September 25, 2003 (Thursday)
London

AT ten a.m. the BBC television starts live coverage of the closing submissions (speeches) by Counsel in the Hutton Inquiry. I settle down with a cup of tea and watch the entire proceedings.

It reminds me of the day I delivered my five-hour closing submission in the Lipstadt Trial, in that same courtroom. Indeed, one of the same counsel is there -- Heather Rogers, barrister for Gilligan. I feel very sorry for this journalist, who has been hung out to dry. Just as in the Lipstadt Trial Professor Richard "Skunky" Evans and his team scrutinised my thirty books for twenty man-years, detected nineteen "errors" (reduced to twelve by the judge, or less than half an "error" per book) and pronounced that I was a "falsifier of history" on the strength of them, here is a radio journalist who is being garrotted on the strength of one unscripted word spoken at six in the morning to a radio interviewer.

I feel less sorry for the late victim, Dr David Kelly, who seems to have slit his wrists, unable to take the strain of the media and government onslaught after he exposed Tony Blair's mendacity. As the Government counsel cruelly put it, Kelly knew what he was doing. He was ratting to the press. He was a whistle blower. To do that takes physical as well as moral courage.

THE shelves all round Court 73 are empty today; in 2000 they were filled with the red binders of evidence. Jeremy Gompertz QC, the counsel for Dr Kelly's family, inevitably pounces on the fact that what defence minister Geoffrey Hoon (right) told the inquiry, on oath I hope (perjury!), is flatly contradicted by the diary produced a few hours later to the Inquiry by Alastair Campbell, the "Martin Bormann" of prime minister Tony Blair.

I don't like Hoon or his type, as my earlier diary makes clear. He will most surely hunker down and sweat it out until Lord Hutton pronounces his verdict later this winter. I would utter the two words "Crichel Down," if they meant anything to anybody in government now. But I am curious about how this document, the diary, surfaced at the last moment -- too late for counsel to cross examine any of the witnesses about its content, including Campbell himself. In fact it reached the Inquiry in two tranches -- the first being largely innocuous, the second containing the sentences which will surely wreck Hoon's career.

How did the Inquiry obtain it? It had no powers to call for documents. The rules of Discovery (Disclosure) seem not to have applied. If we stand back and view it from a distance, its most remarkable sentence is the statement that "TB" (Tony Blair) had insisted that the proper channels be pursued, rather than secretly conspiring to hound Dr Kelly. "TB [Tony Blair] said he didn't want to push the system too far. But my worry was that I wanted a clear win, not a messy draw and if they presented it as a draw that was not good enough for us."

I can't help wondering whether that most-helpful sentence was not a Machiavellian late arrival in a diary written with a pen otherwise dipped in nitro-glycerine -- whether Alastair Campbell (left) and his master, in some late-night sitting, decided that in finest Gestapo fashion they might have to shoot down one or two of their more expendable colleagues, in order to survive themselves: Hoon is exposed as a liar and cheat, and indeed a perjurer; but Saint Tony's posture is to be documented as having been above reproach.

I AM GLAD to say an original of the picture of me dining with Hitler's former Reich minister Albert Speer in October 1979 at the Frankfurt Book Fair is among the pictures rescued from the disaster of last May. I have not seen it for years. Yes, Nazi ministers who have served their terms in Spandau seem almost saint-like in comparison with what now rules in Whitehall.

I also find the photographs taken of my first meeting with playwright Rolf Hochhuth in the Der Stern offices in Hamburg, nearly forty years ago. We have been good friends ever since, and he often phones me -- I cannot now visit him in Germany, and he feels under threat if he visits London. Odd world we live in.

Jessica spends the evening building Javascripts. My brother John phones from Wiltshire to inform me that Tony is now out with the army in Iraq. He is a trained sniper. I am proud of him, but I am not happy, as it is not right that my grandson should have to risk his life in this sh*tty little war of Tony Blair's. I hope that the ghost of his mother watches over him. I am quite depressed after hearing this news.

September 26, 2003 (Friday)
London

UP AT 8 to take Jessica to school; she chatters about the website she is going to build, and discusses domain names. She wants to register pinkblossoms.com, but I suspect that she will be inundated with the wrong kind of surfer. I suggest something anodyne, like library-researcher.com, or londontransport.com. The trip to school is soon over, and I don't think she'll have her mind on math much this morning.

Sir Ludovic Kennedy, one of the world's finest military historians (see his inspiring history of the end of the Bismarck) is in trouble with the newspapers this morning. He has spotted what millions of other White Englishmen have also seen, the sudden and disproportionate proliferation of Black faces on our television screens.

Any policy of positive discrimination must mean of course that White candidates for the same vacancies of equal or better qualifications are being wilfully ignored and set aside.

While it is wrong (and probably illegal) to talk of immigration as polluting any nation's culture-stream, it certainly dilutes it. When thousands of immigrants of one different culture are injected into another, the latter suffers. Public services specific to the host culture are diluted: restaurants, schools (as witness the school system in Vancouver, BC, where English is now a minority language), parks, cultural events, broadcast media, policing -- all are partially hijacked by the newcomers, and the host nation is short-changed in the process.

In England, the Bobby who for a century and a half was able to police the streets unarmed, now carries a Heckler & Koch, largely because of the Yardie scum brought in by the immigrant tide. Nobody is left happy.

The newspapers report the Ludovic Kennedy story with relish, because it gives them a chance to do what they are at their hypocritical best at: they can express vox populi, while mouthing sanctimonious condemnation of it, just in case. (The London Daily Mirror once ran a headline: WE NAIL FILTHY PRINCE PHILIP LIE -- purely because it gave them a chance to repeat the "lie" they were nailing.)

IT HAS taken Ludo long enough to find this irritation beneath his tongue. I have never minced my language. I have often remarked that one of the delights of late-night television used to be the ancient black-and-white Scotland Yard programmes of the 1950s -- Edgar Lustgarten's was one -- which showed an England as it used to be. Police cars with bells, empty highways, steam trains, country lanes and … well, enough said.

I once angered a judge, I think it was Gray J, by having remarked, in a speech ten years ago, that if they must have multi-ethnic newscasts it should be done with discernment. In my view, "our" news should be read by a male, preferably in black tie and tails, as in the BBC heyday of Lord Reith; the female newscaster could deliver the latest cooking and sewing news; and Trevor Macdonald should bring up the rear with the latest drug-busts and muggings.

In fact Macdonald, a Black, is one of the few well spoken British news readers, which would otherwise count against him: see how Mike Smartt, the only newsreader not to split his infinitives and able to talk the Queen's English, has vanished from our screens. Welcome to the world of Greg Dyke, BBC director-general; Dykespeak reigns. (Yes, Dyke is his real name: if it were mine, I would have changed it twice. Perhaps I have -- readers will never know).

What Ludovic Kennedy has now spoken out about, giving the appropriate percentages, is positive discrimination gone mad. For months I have been irritating Bente by patiently anticipating the appearance of The Obligatory Black in each newscast, English sitcom, and children's play. No matter how absurd, a Black is parachuted into every scene, stuttering his lines in his impenetrable Brixton argot; of late, the sitcom scriptwriters are being encouraged to engage their Black actors in liaisons with White girls. Small wonder that Ludo has emigrated from London to Wiltshire, in the west country (where, incidentally, my brother has just been appointed chairman of the county's Racial Equality Council).

Americans visiting London often tell me how startled they are at seeing the mixed-race couples that stroll around here; I respond that the females usually appear to be White girls from the lower end of the Bell Curve (White men from that corner of the Bell Curve appear to have congregated in the media).

I tell our tourist friends that they will have to walk a long way down Oxford Street before they see an Englishman with a Black girl -- or come to that, nowadays, an Englishman at all.

Psychologists will have to explain to me what it is all about. I have heard White girls exclaim, "Once you've had Black, you never go back." It is a matter of taste I suppose. What consenting adults do in private, I mean: but does it have to be forced down our throats on television, night after night? This cowardly mania for political correctness is hissing steam into a pressure-vessel.

In this respect the United States are more rational -- while preaching tolerance, they have Black schools, Black sports, Black televisions channels (UPN33 in Florida, for example), and much else; voices like Ludo's are not raised, and all are content. It is the element of compulsion which is obnoxious: Thou Shalt have a grand, indeed irreversible, mixing-up of God's races, and Devil take the hindmost.

IN WHICH connection one finding of my fearless friend Kevin Macdonald, professor at a southern California university, in a paper mirrored on our website yesterday, deserves highlighting.

He has demonstrated that

pro-immigration elements in American public life have, for over a century, been largely led, funded, energized and organized by the Jewish community [PDF file]. American Jews have taken this line, with a few isolated exceptions, because they have believed, as Leonard S. Glickman, president and CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, has bluntly stated: "The more diverse American society is the safer [Jews] are."

Professor William Rubinstein of the University of Wales at Aberystwyth came to an identical conclusion about the immigration campaigning of Jewish organisations in this country in a paper which he sent me three years ago.