For years, I have worried that the police are becoming too powerful and too dismissive of the public they are supposed to serve. As they have become more political, more left-wing, and less interested in preventing or prosecuting crime and disorder, they have also become more authoritarian and more distant.

This week I have solid proof that this is so. This comes from the mouths of the police themselves. Because I dared to disagree with their point of view, these people reacted like a young Victorian aunt confronted with the glimpse of a bare piano leg.

The cries of indignation and the squeaking of pearls being squeezed can probably be heard as far away as Belgium.

As you will see, they would have been better advised to sniff their smelling salts, lie down for a bit in a dark room, and listen to whale music. But, as a beautiful Irish phrase goes, they “lost control of themselves” and went a little crazy.

Some of what they did must remain confidential to protect my sources. But take my word for it, this is a pretty mild version of the story.

The problem lay in a media briefing organized by Cheshire Police and the Crown Prosecution Service just before the trial of

Lucy Letby. If this was just an unbiased factual discussion on technicalities, why didn’t they also invite Ms. Letby’s defense team? Well, they didn’t. They argued that because I didn’t accept their rationale for holding this event (and I absolutely don’t), that meant I didn’t understand what they told me, probably because I’m stupid.

I understand all of this very well. I simply don’t agree with that, even though I explained their position in my column and accurately quoted what they said.

They accused me of “negligence.” This is not the case. I spent several days exchanging emails with them about this.

At issue was a briefing held by Cheshire Police and the Crown Prosecution Service for the media, just before Lucy Letby’s trial.

The idea that people could have divergent opinions on such a subject seems to be a shocking mystery to them. I think the police – like most public and powerful agencies – seek warm relationships with the media so that they can keep them listening. Their current offended irritability greatly encourages me in my opinion.

Cheshire Police wrote to the Mail on Sunday, strongly implying that we should not have published my column.

Shortly afterwards we received an epistle from various notables from the College of Policing, the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the Crown Prosecution Service, suggesting that this newspaper publish an article “which seeks to provide clarity to your readers” (i.e. which takes a different point of view than mine).

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think a society in which the police seek to influence what newspapers publish, whether facts or opinions, would be a society gone seriously wrong . There’s a name for countries like that that slipped my mind.

Then, on Friday, the Mail on Sunday received a sharp email saying our behavior was causing “disgust and dismay” among police forces in England and Wales. Let us recall that this overheated performance followed my publication of an undisputed fact, and the expression of an informed opinion on the subject.

If this is how they behave towards Britain’s biggest Sunday newspaper, what must they be like?

as in the face of a powerless citizen who has the nerve to disagree with his opinions?

Why is the BBC so interested in Syrian rebels?

The BBC and the “retirees” they love to interview are extremely excited about events in Syria. For what?

Everyone knows that the “rebels” currently sweeping this unfortunate country are ferocious Islamist militants.

the kind we generally fear and dislike. The Assad regime in Damascus is appalling (even though the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that nest of cynics, organized a meeting for him with the late queen in December 2002). But do we really want Al-Qaeda veterans to replace him?

In fact, we have no principles regarding torture chambers and massacres and we are friendly towards the very evil regimes of countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

All this reminds me of our mad enthusiasm to remove Libyan Colonel Gaddafi, a madness that created endless chaos and ushered in the era of uncontrolled migration across the Mediterranean, which forever changed the destiny of Europe. Do these people have any idea what they are doing?

The Ralph Movie Commits a Deadly Sin

Why so much fuss about Conclave, a new film starring Ralph Fiennes, above, about numerous cardinals choosing a new pope?

The whole thing appears to have been filmed during a power outage. It was so dark that Mrs. Hitchens, sitting next to me, thought it was night and fell asleep.

A key conversation takes place as helicopters roar overhead, so it’s hard to make out.

The main conservative character is, of course, stupid and rude.

And we are invited to think that traditional prayers and large families are bad things.

I am one of the last English Protestants for whom the Roman Catholic Church will always remain another country. But my sword comes out of its sheath to defend it against this liberal block.

We are in a country beyond satire

In Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, genius Lewis Carroll depicted royal gardeners being forced to paint white roses red by a mad monarch. He also described a trial in which the sentence came first and the verdict later.

In Gulliver’s Travels, another genius, Jonathan Swift, describes a man who “had been working for eight years on a project to extract the sun’s rays from cucumbers, which were to be put in hermetically sealed vials and allowed to escape to warming the air in humid conditions.” are “.

I fear that almost no one reads these great English classics anymore. If they had, could food manufacturers have drugged their cattle to make them less flatulent, as they do?

Without satire, societies go crazy, like ours today.

• On paper, there is no point in renationalizing the railways little by little. Everything has to be in a coordinated organization, from the signals to the sandwiches (they weren’t that bad). And until it does, don’t expect any improvement.