PETER HITCHENS: Lord Slippery of Tripoli is back… just in time to see the end of his ‘centrist’ lie

How unfair it is on Chipping Norton, that handsome, decent town, to be burdened by a link with David Cameron, the second worst Prime Minister of the modern age. Last week, Mr Slippery, the man who sacrificed the country to save the Tory Party, became Lord Slippery of Chipping Norton.

The appointment was surely the final kiss of death for the Tories in the coming Election. My guess is that he has re-entered the Government for one main purpose – because Rishi Sunak is lonely at the top. I suspect our teenage leader needs someone to talk to about the cares of office, but who also does not want his job.

For some premiers, the monarch has performed this role. But I am not sure that King Charles, who is becoming enjoyably grouchy, can really help. It is all too easy to imagine him tetchily looking at his watch, and yearning to be off back to Highgrove, as Mr Sunak seeks understanding and sympathy.

Mr Sunak surely cannot want Mr Cameron’s expertise on foreign policy. His major achievement in that field was to destroy Libya, replacing the despot Gaddafi with wild, burning chaos. This one action triggered the giant explosion in human trafficking across the Mediterranean which has utterly transformed Europe and European politics for the worse. He also supported the failed attempt to overthrow the nasty Syrian dictator, Bashar Assad, supposedly in the name of democracy and freedom.

The introduction of Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton at the House of Lords on November 20

British Foreign Secretary David Cameron visits Kibbutz Beeri in Israel, November 23, 2023

The problem was that the West allied itself with various tyrannies in the Gulf, and with a local branch of Al Qaeda, to achieve this. What could possibly go wrong? The great piles of corpses, the vast mounds of rubble and the millions of refugees, bear witness to the total failure of that policy, still barely understood by most in this country.

So with a bit of luck, Baron Cameron (Lord Slippery of Tripoli would have been a better title) will be spending a lot more time letting Rishi sob on his manly shoulder, than on directing our national foreign policy.

As the sky darkens and the Government enters the evening of its days, there will be much to talk about. Both men will be able to complain to each other, over endless cups of peppermint tea, about how Tory voters just don’t understand them.

But perhaps it is the other way round. I sense we are coming to the end of the long, strange era when the conservative, patriotic people of this country put their trust in a party which despises them.

Tory parties can fail. In 1993, one of the most successful and confident political parties in the world was almost completely wiped out in a General Election. Canada’s Tories went from 154 seats in Ottawa’s 295-member parliament to a mere two. An outfit called the Reform Party took a lot of Tory votes.

The Conservative leader, the luckless Kim Campbell, lost her own seat as well as the premiership she had held for less than six months. She remarked, as she vanished back into private life: ‘Gee, I’m glad I didn’t sell my car.’

Meanwhile, great seismic rumbles are coming from deep down in Europe’s politics. Why should Britain be immune from this earthquake? It seems to be very profound. Even Geert Wilders, who has been slogging away on the fringes of Dutch politics for ever, did not expect his extraordinary showing in last week’s elections.

PETER HITCHENS: Sahra Wagenkneckt has set herself up as an apostle of an entirely new politics (right, during a demonstration against war and armament in Berlin, November 25)

In Germany, the fascinating Sahra Wagenknecht, an Iranian-German former Communist raised and educated in Marxist East Germany, has set herself up as an apostle of an entirely new politics – Left-wing on social policy, but opposed to mass immigration.

Unlike many of her concrete-headed Left-wing comrades, who have for years told their working-class supporters to like mass migration or lump it, Ms Wagenknecht has grasped these sudden vast increases in population make perfectly reasonable people genuinely unhappy.

Until now, the uncomfortably Right-wing Alliance For Germany (AFD) party has been picking up their votes. Ms Wagenknecht thinks this should stop and has sensibly argued: ‘Germans don’t vote for the AFD because they’re Right-wing. They vote for them because they’re angry.’ Imagine a smart and combative female combination of Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn, and you might get close.

In many continental countries in various different forms, in Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Italy and especially France, something similar is happening. The French elite cannot work out how to stop the National Rally of Marine le Pen at the 2027 presidential elections, as Emmanuel Macron cannot stand again.

Madame le Pen has cunningly sacked her gruesome, fascistic old father from her party, and generally got rid of its collaborationist baggage from the 1940s, reinventing it as a friend to the poor.

Most of the ‘centrist’ conservative parties of the world are in trouble. Because the word ‘centrist’ is a big and dangerous lie. What it means in practice is accepting almost all the policies and desires of the Left-wing elite which now governs so much of society, the Civil Service, the BBC, the schools and universities, and the legal profession.

That is what David Cameron meant when he boasted that he was the ‘heir to Blair’. The ideas of these people, remote, snobbish and scornful, have had a very long run and they have failed.

What a pity it is that we shall all be punished by having to live under Sir Keir Starmer, while they go off to the well-paid world of the played-out politician.

The macho talk that does Israel no favours 

How strange it is to recall the late 1960s, when Israel was a positively popular country in most of the West, especially in Europe. One odd aspect of this was the huge success of an Israeli singing duo, Esther and Abi Ofarim, who at one stage were seldom absent from British TV with a fairly awful song called Cinderella Rockefeller.

There was no doubt that Israel’s smashing victory in the 1967 war, which most accepted had been provoked by Egypt, played a part in this. In the same era, many non-Jews went off to Israel to work on kibbutzes, seeing the young state as an idealistic small country besieged by spiteful enemies.

It wouldn’t happen now. And it is Israel’s accelerating loss of popularity in the West which worries me so much about the recent weeks of bombardment of Gaza. Whatever the end of the current episode is, such a country depends a lot on international goodwill. Lose that goodwill and it will be forced, by the USA, into a dangerous and unsustainable peace deal. Tanks and bombs don’t protect countries from such things. Nor does the sort of macho talk I currently hear from a lot of fairweather friends of Israel.

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