PETER HITCHENS: How a faded cutting of famed gay rights campaigner Peter Tachell in my attic left me pondering a catalogue of ‘what ifs’

Sifting through a box-file in my attic last week, I found myself staring in wonder at a creased and faded newspaper front page with the headline ‘Tatchell Wins it!’  

It described the victory of the famed homosexual rights campaigner Peter Tatchell in a by-election in Bermondsey in February 1983. But of course no such thing happened.

Mr Tatchell, the victim of several rather shocking smear campaigns, was undermined by his own Labour Party and badly beaten by a Liberal, Simon Hughes, and never returned to party politics. He has since risen far above those who did him down in 1983.

The creased and yellowing front page I held in my hand was what is called in the newspaper business a ‘set and hold’, one of several stories I had written in advance to cover all eventualities when the result came in around midnight, too late for fine writing.

It was long ago broken up and melted down, in those ancient days. And the real front page of the paper I then worked for proclaimed ‘Tatchell Thrashed’.

Sifting through a box-file in my attic last week, I found myself staring in wonder at a creased and faded newspaper front page with the headline ‘Tatchell Wins it!’

It described the victory of the famed homosexual rights campaigner Peter Tatchell in a by-election in Bermondsey in February 1983. But of course no such thing happened

Generally I did not keep such things. They were often tiresome to write but editors insisted on them as they knew all too well how things did not always turn out as expected. 

Some instinct must have made me treasure this one, though I had completely forgotten it. It was just so unlikely. But the sight set me thinking of all the many moments when things could have easily gone the other way, sending the country down a totally different road.

What if the Tories had narrowly won the 1964 General Election and the grammar schools had never been abolished? What if the Task Force had been beaten in the Falklands, as it so very nearly was? What if the IRA had succeeded in murdering Margaret Thatcher when they blew up the Grand Hotel in Brighton? What if Sir Anthony Blair’s student Trotskyism had emerged before the 1997 Election, rather than years after he left office? What if Alexander Johnson had sent the panic merchants packing in March 2020 and followed Sweden’s sensible example over Covid?

And, above all, what if the Soviet Communist Party had got rid of the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev in the autumn of 1989, and ordered the East German regime to massacre pro-democracy protesters in Dresden and Leipzig, as China’s leaders did on Tiananmen Square in the same year? The Berlin Wall would still be there, Germany would still be divided and Western governments would treat the stone-faced Soviet despots with the same fawning respect they now give to the Peking regime.

It is not true that you learn nothing from history. You can learn a lot, if you wish to (though few do). Two things are for sure. 

The first is that history does not take sides. Its outcomes are good or bad mainly depending on the courage, will and intelligence of those in conflict.

Bad people and bad causes can and do win. The second is that it is often a very near-run thing and that vast events may depend on a tiny, unexpected detail.

You can’t have it both ways on despots

I shall not be lining the streets to cheer when the despot of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman (matily known as ‘MBS’), rolls up here in October. 

Actually, I understand that Britain is so broke it cannot be choosy about such things. 

Saudi Arabia has lots of money and we want that money to be spent and invested here.

For decades now, our senior politicians and Royals have (literally) bent the neck to various Saudi tyrants – they had to do so while those tyrants hung medals round their necks.

Saudi Arabia is a political slum, a place of torture, censorship, prejudice, repression and injustice, whose leaders are not even ashamed of this. 

The CIA, which has better ways of knowing such things than most of us, concluded that MBS was personally involved in the murder and dismemberment of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, pictured, on Saudi diplomatic premises

The CIA, which has better ways of knowing such things than most of us, concluded that MBS was personally involved in the murder and dismemberment of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, on Saudi diplomatic premises.

He was also prominent in the decision to launch the bloody and disastrous ‘intervention’ (perhaps ‘Special Military Operation’ would have been a better term) in Yemen by several Arab countries, backed by the USA. 

The death toll among innocent bystanders is disputed but it is large whoever you ask. OK, we need the money. But if we are prepared to host such a person (and will King Charles welcome him?), what is all our moralising bluster about Russia worth? 

Moscow murders its targets with polonium and novichok. Saudi Arabia cuts up dissidents with bone saws. Both invade their neighbours.

If MBS is coming here, we really will have to shut up about how wicked Russia is. If we want to carry on delivering moral sermons to the world, we have to cancel the invitation and accept our poverty. If we want the oil money, we will have to can the homilies. One or the other. Not both.

 I am so sorry but I think there is something totally phoney about all this whooping and yelling for women’s football. 

Perhaps it is because I dislike the men’s game so much, that I am so sure the enthusiasm for it is deep and genuine and equally sure that the hoopla about the Lionesses is an act.

Drugs as a defence? Now I’ve heard it all

There was a curious and telling detail in the defence offered by Elton Charles, husband of Lord Patten’s daughter Laura, when he was accused (and last week convicted) of ‘conspiracy to possess a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence’.

The curious detail was his alibi. He said he was not doing what the prosecution claimed he was doing. 

The 51-year-old father-of-three (pictured) was found guilty on charges relating to a shooting at a West London restaurant by his younger half-brother Nathaniel St Aimie

Conservative life peer Chris Patten was first elected as an MP for Bath in 1979. He lost his seat in 1992. He is pictured at the Chapel Royal Hampton Court Palace in June 2017

He was just meeting his brother to obtain some marijuana. Now, I know the police and the courts have totally forgotten this but I have not: possession of marijuana carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and an unlimited fine.

Is this the first time anyone has ever pleaded not guilty to one crime on the basis that he was committing another at the time? I have seen no report that prosecutors then moved to charge him with this offence, although he had stated on oath that he had committed it.

Or is it yet another admission that this law, so often claimed to be part of a cruel and ruthless ‘war on drugs’, has been secretly repealed by a pro-drug establishment?

You might get the same impression from the repellent, smug confessions of two professionals, a banker and a teacher, in Femail last week, that they smoked this noisome drug with their grown-up children. What brainless noodles they all must be, more so now than when they started doing this. Weak laws mean weak morals, and that’s what our elite seem to like.

I await the report on drugs by the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee which, as far as I know, finished taking evidence on May 25. Will it call for tougher enforcement of the existing law? What do you think?

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