Johann Hari

I'm on a two-week break from the Indie - hence limited updates here - but you can hear an hour-long interview I did (about the Mohammed cartoons, Iraq, Iran, global warming and nuclear weapons - all the fun subjects) at

http://www.littleatoms.com/audio.htm

Scroll down and you'll find me. If any lovely person out there in cyberspace wants to type up a transcript, e-mail it to me and I'll send you a pile of good books as a thank you.

Across the world, travel agents are in panic. There is a new go-go-go destination for trendy tourists that trumps mere distractions like Paris, Tokyo, New York and Milan, and they are all scrambling for a slice of this shimmering new location. Its name? Peckham. It is written in the stars. At least, that’s Southwark Council’s plan. Late last year, they published the first tourist map of Peckham, and decked the High Street out with signs saying ‘Welcome to Peckham’ in twelve different languages. So, for all you Germans: ‘Ja Volim Peckham’.

When my Texan friend Jake (who is very, very sorry about George Bush, by the way) arrived in town last week, I decided there was only one place to take him. At first glance from the taxi window, Peckham looks like an ordinary London suburb with fifty years of grime and decline encrusted on its face. But then the taxi driver – spotting our unfolded tourist map – begins his own impromtu tour. “On the left there, that’s Chicago’s, the nightclub where nine people were machine-gunned down. And here, that’s where Damilola Taylor was stabbed. He walked along there – see, just over there – and died. Oh, and here’s Mansies, the pie and mash shop.”

Jake turns to me, his brow furrowed. “That’s Peckham police station. Make a note of that, the tourists will need to know where it is,” the driver continues. “And here’s the Lloyds bank, stick around long enough and you’ll see it getting robbed.” Jake begins to sweat. “And here you are,” he says, pulling up. “Downtown Peckham. You used to have C&A, Dickens and Jones, C&A – all the big names. Now you’ve got fried chicken and pound shops. Enjoy.”

I stagger out onto the street, and the stench of rotting meat hits my lungs. It is coming from the rows and rows of butchers on this road, and from the whole schools of dead fish staring at us from shop windows. In front of us, there is a giant poster of a dog turd, and underneath the message: “Dog fouling can cause blindness.” Ja Volim.
I decide to dive into ‘K&J’s Hair, Nails and Beauty’ to ask the locals what they think of the influx of tourists to their manor. Peggy Parchment is sitting with her head in a dryer, so I ask her if she thinks this new map is a good thing. “Yes. Yes I think it is.” My wariness melts. They are glad! Glad we are here! Tourism can make a difference! So, I ask, my notebook poised and ready, what should we see? “Well, there’s the filth. There’s the roadworks and the condemned buildings. There’s the big nasty dirty market that stinks so bad you feel sick. It’s not a market, it’s just a big stink. You could see that.”

Ah. I decide instead to follow the sights laid out in the tourist map. The nearest, I discover, is the Peckham Wildlife Garden. We wander down a few grey streets that perfectly match the grey of the sky, and then stumble across some grating. This leads us into the ‘park’, a tiny slab where there are a few tired-looking pot plants and some armchairs made of wood. “Dude, where’s the wildlife?” Jake asks. (Where he comes from, parks cover about a hundred acres, minimum). I search the joint, but only find a few depressed-looking woodlice. “Onwards!” I say with a defiant grin. “To the next sight!”

The tourist map guides us to “Peckham’s famous wooden bollards.” They are still bollards, only made of wood. They resemble immense sex toys designed for the loosest of vaginas. We tick these off, still smiling expectantly, and head for “Peckham’s famous specially designed manholes.” They are… just manholes. As I stare at them, trying to figure out how they differ from every other London manhole, a mini-van nearly mows me down. “Idiot! What are you doing staring at manholes?” the driver screams, not unreasonable. But I am prepared to die to see the sights of Peckham, I vow. Next up is the Bellenden Topiary Project. It is – I don’t want to oversell them here – a row of trees by the road, cunningly snipped and clipped into the shape of… trees.

I am beginning to suspect they have padded this tourist map out a bit. We dive into the Nag’s Head pub, named after Delboy’s local, for a pint. Stale smoke hangs defiantly in the air, as if it know it is about to be banned. The chirpy 1950s music – Hello Mary Lou, Goodbye Heart” – clashes with the dour, sour faces of the punters as they stare at the racing on the TV screen, betting slips in hand. The carpets are floral, the design 1950s. In Hoxton, this pub would be retro; in Peckham, it’s never-was-ro. “Why would anyone come to Peckham?” the barman asks when he sees our map.

We leave to wander up the road. The corporate brand-names – Starbucks, McDonald’s – are all absent: hardly anybody here can afford them. Instead, there are the alternative brand-names of London poverty: the Money Shop for cheap five-quid loans to tide you over until the giro arrives, Tennesse Fried Chicken, the betting shops. A spray of chicken-juice hits my face from a passing butcher’s and I gag. Jake tries the local delicacy – Jerk Chicken – but the fact its name is also a synonym for masturbation puts me off.

Soon, we have walked so far that we have hit the boundary between Peckham and Dulwich, between effluence and affluence, between unearned poverty and unearned wealth. There is a mural marking William Blake’s vision of a Peckham angel marking the dividing line, and as I cross over, the temperature seems to drop a few degrees. It is only then that I realise how much – in a strange way – how useful this map is. If tourists really want to see the spirit of London, they will find more of it in the wry laughter of Peckhamites when you tell you are touring their town than in a thousand years of watching the sterile pomposity of the Changing of the Guard or the bongs of Big Ben. In the shining hair and nail salons, in fetid meat, in the wildlife parks-with-no-wildlife, in the eccentric bollards – here lies London in all its grimy glory.

POSTSCRIPT: A reader has e-mailed to point out the hideous nonsense of saying 'Ja voilm in Peckham'. I know, I know - Swiss-German was (along with English) my first language, and although it's pretty damn rusty now, even I know that is a nonsensical translation, Blame Peckham Council, not me, guv...

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Thanks to everyone who has e-mailed to point out that, in fact, Ja Volim In Peckham is Serbo-Croat. (The wave of Serbo-Croat tourists flooding Peckham is virtually a tsunami). Apologies to my ignorance... (and credit to all my clever readers! Who knew?)

Charles, more than any other royal except perhaps Margaret, has had his life ruined by the monarchy. The monarchy has put Charles in a uniquely savage position. He can only prepare for one job, but he can’t do that job until he is an old man. Indeed, it must have crossed his mind that he might never get to be monarch at all. His grandmother outlived one of her children; his mother, who seems likely to repeat that longevity, may well outlive him. Charles has always been acutely aware of the trap he’s in. As he told an audience at Cambridge University when he was in his twenties, “my great problem in life is that I do not really know what my role in life is. At the moment I do not have one. But somehow I must find one.”

Charles’ frustration at not having a job is so intense that he has on occasion wished his own mother dead. He approached his then-brother-in-law, Charles Spencer, at the funeral of Diana’s father, and repeatedly told him how lucky he was to have inherited so young. He then added, “I wish I had inherited young.”

From birth, Charles has never been treated like a normal child. Lord Mountbatten said that “loneliness is something that royal children have always suffered and always will. Not much you can do about it really.” This was callous but true. Charles found it hard to make friends. He was taken to primary school every day in a royal limo, greeted at the gate by a bowing headmaster, and seen off by him at the end of the day too. His childhood was filled with bizarre special treatment. For example, it was judged that it would be terribly vulgar for a Prince to use a normal, common persons’ swimming pool, so for his school swimming lessons, his whole class was taxied to Buckingham Palace. When he started secondary school, the treatment was even worse: on his first day he was greeted by a crowd of members of the public gawking at him.

At every traumatic moment in Charles’ life, the ceaseless glare of the media has made the experience even worse. Every child find their first day at school unsettling – how much more so must it have been given that he was also accompanied by yelling hoards of photographers screaming his name all the way to the entrance? All of Charles’ rites of passage were splashed across the front pages. When he ordered a cherry brandy in a pub (moderate behaviour indeed for a fifteen year old), it caused a press furore that lasted weeks. When he was sixteen, a book of his essays was stolen and published in the German press. The pressure on Charles even at primary school was so intense that by the end of his first term, his headmaster complained that press intrusion was seriously impairing the functioning of his whole school.

In the biographies of all Royals, there is a moment when the awfulness of their fate becomes apparent to them. For Charles, it occurred when he was nine years old and he was summoned to his headmaster’s study. He was told to watch the television. His mother announced before a baying crowd that she was making her son into the Prince of Wales “today.” As Jonathan Dimbleby, who is a close friend of the Prince, explains, there was a “look of acute embarrassment which flashed across the face of the Prince. For him, it was not a moment to rejoice but the sealing of the inevitable, that ‘awful truth’ from which there was no escape.” What parent would put their nine year old child through this anguish? And what parent would do it without even warning him in advance, or calling him to offer comfort?

But then, we should bear in mind that Charles was a victim of abuse and neglect as a child which makes even this casual neglect seem slight. His parents, we must never forget, abandoned him for six months when he was only five years old. They often didn’t bother to see him on his birthdays even when he was very little. Even when he was in their company, the Prince was – according to interviews which he himself has given – treated with appalling cruelty by his father, who, according to his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, would “seem intent not merely on correcting the Prince but mocking him as well, so that he seemed to be foolish and tongue-tied in front of friends as well as family. To their distress and embarrassment, the small boy was frequently brought to tears” by his father.

But even this cruelty was not due only to the twisted personality of Phillip Mountbatten but also to the institution of monarchy. One friend of Phillip’s explains that “Phillip hectored his son because it was the only means he knew to achieve his supreme objective – to mould a Prince for kingship.” Another says that “Phillip put his loyalty to the Crown above and beyond his responsibilities as a father.” So this is yet another significant way in which monarchy has broken Charles Windsor’s self-esteem and purpose in life.

Charles has been used since childhood as a PR puppet for the monarchy, a process his parents only encouraged. As the Daily Mirror columnist Cassandra wrote when, barely out of his teens, the Prince was subject to a preposterous ‘investiture’ ceremony: “He is to be turned into a puppet, publicly in front of all our eyes and ears…I find myself extremely sorry for Charles, principal boy in the pantomime at Carnarvon next July that should never have been ballyhooed at all: a young man who is already the plaything of outmoded politicians.” But this cruelty stretched right back to his childhood, when he was paraded by his parents before cameramen.

Treated with appalling cruelty at home, he was sent to a school which can only be described without hyperbole as a centre of sadism. At Gordonston, the journalist Ross Benson recalls, the windows would be kept open all night, so that pupils who were forced to sleep next to them “were likely to wake up with blankets rain-soaked or, in winter, covered with a light sprinkling of snow.” But this was the least of the problems pupils faced. Once lights were out, gangs of thugs would “roam the house beating up smaller boys, extorting food and money…and creating an atmosphere of ‘genuine terror’.” New boys would be greeted “by taking a pair of pliers to their arms and twisting until the flesh tore open.”

Charles was singled out for especially viscous treatment. Lads would deliberately attack him and then brag “we did him over. We just punched the future King of England.” Nobody would befriend him for fear of being accused of sucking up. When Charles told the headmaster that he had had his head forced into a toilet pan, he was told to stop being such a sissy.

Parents who failed to notice that their child was being abused in this way would be culpably negligent. Elizabeth and Phillip were not. They were worse: they knew everything that was going on, and they did nothing. He wrote to them constantly, explaining that it was “absolute hell” and that, to give but one example, “I don’t get any sleep practically at all nowadays… [The people in my dorm] throw slippers all night long or hit me with pillows or rush across the room and hit me as hard as they can… Last night was hell, literal hell.” But parents who had abandoned him as a child were happy to abandon him again now.

One of Charles’ few precious moments of freedom from misery and control was when he was seventeen. Following his trip to a remote community in Australia, a nun wrote that “it was grand to see him walking around Dogura – walking alone with no gaping crowds waiting for him…I do not suppose there are many opportunities for such times in his life.” She said that he had “come amongst them as if in a cage”, which, of course, he was. And even during those years, he was stricken with the knowledge that his parents still didn’t care. They didn’t even bother to meet the family he was travelling out to Australia with and going to live with for six months.

When he returned from Australia, the cage door snapped shut. He was given almost no freedom to chart the next decade of his own life. In 1965, a committee was set up to decide the Prince’s future. The Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury were on the committee, but Charles himself was not. They decided that he “would have to enter one of the armed services,” but that he should go to University first. Charles was eventually informed about their decisions. He was given no input at all.

Predictably, the decisions they made were grossly inappropriate for the ‘Prince’. He was far too unintelligent to go to Cambridge University, and he was almost comically incompetent in the navy. He couldn’t master navigation for the life of him (a pretty fundamental skill when you’re at sea), but they couldn’t punish his failures in the way they would with anybody else. As the Naval Secretary to the Ministry of Defence wrote, “the thought of Court Martialling the heir to the throne for a navigational error is good nightmare material.” In the end, he had to be given intensive course after intensive course until eventually he was receiving one-to-one tuition.

It was cruel to put an unintelligent man in positions like this, where he was bound to fail. Yet this points to perhaps the greatest cruelty of all. Charles has been surrounded by sycophants all his life. They have indulged his every whim, including the strange delusion that he is an intelligent man. This has gone on for so long that Charles Windsor now seems seriously to believe that he is an important thinker. A friend of his told Nigel Dempster, the journalist, that “he lives in an isolation ward of flattery. He goes to Hollywood and is told he’s handsome. He swaps jokes with a comic genius like Peter Sellers and the other Goons, and they fall down laughing. He boffs a woman once, and she tells him he’s the greatest lover she’s ever had… The best education in the world can’t defend you against sycophancy on that scale.” This process has warped Charles in innumerable ways; the saddest is that it has led him to believe he is intelligent and well-informed.

Yet in truth, Charles has always been thick. Even his very sympathetic biographer Jonathan Dimbleby admits that “he was by no means an apt pupil” at school. Despite some of the most expensive education money can buy, he sat only two A-levels, and in those he achieved the mediocre grades of a B in history and a C in French. He then attended Cambridge University, despite the fact that his grades were nowhere near good enough to merit admission. Predictably, his degree was a disaster, and he came out the other end with a polite 2.2., a qualification which one Cambridge don recently described as being given only to “the terminally lazy or the very stupid indeed.”

Even Charles’ closest aides admit that all too often he simply spouts whatever the last person to whisper in his ear has said. His very sympathetic biographer Jonathan Dimbleby admits that “they were uncomfortable with his tendency to reach instant conclusions on the basis of insufficient thought.” Edward Adeane, Charles’ private secretary for many years, was deeply disturbed by the fact that “Charles was extraordinarily easy to lead by the nose.” These are understatements.

Charles is not more thick than his mother and grandfather. The difference is that they at least seemed to know that they were hardly Steven Hawking and acted accordingly. His wife Diana cheerfully admitted that she was “thick as two short planks” but had other qualities that counted. Charles, in sharp contrast, has (to use AN Wilson’s useful term) no intellectual humility at all. Can you imagine him ever being as self-aware about his intelligence as Diana, who, after she bumped into a wall beam and he told her to mind her head, asked, “Why? There’s nothing in it!”

His stupidity can be illustrated in countless ways, but let’s start with his dire judgement in selecting mentors. Look, for example, at the exceptionally odd ‘Lord Mountbatten’. Elizabeth Windsor described him as “a medieval matchmaker”, and he certainly seems to have been obsessed to an unhealthy extent with attaching himself to the royal family. He would constantly boast about his (unreal) closeness to Elizabeth. He became obsessed with genealogy (the only integer of merit, according to the Windsors), and his biographer Phillip Ziegler explains that he only ever picked up a book if it was about this topic. We can only speculate now about the deep character flaws which led to this desperation. What we can say firmly is that it reveals a lot about Charles that he was drawn to such an unsavoury figure.

Exhibit B in the case of the People vs. Charles’ choice of mentors can be summarised in four words: Laurens van der Post. Charles revered Van der Post as a guru and epitome of all he admired. He took his books away with him on honeymoon, to Diana’s dismay. (She took only Danielle Steel, to Charles’ anger – but her novels probably have more basis in fact than Van der Post’s purported non-fiction). Charles wined and dined him, and made great efforts to boost Van der Post’s public standing. He even became William’s godfather. As Van der Post’s distinguished official biographer JDF Jones puts it, “for twenty years, they shared the most intimate conversations and correspondence. Charles even told him about his dreams.”

Yet Van der Post was, as Jones says, “a compulsive fantasist.” Amongst his many, many lies were his claims to have an aristocratic lineage, a glittering war career, remarkable political achievements (he claimed, entirely falsely, that he was the author of the 1980 Rhodesia settlement)… the list goes on.

For those who had any intelligence (a category into which Charles Windsor very obviously does not fall), the evidence was there. Van der Post admitted, for god’s sake, in one of his books that “this is one of the problems for me: stories are more completely real to me than life in the here and now. A really true story has transcendent reality for me which is greater than the reality of life.” Translation: I bullshit constantly.

Yet still his portrait hangs in Charles’ study. Under the influence of this charismatic but manifestly dishonest man, Charles allowed himself to be persuaded that Nelson Mandela was not the right man to be elected President of South Africa! Van der Post intoxicated Charles in particular with his tales of the noble savages who lived in the Kalahari. These condescending myths had long since been discredited by anthropologists (something Charles really ought to have known since he studied the subject at University – another sign of his thickness). Yet Van der Post claimed that the African peoples “participated so deeply” in the life of “animals, stones and rocks” that “the experience could almost be called mystical.” Charles lapped up this gibberish.

It is hardly surprising, I suppose, that Charles, with such an underdeveloped intellect, was attracted to Van der Post’s rhetoric, which stated that intellectual approaches to life were flawed and missed some unseeable, mystical ‘truth’ which we can only sense through the trees. Van der Post said that “we behave as if there were some magic in mere thought, and we use thinking for purposes for which it was never designed.” Charles kneeled in obeisance before this cascade of tripe. Indeed, Charles tried, rather dismally, to develop this line of thought himself. He told an audience of bemused Harvard graduates that “we have concentrated on the development of the intellect to the detriment of the development of the spirit.” This facile dichotomy, between the recognisable intellect and the vacuous spirit, must have been a great temptation for Charles. After all, people could point out that his intellect was painfully deficient, but who could say that his ‘spirit’ (whatever that might mean) was below par?

Van der Post went even further with this quackery and convinced Charles that the Old Man of Lochnagar, a fictional character Charles had created when he was twenty in a story for his little brothers, was Charles’ ‘guru’ inherited through the ages and embedded in Charles’ ‘collective unconscious’. How that old charlatan Van der Post must have chuckled at the extraordinary gullibility of the man.

But then Charles has always been wide open to cranks. In the 1970s, a young Indian woman persistently called Buckingham Palace begging to be put through to Charles. Eventually, she spoke to him and explained that she had a mission as a Buddhist to convert him to understanding the role of the Past Masters. Rather than shrug her off as a nutter, he invited her into the Palace and formed a friendship with her. She even converted him to vegetarianism.

But there is a common thread running through the lunatics and charlatans that Charles is attracted to. They all articulate some kind of ultra-reactionary hatred of modern life, and the desire to retract to a pre-modern, pre-industrial world. Van der Post, for example, was part of a wider movement which sought to oppose urban life and its cosmopolitan values, and replace it with a vision of a pure, ‘natural’ life in the jungles, deserts and forests. Van der Post dishonestly claimed that “by merely taking the most sophisticated people into the bush and wilds of Africa, we have produced the most startling re-educative and therapeutic effects upon their divided personalities.”

From thinkers like this – and Charles’ own endless speeches – we can start to piece together a vision of Charles’ political philosophy. Of course, describing Charles’ thought is difficult because it is so shallow, facile and at times incoherent: we ain’t talking Bertram Russell here. Nonetheless, there are recurring themes and leitmotifs. Charles is essentially a feudal thinker. Feudalism was the prevailing social structure before capitalism, and it is based on a mystical notion that everybody knows their place within nature. Feudal thinkers believe that we are each born within a particular part of the social hierarchy where we ‘belong’ and are destined to remain. Monarchy is the archetypal feudal institution. It is central to the thought of the ‘old right’ which has been so entirely eclipsed during the twentieth century by the new right and the left.

It shouldn’t surprise us that a man raised to believe that the feudal institution of monarchy is all-important has turned out to be attracted to long-dead feudal political ideas too. Charles not only aspires to head a feudal institution; he also lives like a feudal lord. Dimbleby says of him that as a landowner “he knew all the tenants, the farm workers and their families, their names, their histories and their lives.” Just like the old Lords of the Manor were expected to before those new-fangled ideas like capitalism and equality of opportunity came along…

To find a Western feudal political thinker who is taken seriously we have to go back to the first Prime Minister of the twentieth century, Lord Salisbury. Andrew Roberts’ definitive biography shows that, like Charles, Salisbury was sceptical of industrialisation and idealised the countryside and aristocratic pursuits as somehow more in tune with nature than the vulgar, egalitarian world of the city. The public voice in Britain closest to Prince Charles’ is the hard-right quarterly the Salisbury Review. Like him, they often fulminate about the lack of Shakespeare in our schools, the arcane question of which should be the authorised prayer book, the state of the countryside, and various other reactionary obsessions. Charles even used his privileged position to lobby the Prime Minister with the odd idea that all teenagers should be sentenced to community service.

Charles and the Review, in keeping with their feudalism, venerate Nature (it is always capitalised) as the ultimate good. Often, this simply takes the form of quasi-mystical verbiage dressed up as though it were an intelligent comment. For example, he has uttered the meaningless following sentences: “It is high time we once again respected flights of the spirit; high time we concentrated our collective efforts on unleashing the vast transforming and regenerative potential which lies within the individual as a member of the community.” What can he possibly mean? Does even he know?

This anti-modern instinct can be positively pernicious when it comes to an analysis of developing countries. He said of the economic development of Africa, “is all this development really progress?” What, things like clean water and sewers and all that? Well, yes, actually, you fool. He dismissed the “squalid little houses” of African towns, from the comfort of his five palaces.

His ascription of special, nostalgic powers to non-European peoples is always offensive, but at times hilarious too. At a Commonwealth dinner in the 1980s, Charles made the following entry in his diary: “I saw [all the Western delegates making awkward small-talk] while the others [from non-western countries] merely sat and contemplated the infinite by looking straight through the person sitting opposite them….I sometimes wonder whether the people who sit throughout…three hours of dinner without uttering scarcely a word [sic] are in fact picking up some kind of thought transference from their neighbours by remaining silent? Slowly but surely I am beginning to indulge in little periods of silence.” Could this entry be parodied?

Further evidence of Charles’s exaltation of that nebulous concept, ‘nature’, and those who he judges to be ‘close’ to it, can be found in a speech he delivered in 1982 in which he said that doctors “should be intimate with Nature.” It has also led to an obsession with unproven ‘alternative medicine’ techniques. Michael Baum, the Professor of Surgery at King’s College Hospital School of Medicine, pointed out that the treatments Charles cited approvingly had nothing but “anecdotal case-reports” to back them up. Baum warned of “the tragic consequences of adopting therapeutic revolutions on the basis of a plausible scientific hypothesis in advance of its scientific testing.” Normally a mild man, Baum was provoked to say that Charles was “guilty of the most extreme intellectual arrogance, or more charitably, of confusing fiction with fact.” John Diamond, the journalist who was dying of cancer, took particular offence at Charles’ ridiculous claim that there were effective ‘alternative’ therapies for cancer.

Charles had dabbled in mysticism and non-scientific, ‘spiritualist’ thought before. He had been drawn to parapsychology as a student. This is an occultist school of thought which believes in a ‘super-natural’ magic which can stretch as far as summoning angels. Nor did he keep these odd beliefs private: he even wrote to a University Vice-Chancellor urging him to establish a Chair of Parapsychology, describing it as “of immense significance in terms of the ‘invisible’ aspects of our existence in this universe.” Again, he never questioned whether it was inappropriate for him to use a hereditary, non-merit based position to seek to influence public affairs in this way.

Following the death of his close confidante Lord Mountbatten, Charles became deeply attracted to the Buddhist actress Zoe Sallis. She gave him the book ‘The Path of the Masters’ and became determined to make him believe in reincarnation. He began to speculate about how Mountbatten might be reincarnated. (The Prince’s private secretary, Edward Adeane, intervened and told the Prince that he simply was not free to believe what he chose: he was destined to be head of the Church of England – another cruelty monarchy has inflicted upon him.) He tried to link all these beliefs in with his feudal politics, in what can only be described as an intellectual mish-mash which resembled a traffic pile-up. But to him, it all looked perfectly consistent.

There has, however, been one clear thread running through all his arguments: his clear desire to disparage and insult atheists at every opportunity. He told an audience at the Salvation Army centennial that “what we should be worried about is whether people are going to become atheists, whether they are going to be given an idea of what is right or wrong [he implies, extremely insultingly, that the two are linked and that therefore atheists don’t know right from wrong]…These are the things that matter.”

Charles’ intellectual arrogance (an odd quality for a man with no intellect) also emerged in his contribution to the ‘debate’ about the English language. He said that he and others “wonder what it is about our country and our society that our language has become so sloppy and so limited that we have arrived at wastelands of banality, cliché and casual obscenity.” He added that “all the people in my office, they can’t speak English properly, they can’t write English properly. All the letters sent from my office I have to correct myself.”

In no other speech has the corrupting influence of monarchy on Charles Windsor been more clear. He does not have a good or even adequate grasp of English himself. His own writing is, to use his own phrase, filled with banality and cliché, and his speech is itself filled with casual obscenity (fancy being a tampax, anyone?). I strongly suspect that the ‘corrections’ he makes to letters are in fact altering an already correct sentence. Yet nobody has the nerve to tell him because it simply isn’t the done thing to correct a ‘Prince’. So he is allowed to live with this delusion that he speaks wonderful English and nobody else does.

Poor, pathetic Charles. No wonder he thinks the rest of the world is always wrong: after all, isn’t he surrounded by people who convince him he is always right? Hasn’t he always been surrounded by these people? A former girlfriend of Charles’ recently said, “The amazing thing is that Charles might have lost a lot of public respect, but he lost none of his friends – even when his behaviour was appalling, even when he had cuckolded one of his best friends. Why? Because he is a Prince.” So even his friends, it is clear, don’t mention these things. They do him no favours in the long term.

Despite having no recognisable intellect or ability, Charles, scandalously, is accorded a public role and his statements about public policy are taken seriously. Amongst his blatantly political roles (for which he has no qualifications at all) in the last year have been: firstly, his fierce advocacy of vaccination in the foot-and-mouth crisis, which he was able to put to the Prime Minister repeatedly. Why? If an ordinary member of the public, even one who was an expert in the disease unlike the know-nothing Prince, had called the Downing Street switchboard, they would not have got through to Blair. Why was Charles allowed extensive access simply because of who his mother was?

Secondly, Charles is a government ‘design tsar’, giving him the power to stamp his ‘vision’ of classic architecture on Britain’s new hospitals. This is despite the fact that the Prince’s architectural skills are so poor that he was given only a 2:2 in his degree in the subject. The initiative was, according to an aide quoted in the Observer, “very much his own idea.” (Who else would have thought of him?) “He will be talking to firms directly,” apparently. His earlier forays into the world of architecture have been failures: his plans for an eco-friendly model village in the Hebrides had to be ditched. Yet, surrounded by sycophants, Charles has not got the message that he is too untalented and thick to meddle in this area. No, he meddles on. Charles even had the nerve in December 2001 to accuse architects of having “inflated egos”: the lack of self-knowledge is breath-taking.

Thirdly, the Prince acted as an “unofficial envoy” during the war on terror. Charles and his spin-doctors were eager to see this task trumpeted in the press (it made the front page of the Daily Mail) despite the fact that it was meant to be a behind-the-scenes job. Charles’ task was to keep the Saudi royal family – notoriously one of the most corrupt, decadent and totalitarian ruling houses in the world – on side because he is so friendly with them. Yet even in this, he was unsuccessful: the House of Saud has publicly distanced itself from the ‘war on terror.’ Downing Street had to waste its time, at a vital moment when every second counted, listening to Charles’ whining that he should be found a role, and then finding somewhere to shunt him off to. Far from being helpful, having a brainless Prince chuntering around the globe was an unneeded distraction.

This was part of a long and rather desperate attempt by Charles to find a foreign policy role for himself. He infuriated Margaret Thatcher for one when he conspired inappropriately with the Foreign Office to systematise his relations with the Middle East. Thatcher rightly saw this as an attempt to set up a Foreign Office in miniature without any reference to that tiresome bunch, the democratically elected government. As one Foreign Office civil servant said, when Thatcher found out, “the sound of breaking furniture could be heard all around Whitehall.” Busy Prime Ministers should not have their carefully rationed time wasted like this. Charles can’t, I suppose, be blamed personally for this though: the very institution of monarchy guarantees that he will be surrounded by yes-men who convince him that, simply because of who he is, he has something to contribute.

Fourthly, Charles has a predilection for offering utterly irrelevant personal blue-prints. He has in the last year authored articles titled ‘My blue-print for NHS hospitals’ and ‘My vision for urban renewal’. He even in the 1980s wrote a book called ‘Vision of Britain’. Erm, hasn’t anybody told him that Kings and Princes don’t have any remit in public policy anymore? His highly political statements have absolutely no relevance. It is offensively arrogant for him to assume that simply because of birth, he has the right to offer these ‘visions’ and expect them to be treated seriously.

But then, we should be aware that Charles believes that the monarchy has a right to be superior to politicians. When he first attended a meeting of the Privvy Council, an institution which contains all current and former Cabinet ministers, he wrote that “I daresay many politicians would like to do away with this particular institution and establish something more rational and modern but it is one of the last remaining links between Crown and Parliament and does help to remind ministers that there is one final authority that is not themselves.”

He thinks, then, that it is a good thing that the people’s democratic representatives are reminded of the undemocratic “final authority” that hangs over them. Similarly, he has said that he “will not be diverted from using the authority of his position to speak out across a range of public issues.” But what authority does his position have? Why on earth should a hereditary position have any authority at all? The very idea is madness. Charles has often shown that he expects to be treated differently because he is a Royal. He insists that politicians call him “sir” and “your royal highness” still. He even believes in a hierarchy within the royal family itself, showing that he believes people are carefully ranked according to birth into a caste system-style hierarchy (feudalism yet again). He once screamed at his father, “Don’t you realize you are speaking to the next King?”

One small sign of his arrogance is revealing. He was given a list of the rules of the University of Aberystwyth when he was a student there. It said at the bottom, “His Royal Highness…would comply with the rules and regulations,” to which he responded by writing, “Like hell!” Another can be found if we look at when Jim Callaghan, the Labour Prime Minister, tried to find some meaningful work for Charles in the mid-1970s. Callaghan suggested that Charles take a job in Whitehall or the Cabinet Office, or as a member of the Commonwealth Development Corporation. Charles refused to do the job unless he could enter at the absolute top.

In an interview with Mary Riddell last year, Charles made the extraordinary claim that “as usual I am rubbished and ridiculed.” Hello? Does he have no awareness of his own position at all? If it were not for who his mother happened to be, his nonsensical speeches and articles simply wouldn’t appear at all. Nobody would publish the articles or turn up to hear the speeches, for he has nothing intelligent or incisive to say. Far from being ‘rubbished and ridiculed’, he is granted a respect and attention he does not deserve. When Charles delivered one of six Reith lectures in 1998, he was the sole lecturer not to answer questions at the end. It’s clear why: his arguments were so nebulous and often risible that he would have been ripped to shreds. He plainly lacked the intellectual rigour to stand up to cross-examination.

There is nothing wrong with being stupid; some of the people I most love in all the world do not have the quality of intelligence, but have other, wonderful qualities. What they don’t do is delude themselves that they can cut it as intellectuals, and then get all sour and bitter when they aren’t treated as such.

But Charles emerges time and again as a man who, hilariously, believes that he is an intellectual prophet who is being ignored by foolish figures like the government. He told Mary Riddell, “on integrated healthcare, on sustainable agriculture and public private partnerships I have had to battle and battle and battle against a complete wall of opposition.” This opposition comes from “everyone, everyone. All the professional bodies, the institutions, the media.” This truly is the deafness that comes from only hearing sycophants. Never once does it seem to occur to him that it is not the government, the professional bodies and the media who are wrong, but him. After all, this triumvirate of critics actually take the trouble to either become elected, work hard for qualifications and expertise, or actually attract customers, not activities which the unaccountable Prince ever troubles himself with.

He went even further in a speech to the British Medical Association in the 1980s so arrogant that it defies description. He said – clearly in reference to himself – that “Perhaps we [meaning ‘I’] just have to accept that it is God’s will that the unorthodox individual [i.e., me] is doomed to years of frustration, ridicule and failure in order to act out his role in the scheme of things, until his day arrives and mankind [!] is ready to receive his message, which he probably finds hard to explain to himself [that’s because you’re thick and inarticulate, Charles], but which he knows come from a far deeper source than conscious thought [like Lauren Van der Post, perhaps?].”

It might seem cruel to repeat Charles’ deranged speeches which imply that he is a Moses-type figure, and it might seem even more cruel to mock them so heartily. But isn’t the ultimate cruelty to let him continue in these bizarre delusions without pointing out that everyone is laughing at him? I can only think of those times we’ve all experienced when you emerge from the dressing room in a clothes shop and say, “do I look good I this?” Some friends will say you look fine to bolster your feelings in the short term, even if you look hideous. I’d rather be told that I look awful in something because then I won’t buy it. In the same way, Charles needs to be told that he isn’t Moses leading us to the promised land. His true friends aren’t the ones who allow him to think that he has discovered some deep underlying truth about the universe that, if only the rest of us were as smart as him, we’d all acknowledge. His true friends should tell him that he simply doesn’t have the intellectual calibre to make this kind of speech, and that he should just move on and find something else to do.

However, I wouldn’t recommend a career in business. Charles has also showed crass unintelligence in his dealings with the corporate world. Guardian journalists Oliver Burkeman and Angelique Christafis helpfully chronicled the Prince’s idiotic relationship with Spanish tiling firm Porcelanosa. Charles – a man who is a multi-millionaire many times over – accepted a garden worth over £100,000 for his private home at Highgrove. In a blatant reciprocal favour, Charles hosted a lavish corporate party for the firm, and flew over to Spain to supervise the opening of one of their factories. Charles appears to have been too stupid to realise that this would inevitably come to light, or too arrogant to care about the perception that the British monarchy is available for hire despite the fact that its members are paid a massive wage to serve the British people.

Charles appeared not to realise the hypocrisy in his stance when he argued that, in light of the ‘Sophiegate’ embarrassments, personal business engagements were incompatible with royal status. Sophie might well have been tempted to answer his criticisms with two words: Armand Hammer.

Hammer was the elderly chairman of Occidental Petroleum when he first bought Charles. Now, you might think that the head of one of the most polluting oil firms in the world would be an unlikely friend of Charles the self-proclaimed environmentalist and lover of nature, but that would be again to foolishly presume that Charles has any coherence or consistency.

(Remember: this is a man who preaches fuel conservation yet drives one of the greatest fuel-wasters in the world, a Bentley – or rather, three of them. This is a man who took a trip to the USA to inspect urban slums and spent half the trip playing polo. This is a man who preaches about agricultural traditionalism but was quite happy to shut down his own ‘model farms’ so that he could make an extra few quid by ‘rationalising’ the Duchy of Cornwall. His hypocrisy is so blatant that you have to almost admire his nerve).

Hammer was keen both to donate large sums to charity and to make it very well known that he had done so. So Charles allowed himself and Diana to be bought for a night by Hammer in return for a $1 million dollar donation. So they turned up at his ball and gave this weird old crook (who was, oddly, a long-time sympathiser with the totalitarian Soviet Union) a great deal of kudos. Hammer was delighted to be viewed as yet another one of Charles’ dodgy gurus.

Quite why Charles is so intoxicated by the ultra-wealthy is a mystery. As Prince of Wales he has inherited (or ungratefully accepted from us, the tax-payers: it depends on your perspective) the Duchy of Cornwall, which adds £321 million to his personal fortune. It gives him an annual income in excess of £7 million. This should, of course, be largely considered public income and go back into the tax pot to pay for schools and hospitals. Instead, it is claimed exclusively by one man. He must, admittedly, hold it in trust: Charles must pass it onto the next Prince of Wales, and he cannot touch the Duchy’s capital. Who on earth thinks that Charles works sufficiently hard to earn £7 million a year, more fifty times the wage of the Prime Minister? The government at the very, very least should claim rightful ownership of the Duchy, use the vast sums it earns to pay for public services, and pay Charles a reasonable wage for the job he does – perhaps £50,000 per year, a little below the rate for a school headmaster.

But taking all the profit from the Duchy – our Duchy – isn’t enough for Charles. In 1999, Charles sold 2500 acres of trees which he claimed to own privately to the Duchy (us). His insistence that he owned this land privately (rather than as part of the Duchy) was rather undermined by the fact that the trees were planted on Duchy land and their maintenance was paid for by the Duchy. Even Duchy officials admit they had no need for the timber. The ‘Mail on Sunday’ argues that this was a devious way to get around the rule that bars the Prince from selling capital assets for his own profit. Not content with the millions he already receives, this supposedly humble Prince wanted an extra few million in the bank.

He clearly sees taking exorbitant amounts of money from the state as his birthright. This greed becomes even more striking when you realise that the Prince is given access to a huge amount of expensive luxuries free of charge. If, for example, he wants a swish holiday abroad, he has more than enough super-rich friends who will lend hi premises for nothing. His friend John Lastis (who, as an oil tycoon, is a strange bed-fellow for a self-professed environmentalist) has lent Charles his £25 million yacht over ten times since 1991, entirely free of charge. He doesn’t even have to pay for his London flat (we do) or his transport to official functions (for which we stumped out a whopping £1.3 million last year).

It would be wrong, however, to say that Charles, has not done some good things. Despite his awful, warping upbringing, which has cruelly made him into the grotesque caricature he is today, he has tried to do some good for the poorest people in our society. He has used his privileged access to the wealthy to establish an excellent charity, albeit one rather self-servingly entitled the Prince’s Trust. The Trust carries out valuable work day in, day out with some of the most disadvantaged young people in Britain. A friend of mine was given a grant by the Trust to set up his own business, and it turned his life around. Yet even the work this has taken fills Charles with self-pity: he told Riddell that “I’ve tried to make the most of the position I’m now in. If that kills me in the process, then so be it.”

Charles’ commitment to charity and the poor is, however, somewhat undermined by his own relentless decadence. This is, of course, an imitation of his grandmother Elizabeth Bowles-Lyons. A palace insider has said that “his attitudes are very like hers. He mirrors her view of life.” His grandmother has encouraged him “to be really royal, in the old style.” When Charles travels, he demands seven bedrooms to himself. This includes a dressing room, a room where he can write his letters, and accommodation for his preposterous number of servants. His staff includes three butlers, four valets, four chefs, ten gardeners, and more. He insists that his staff at Highgrove wear specially designed uniforms and bow to him every day when they first speak to him. The journalist Graham Turner has described Charles’ Sandringham parties. “To start with, there must have been 20 or 30 servants…Everybody had their own individual valet or maid and, each evening [at dinner]…jaws dropped open at the splendour of the table, the silver, the decorations, the flowers, the statues and the lighting.”

His mad self-indulgence is occasionally comic. He spent hundreds of thousands of pounds building a garden which he wanted to be “the outward expression of my inner self.” It is less funny, however, when you realise that he is spending hard-earned tax-payers’ money which could be used on schools, hospitals and caring for the elderly. Charles uses £3000 a week of public funds from the Duchy of Cornwall to pay for the upkeep of his partner, Camilla Parker-Bowles, who doesn’t perform any public duties at all. Yet his private office provides her with a car, pays her household bills, and splashes out on the upkeep of her horses. He used public RAF jets to take his kids and some friends over to Zurich and then on skiing. His squandering of our money is offensive, to say the least.

Yet it is hard to blame Charles Windsor for his obvious character flaws, because we are always drawn back to admitting that he was appallingly badly brought up. Even now his parents treat him in a despicable way. At the time of the ‘Camillagate’ revelations, the Queen was concerned that “Charles’ melancholy and his sense of defeatism would outweigh his sense of duty to the Crown.” This is true cruelty. Your son as been publicly humiliated and ridiculed after a dreadful invasion of privacy, and he entirely understandably becomes deeply depressed and tempted to withdraw. Yet your reaction is to worry not about that but about an inhuman institution. This is the climate in which Charles was raised. Is it any wonder that he is such an odd man?

And now, of course, we much dicuss the relationship which is central to his life but which the institution of monarchy prevents from being formalised. The story of Charles and Camilla is actually a very moving love story. The first time they met, Camilla strode towards him and said frankly, “My great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather’s mistress. How about it?” From that moment on, they appear to have had a special bond which has endured their marriages to other people and several intervening decades.

Yet they are unable to marry without constantly monitoring grotesque opinion polls, with intrusive findings like (in a poll to mark Charles’ 50th birthday!) 40% believe they should marry and 46% believe they shouldn’t. He is also constantly conscious that – uniquely for a man in his fifties – his mother can block his marriage. A senior courtier has explained, “On this issue, the Head Lady is not for turning. She has rehearsed all the constitutional and legal arguments…and knows she can block the Prince of Wales from getting married. To her, Charles either becomes king and puts Camilla aside, or marries her and reconsiders his future.”

Confronted with appalling parenting and the distorting effects of monarchy, is it any wonder that Charles is – well, the way he is? What is a little shocking is that Charles doesn’t even seem aware of his own freakishness. When Mary Riddell told him he seems like a very normal dad, he said, in a voice she describes as “suddenly querulous and huffy”, that “I don’t see why people think I am abnormal.” He has been so abused by monarchy that he can’t even see how warped he has become. That, perhaps, is the greatest tragedy of all.

Later in the book, I discuss the idea that Charles Windsor and his mother are 'apolitical':

The monarch’s political influence will be even more offensively undemocratic in the unlikely event that Charles Windsor becomes King. What on earth would happen if – in a not unrealistic scenario – he found himself with an anti-organic food, pro-GM, anti-PPP government? Would he use his weekly meetings to lobby the PM with his totally unrepresentative and unchecked (not to mention ill-informed and poorly understood) views? How could any democracy tolerate such an insult?

Indeed, Charles has already used his position completely inappropriately for political influence, as I hope I showed fairly comprehensively earlier. But just to reiterate the point, it’s worth bearing in mind that the Prince admitted to his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby that he specifically intervened in disagreements within the Thatcher government in order to press for his own political beliefs and argue against the (democratically elected) Secretary of State, Nicholas Ridley. He used every possible opportunity – including meetings with the Secretary of State and meetings with his ministerial rivals – to lobby in favour of one of his (blatantly political) pet projects. He provoked the normally sanguine Ken Clarke (then Education Secretary) into a fit of rage when he blatantly tried to affect the content of the National Curriculum.

He is such a notorious political in-fighter that Michael Heseltine told him he had “all the hallmarks of a seasoned politician.” One former minister, Peter Morrison, has recounted how Charles called him into Kensington Palace and screamed and shouted and banged his fist on the table when Morrison wouldn’t accept his arguments.

We therefore have very strong reason to believe that he would try to pressurise a Prime Minister in the same way. It will be utterly impossible to maintain the myth that the monarch is apolitical or above politics: our next monarch is unashamedly a political lobbyist with his own highly politicised agenda. He even publicly admitted that “I understand the perimeters in which I can operate but at the same time I’m quite prepared to push it here and there because I happen to be one of those people who feel very strongly and deeply about things.” At least we can’t say he didn’t warn us.

My point here is not to say that he shouldn’t talk about politics. Seeking to influence public policy is an admirable desire in any citizen. If, as is clearly the case, Charles wants to do this, he should abdicate and stand for election or try to get a job as a policy advisor or journalist. What he cannot legitimately do in a self-respecting democracy is claim a right to access to those at the highest levels of government simply because of who his mother is.

Charles tried, when he was a student, to get involved in politics. He asked the master of his college, Rab Butler, if he could join the Labour, Conservative and Marxist parties, hoping that the overlapping memberships would cancel out any accusation of political bias. Butler refused permission. Of course, if Charles abdicated, he could join any party he wished.

It is worth pointing out that, just as the monarch (and future monarchs) try to use politicians, so politicians often try to use the monarch. Ben Pimlott describes eloquently the first such occasion in Elizabeth’s reign, when as Heir Presumptive she was sent on a tour of Northern Ireland where she was a blatant political tool in the Loyalist battles against the Republicans. He describes how an “almost hysterical atmosphere of loyalism” accompanied the tour. The pattern of using Elizabeth has continued intermittently. She was similarly manipulated by Harold Macmillan into selecting his preferred candidate to succeed him as Prime Minister, an episode which even devoted monarchists now acknowledge to have been a serious misjudgement on the Queen’s part.

Despite all this, some monarchists still argue, ridiculously, that Elizabeth Windsor and her heir are apolitical. Look: Elizabeth does two hours of government paperwork a day. What do the monarchists think this paperwork is? They cannot have it both ways. They cannot say on the one hand that the monarchy has no power and is purely decorative, yet on the other hand laud the Queen’s incredibly hard work on constitutional matters. Only one of these compliments can be true.

To read the full story, you can buy the book by clicking on the little advert to the right.

After the honeymoon, you expect aching genitals and a pounding headache. So after this winter’s moment of glory – the effective introduction of gay marriage in Britain – many gay people checked nervously for signs of a backlash. Would this, the ultimate moment of gay acceptance, the culmination of decades of marching and fighting and winning, provide the trigger for another wave of sneering, jeering homophobia?

And, sure, there were a few. Outside Belfast City Hall, a handful of Save Ulster From Sodomy loons – rather appropriately abbreviated to SUS – gathered to protest the first lesbian wedding in this country. (Perhaps somebody ought to explain to them that there’s not much sodomy in lesbian sex…). But the newly married couple - Shannon Sickles and Grainne Close – refused to scuttle round the back entrance and hide their love away. As they walked out hand-in-hand, the SUS campaigners were drowned out by cheering well-wishers. When one of the religious freaks managed to yell above the applause “Abomination! Abomination! You can’t marry her!”, Shannon laughed and said politely, “Why?” The man looked thrown. He spluttered, “Because she’s a lady!” The crowd roared, Shannon said “you’d be lucky to have her, mate,” and they kissed in the sunlight.

Beyond the fundamentalist fringe, there was little complaint. Even the ugliest right-wing newspapers ran sympathetic coverage of couples who had been together for decades and now finally could formalise their love. Opinion polls showed the vast majority of British people backed the reform – a silent liberal majority continuing step-by-step to cast homophobia into history. The few moaners were fragmented and scattered: Mother Melanie Phillips of the Convent for the Perpetually Enraged used her column in the Daily Mail to warn that this was “an assault on the bedrock of civilisation.”

The same newspaper offered twelve pieces of silver to the only camp Uncle Tom it could find to condemn this piece of progress from a gay perspective: Christopher Biggins. Taking a break from the intellectual rigour of playing the Widow Twanky, he wrote, “Marriage, in my view, should always be reserved for the union between a man and a woman for the purpose of bringing up a family.” (I look forward to Biggins’ campaign to ban infertile couples from marrying then.) He wrote that gay marriages were “a mockery” and that “many gays do not want that.”

But these were isolated pitchers of bile. The introduction of gay marriage was a victory, above all, for the institutions of a liberal democratic society: free speech and open political campaigning. Gay people had used our democratic freedoms to persuade our fellow citizens that we are ordinary people like them, deserving of the same rights and the same responsibilities, and the right side prevailed.

That’s why – at the very moment of our victory – it is worrying that some of us are eagerly undermining the principles that brought us to this moment. Over the past year, there has been an intensified effort by the British police to shut down many expressions of free speech – and some gay men have cheered it on. Sir Iqbal Scaranie, the head of the Muslim Council of Britain, has been investigated by the police for saying homosexuality is “an abomination.” Lynette Burrows, an agony aunt (and the emphasis is on the agony), has been questioned for saying she opposes gay adoption. An Oxford student was arrested for asking with a sneer if a police horse was gay. The list goes on.

As it happens, I was once invited onto a TV show called ‘Mad As Hell’, where Lynette Burrows was arguing – along with a deranged fundamentalist preacher called Rvd Jim Dowson – that homosexuality should be criminalized. They were a pair of cackling bigots who appeared to be primarily motivated by a strange anal fetishism, constantly citing “studies” that “showed” 50 percent of gay men eat their own shit, and that we are all constantly fisting each other.

I found them revolting – but it never occurred to me for a second to say they should be arrested. The deal is simple: in a free society, they have the right to insult us, and we have the right to insult them in turn. If we start to ask to be protected from the things that offend us, then other groups will ask to be protected from the Gay Pride marches and the PVC hotpants that offend them. This is a spiral that can only work against gay people and corrode the basis of a free society.

It is time gay people were confident enough to know that our arguments are so strong they can sustain any vitriolic rebuttals. As I heard the Rvd Dowson claim that all gay people want to fuck children and eat shit (literally), I understood for the first time what Woodrow Wilson meant when he said, “I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking.” At the end of the programme, I went to shake Dowson’s hand – I believe in being polite, even to enemies – and he thrust his hands angrily into his pockets. “I know where it’s been,” he said. Is there anybody who saw that who would not come down against him? Isn’t it better for people to see and hear it?

Besides, it’s the easiest thing in the world to defend free speech for nice people. The real test comes when you have to defend free speech for the people you detest, the people who believe you are a subhuman piece of slime. As so often Peter Tatchell – one of the greatest exponents of freedom in our time – provides a moral example. Three years ago in Bournemouth, an elderly evangelical preacher called Harry Hammond took to the streets with a banner saying “Stop homosexuality – stop lesbianism.” He was attacked, arrested and fined – and died soon afterwards. Peter Tatchell wrote at the time, “The conviction of Harry Hammond for displaying a placard criticising homosexuality is a grotesque misuse of the Public Order Act. His placard was offensive to gay people; that is not, however, a legitimate reason to suppress his right to protest and turn him into a criminal. If Mr Hammond appeals, I would gladly testify in favour of his conviction being overturned.”

Tatchell knew from personal experience how unjust it is when the Public Order Act is used to suppress free speech. In 1994, he protested at Wembley Arena outside a rally of 6,000 Islamic fundamentalists who were advocating homo-cidal slaughter of gay people. He was arrested and charged under Section 5 of the Public Order Act for displaying a placard that read ‘Islamic Nazis behead and burn queers’ - a simple statement of fact. The prosecution said that his placard was “threatening, abusive or insulting” to Muslims at the rally and was likely to cause “harassment, alarm or distress”. This is what happens when “offence” trumps freedom.

In this country – and across the Western world – we are winning. Gay people have never been safer, and in Europe at least, the backlash is negligible, mere foam on an irreversible tide. We have not achieved this by artificially suppressing debate and shutting up our enemies; we have achieved it by entering into debate and outclassing our enemies. It would be foolish if – heady with our own success – we abandoned the principles that have brought us here.

Wipe the gooey drool from your chin and from your soggy copy of the Standard. Rub your eyes, even though they carry more black bags than the Ritz. Hope nobody noticed that you just slept past your tube stop. Oh, and pray your tonsils were not providing a revolting floor-show for too long.

Familiar? Londoners have a schizophrenic attitude towards sleep. We are all, always, exhausted. On average, we sleep 20 percent less than our parents’ generation, and it shows: glance at any crowded tube carriage and you’ll see a slew of slumped commuters. Millions of us deliberately skimp and scrape back the recommended eight hours - yet we are simultaneously buying and buying into a get-to-sleep industry that, according to the corporate bible Forbes magazine, is “almost as big as the sex industry in the US.” We spend over £100m on sleeping pills and gadgets in this city, and the market is swelling like a fluffed pillow.

And the next wave of the sleep industry is about to wash across the Atlantic. In the Mall of America in Minneapolis, there are over-subscribed ‘snoozing suites’ where busy shoppers pay a fiver for seventy minutes of quality napping in a darkened, warm womb-room. Christopher Lindhoist – head of a string of sleeping salons – says, “this is like opening gyms in the 1970s and selling bottled water in the 1980s. It’s the next big thing.” Is it? London is confused: we are swallowing fistfuls of sleeping pills, but with a big mug of black coffee. We want to sleep – but we don’t want to sleep. We crave bed, but spend less and less time there. I have twentysomething friends who brag about their six hours a night, see sleep as a symptom of caffeine deprivation – and are sagging into a premature middle age, with fading memories and aching bones, as a result.

Some people believe there is a natural explanation for London’s Sybil-like switching between insomnia and narcolepsy. This is one of the noisiest and most light-polluted cities on earth, where we cannot see the stars for the streetlamps – so is that what’s keeping us up? I’m sceptical. On the very rare occasions when I am coaxed to go to the living hell called ‘the countryside’ – oh, won’t somebody turn the M25 into a moat to keep it far from us? – the silence and darkness keep me awake and terrified. I can’t sleep without the lovely orange glow that hangs over this city, or the sweet chorus of car alarms and drunken swearing that wafts over an East End evening. And who wants to see the stars when you have Soho anyway?

So it must be something else – and I think it’s a bad, bad philosophy towards sleep. London is a frenetic, frantic city that believes down-time is dead-time. We have bought into the Thatcherite idea that sleep is for wimps. Perhaps the best expression of this, London’s secret philosophy, can be found in Jonathan Coe’s novel ‘The House of Sleep’, where a crazed sleep scientist raves that sleep is “the most widespread and life-curtailing disease of all. Forget cancer, multiple sclerosis, AIDS. If you spend eight hours a day in bed, then sleep is shortening your life by a third. That’s the equivalent of dying at the age of fifty – and it’s happening to all of us. This is more than just a disease; it is a plague.” Is there any Londoner who does not feel a small sliver of sympathy for this? Is there anybody here who did not feel a thrill when they heard the speculation in the New Scientist this week about a pill that could let us live on just two hours a day?

But this is based on an old view of sleep as a period when nothing happens, or even – as Edgar Allen Poe put it – that naps are “little slices of death”. In reality, neuroscientists have shown that sleep is when our brains consolidate memories. Far from being dormant, PET scans find that many parts of the brain are 20-30 percent more active during sleep – and cutting back on sleep is a false economy. Even if you only skimp on 40 minutes a day, you will be more sluggish, more forgetful, and more likely to crash your car.

Shakespeare had the right idea; he called sleep the “balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast.” We need to start seeing a proper sleep as equally important as eating well and exercising. (Oh – wait – nobody told me about those last two. Damn.) Or do we really want to be a city that skimps on its dream-time until we finally crash out on the Circle Line during rush-hour?

Seventeen years ago, the streets of Westminster and Bradford filled with smoke and shrieks as Muslim protestors threatened to “burn alive” a man who had dared to use his freedom of speech in a way they disliked. On the surface, it seems like little has changed since the Salman Rushdie affair, when a theocratic dictator demanded the slaughter of perhaps our greatest novelist and much of the democratic world equivocated. Once again, artists are driven into hiding in a liberal democracy for apparently insulting Islam. Once again, most of the democratic world resorts to a “yes… but…” non-defence of freedom. But this time there is a difference – an inspirational difference.

This time, moderate Muslims are fighting back. Slowly, steadily, a stream of heroic Muslims are standing up, loudly refusing to be defined by fanaticism and death-threats. In Jordan, the newspaper editor Jihad Momani has risked his life to publish the cartoons alongside an editorial demanding, “What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony in Amman?”

And across Britain, Muslim women are refusing to bow to fundamentalists who believe beheading is a legitimate form of literary criticism. While criticising the cartoons of Mohammed as “distasteful”, Fareena Alam, editor of the Q News, damned the protestors, demanding to know “what the parents of the child wearing the ‘I love Al-Quaeda’ cap would say had their son been on the number 30 bus that terrible day.” At a massive conference of young Muslims organised by Fareena last week, one speaker said the way for Muslims to express their faith was “to mobilise to end the conflict in Congo, or to make generic Aids drugs available where they are not”, to roof-raising cheers. Sairah Khan, the Muslim near-winner of the Apprentice, said the ‘Death to Freedom’ protestors were “far, far worse” than the cartoonists, adding “If you don’t like it here, go and live somewhere else.”

The right are busy hyping this fight as a Clash of Civilisations between democracy and Islam – but that is a betrayal of democratic Muslims like Jihad and Fareena and Sairah. This is a clash within Islam between democrats and totalitarians, and demonising all Muslims is a racist, foolish way to ensure the wrong side wins. Religions are not inert, homogenous blocks; they are elastic, and they stretch and shift shape over time. The British Muslim community is genuinely divided, as a recent Populus opinion poll proved: some 12 percent of Muslims my age believe suicide-murder in this country can “sometimes” be justified and 34 percent believe British Jews are “a legitimate target”, although at the other end of the spectrum more than half of British Muslims believe Israel has a right to exist. These are much better than the figures at the time of the Rushdie affair, showing that Muslim opinion is in flux – and can be swayed by persuasive argument.

Only a fierce, fighting moderate Islam can win this struggle. In France’s Muslim ghettoes, an amazing movement of Muslim women called "Ni putes ni soumises" (neither whores nor doormats) has risen up, initially to fight against the epidemic of domestic violence in their communities but increasingly to craft a liberal – even feminist – brand of Islam. In the past fortnight, we have seen the first stirrings from their British sisters.

I live round the corner from the East London mosque, and most weekends there are stalls of jihadists perched outside, preaching sharia law and suicide-slaughter. However tempting it might seem, I don’t want to see these young men driven underground (or Underground) through censorship and the introduction of thought-crimes like the government’s mooted ban on “glorifying terrorism”. I want to see every one of their stalls matched by a stall of feisty Muslim women like Sairah and Fareena, ridiculing their bizarre beliefs and manifest sexual inadequacy, and offering young Muslims a different and better brand of Islam. Don’t suppress the battle within Islam – let’s have it out on the open and on the streets, led by amazing Muslim women like Fareena and Sairah.