AU (Artificial Unintelligence), I found the following passage: ‘Labour is committed to making Britain the best place in the world to be a football fan.’ And no, I am not making this up.

I have warned you about this ‘Supreme Court’, now increasingly behaving as if it is the actual government. It grows like a tumour, drawing the life out of Parliament. A Starmer victory will make it more powerful still.