PETER HITCHENS: The night a fleet of Tory snake-oil tankers sailed into Rochester... and sank Mp Emily Thornberry has been sacked over posting a tweet which said 'image from Rochester' next to a picture of house draped with football flags I wondered how our neutered, bootlicking, pro-Government media would manage to turn David Cameron's devastating personal and political defeat in Rochester into a disaster for Red Ed. Piles of money, tankers laden with snake-oil, five visits by the Prime Minister himself, even a frantic plea for Guardian readers" votes could not save the Tories from what I reckon was the worst defeat in their entire history, losing a seat to a party that really believes in what the Tories pretend to believe in. Yet you'd think the main event was the sacking of a Labour nobody by another nobody for doing nothing. Here's the supposedly big story: Emily Thornberry MP posted a tweet in which she wrote the words "Image from Rochester" next to a picture of a house draped with football flags. Gosh. Somehow this non-event has led to her sacking. Admittedly she has been sacked from a non-job. And if I were Ed Miliband I would have relished the chance to get rid of this blowhard and poser. She once tried to attack me on Question Time, shrieking "How dare you!" at me for making a few mild remarks about the need for welfare reform. She sought (quite wrongly) to imply that by doing so I had attacked single mothers personally. I suppose it's fitting that someone who uses phoney outrage against others should herself be destroyed by phoney outrage. Ms Thornberry is a typical modern politician, struggling to fool her party's remaining loyal voters into believing she is anything other than a careerist professional. Like the former Tory MP and Cameron-boosting media figure Matthew Parris, who sneered at length about Clacton, Ms Thornberry was baffled and amazed when she actually visited modern England. Presumably, in her smooth daily journey from her rarefied London district to her office, she has never before seen St George's Cross flags draped on a house. The remarkable thing is that she thought such a sight was unusual and interesting enough to tweet. Peter Hitchens blog But the incident is essentially trivial. Compared to the earthquake of the Rochester result, it is as weighty and significant as a seagull-dropping falling on to a politician's greasy head. What does Rochester mean? It means that a barrier to real and significant change is crumbling and may yet collapse. Seven years ago the brilliant pollster and Blairite Establishment figure Peter Kellner (a longstanding Labour Party member) told me at a public debate: "I think it's really important that the Conservative Party does survive as a substantial brand, because there will always be a need for a centre-Right party." Need? I wondered as he spoke, who exactly needs it? Why does a lifelong Lefty like Mr Kellner wish to save the Tories? Mr Kellner read my mind and continued: "If the Conservatives were to go the way that Peter expects (and I think possibly would relish), I am frightened as to what kind of Right-of- centre politics would then spring up... The picture of the house draped with football flags which Thornberry tweeted, and which led to her sacking One of the great virtues of British politics... is that we have not had a substantial far-Right nationalist xenophobic party in Britain. A substantial Conservative Party is our best bulwark against the kind of politics that I think could become very nasty. When Mr Kellner uses terms such as "far-Right nationalist xenophobic," he means a party that would be hostile to the European Union's control of our Government, laws and borders. The British Left have for many years seen Brussels as the way to turn Britain into the sort of country they want, by the back door. If you doubt the strength of this link, please note that Mr Kellner is married to Baroness Ashton of Upholland, who has just retired from the European Commission, where she was its (greatly underestimated and unfairly mocked) foreign policy chief. The Tory Party has helped the Left for decades. It has blocked the creation of a strong pro-British parliamentary force. It has done so by pretending to love Britain when it doesn't. Its every pose is a fake. All its principal figures are fakes as well. And they have got away with it. For nearly eight years I have been in something close to despair at the continued willingness of patriotic British men and women to give their votes to the Conservative Party. This weekend, for the first time, I begin to have a very faint hope that they have finally seen through the Tory fraud. Rochester has shown that a pro-British rebellion against the Tories could, if properly handled, sweep the country, elbowing Labour aside as it does so. What I hope for is what the Establishment fear. That is why they hope you will be distracted by the drivelling fate of a New Labour nonentity. Do not be. A Vital message - hidden in a laughable movie Crowds are flocking to see The Imitation Game, the laughable new film about computer genius Alan Turing. I think they are mainly women besotted with Benedict Cumberbatch, though some men may enjoy the sight of Keira Knightley got up as a 1940s intellectual sexpot. It's the usual hopeless attempt to recreate the past by dressing the cast in acres of tweed, making them all smoke and renting some ancient cars. But the ending is genuinely horrible. The homosexual Turing is shown robbed of his mental powers by hormone drugs supposedly intended to make him "normal." DRUGGED: Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing with co-star Keira Knightley in The Imitation Game We can all shudder at this stupid and wrong treatment. But it is easy to condemn the follies of the past. At the time, fashionable opinion believed Turing's "chemical castration" was a humane alternative to prison. What similarly stupid things do we believe today? How about this? Despite growing medical doubts (a report this week said it had more to do with drug marketing than medicine), we dope huge numbers of children with pills very similar to illegal amphetamines. This mass-doping is justified by the suspect "diagnosis" of an alleged complaint called "ADHD." If Alan Turing were a child now, I think it pretty likely that his "odd" behaviour would lead him to be drugged in this way, killing his special talents. It seems to me very probable that, as you read this, some potential genius is having his life blighted, forced by smiling adults to swallow pills to make him "normal." We can see this was wrong in 1953. Why can't we see it is wrong now? How can it possibly be balanced for the Radio 4 Today programme to run an uncritical, near-reverent commercial for cannabis, as it did on Wednesday? People who take this drug can end up in locked wards for the rest of their lives. Who was responsible? I just thought I would note that it is now officially recognised that the police have been fiddling crime figures, a fact I was jeered at for exposing some time ago. Mind you, the authorities still can't quite admit that the reason for this is political pressure. Of course it is.