One

Together with Mrs Gabb, I have just returned to London from a week's holiday in Cornwall. We had a delightful time exploring Tintagel and the wild coast around and walking on Bodmin Moor. We followed the paths of the old smugglers and wreckers, and rejoiced when told that the people of Cornwall have again taken to smuggling - this time of recreational drugs - now that fishing in British waters has been outlawed by the European Union.

Best of all, though, we made a deliberate effort so far as possible to avoid the newspapers and television. Every so often, my eyes would light on a newspaper filled with atrocity propaganda against the Serbs, but I would quickly avert my gaze and continue with the pretence that I was living back in the England of my childhood - surrounded by normal people not afraid to speak their mind about drugs and guns and compulsory metrication and the traitor Government far off in London.

If only we had a Conservative Party - something able to gather up and focus this patriotic and liberal sentiment. It could bring down the whole rotten structure of our present Establishment in months.

Sadly, the name is already taken, and colonised by so many political hermit crabs - creatures like John Maples, a spokesman on defence who as my MP in the 1980s spent much of his time trying to get a local gun shop closed down, and that absurd parody of a garden gnome William Hague.

"Is there to be no salvation for us" I sometimes asked in Cornwall. My answer, now I am back in London, is "probably not".

Two

Why do so many politicians fall apart as soon as they get into office? John Major was Prime Minister for six and a half years. In this time, he seemed to age at least twenty. It was the same with Kenneth Clarke, and even worse for Michael Heseltine. In just two years, Tony Blair has begun to go bald and is looking increasingly haggard. Other Ministers are beginning to age.

Margaret Thatcher, on the other hand, left office after eleven years of frantic activity looking better than she started. I grant she had the advantage of being able to pile on as much paint as her face would take, and of a high and stable intake of alcohol. But I do not think this is the whole explanation.

The true reason, according to my Friend and Proprietor Chris R. Tame, is that she had principles and they have none. She knew roughly what she wanted and roughly how to get it. She had to make endless compromises, and these often blew her far off course. But she always knew what was a compromise and how far it was from what she really wanted; and she usually knew when the advice people gave her was good or bad for advancing her agenda.

Try to imagine how hard it is to govern a country without fixed principles. There is the daily job of reading and assimilating huge amounts of data. Things keep happening that are beyond your prediction or control. You are surrounded by colleagues and advisers and lobbyists all telling you what to do. They do not agree on what you ought to do, but are good at producing unanswerable reasons for why you should do what they want. Do we or do we not sign up for the Single Currency? These people say we have no future outside it. These other people say it will end in disaster. Both have 500 page briefing documents filled with statistics and reasonings that might make sense read and considered over a quiet weekend - only there are no quiet weekends. Everyone seemed so pleased when you stood up and said "the only thing that matters is what works". The problem is that you cannot decide between different policies, any one of which might "work". No wonder you begin look and feel like a hunted animal.

Though we may not deserve to have him as Prime Minister, perhaps Mr Blair in a very real sense has got his just deserts!

Three

 I have decided not to review the Stephen Lawrence Report. The temptation to poke fun at its oily, sentimental style would have been too much. So too would have been the temptation to insult the Lawrence family and their friends. I sympathise with their loss and wish more had been done to catch the people who murdered their son. But their continued public grieving has become tiresome, and is being used to promote an agenda of hatred and tyranny that is in the interests of no ordinary person, black or white.

The Home Office has long been chafing within the restraints imposed by the Jury system. Despite three decades of gradual abolition, it still remains a shield against injustice. Ending the double jeopardy rule - letting the authorities drag acquitted suspects back into court after the discovery of fresh "evidence" - would cut out the ten years or so during which Trial by Jury would otherwise remain effective.

Similarly, the proposal to make criminal offences out of what people say to each other at home would finish the removal of obstacles that the Home Office has been clearing a block at a time for years.

The Report has been interpreted largely in racial terms. But though part of its agenda is the promotion of black racism, by far the most important part is an impartial destruction of liberty and its safeguards. And this agenda is not being advanced by the usual beasts like Michael Howard and Jack Straw, but as a means of wiping the bravely pained look from Neville Lawrence's face.

The time has come - in the public interest and for the preservation of their own dignity - for the Lawrences to go away and grieve in private. For the past six years, they have enjoyed the kind of hushed reverence that only dead royalty normally gets. But they should bear in mind how sluttish the media is in this country. Like the mob in first century Palestine, they cry "Hosanna" today and "crucify" tomorrow.

The only good to come out of the Report is that the Police got officially knocked off their perch. I am not sure about this Trotskyite notion of "institutional racism", but I have never met a police officer who was not incompetent or stupid or malevolent, or all three. I have no doubt they treated the murder as just one more crime they should pretend to solve. The only pity is that the Report fails to recommend the right solution. Instead of trying to brainwash the Police into thinking and acting like Guardian-readers - a brainwashing that would make them worse than they are, even if it could work - the true solution would be to abolish state policing. I do not mean privatisation - I mean outright abolition: no more constables. Give me the right to blow a five inch diameter hole through the back of any thief or murderer that comes my way, and you can keep PC Plod.

Yes, I think I decided right. 3,000 words of the above might have given entirely the wrong impression about me.