PETER HITCHENS: Putin already knows Trident is an obsolete monster. The real question is: DO YOU?

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A Trident II, or D-5 missile, is launched from an Ohio-class submarine

If Trident missile launches are so secret, why was I invited by the British Embassy in Washington to go and watch one? 

It was May 1994 and HMS Vanguard was launching Britain’s first ever D-5 Trident rocket down the 5,000-mile range towards Ascension Island. It was held in conditions of total publicity.

The US Navy was rather embarrassingly in charge. I and several other invited guests watched the occasion from an American support ship, where we were given souvenir baseball caps, lent powerful binoculars and plied with hot dogs.

It was more like a day at the races than a rehearsal for Armageddon, not least because Greenpeace activists were trying their best to get in the way.

They nearly succeeded, but just as time was about to run out, the sinister cylinder leapt from the warm Florida sea (we weren’t far from Orlando and Disney World), ignited and hurtled off towards Africa, via space.

I have absolutely no doubt that the Russian Navy was also watching the £17 million spectacular. It had long been a tradition for them to do so, as the launches are announced in advance to make sure aircraft stay out of the way.

A Polaris captain once told me how he had just surfaced after despatching one of his missiles when the international frequency crackled into life and a Russian voice said in perfect English: ‘Congratulations, Captain, on a successful launch!’ So whatever the reason for staying quiet about the failed flight of a Trident missile last June, it wasn’t to keep it from the wicked Russians. Every intelligence service in the world will have known within minutes.

The reason for keeping quiet was to keep it from us, the British people, in case we start wondering whether we really need this wildly costly Cold War superpower weapon. Given that we’re broke, that the Cold War ended in 1991, and we aren’t a superpower, I should have thought the answer is obvious. We don’t need this colossal weapon any more than an elderly suburban couple need to starve themselves to maintain a Lamborghini.

The huge Soviet armies in Germany, which Trident was rightly designed to deter back in 1972, are gone for ever. It’s not unpatriotic to want us to have a smaller, more modest nuclear weapon. On the contrary, it’s unpatriotic for Sir Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, to carry on ignoring the terrible state of the conventional Army and Navy, rapidly losing their technical strength and their hard core of experience, so that we can pay for this obsolete monster.

The Big Drug Con marches on 

Police, having more or less given up enforcing the cannabis law

Police, having more or less given up enforcing the cannabis law because they didn’t feel like bothering, have now begun a stealthy campaign to decriminalise Class A drugs by default.

They have been doing this since April last year. The Home Office – then run by Theresa May – were informed. They did nothing to stop the retreat.

This week I learned that Avon and Somerset police in the South West (there may be others) have been operating ‘diversion’ schemes. Those caught with illegal drugs (which in many cases carry a theoretical penalty of seven years in prison) are offered a ‘workshop’ which lasts three and a half hours. If they accept, the case is dropped.

So far, nearly 350 people have taken advantage of the ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ offer, made even to those with past drug convictions. The scheme was devised by the force’s ‘drug strategy manager’, who is not a police officer.

The Home Office were extremely cagey about exactly when they were told, but it is beyond belief to think the force did not keep them informed from the start, or that they couldn’t have stopped it if they had wanted to. They didn’t want to, but they hoped nobody would notice.

They told me testily: ‘This Government has no intention of decriminalising drugs’ – guiltily answering a question I hadn’t even asked. 

Even that statement is a whopping half-truth. For decades (I’ve written a book about it) the Home Office has been decriminalising cannabis in practice, often while making loud claims that this will ‘free up’ officers to fight the supposedly ‘harder drugs’. 

Not that cannabis is soft. The law stays on the books. It just isn’t enforced. But if you look at court cases and prosecutions, there’s no sign that this ‘freeing up’ has led to any tougher action there either. 

The Home Office added: ‘Police are operationally independent and chief constables have discretion to decide within the law how to deal with offenders.’

Another half-truth. A chief constable who offered such workshops to child sex abusers would instantly be in huge trouble. Police chiefs know this Government’s pose of being tough on drugs is just that – a pose. A few noisy raids on dealers are expected to fool the public into believing something is being done. In fact, as my revelation shows, they have surrendered but are too cowardly to admit it.

ELEGANT CLOTHES CAN'T OBSCURE SQUALID REALITY 

 Natalie Portman plays President John F. Kennedy's wife in the new biopic, Jackie

I was puzzled by the strange new film Jackie, about the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, starring Natalie Portman, left. 

What is it for? It shows her, after her husband’s assassination, as wishing for death, angry, resentful of JFK’s successor Lyndon Johnson – and many other quite understandable things. 

It revels in portraying her as a heavy smoker, something she sought to hide in real life. But in general it seems to be trying to restore some of the long-rotted glamour of ‘Camelot’ to JFK’s White House. 

You can see why American liberals might want to clutch at such things in the era of Donald Trump’s White House, which is emphatically not Camelot. 

Mr Trump is so lumpish and unromantic that he makes Richard Nixon look like Oscar Wilde. 

But there was no Camelot. The Kennedy years were often squalid and very dangerous. The fact that they looked more elegant doesn’t really excuse that.

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Pausing for a physical needs break in Cambridge’s beautiful but wildly Leftist King’s College the other day, I found myself baffled at the lavatory door. Where were the Gents’ and Ladies’ conveniences I had used so many times before, just behind the Junior Common Room?

They had been abolished. Instead, I could choose between ‘Cubicles and Urinals’ or ‘Cubicles’. Fuddled with flu, I eventually worked out which of these I preferred. But, of course, the whole point was that it wouldn’t have mattered. There was no more right or wrong, on this subject at least.

Thus has ‘gender neutrality’ arrived at the college once adorned by the mighty economist Maynard Keynes (who went in for a bit of gender neutrality himself).

I laughed quite a lot. But is this a bad thing? In itself, not really. But the huge, expensive effort to pretend that there are no objective differences between the sexes is very bad, because it simply isn’t true, and I think much sadness will result from it.

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