PETER HITCHENS: How dare Burnham use the soldiers of the King as stage props for his Ukraine police?

Andrew Burnham breached our constitution very seriously on Wednesday. He had absolutely no business deploying soldiers of the Irish Guards, in full ceremonial uniform, outside his Downing Street office.He did this so he could show off to Ukraine's President Zelensky. Yet Mr Burnham is not head of state or commander-in-chief. He was usurping privileges which belong very strictly to the Crown.In fact, this is one of the main reasons we have a king, to stop partisan politicians posing alongside soldiers, taking salutes or riding about in horsedrawn carriages. I hope he gets into trouble for this arrogance.Yet will anything happen? Our governing elite, in all the big parties, suffer from a strange swooning romance with Ukraine, a country with which we do not even have an alliance. The Ukrainian flag has been flying for years from British Government offices, a privilege never given to any other country (I don't recall the Falklands flag flying over Whitehall during the conflict there).How touching. But this grand passion has done Ukraine no good. It has prolonged its agony. The 'help' we give them is not the sort of help most sensible people would want. It does not bring peace nearer but pushes it further away. It stokes the furnaces of war, which are the furnaces of hell. That country is now trapped in a forever war which has killed and maimed untold numbers of its people, creating graveyards you can see from space. It has forced millions to flee and resulted in the gruesome destruction of its cities and its civilisation. Prime Minister Andy Burnham deployed soldiers of the Irish Guards, in full ceremonial uniform, outside his Downing Street office Well, if we were a great and wealthy world power, this would be a policy you could at least argue for, though I think the case for it is thin. But we are not. Hardly a day goes by when we do not learn of another warship laid up, or broken down, or another failed military project, or that our army has shrunk again. We would have a hard time taking on Legoland or Ruritania in war.Nor can we afford to fix this. At the end of July, our public sector net debt reached £2,984.9 billion, that is 94 per cent of our Gross Domestic Product. Since February 2014, when Ukraine's democratically elected president was overthrown in a squalid coup (condoned by us), so beginning the current crisis, we have sent £25 billion to Ukraine, nearly £14 billion of it in gifts of military assistance including missiles, air defence systems, tanks and drones. I will not bother to list all the parts of our economy and society which are failing because of lack of money. You experience them every day. The roads are full of holes. Our power grid trembles on the edge of a major failure. So, I suspect, does the pound.Are the warmongers confident of their case? I don't think so. Did anyone ever ask you if you wanted this policy? Did you ever hear a fair debate about it? If you dare to criticise it, the answer comes in the form of slanderous insults and claims of treachery. Stop playing at soldiers, Mr Burnham.Why is BBC biased against Lucy Letby? Does Britain in fact have a secret colony on the Moon? I ask only because so many people seem to have completely missed the three years of devastating public demolition of the feeble case against Lucy Letby.She didn't confess. She wasn't always there when babies died. She wasn't caught red-handed. In fact there's no evidence she ever harmed anyone at all. More than one piece of the remaining 'evidence' against her turns out to be highly dodgy. Yet Lady Justice Thirlwall came up with a report that didn't seem to have noticed any of this.The BBC is much the same. On Friday it noisily promoted an interview with one of Ms Letby's accusers, Dr Stephen Brearey. In my view he has his own troubles. But repeated plugs of this interview on BBC Radio 4 contained no acknowledgement that the Letby conviction had been challenged by experts, former Cabinet ministers and a retired Supreme Court judge. They did eventually get round to it in the introduction to the interview, which many will not have heard. But presenter Anna Foster appeared to be conducting the exchange with Dr Brearey from a kneeling position. I think the word 'untough' fits it well.Perhaps she was exhausted by her earlier savaging of Reform's Robert Jenrick.Yes, that must be it. We all know the BBC is biased, but why is it biased in favour of a severe miscarriage of justice? Lucy Letby was convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven othersHistory minus the rude bitsI have at last been to the proper British version of the Bayeux Tapestry, housed in the town hall museum in Reading. It is really very good, the work of Victorian ladies from Staffordshire. There is no entrance fee and there are no seething crowds.It does have one striking difference from the original, which is said to feature either 93 or 94 penises, most of them belonging to horses.In Reading there are none, but one character has been equipped with a very sturdy pair of pants to preserve his modesty.Police raid Turkey's TV opposition A few days ago, police raided the studios of Turkey's last major opposition TV channel. This happened at a key moment in the 'trial' of that country's opposition leader, who faces about 2,000 years in prison in a ludicrous prosecution. Turkey's tyrant, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is the twin of Vladimir Putin. But the blowhards who never cease to attack Putin never criticise Erdogan. Is this because Turkey is a member of that supposed bastion of democracy and freedom, Nato, and that his behaviour shows up all our pretences? Yes, it is. Pictured: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan