How Mandelson and a bunch of revolutionaries created the sordid world through which we stay: PETER HITCHENS

While Peter Mandelson’s mother Mary was driving him to the airport for a gap-year visit to Africa, he made a strange request. 

He ‘left her with strict instructions to tear up a membership card and then make a telephone call saying that she had done so’. This was in 1972.

Mandelson’s astute unofficial biographer, Don Macintyre, records that she did as she was told. Asked about it many years later, Mrs Mandelson (who died in 2006) couldn’t remember what card it was or who she had to call.

A renegade MI5 agent told Macintyre that he had seen a copy of Mandelson’s adult Communist Party membership card. 

Mandelson (who was undoubtedly a member of the Party’s youth group, the Young Communist League) has always said he does not recall joining the adult party.

But in September 1997, Mandelson, then a junior minister in the Blair government, called on MI5 to destroy all files on ‘subversives’ it compiled during the Cold War. Amazingly, the Security Service complied. On January 12, 1998, The Guardian reported that the process was being speeded up.

So perished the only remotely thorough record of the revolutionary movement that swept through British universities in the 1960s and 1970s.

Those supporters then fanned out into schools, newspapers, broadcasting studios, trade unions, law firms, local government, the Civil Service, the police and, above all, the Labour Party – which was an empty husk, ripe for colonisation. 

Wouldn’t you like to know who they all were? I certainly would. Sir Anthony Blair and several members of his Cabinet – including Lord Reid, Bob Ainsworth, Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers, and the late Alistair Darling – are known to have been 1960s or 1970s Marxists, though they mostly don’t like talking about it.

Sir Keir Starmer, unusually for his generation, also has a revolutionary past which, to his credit, he does not deny or belittle.

These revolutionaries weren’t really interested in uniting the workers of the world or helping the Soviet Union. Far from it. 

They wanted a new world of sex, drugs and rock and roll, plenty of immigration (as they knew it would change the country) and they would mostly become fascinated by Green ideology.

I have always thought this was much more interesting than the various personal scandals which have erupted around Peter Mandelson. These people helped make the sordid world we live in.

If you find the actions of Jeffrey Epstein and his hangers-on

repulsive and grubby, I am with you. But how did such people become so prominent? Look at what your children are told in the schools the state provides. 

This is a world where it is now considered polite and proper to call a prostitute a ‘sex-worker’, and where lifelong marriage is an embarrassing leftover from the past. 

The very concepts of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ have been tossed into landfill, to be replaced by the negotiable ideas of ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’.

Almost anything goes when it comes to sex, pornography is just fine, and greed is good. And this is still their world.

After all this rage and fuss, the greedy and cruel will just be better at deleting their emails and hiding their tracks.

All this muck follows a devastating moral and cultural revolution in which Peter Mandelson was one of the central figures.

Unlike my old friend Richard Littlejohn, I think Mandelson was a highly effective political machine operator. I rejoice to see him fall and hope he will take many others with him.

But until we realise what kind of revolution we have undergone, we will have no chance of reversing it.

Another cruel murder – by a cannabis user 

Can reporters, news editors and editors please pay more attention to the marijuana menace? If you won’t, then one of the greatest scandals of our time will go unexposed and nothing will be done about it.

Here’s a simple test. When you hear of any especially irrational, cruel murder, check thoroughly to see if the perpetrator is a marijuana user.

On Friday, we learned of the conviction of Deividas Skebas for the grotesque murder of nine-year-old Lilia Valutyte in Boston, Lincolnshire.

Like all such murders, the killing was unhinged and random.

Skebas (though few reports mentioned it) is a marijuana user, and is crazy. I say this not because I seek to excuse him but because this type of murder is an increasing danger to us all.

It will grow and grow until we abandon our absurd policy of treating cannabis possession as less important than parking on a double yellow line.

Letby police fail the challenge

If ever you visit London’s wonderful National Gallery, be sure to look at the floor. 

In the grand old entrance hall you will find witty and rather moving mosaics created 70 years ago by a Russian artist who loved this country, Boris Anrep. 

Among my favourites is a picture of an old-fashioned English judge, above the words ‘OPEN MIND’.

Well, let us hope such an open-minded judge will soon hear, once again, the case of Lucy Letby. 

Let us also hope that Shy and Retiring Cheshire Police will live up to the claim, made in a TV programme by one of the senior officers in the Letby case, Paul Hughes, that ‘we would invite any challenge… because challenge is good’.

Not so far. 

Mr Hughes revealed last week that Ms Letby had emailed him, in April 2018, offering to help with his enquiries into deaths at her hospital.

I emailed Cheshire’s Finest to ask if, when and how they had replied to her. Their response? ‘No comment.’