PETER HITCHENS: The police have grown too highly effective and too scornful of the general public they’re presupposed to serve – and I’ve proof, after what occurred after I dared to disagree with them

For years I have feared that the police have grown too powerful and too scornful of the public they are supposed to serve. As they have become more political, more Left-wing and less interested in preventing or pursuing actual crime and disorder, they have also become bossier and more remote.

This week I have strong evidence that this is so. It comes from the mouths of the police themselves. Because I dared to disagree with their view, these persons have responded like a Victorian maiden aunt confronted with a glimpse of a naked piano leg.

The squeals of outrage and the grinding noise of pearls being clutched can probably be heard as far away as Belgium.

As you will see, they would have been better advised to sniff their smelling salts, lie down for a bit in a darkened room and listen to some whale music. But, as a lovely Irish phrase expresses it, they ‘lost the run of themselves’ and went a bit wild.

Some of what they did must remain confidential to protect my sources. But take my word for it, this is a rather mild version of the story.

The problem was a briefing by Cheshire Police and the Crown Prosecution Service held for the media, just before the trial of

Lucy Letby. If this was just an impartial factual discussion of technicalities, why didn’t they invite Ms Letby’s defence team along too? Well, they didn’t. They argued that because I did not accept their justification for holding this event (and I absolutely don’t), this meant I didn’t understand what they had told me, presumably because I am stupid.

I understand it all too well. I just don’t agree with it, although I explained their position in my column and quoted accurately what they had said.

They accused me of ‘carelessness’. Not so. I had spent several days on email exchanges with them about this subject.

The idea that people can hold differing views on such a topic seems to be a shocking mystery to them. I think the police – like most public and powerful bodies – seek cosy relations with the media so that they can keep those media onside. Their current affronted petulance greatly encourages me in my view.

Cheshire Police wrote to The Mail on Sunday, heavily implying that we should not have published my column.

Soon afterwards, we received an epistle from various notables at the College of Policing, the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the Crown Prosecution Service which suggested that this newspaper publishes an article ‘which seeks to provide your readers with clarity’ (ie, which takes a different view from mine).

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think a society in which the police seek to influence what newspapers publish, whether fact or opinion, would be a society that had gone badly wrong. There’s a name for countries like that which has slipped my memory.

Then, on Friday, The Mail on Sunday received a snappish email declaring that our behaviour was causing ‘disgust and dismay’ among the police forces of England and Wales. Remember that this overheated performance followed my publication of an uncontested fact, and an informed expression of opinion about it.

If this is how they behave towards Britain’s biggest Sunday newspaper, what must they be

like when dealing with a powerless citizen who has the nerve to disagree with their opinions?

Why is BBC so keen on Syria rebels?  

The BBC and the ‘retired’ spooks they love to interview are hugely excited about events in Syria. Why?

Everyone knows that the ‘rebels’ now sweeping across that unhappy country are ferocious Islamist militants

of the kind we generally fear and dislike. Assad’s regime in Damascus is terrible (though the Foreign Office, that nest of cynics, arranged for him to have tea with the late Queen, in December 2002). But do we really want Al Qaeda veterans replacing it?

We do not in fact have any principles about torture chambers and massacres and are friendly towards very nasty regimes in such places as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

This whole thing reminds me of our crazed enthusiasm to depose Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, a folly which created endless chaos and began the era of uncontrolled migration across the Mediterranean, which has changed the destiny of Europe for ever. Do these people have any idea what they are doing?

Ralph’s film commits a cardinal sin 

Why such a fuss about Conclave, a new film starring Ralph Fiennes, above, about a lot of cardinals picking a new Pope?

The whole thing seems to have been filmed during a power cut. It is so dark that Mrs Hitchens, sitting next to me, thought night had fallen and sank into sleep.

A key conversation takes place while helicopters thunder overhead, so it is hard to make out.

The main conservative character is, of course, stupid and crude.

And we are invited to think that traditional prayers and big families are bad things.

I am one of the last English Protestants, for whom the Roman Catholic Church will always remain another country. But my sword leaps from its scabbard to defend it against this liberal bilge.

We’re in a land beyond satire

In Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, the genius Lewis Carroll depicted royal gardeners being forced to paint white roses red by a mad monarch. He also portrayed a trial in which the sentence came first and the verdict afterwards.

In Gulliver’s Travels, another genius, Jonathan Swift, described a man who had ‘been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials, hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers’.

I fear hardly anybody now reads these great English classics. If they did, would food manufacturers have been able to drug their cattle to make them less flatulent, as they are doing?

Without satire, societies go mad, as ours now is.

• It’s no good re-nationalising the railways bit by bit, on paper. The whole thing needs to be in one co-ordinated organisation, from signals to sandwiches (they weren’t that bad). And until it is, expect no improvement.