Alex Singleton

Christianity cuts crime (Photo: Corbis)

At the risk of giving Richard Dawkins a heart attack, there’s one man Ken Clarke, the Justice Secretary, really ought to meet, and he’s Chuck Colson. The former Nixon advisor, who went to jail for his involvment in the Watergate scandal, has spent decades promoting evangelical Christianity to American prisoners. And it’s very clear that his work has cut crime.

In Texas, for example, reoffending dropped from 55 per cent to eight per cent for those who took part in his InnerChange prison programme. Officials are effusive with praise. Joan Fabian, the Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Corrections said: “I was skeptical in the beginning, but it is one of the best things that we’ve done in our system. I think its a program that is just the right one when nothing else worked.”

Some evangelicals have tried to expand this programme into Britain, most notably into Dartmoor Prison. The organisers who went into that prison claimed that the prisoners on the scheme saw “their outlook, their behaviour, even their appearance” undergo transformation in most cases. That didn’t stop InnerChange being booted out, after huge opposition from quangocrats, who see Christianity as intolerant of homosexuals and other religions.

Well, despite the efforts of friends, I don’t believe in God, and I also have libertarian social views. But I’m concerned about what works, and if Christianity can provide a crutch that stops convicts falling back into a life of mugging and robbing everyone else, who cares if the religion’s true, or even if it’s a bit un-PC?

Suddenly I’ve become a poster boy for the Republican Right. It started when Fox News linked to a blog I’d written suggesting, not terribly seriously, that Brits ought to boycott America in retaliation against Barack Obama’s refusal to support us in the Falklands.

Now thousands of emails are being forwarded around the US – particularly in southern states such as Texas – quoting me. The Telegraph’s reader-relations department is being innundated with queries asking if I really called for a boycott of America. And Google tells me that quotes from the post now appear in hundreds of websites.

This would all be fine, except that after the first paragraph in the email, it transforms into a rant about “Barack Hussein Obama”, using bizarre language that certainly isn’t mine. No doubt this email appeals to the nuttier supporters of the Republican Party, for whom politics has ceased to be about principles and is now all about smearing opponents with false accusations about their nationalities and their patriotism. It also contains the delusional claim that Reagan supported Thatcher over the Falklands (he didn’t) and denounces Obama for failing to suck up to Gordon Brown (as if that was a bad thing).

My new fans won’t like me saying this, but while Barack Obama is clearly one of the most hopeless Western leaders at the moment, I haven’t forgiven the Republicans for their disgraceful record under George W. Bush. These supposed conservatives stood by as Bush threw away the wonderful Reagan legacy by signing off on ruinous spending commitments and imposing economically illiterate steel tariffs, as he destroyed ancient civil liberties, and as he sank their country into an ill-conceived and disasterously managed war in Iraq. Britain’s Conservatives, even under Ted Health, have never been that destructive.

Gareth Malone takes a break from wearing tweed

The BBC has taken a minority interest that’s seen as seen as elitist and boring and turned into one of the most gripping programmes on television.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, Gareth Malone Goes to Glyndebourne is a prime-time show about opera. Malone, an energy-filled, dapper 35 year-old who looks about 22, is putting together a specially-commissioned opera – but he’s trying to cast its chorus with teenagers from council estates, including one adolescent who’s just come out of prison and has an attitude problem. The challenge, over the three-part series, is to get his chorus singing and acting to a standard that doesn’t embarrass the professional singers taking the main parts.

This is the sort of thing the BBC should be doing all the time: taking the arts and making them interesting for a prime-time audience – rather than just trying to copy ITV with entertainment that’s “safe” in the eyes of commissioning editors.

It’s a pity, then, that the BBC has slashed BBC Four’s budget, the supposed “place to think” in its empire, from 64.8 million in 2007-8 to £53.5m this year. The channel was already starved of cash anyway, and forced to broadcast endless repeats. While BBC Four broadcasts for 2,286 hours a year, the BBC Trust only makes it show 100 hours of new arts and music programmes and 110 hours of new documentaries in a whole year.

The BBC neglects BBC Four so much that a senior executive at the corporation told me last year that he thought that BBC Four would be closed, with the programming moved to BBC Two, because there wasn’t enough money. That didn’t happen, thank God, but the fact that someone at the Beeb’s top table believed that was the likely outcome indicates just how low down public-service broadcasting has become.

Malone’s programme shows that the BBC can produce truly superb public-service output, but can anyone persuade the Beeb to do more of it?

The Left did a lot of sniggering one day in August 2008. That was when Policy Exchange launched a report saying that regional development policy had failed and calling for unemployed Scousers to move down south to successful cities, such as Oxford and Cambridge.

The Labour Party and at the BBC ridiculed it, suggesting that it proved that the Tories hated the north. And as the report came from “David Cameron’s favourite think tank”, Cameron was also keen to wade in with criticism. He denounced it as “insane” and “rubbish from start to finish. It certainly won’t become Conservative policy”.

This was a disaster for Policy Exchange’s reputation, and even some of its own staff told me that they were embarrassed. They blamed it on the the lack of a boss – the outgoing director had not seen the study before release. And the writing of the press release had been outsourced to a PR company, which wrote it provocatively.

The strange thing is that, two years later, the thrust of the report is now government policy – the state is going to give help to people to relocate.

Iain Duncan Smith told the Telegraph that “we have workforces that are locked to areas… Often they are trapped in estates where there is no work near there and – because they have a lifetime tenure of that house – to go to work from east London to west London, or Bristol, or whatever is too much of a risk because if you up sticks and go you will have lost your right to your house… Sometimes you just need to be able to move to the work.”

So no need for Policy Exchange to be red-faced: what was insanity for the Tories in Opposition is now common sense.

I dare say that you’ve never heard of Timothy Kirkhope MEP. He has the presence of a paperclip – but he is actually quite important. As the effective leader of Conservative Party in Europe, he ought to be leading the fight to sack thousands of Brussels bureaucrats, to abolish the Common Agricultural Policy, to tear down the Common External Tarriff and to reclaim our fisheries.

Instead, his website reveals that he rejects what genuine Conservatives believe. He is (of course) against leaving the EU. But he goes further, endorsing “the principle of the states of Europe coming together to cooperate freely within a framework of common institutions based on the rule of law”. I don’t know about you, but that sounds rather like a European superstate to me.

He is against a “tedious institutional debate” (ie, any discussions about the stuff that really matters) wanting only for Europe to “focus on the real issues that matter to people” (ie, to the political class). He wants the EU to focus on running our economy, promoting a “strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth” which can deliver “high levels of employment, productivity and social inclusion”. There’s a term for this: it’s called economic union. Oh, and he also wants Brussels to “play a leading role” in tackling climate change.

Now I’m sure that Kirkhope isn’t the most fanatical pro-European in Brussels by any means – but couldn’t the Tories choose someone with views that aren’t quite so abhorrent to his party’s rank and file? There are Conservative MEPs who actually believe in conservative principles and are prepared to defend Britain’s interests against those of the Commission. “Vicky” Kirkhope, as he is mysteriously known, isn’t one of them.

If there’s one thing that the Department for International Development should scrap immediately, it’s a magazine called “Developments”. This has been costing taxpayers £400,000 a year and is distributed free of charge – well, no one in their right mind would pay for it. It reads like a magazine in search of a purpose, and is so boring that my copy normally goes into the bin within 30 seconds of opening.

Yet the Tories have missed a brilliant opportunity to show that they want to purge DFID’s wasteful expenditure by deciding to keep the publication. What they plan to do, apparently after pressure from the Treasury, is to stop sending it overseas. This change will cut £186,000 of distribution costs and £18,000 in printing costs.

That might seem welcome, but it still leaves around £200,000 of taxpayers’ money squandered on an unnecessary venture. A DFID spokesman told me that the department is “urgently reviewing” other ways to make savings in the magazine’s production, but the department still wants its 31,000 British readers to receive the publication.

Now I can see why DFID likes having a printed magazine – it looks good on coffee tables and makes DFID’s aid bureaucrats feel important. But if the department wants to communicate effectively with the development community – which accounts for 72 per cent of the magazine’s readers – there’s something it should know: many of the magazine’s target readers are rarely back at base to read their post, and if they are, find themselves inundated with reading material.

Let’s face it: effective aid workers spend large amounts of the year away from their offices in impoverished communities abroad. A printed publication is a singularly bad way of communicating with them and the DFID website would do a perfectly good job of communicating pertinent information without it.

There is no point to this vanity magazine, which does nothing to reduce poverty. The Tories should look again and scrap it.

Diane Abbott is refreshingly honest for a politician (Photo: Christine Boyd)

No, I haven’t gone completely mad. Nor am I suggesting this as some Right-wing plot to lumber Labour with an electorial liability. After all, a PoliticsHome poll says that the public backs her bid for leadership and, even though some votes from Tories and Lib Dems could have been disingenous, she’s clearly built a strong rapport with the public.

I hope Diane Abbott becomes Labour leader because, unlike so many politicians, she did something beautiful: she put her family above her ridiculous politics.

After sending her son to a £10,000-a-year public school in 2003, she admitted hypocrisy. “It is inconsistent, to put it mildly, for someone who believes in a fairer and more egalitarian society to send their child to a fee-paying school”, she said, but explained: “I had to choose between my reputation as a politician and my son.”

It’s easy to sneer at her actions. It would have been much easier (and cheaper) for her to do a David Cameron and send her son to the local comp (there was no local grammar school). Or to have engaged in the intellectual gymnastics so common among the political class to justify herself. But she didn’t – and that’s why she would be such a refreshing party leader.

Pity about her politics.

There’s no let-up on bad spending ideas coming from the Tory-run Department for International Development (DFID). It is going to spend £2.95 million to give Uganda 45 million condoms, along with some implantable and oral contraceptives. “Who could be against that?”, the sandal-wearing do-gooders at DFID might be wondering. Well me, for a start – and no, I’m not a Catholic.

No one wants HIV/AIDS to spread, but free distribution will never work. As Professor William Easterly, the eminent development economist, has argued, there’s no shortage of Coca-Cola in Africa, and condoms should be treated in the same, for-profit way.

Coke and other soft drinks are vital way of getting something drinkable in rural africa, and tens of thousands of entrepreneurial Africans sell them out of wooden shacks and by the side of roads. The drinks are affordable, but by charging, Africans are able to make a living distributing them.

However, when aid agencies reject the market and demand that Africans distribute goods free of charge, little distribution takes place. It’s now widely accepted that aid-funded bed-nets, which are supposed to stop malaria, are routinely dumped in villages with community leaders and forgotten about, or used as fishing nets. Few of the promiscuous men who would benefit from condoms are going to happily accept contraceptives from community leaders, because it would damage their pride. Nor are they likely to request them from a hospital.

And there is considerable evidence that women who take aid-funded contraceptives are often subject to domestic violence from husbands who accuse them of infidelity or who think that it is the husband’s role to make decisions about family planning.

Moreover, the DFID scheme is unsustainable. 45 million condoms for a population of 33.3 million means little more than one condom for every citizen per year. When so many men are engaged with multiple sexual partners, it’s clear that aid-funded schemes simply can’t compete the scale that profit-making businesses can deliver, but by making people feel that condoms should be free, DFID will undermine those who want to sell them.

And much as the do-gooders will hate me for saying this, sleeping around is not a human right. When people are dying of diseases such as malaria and TB through no fault of their own, directing money to help people carry on sowing their oats is the wrong approach.

DFID opposes abstinence-only AIDS-awareness programmes. Instead, it is supposed to support the ABC technique of preventing HIV – abstinence, be faithful, use a condom. But, in practice, DFID-funded projects are surprisingly quiet on the A and the B – staffed, as they are, by politically correct workers who think telling poor people to stop having sex with prostitutes and other peoples’ wives is racist.

Andrew Mitchell gets to spend three times as much as the FCO (Photo: Jane Mingay)

As a special treat one Christmas, Andrew Mitchell invited me, and a few others who’d been helpful to him, for drinks. As one of his assistants started pouring the champagne, Mitchell – in his typically Alan B’Stard way – interjected and instructed her to pour us only half a glass. We were also handed half a mince pie. Mitchell then spoke of how much he appreciated our help.

If only Mitchell – now the International Development Secretary – treated aid like he treats his friends (and his own money), taxes could be cut. Unfortunately, his prestige is determined by the size of his department’s budget, so he is supporting a massive expansion of aid.

Only today, his department has issued a statement congratulating itself for squandering our money by sending Liverpool’s football coaches to South Africa – which isn’t even a poor country – to share the “magic of football”. The department, bizarely, thinks football coaching will reduce HIV, presumably because the coaches will also talk about safe sex.

This is absurd, but if Mitchell removed all the ridiculous and ineffective expenditure from his department, would there by anything left?

Three cheers for Liam Fox. He’s said what all sound Conservatives think, which is that “we are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country. We are there so the people of Britain and our interests are not threatened.”

This is a distinct snub to Andrew Mitchell, the new International Development Secretary. Mitchell was on the same trip to Afghanistan as Fox and – sounding like a spokesman for Christian Aid – emphasised how vital it was that British taxpayers fund the country’s schools. In fact, the evidence from elsewhere is that schools funded by our Department for International Development force the closure of good quality indiginous schools and lead to lower quality educational standards.

Mitchell has ceased to be a conservative, but it is good to see that he has at least one colleague willing to put his brand of global socialism in its place.