PETER HITCHENS: Evil terrorists? No, they’re just solitary drug-crazed losers 

If I ever feel the need to have several nice cold buckets of slime tipped over my head, I point out that most of the supposed terrorist attacks in this country are, in fact, the work of solitary drug-crazed losers.

The drug involved is most often marijuana, though steroids are also increasingly implicated, as are some prescription medications. 

But it is mainly marijuana, which is just now the subject of a huge billionaire-backed campaign to allow it to be advertised on TV and sold in supermarkets. Yes, that is what legalisation means.

Within seconds one choir of morons will be yelling that I am ‘an apologist for Islamic terror’. No, I am not. I hate terrorism of all kinds and wish we did not give into it so often.

As I turn to deal with them, a second choir of morons will begin to howl that marijuana has no links with mental illness or crime, is a valuable medicine, and how dare I damage its chances of being legalised?

They have half a point. It should not be legalised, and I will do all in my power to prevent that happening. But that is because there are mountains of evidence of its connections with mental illness and with violence. This danger is getting harder to contest every day.

So here comes the slime, the dimwit screeches and the self-interested squawks. Because the official claim that the dreadful slayings in a Reading park last weekend were ‘terrorism’ is so absurd that it simply has to be countered. 

This belief actually leaves us in more danger, not less, because it means we look in the wrong direction and take precautions against the wrong menace.

First is the obvious question. What conceivable cause could have been helped by this frightful crime? None. 

Anyone identified with it would have earned nothing but hate and fury. Terrorists have purposes, and all too often attain them. This had no purpose. It is not even very clear what religion the alleged culprit followed.

Next we must come to this suspect. Of course he may be innocent of the accusation and we must wait for a trial to establish that.

But I am interested in the way that a large part of the Establishment have dealt with the fact that this alleged culprit has been described by friends as a marijuana user. There’s no serious doubt about it. 

Photographs have been published showing him holding what looks very much like a marijuana cigarette, which we all nowadays knowingly call a joint or a spliff, as we have become used to the utter failure of the police to control or suppress this crime.

Did the Home Secretary mention this in her statement on the Reading killings? I couldn’t find it if so. But she prosed on about ‘poisonous extremist ideology’. 

Downing Street was the same. Did police chiefs mention it? Again, I can’t find any trace of them doing so. 

Several newspapers and broadcasters also failed to mention this key fact about the suspect. The Left-wing Guardian even managed to publish the picture of him with the joint in his hand, but cut out that part of the photograph. Someone must have decided to do that.

The ridiculously biased Wikipedia, which really should be renamed ‘Wokipedia’, managed to create an entire entry about the crime without mentioning the suspect’s drugs use. But all gave plenty of space to the tenuous theories about his supposed connections to terrorism.

I promise you that all of us are now in far greater danger from a random attack by a person made mentally ill by marijuana than we are from terror.

Resist the march of the muzzle zealots

How much more of this virus panic can we take? A large part of the country is sick of being bossed about and kept from its pleasures, and the Government is plainly afraid of an explosion if it tries to close beaches and keep people from gathering.

It is wise to be cautious. Everyone saw the way that Ministers did nothing to prevent large Left-wing demonstrations. Everyone must also have noticed that so far there’s been no evidence of the much-touted second wave, or of any spike of deaths in areas where these demonstrations took place.

Until now, the Prime Minister has distilled power out of fear. But the fear is fading. So do not be surprised if there are claims soon that ‘infections’ are rising. This is actually meaningless, as many of them will be mild or without symptoms, and the more you look for them, the more you find.

The chances are that they are way below the number of infections back in December and January, when many people may have had the virus without even knowing what they had. But nobody will ever know, because nobody was searching for those people then, or even knew how to.

Then there’s the continuing attempt to pressure us all into wearing muzzles or (as a friend of mine calls them) ‘face-nappies’. There are many interesting exemptions from the rule forcing their use on public transport, which I often mock by wearing a huge wheezy gas mask.

But the Government does not, in fact, believe they are any use. In its own documents for guidance on reopening businesses it says: ‘The evidence of the benefit of using a face covering to protect others is weak and the effect is likely to be small.’

And if you go to the hairdressers and they tell you that you must wear a muzzle, they are wrong, at least in England. The guidance says clearly there is no such requirement if the hairdresser is wearing a visor.

I think the muzzle zealots want us to adopt the mouthless, submissive look because it makes us all more used to being told what to do, however silly the instruction. If you agree to that much interference in your life, then what won’t you also do? That’s why I resist it.

I am pretty sure this is going to last for ever, now. Those of us who have studied the evidence and know the whole thing was a vast and illogical over-reaction are in a minority of about 15 per cent. The great majority still swallow the propaganda, and will soon be persuaded that the Government’s big mistake was not to shut down the country sooner.

Perhaps that will make the coming unemployment, inflation and confiscatory taxation easier to bear. But not for me.

Only the Queen should travel in style, Boris

I am against the transformation of an RAF Airbus into a cheap copy of Air Force One. Prime Ministers – unlike US Presidents – are not heads of state, and shouldn’t pretend to be. Our head of state is the Queen.

The flashy painting of a union flag all over the tailplane makes Al Johnson’s vanity project look as if it belongs to a slightly dodgy holiday airline. And it draws attention to the fact that Britain no longer makes passenger jets of its own.

Years ago I used sometimes to travel on Margaret Thatcher’s flights abroad. These took place in an unadorned VC-10 of RAF Transport Command, in which we all had to fly facing backwards because that is what the RAF do (it is much safer).

The ancient, graceful, wholly British plane was impressive precisely because of the absence of silly grandeur and self-promotion.

If there’s money to spare for this sort of thing, can we please have the Royal Train back, preferably hauled by the beautiful modern steam locomotive Tornado or the soon-to-be finished Prince of Wales? I’m sick of the way Her Majesty is now forced to travel in dreary railbuses, and we’re all supposed to applaud.

A Monarch ought to be grand, and politicians ought to be drab.

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