Month: January 2022

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a US president utter anything quite so cretinous and subversive as Biden’s statement the other day.

How will America respond to Russia’s impending attack on the Ukraine? That was one of the first questions asked at the press conference, and surely it was entirely predictable.

Biden’s coaches must have drilled the appropriate reply into his mind, but their pedagogic efforts went to waste. For Biden effectively encouraged Putin to invade.

“I think what you’re going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades,” he said. “And it depends on what it does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do, et cetera.”

And who will judge whether the incursion is minor or major, Joe? For example, if the Russians annex Kharkov, Ukraine’s second largest city, would that qualify as minor? Compared to Kiev, it doubtless would be.

That sends an unmistakable message to Putin: Go ahead, Vlad. As long as you don’t occupy the whole country and hang President Zelensky off the steeple of Kiev’s Saint Sophia, you’ll get nothing worse than a gentle rap on the wrist.

Biden’s craven idiocy reminds me of the old communist dogma about the historical insignificance of any person running a country. History, you see, unfolds according to its own unbreakable laws, and no one can make it deviate from the course thus charted.

Like all Marxism (and any other secular determinism), this is demonstrable bilge. However, if pressed, I might accept that the personality of a leader doesn’t matter very much during an historical lull.

However, during a storm, especially one of hurricane strength, a strong hand on the tiller can make all the difference. If we fearlessly entered the subjunctive territory, we could perhaps suggest that the French Revolution might not have happened had France been ruled by Louis XIV, not Louis XVI.

Had England, France, Germany and Russia had different personages at the helm in 1914, neither world war might have broken out, and the two most satanic regimes in history might not have crawled out of the swamp. And if Churchill rather Chamberlain had been prime minister in 1938… well, you get the message.

It’s vital that a country, and especially an alliance of several countries, should be led by strong, intelligent, resolute men at critical historical junctures. We are at such a juncture at present, and we have a feeble-minded, weak-kneed leftie as the Leader of the Free World.

I’m surprised that only 47 per cent of Americans think that Biden is mentally unfit for the job. Half as many think he’s fine, with the others unsure one way or the other.

Chaps, even Joe’s mother, God rest her soul, would have told you her boy wasn’t especially bright even when he was still in full command of his faculties, such as they were.

Now he is so obviously demented that one has to hope he’s strictly a figurehead, with somebody more competent pulling the strings. A forlorn hope, I know, but dum spiro spero, as the Romans used to say, and the motto of South Carolina still does.

Those who think the Ukraine has nothing to do with them keep repeating Chamberlain’s philistine mantra about that faraway land that’s none of our concern. They, and also Joe, should remember the lines written by two great poets, one English, the other German:

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man/ is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; /if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe/ is the less…”

And:

“Of freedom and of life he only is deserving/ Who every day must conquer them anew.”

Yes I know, Joe, one is a limey, the other a kraut, and neither nationality is on your list of favourites. But strain what’s left of your brain and try to understand that Putin’s aggression isn’t just the Ukraine’s problem. It’s not just her freedom that’s under threat, but also ours.

Let’s follow the wisdom of Greek rhetoricians and agree on the terms of discussion.

It’s generally believed that the West has historically featured three types of governance: authoritarian, totalitarian and liberal-democratic.

The first is typified by all Western monarchies of old, various South American states and countries like, say, Franco’s Spain or Salazar’s Portugal. The second term usually describes Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and the Soviet Union along with all its satellites. And then there are the modern Western countries that all proudly wear the tag of liberal democracy.

Now, I don’t accept this taxonomy. My contention is that there really are only two types of states, not three. The true line of demarcation separates traditional authoritarian states from modern ones, either totalitarian or liberal. These two sub-types, different though they may be in variously important details, are closer than people think in their philosophical and, if you will, intuitive foundations.

Proceeding from terminology to observation, we all notice in today’s liberal West tyrannical practices that used to be associated with totalitarian states only. Suppression of free speech, banning of books, persecution of people for what they say and increasingly think, imposition of ideological uniformity, ever-increasing power of central government – you can extend this list at your leisure.

Yes, everybody notices such things. Yet most people believe they are perversions of liberalism, which is where I diverge from majority opinion. I regard liberalism and totalitarianism as Siamese twins separated at birth. This degree of kinship presupposes inordinate mutual affinity and an inclination towards ever-growing proximity.

In other words, because liberalism is close to totalitarianism, it reaches out to it by cultivating the totalitarian aspects of its own DNA that have hitherto been more or less suppressed.

Actually, we aren’t quite done with terms. I’d like to introduce another one, which designates the crosshatched area on which liberalism and totalitarianism overlap: anomie.

It derives from the Greek word nomos, the sum total of traditions, creeds, conventions, natural injunctions, customs, mores and morality that have been passed on from one generation to the next for centuries. Anomie thus signifies the abandonment and debauchment of all such things.

The traditional and only possible depository of nomos is the family, along with familial institutions patterned after it: parish, clan, neighbourhood, guild, township, village and so forth. Such bodies come together by free association, and they lie outside the political realm. In fact, they act as gaskets separating and protecting private individuals from political tyranny.

Thus there is a fair amount of organic, as opposed to political, pluralism built into authoritarian societies. The king (president, prince, duke etc.) neither has nor wishes to acquire control over nomos, which makes his control of the populace limited.

Authoritarian states monopolise central political power, but, as power radiates towards the periphery, it’s absorbed and attenuated by nomos. In such states of yesteryear, nomos had a mighty protector: the church, the guardian of the kingdom that is not of this world.

When Christ used that phrase, he effectively separated the political realm from his own, which in the West produced, protected or at least underpinned much of nomos. As long as people left national politics to the central state, the state was satisfied or at least had to act as if it was.

Liberalism appeared as a child of the Enlightenment, which misnomer designates a revolution against the church and the nomos intertwined with it. The revolt was merciless and all-encompassing, treading underfoot not just the church, monarchy and aristocracy, but also all institutions capable of claiming generational, dynastic, cultural or apostolic succession going back centuries.

That means that every sanctuary of nomos was ripped apart: revolutions are by definition mortal enemies of tradition. The West became anomic, with every synapse of the traditional ganglion snipped either immediately or over time.

Falling by the wayside was the established concept of man as a creature corrupted by original sin, whose purpose in life was to overcome that handicap by virtuous exercise of free will. Instead, the liberal state adopted a raft of variations on the Rousseauian fallacy of the inherent goodness of man. The ideal the liberal state sees in its mind’s eye is the noble sauvage, his slate clear of nomos, a tabula rasa readily inscribable with liberal messages.

Man was no longer driven by nomos. His supposedly innate goodness unleashed and encouraged by liberalism, he was ready to rebuild the world in its image. He was cast adrift and made to chuck overboard the ballast of nomos.   

Gone with it was the ancient separation between the realms. The liberal political state is innately expansionist, seeking to subjugate and eventually absorb nomos, whatever is left of it. One dire consequence of the Enlightenment was the thorough politicising of life, with the power of the central state usurping ancient localism.

That is a feature of all liberal states, and in fact the bloodiest conflict in American history, the Civil War, was fought to overcome residual resistance to runaway political centralisation. The liberal state is dirigiste by definition.

So of course is the totalitarian state. It too seeks to extend the power of the political realm ad infinitum (“Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” was how Mussolini expressed this aspiration). It too correctly identifies traditional nomos as its deadly enemy. It too concocts a bogus ideal that must by fiat supersede custom and convention.

That similarity of purpose between the liberal and totalitarian states overshadows the divergence of their methods. Both are equally anomic, but they tend to enforce anomie differently.

The totalitarian state is more impetuous and impatient. It wants everything and it wants it straight away. This is bound to produce resistance, and resistance is bound to produce violence.

The liberal state is a believer in natural and ineluctable progress, covering not just things like science and technology, but the very essence of man. If violence is the only way of making sure people don’t deviate from that straight path, then the liberal state won’t be above it. But by and large it prefers to seduce people, not rape them.

Both the liberal and totalitarian states are aware of their natural affinity, as they are of their shared enmity towards the traditional state with its nomos. That’s why an authoritarian state is hardly ever directly followed by a totalitarian one. Such states, be that Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany, tend to come out of the liberal antecedent the way Eve came out of Adam’s rib.

It’s instructive to compare the liberals’ feelings towards, say, Stalin’s Russia and Franco’s Spain. When the heinous crimes of the Soviets became public knowledge (or rather when that knowledge could no longer be suppressed), the liberals feigned indignation, and some might actually have felt let down. But that was nothing compared to the visceral hatred they spewed on Franco’s authoritarian regime.

The former was a wayward friend gone awry. The latter was the devil incarnate.

I remember first hearing the term ‘political correctness’, back in the 1980s. The noun didn’t surprise me: everything liberals believed in was ipso facto correct. But why was it political?

Why was saying things like chairperson instead of chairman politically, rather than, say, morally, ethically or socially, correct? But of course my amazement was misplaced. Correctness is political as a part of the general tendency to dissolve and thereby expunge whatever is left of nomos in the political realm. It is political because everything is political, or should be.

What we are witnessing today is an accelerating convergence of liberalism and totalitarianism. The anomic twins separated at birth are coming back together. And while I tend to shy away from playing Cassandra, I can confidently predict that this convergence will be getting more and more pronounced. We are in for a rough ride.

Suppose you taught religious education to children. Personally, I wouldn’t because the subject is ill-defined.

I’d happily (if hypothetically) teach Christianity or Bible studies, but how on earth does one teach religion in general? No such thing exists. There are only separate, distinct religions, each with its own view of God, man or, as the case may be, God-man.

Comparative religious studies is a proper academic subject, but surely only for universities. Children should first be taught the religion that formed our civilisation.

Then perhaps the tail end of the curriculum, say 10 per cent, could be devoted to creeds that are as central to other civilisations as they are marginal to ours. I’d even go so far as to explain that our religion isn’t just different from others but better, but I do realise that such supremacism may well be a criminal offence in today’s climate.

That objection aside, imagine teaching RE to 11-year-olds. Sooner or later the subject of good and evil is bound to come up, and every teacher knows how useful visual aids can be.

What would be yours? No, don’t tell me. Both the mythology and history of Christianity provide enough illustrations to last Methuselah his lifetime, and I’m sure you’d easily find an appropriate polarity there.

However, I’d venture a guess that your two examples, whatever they are, wouldn’t be the same as those an RE teacher at Stoke-on-Trent offered his little pupils.

He showed them an animation, and so far so good. His charges were brought up on cartoons, and they could more easily grasp notions presented in that format.

Yet venturing another guess, I doubt the cartoons they watched at home were full of four-letter words – and I don’t mean ‘love’ ‘good’ or ‘evil’. This one was, though, to be fair, the teacher forewarned the tots in the style of film classifications: “strong language from the onset”.

The video then quickly went into Taoism, whose fine points any 11-year-old presumably must grasp to have any hope of cultural survival in Stoke. Hence there followed a juxtaposition of yin and yang as two complementary forces, although perhaps illustrating such an interaction by the person of Christ would have been more apposite.

In that Asian context, the children were asked to imagine the best and worst things in the world. Having given them a few seconds to ponder, the video then proposed its own, correct, version.

Cheese toast was given as the embodiment of absolute good, while absolute evil was illustrated with a picture of a dildo studded with razor blades.

In fact, about half of the four-minute video included images of sex toys, most of them less evil than the razor-studded one. Those sequences were interspersed with frames showing Jesus Christ reading Playboy (the picture above).

Every teacher knows that the best way of introducing new concepts is to build on the foundation of knowledge the audience possesses already. In this case, the working assumption must have been that those 11-year-olds were familiar with sex aids, in theory or perhaps even in practice. They could also be expected to be intimately familiar with Playboy and other similar publications.

Yet even supposing that today’s tots are as precocious as that, I’d suggest that perhaps such knowledge shouldn’t be encouraged, certainly not in RE classes. Anyway, judging by the reaction of the pupils and their parents, that visual material caught both groups unawares, causing quite some shock.

Protests ensued, the locum teacher responsible was reprimanded, and the school apologised for the offence caused. However, reports of the incident show that the protests were half-hearted, and the apology perfunctory.

One heard no demands that the teacher involved be imprisoned, and the school itself shut down for moral and intellectual fumigation. No one extrapolated beyond Stoke to cry civilisational havoc and let slip the dogs of war. The overall tone was that of regret, rather than rage.

We no longer have any dogs of war to let slip. We have, and put up with, other dogs, those to which the West is going. A civilisation in which that incident could be possible, or even imagined, may or may not deserve to survive. But it’s a dead certainty that it won’t.

P.S. A TV commentator described a tennis player at the Australian Open as ‘stylistic’, meaning stylish. Oh if only our schools taught English, rather than condom and dildo studies.

P.P.S. Speaking of Australia, say what you will about the draconian, liberty-defying measures imposed by the country’s government, but please don’t say they don’t work. Compared to Britain, Australia has suffered one-twentieth the number of Covid deaths per million.

…and I’ll tell you: “Sack him.”

We are waxing indignant about the unauthorised BYOB shindig at 10 Downing Street, and fair enough: that was an appalling lapse of judgement.

Having said that, even more appalling are our media with their never-ending parade of lachrymose diatribes from wronged Britons, along the lines of “I couldn’t even say good-bye to my dying mother, and there they were…”

We get the point, chaps, just one or two illustrations would have sufficed. The PM is crass, insensitive and divorced from the reality we common folk inhabit. A sacking offence? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. I’d sack him anyway, even if he had led a suitably monastic existence throughout the lockdown.

For me the issue of Boris Johnson became an open and shut case when he elevated to the Lords Evgeniy Lebedev, who co-owns, with his father Alexander, several British newspapers. Lebedev père bankrolled the purchases, with no one especially interested in the source of his wealth.

It wouldn’t have taken an extensive investigation to find out. Alexander is a career KGB officer, one in the long line of KGB gangsterish ‘oligarchs’ whose godfather sits in the Kremlin. His millions were a little stream in the mighty flood of Russian cash flowing into the veins of our body economic and infecting it with contagions much worse than Covid.

Many of these ‘oligarchs’ live in England; some, like Lebedev, even become citizens. All of them know how to cultivate useful friendships with politicians. Their methods are as old as the hills: lavish parties and even more lavish donations to the party coffers (I’m talking strictly about legal methods).

Their road to British respectability is paved with ill-gotten gold, and they seldom fail to get to that destination. Yet even I was surprised when Johnson conferred a peerage on the scion of a KGB spying family. That was it, I thought. I would have fired him there and then.

Now it turns out that two of his other Russian friends and, coincidentally, Tory donors, are in charge of the project guaranteed to make Britain even more dependent on foreign sources for her energy.

The friends in question are Alexander Temerko, who has donated £730,000 to the Tories, and Victor Fedotov (a mere £500,000). The two gentlemen are controllers of Aquind Limited, a company that is awaiting government approval on its £1.2 billion project to lay a power and communication cable plugging Britain into the French grid.

Both of them have links to the Russian oil and gas industry, which means to organised crime, which means the KGB/FSB, which means Putin. Temerko also used to head an armament company owned by the Russian government, which seldom supplies weapons to our friends.

I was particularly moved by the stories of the intimate friendship between Alexander Temerko and Boris Johnson, né Alexander. Apparently they call each other ‘Sasha’, which is the Russian diminutive of their name.

The deal with Aquind is wrong on more levels than one can find in an average skyscraper.

First, energy is a vital strategic resource, and a serious country must do her utmost to be strategically self-sufficient. If that’s not possible, at least foreign energy suppliers should be seen as our reliable long-term friends. France, which has already tried to blackmail Britain with EDF electricity, doesn’t quite qualify – and a company owned by Messrs Temerko and Fedotov definitely doesn’t.

Second, though I don’t know if Johnson has facilitated this deal directly, Temerko’s close friendship with the PM couldn’t have hurt. Or does Johnson think Temerko and his millions are drawn to his insouciant sense of humour and enviable erudition in matters classical? No ulterior motives, not even teensy-weensy ones?

To her credit, my favourite government official, trade minister Penny Mordaunt, is trying to stop the deal in its tracks. She correctly feels that this increased dependence on foreign suppliers will further jeopardise our energy security.

She doesn’t cite Johnson’s friendship with shady Russian characters as another reason for demurring. That’s understandable: he is, after all, her boss.

Since I don’t owe Johnson any such institutional loyalty, I don’t mind saying that I’d sack him just for such links – and never mind the odd ill-advised drink.

We don’t realise to what extent our institutions, both political and financial, are penetrated by foreign criminals. Pecunia non olet is the governing principle of our powers that be, but money, especially if originally denominated in roubles, does smell.

It reeks of criminal corruption, moral decay, intellectual myopia and enmity to everything Britain should stand for. Not exactly the qualities one would like to rub off on our leaders.

On 26 November, 1939, seven artillery shells hit the Soviet outpost at Mainila on the border with Finland.

The Soviets immediately blamed Finland for this act of aggression. Four days later Stalin’s hordes launched a full offensive, aiming to rape Finland the way they had already raped the three Baltic republics. These were the territories Stalin considered his own following his criminal Pact with Hitler.

The incident was the pretext the Soviets needed to add a veneer of legality to their international banditry. Hence they claimed that it was the Finns who had shelled Mainila.

Yet the evidence was incontrovertible: shell fragments disperse in the direction of the trajectory, which in that case came from the south, not the north. Moreover, the Finns didn’t have a single artillery position within range of Mainila.

That was a classic example of a false-flag operation, and the inspiration must have come from the Nazis’ attack on the Gleiwitz radio station, which they blamed on the Poles and used as the casus belli. The two allies freely exchanged ideas at the time, and it’s good to see that their spirit lives on.

Last week the US published a CIA report saying that the Russians are planning a false-flag attack on one of their cities as a prelude to their tanks rolling across the Ukraine’s border.

Typically, such reports are kept under wraps until after the event. Making them public at this point looked like a desperate last-ditch attempt to prevent the offensive. It was as if the Americans were saying to Putin: “We are on to you”.

Then in the early hours of last Friday, many Ukrainian government websites were hit by a coordinated cyberattack. After several hours the sites were brought back to life, but the attack had every look of a dress rehearsal.

The National Bank was among the targets, with the hackers issuing a personalised warning: “Ukrainian! All your personal data are uploaded on a single network. Once the data are wiped out, they aren’t restorable. All your personal information is now public – expect the worst and be afraid.”

I’m beginning to think that Putin wants more than just to blackmail the West into concessions. He wants war. Otherwise Russia’s demands to the West would have been couched in some sort of civilised terms, making it possible for Western appeasers to consider them.

As it was, the demands smacked, in both essence and style, not so much of diplomatic protocol as of a gangster’s ultimatum, along the lines of “if you ever want to see your children again…”.

The Russian dictator regards the West as his country’s existential enemy, and the world as too small for both. In case the West wasn’t quite getting the message, a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry helpfully translated from diplomatic into colloquial. “The West,” he said, “should pack its bags and get back to the 1997 borders of NATO”.

The other day, Vice Speaker of the Duma Pyotr Tolstoy, a member of Putin’s United Russia party, put the overall strategy in a nutshell. Russia, he announced, must restore the erstwhile Empire within its borders. Annex a number of former Soviet republics for starters, he explained, and the Baltics and Finland will then realise their own “nullity” and “crawl in by themselves”.

The Winter War that followed the Mainila incident, which cost 500,000 Russian lives, should have disabused Putin’s mouthpiece of such grandiose plans. In fact, Finland is reversing her opposition to joining NATO, while the Baltics are already members. 

None of these countries will “crawl in by themselves”. They’ll fight to the last man, leaving NATO two options only. Either it stops the international gangster or disbands, eliminating the system of collective security that has served Europe so well since 1945, and leaving the continent at the mercy of Putin’s kleptofascist regime.

The signs that NATO may have to face that stark choice are multiplying every day. Russian heavy armaments are being moved westwards from the Far Eastern and Siberian areas – just as they were in 1941, when Moscow was about to fall.

Unknown drones have been overflying Sweden, and the country has reinforced patrols around her largest island, Gotland. Ann Lena Hallin, Director of Military Intelligence, says that “at the moment, Sweden’s safety situation is far from normal”.

Norway is feeling uneasy too. A few days ago one of the two underwater Internet cables connecting the mainland to the Spitsbergen archipelago was severed.

As a deliberate throwback to the 1962 Cuban crisis, the Russians are threatening to install ICBMs in Cuba and, this time, also in Venezuela. Even though the Americans are more inclined towards appeasement now than they were then, they promised to respond to that development in all seriousness, and for once I believe them. No US president will stay in office if he fails to react to that slap in the face of the Monroe Doctrine.

When Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov was asked to clarify Russia’s position on another potential Cuban crisis, he left the matter open: “I will neither confirm nor deny anything.” Putin, he added, “has mentioned many times how, for example, the Russian navy may respond to America’s provocations and ratcheted military pressure”.

This is another case of a thief screaming “Stop thief!” as he runs away from his pursuers. There have been no American provocations, and no military pressure has been ratcheted up. Putin and his stooges are lying through their teeth.

The moment Eastern European countries shook off the yoke of Soviet tyranny, they came under pressure from Russia to come back into the fold. In response, they applied for NATO membership, hoping that would save them from new carnage.

By 1997 NATO agreed that 10 countries, including the Baltics, satisfied membership requirements. No one forced or bribed them into NATO – they desperately sought protection from their Eastern neighbour, and, unlike the West, they didn’t have much faith in Russia’s democratic transformation.

NATO only began to enlarge its presence in the east after Russia’s 2014 aggression against the Ukraine. That organisation has always been, and still remains, strictly defensive, set up to protect Europe and the West in general from predatory Russia.

Putin’s Goebbelses are meanwhile whipping up war hysteria, capitalising on the old Russian paranoia about being “encircled by enemies”. That too is a lie.

Only five NATO countries border on Russia, covering just about six per cent of the country’s perimeter. That hardly amounts to encirclement, does it?

People who really understand Russia have known all along that the empire President Reagan so aptly described as “evil” has never really gone away. Yet even those without such extensive knowledge ought to realise that, one way or the other, the evil empire is here now.

The world is on the brink of war, and only an immediate show of resolve and force can stop the evildoers. Westerners, including my readers, must realise that international fascistic gangsters always have designs far exceeding their ostensible claims.

When Putin’s regime pounced on Georgia and the Ukraine, the West merely responded with token sanctions and “expressions of concern”. The present situation fraught with mortal danger is a direct result of that craven acquiescence.

Should the West allow Putin to rape the Ukraine again, the turn of NATO members will come next. At some point a military response will become unavoidable, and God help us then.

Alas, history is a poor teacher – or rather people are truant pupils. All lessons fall on deaf ears, and we’ve learned nothing from Chamberlain’s “quarrel in a far-away country, between people of whom we know nothing”.

We are too ignorant and lackadaisical to realise that, if the Ukraine falls, the UK won’t remain safe for ever. History is screaming parallels, yet nobody hears the screams.

That Labour’s Deputy Leader Angela Rayner denies the very possibility of social mobility is par for the course. As a raving socialist, she has to believe in an ossified class structure.

Anyone born working class remains working class for life – that’s an article of faith for her ilk. Never mind that we could all cite numerous examples of people moving up or down the social scale. When ideology barges in, reality flees.

What’s rather odd in a socialist fanatic is her utter contempt for comprehensive education, which is an icon for every left-thinking person. Comprehensive education, she believes, means comprehensive illiteracy. It don’t teach nothing to nobody.

To be fair to the self-described “fiery, ballsy, gobby Northern lass”, she didn’t express either belief in so many words. Both, however, can be inferred easily and ineluctably from what she did say.

Angie seems to regard illiteracy as a virtue, a badge of class honour. And she practises what she preaches.

The other day she launched another one of her vituperative (if not exactly unfounded) attacks on Boris Johnson. “Was you there or not at the party?”, she kept repeating. In fact, her insistence on that usage throughout shows that it wasn’t an unfortunate slip of the tongue. She really doesn’t have a clue about the conjugation of the verb ‘to be’.

Amazingly her consistent solecisms drew a lot of criticism. Since I can’t imagine any tweedy member of White’s watching Angie’s BBC interview, the Twitted criticism must have come from her natural constituency.

That in no way mitigated her indignant response in the same medium: “I wasn’t Eton-educated, but growing up in Stockport I was taught integrity, honesty and decency. Doesn’t mater [sic] how you say it. Boris Johnson is unfit to lead.”

Now, integrity, honesty and decency aren’t recognised academic subjects. English is, and logic used to be. So it does ‘mater’ how you say it and spell it. Angie’s response is an illiterate non sequitur, even though I may agree with her conclusion.

As a gesture of geographical loyalty, Angie established her credentials by becoming a grandmother still in her 30s. She could use that fact to ward off any accusation of ‘poshness’ if she spoke grammatically. There’s no need also to sound like a Dickensian urchin.

Going back to my original two inferences, they seem to be unassailable.

First, Angie clearly believes that “growing up in Stockport” (that is, being working class) precludes any possibility of future advancement, social, cultural or educational. Second, she is effectively saying that no school below the level of Eton, and certainly no comprehensive school, can teach its pupils to say ‘you were’, rather than ‘you was’.

Now, I despise the very idea of comprehensive schools hatched by Angie’s ideological brethren. Yet even I have never launched such a scathing attack on this egalitarian nonsense. It’s true that most youngsters thus educated emerge as functional illiterates. But that doesn’t mean such an outcome is predetermined, inevitable or universal.

In fact, I know several Northern lasses who speak with faultless grammar, if with a slight regional accent. In fact, the husband of one of such lasses comes from a similar background, which doesn’t prevent him from speaking and writing some of the best English in these Isles.

I myself went to a school where most boys carried knives or knuckledusters and hardly ever had a square meal that would be recognised as such even in Stockport. Yet I knew how ‘to be’ conjugated when I was about 10. And oh, did I forget to mention that my school was quite a bit north of Stockport, in Moscow, where English was taught as a second language?

Here’s a harrowing thought: if a general election were held today, and if the current Labour lead in the polls were reflected in the number of seats, Angie would have a senior ministerial post. This obscenely illiterate class warrior would be in a position to decide how a great nation is to be governed.

Call me a reactionary, but when my wife Penelope was a little girl someone like Angie wouldn’t even have got a secretarial job in the City. This makes me question my previous sentence.

Just how great is a nation where such a nincompoop, long on ideology, short on brains, is allowed to get anywhere near Westminster as anything other than a tourist? Or, to rephrase perhaps more accurately, how long will such a nation remain great even assuming it still is?

Please don’t answer that. I don’t want to get any more upset than I already am.

With apologies to Jane Austen, it’s a law universally acknowledged that the likelihood of a man being sued for sexual assault is directly proportionate to the man’s wealth.

Those female chancers are easy to understand: what’s the point suing if the mark has no money? That’s why Virginia Giuffre must be commended for her common sense and a feel for arithmetic. She saw an opening and went for it.

Having said that, I could have done without her sanctimonious lies about wanting only justice, not money. She must have inhaled the zeitgeist through both nostrils and the words floated onto her lips as if by themselves. Justice for what exactly?

For Andrew having had sex with her 20 years ago when she was 17? So fine, that was under the age of consent in the US at the time. That cut-off point is now 16 in most states, so if Andrew had kept it in his trousers until 2018, when the change happened, he could then have had all the 17-year-old American lasses he wanted without any risk of prosecution.

It’s useful to remember yet again the difference between malum in se and malum prohibitum. The former is an act that’s bad in itself, such as murder, theft or burglary. The latter is an act that’s only bad because it’s prohibited, such as not wearing a seat belt, driving in a bus lane – or having sex with a 17-year-old girl well-versed in the amorous arts.

Let’s face it, Virginia wasn’t a daisy-fresh virgin taken advantage of by an old lecher. She wasn’t Katyusha Maslova to Prince Nekhlyudov in Tolstoy’s Resurrection. She was a regular visitor to Jeffery Epstein’s dens of iniquity, where she was passed from guest to guest like a relay baton.

Now she’s out for all she can get, which is money and ‘justice’. I’m sure if the first is right she’ll be happy to compromise on the second.

Andrew meanwhile has lost his HRH title, along with all his other honorary entitlements. He has been cut off from the royal family, and his life has been more or less ruined. That, in my view, should have happened a long time ago, Virginia or no Virginia.

In common with his ex-wife, late sister-in law and nephew Harry, Andrew belongs to the royal coterie seemingly committed to destroying the monarchy. Unlike, say, his elder sister, to say nothing of his parents, he doesn’t realise that his life isn’t entirely his own.

He was born to privilege, but also to a lifetime of duty – duty to his family, the dynasty and ultimately his country. Accepting the privilege while reneging on the duty is fundamentally dishonest and, in every other than the legal sense, treasonous.

Cavorting with the likes of Epstein and, much worse, Nazarbayev, swapping the door-opening power of his name for all those yachts, private jets and lavish parties with ladies of easy virtue was vulgar, louche and irresponsible. It was letting down his mother and her realm.

Andrew may not be the sharpest chisel in the box, but a man figuring in succession to the throne doesn’t have to be either an intellectual or a Mastermind contestant. He must, however, be a man who never forgets his mission in this world.

Andrew is among those few royals who seem to suffer from amnesia when it comes to that mission. He probably doesn’t even realise the damage he has done to the royal family and hence our constitution.

I hope the Queen doesn’t come to his rescue at pay-off time. Let him fend for himself, see how he gets on without his hand in her piggybank.

He and Virginia deserve each other. Too bad she’s already married – they could make such a lovely couple. A girl who used her body to get ahead in life and a man who did the same with the position to which he was born.

I only wish our papers stopped catering to the voyeuristic, onanistic instincts of their readers on the current scale. Their coverage of Andrew’s saga is worse than Page 3 in The Sun, featuring topless Playboy-type lovelies. At least those photos don’t encourage hypocrisy and self-righteousness.   

The English constitution adopted its modern shape in 1688, and all subsequent changes have been mere embellishments or, these days, corruptions.

By contrast, France has had 14 different constitutions during the same period, which is hardly surprising. She has been ruled by several monarchies (constitutional or otherwise), an ad hoc revolutionary committee, a Directory, a military dictatorship, an emperor, five different republics and, from 1940 to 1944, by the Nazis, first de facto and then de jure.

Given such a kaleidoscope, one can understand why politics has a different role to play in both countries – and why so many French thinkers, including some pernicious ones, have admired Britain’s political dispensation.

Britain may not have pioneered all of such political virtues as constitutional monarchy, inviolable property rights, division of power, independent judiciary and parliamentarism, but she has certainly shown how successfully they can work in a modern context. (She has also shown how thoroughly they can be debauched, but that’s a separate subject.)

That’s why, when one ponders Britain’s contributions to our civilisation, politics springs to mind first. Britain is defined by her politics – and political thought – more than by anything else. Even the country’s religion is fused with politics, which a state religion always is by definition.

That doesn’t mean Britain has nothing else to boast about. Since I don’t see culture as a competitive sport, I wouldn’t want to join a cultural tug-of-war with the French or anybody else. Suffice it to say England has much to be proud of, especially her great language and the literature it has produced.

Yet the English en masse aren’t proud of their language and literature, nor culture in general, as much as the French are proud of theirs. As well they should be: during the Middle Ages France was the cultural centre of Europe.

Even Gothic architecture is a misnomer. It was first created in Île-de-France, and at that time it was called opus Francigenum. Since then French architecture, as it should be more appropriately called, has dotted not only the French but indeed the European landscape with unmatched masterpieces.

That alone would be enough to foster national pride, but there is so much more: literature, music, painting, philosophy and of course the French language. Even though it has ceded its international dominance to English, the French still cherish it and try to maintain its purity. They don’t succeed as universally as they’d like but, unlike the British, they do make the effort.

Yes, their cultural pride is justified – but their cultural nationalism isn’t. As any other kind, this type of nationalism is an attempt to compensate for being underappreciated. Hence it’s always comparative: nationalism is self-assertion at the expense of others.

It’s not just saying “our country is great.” It’s also saying “our country is greater than any other.” When this mode of thought is applied to culture, it’s indeed turned into a competitive sport and consequently vulgarised.

This tendency is observable in France, where, in the absence of an historically stable political arrangement, culture becomes the key marker of national self-identification.

It’s against this background that one can understand the attack launched on Macron by the Republican challenger Valérie Pécresse. Manny, she said, didn’t call for the national (global?) celebration of the 400^th anniversary of Molière’s birth.

Such negligence, according to her, was tantamount to treason. Manny betrayed French culture, which is to say France. For Molière, fumed Mme Pécresse, left “an indelible imprint on universal culture”.

Now that’s like a British prime minister being accused of ignoring the anniversary of Magna Carta and not even knowing where Runnymede is.

I know it’s counterproductive to draw parallels with Britain, but can you imagine one British politician accusing another for not venerating some Restoration playwright, say William Congreve? It’s easier to imagine a British politician who thinks restoration comedy is a botched up remodelling job on his conservatory.

I found Mme Pécresse’s diatribe quite endearing – until she insisted that Molière was the French Shakespeare or, if you’d rather, the French Dante. That’s where cultural pride ended and cultural nationalism began.

Molière was an excellent writer, but comparing him to either Shakespeare or Dante is silly. France may be a founder, some may even insist on the founder, of Western culture. But she has produced no literary figure comparable to either Dante or Shakespeare. In any case, usually it’s Racine, not Molière, who is mentioned in that context, with perhaps more justification, but still far from enough.

It’s that difference between national pride and nationalism again. It’s one thing to say, correctly, that Molière is an excellent French playwright. It’s quite another to claim he was a universal genius simply because he was indeed a French playwright. I for one love his plays, but he’s really closer to William Congreve than to William Shakespeare.

There, I said I didn’t see culture as a competitive sport, yet here I am, awarding points and prizes. If that’s what I’m doing, I’m sorry. That isn’t my intention at all.

It’s just that I despise nationalism as much as I respect patriotism – and I’m aware of the difference. That France hasn’t produced a Shakespeare or a Dante is no shame. She has produced enough of everything else to make ten other countries proud.

There are perhaps more great Romanesque and Gothic churches within an hour’s drive from us than in all of the British Isles. Just yesterday we visited, for the umpteenth time, the sublime 12^th century abbey at Vézelay, and the photo above, with my bulk strictly for size reference, is testimony to the grandeur of France.

The abbey is where Romanesque meets Gothic and God meets man. We gasp every time we see it, especially in winter, when the basilica and the crypt are empty.

With such truly universal glory to be proud of, why would anybody wish to indulge in petty nationalism? Oh well, nowt as queer as folk, as they say upcountry.   

I must be a slow learner. We’ve been spending a lot of time in France for the past 25 years, half the time for the past 17 (just under, Mr Taxman, relax).

Yet only the other day did I understand something vital about that country: France doesn’t exist as a single entity. There are two Frances, not one, each with her own personality.

I saw the signs much earlier; I just couldn’t synthesise them into general understanding. At first, I was simply satisfied with observing the differences between the English and the French.

There are many – in fact I can’t think of another two neighbouring nations that have so little in common. This, though during large swathes of history France owned much of England and vice versa.

Look at the country roads, for example. In our neck of the French woods, many roads stay ramrod-straight for miles, as if someone had put a ruler on the map and drawn a line (actually, someone did). In England, on the other hand, most country roads are practically labyrinthine, especially in Devon.

Why? Because right of way was left out from the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. In England private property was sacrosanct. If an owner didn’t want to sell a parcel of his land to the government, that was it. If the government wanted to build a road, it had to go around, not through, his holding.

No such problems in France: landowners could be ‘repossessed’, as the French inaccurately refer to confiscation. The rights of the state trumped property rights, and the owners were obliged to accept whatever the state was willing to pay for their land, usually, I suspect, a fraction of the market value.

For someone imbued with the English sense of justice, this is egregious. For the French, explained my good French friend, that’s par for the course.

“The English,” he said the other day, “regard the central state as a factor of at least potential oppression. In France, the people adore their central state. In the old days the kings protected the people from the local barons, and the warm glow of gratitude was inherited by the subsequent republic.”

Since by then we had gone through several bottles of decent Burgundy, I didn’t feel like pressing for a debating victory. Otherwise I could mention that the French butchered their king with considerably greater enthusiasm than the English beheaded theirs.

Or, closer to our time, that the French start building barricades the moment the government does something they don’t like. In the 35 years that I’ve lived in London, I’ve witnessed two riots. In Paris, that’s the annual average, which hardly betokens the behaviour of people passionately in love with the state (and I’m not even counting the non-riotous demonstrations).

In any case, I knew that all my French friends are enthusiastically, philosophically dirigiste. They see nothing wrong in an omnipotent central state assuming powers that conservative Englishmen would regard as despotic.

Another close friend, a lovely man in every other respect, even adores Putin because he personifies the notion of a strong, imperial government. My objections that so did Hitler never make a dent in his statist ardour.

It follows naturally that all my friends without exception are Euro-federalists. That stands to reason: if they see a big state as ipso facto good, then the bigger, the better seems to be the only logical conclusion. And states don’t get much bigger than the one the EU sees in its myopic, jaundiced mind’s eye.

You’ll have noticed that I keep talking about my friends, who are all well-to-do, extremely well-educated, multi-lingual, aged late-40s to mid-70s, politically Gaullist (which in France is right of centre), typically with a financial or legal background. A pre-selected group, you might say, and you’d be right.

But in all the decades of French living, I’ve talked to many other people as well: barbers, car mechanics, plumbers, electricians, farmers, butchers, neighbours, tennis players (I don’t know what most of them do, but they don’t resemble my friends at all) – well, you know.

And these people are much closer in their views to their English counterparts than they are to my French friends. They treat the government with suspicion at best, antipathy at worst.

They detest the EU – to the point that Macron is convinced, with good reason, that France would vote for Frexit given the chance (which is why she’ll never get that chance). Fiercely independent economically, they resent any state interference. Their views on immigration are close to those of Marine Le Pen (if not quite her father’s).

So on, so forth – the difference is striking. Now, it’s ill-advised to generalise on the basis of one’s personal observations. Still, my experience is extensive enough to afford me some leeway in that undertaking.

Since Descartes postulated that all true knowledge is comparative, I’d be betraying my French friends if I didn’t take his idea on board. Hence I’m comparing not only one group of Frenchmen to another, but also all of them to their English equivalents.

And in my 35 years as Her Majesty’s subject, I’ve never observed such a sharp divide, nay chasm, separating the Weltanschauung of different classes. Some Englishmen are conservative, some aren’t. Some are Leavers, some Remainers. Some opt for individual liberty before collective security, some don’t. Some are woke, some aren’t.

Yet from what I can see, such beliefs, or if you will character traits, are spread evenly throughout the whole population. Whatever the national spread is statistically, it’ll be roughly the same across all social groups. In that sense, the classes are closely integrated.

In France they manifestly aren’t – this though Britain is supposed to be a class-ridden monarchy and France an egalitarian republic. In fact, she is so egalitarian, so committed to the égalité emblazoned on the façade of every public building, that one is justified to maintain that there exist two Frances, not one.

Another observation – take it for what it’s worth. The French Revolution abolished all titles of nobility for a while, whereas in England they are very much extant. And yet titled French people seldom let one forget who is a count, who is Madame la baronne, and whose title is older.

By contrast, the titled English people I’ve met never flaunt their pedigrees – and they certainly don’t patronise, say, their servants the way the French so often do. Some even commit blue-collar crimes: a young English lord I know once did a year in prison for knocking off a convenience shop.

I’d suggest that the French are more class-conscious not in spite of their revolutionary republican constitution, but specifically because of it. They overcompensate, which is a natural human response to deprivation.

Still, as I always tell my dear French friends, their country can be forgiven everything for her wine and cheese – not to mention her founding role in Western culture.

P.S. Speaking of the French Revolution, it not only abolished aristocratic titles, but also decriminalised incest. That touch of libérté will soon be reversed, with sex between next of kin to be outlawed. That’ll destroy sex life in my part of Le Pen-voting France, where long winter nights are cold, and where men tend to be stronger and faster than their sisters.

Melanie Phillips has written a superb article, Perverse Jury Verdicts Reveal Moral Confusion. Since both this subject and Miss Phillips are close to my heart, I have to add my penny’s worth to her thoughts.

The perversions that drew her ire are acquittals of vandals and hooligans supposedly acting on their political conscience. Miss Phillips mentions several such verdicts, starting with the four Bristol thugs who pulled down the statue of the slave-trader Ed Colston.

Then last April a jury acquitted – ignoring the judge’s direction – six Extinction Rebellion fanatics who vandalised the Shell building in London. And last month another jury acquitted six other climate activists who had obstructed the Docklands Light Railway.  

“It appears from these verdicts,” writes Miss Phillips, “that the ‘conscience’ of the jury supports inflicting harm if its members agree with the political cause behind such acts.”

Her conclusion can’t be faulted: “This cannot be fixed by simply changing the law. It requires instead a so far nonexistent determination by society’s leaders to address the rot they have allowed so widely and deeply to penetrate into the cultural core.”

That’s where Miss Phillips leaves off and I’d like to pick up. First, by saying that the jury system is fundamental to the English Common Law, which in turn is the skeleton of our body politic, legal and social.

Second, it may well be that trial by jury can no longer serve the cause of justice in Britain. It can’t survive as an instrument of justice in the absence of a broadly based group of people who understand what justice means.

That’s demonstrably not the case, judging by the number of acquittals prompted by the mantra “it’s all society’s fault”, references to the defendant’s impoverished childhood or race – and of course to his political motives, frequently viewed as being somehow more noble than depoliticised brutality or vandalism.

A jury system can’t function properly in the absence of a vast pool of citizens who, even without any legal training, understand the meaning of such concepts as law, crime, justice, punishment – and that’s to begin with.

For such understanding can’t be inhaled from ambient air. It has to be informed by a deeply ingrained, almost intuitive command of such concepts as good and evil or, at a pinch, their secular reflections, right and wrong.

In other words, there has to exist in society a moral system shared by most and accepted by all as absolute and inviolable. Yet it’s not immediately clear how a purely secular country can create such a system. For anything like that to appear, a society has to be glued together by a powerful adhesive – and a widely shared desire for rapacious consumption doesn’t seem to do the trick.

Citizens of an almighty materialist state lose the capacity for being just that, citizens, in the sense in which, say, Plato and Aristotle understood the term. Real citizenship presupposes individual liberty based on individual responsibility for one’s actions. It also involves an ability that’s practically extinct in today’s West: correlating one’s individuality, as expressed through words or deeds, with public good.

And even that isn’t all. People must also see how they and their time fit into their national or, even broader, civilisational continuum. In practical terms, they have to know without having to think about it that a law that has been on the books for a millennium must be treated at least with respect, ideally with reverence.

The absence of all such lovely things is exactly “the rot” that has “deeply penetrated into the cultural core”. And Melanie is right that our leaders show no determination to expunge the putrefaction. They can’t – they have the next election to think about.

A chap preaching that eating human flesh is wrong will never seduce an electorate of cannibals. If people have been brainwashed in moral and intellectual perversions, these have to be accounted for and catered to.

In the examples chosen by Miss Phillips, our population at large has been conditioned to view the world, both synchronically and diachronically, strictly in terms of economic, racial and sexual equality, with an extra layer of commitment to stopping climate change – something that no society in the 5,000 years of recorded history has managed to do.

Sensible people do exist, but not in numbers large enough to make it statistically probable that they’ll find their way to jury service. This means that, in a society lacking a moral and therefore intellectual core, jurors are overwhelmingly likely to be weathercocks turning in the winds of prevailing fads.

Hence it’s not any old political motivation that’s seen as extenuation in our courts, but specifically the kind consonant with the current cults. Let’s say, by way of illustration, that I find both our secular saints, Mandela and Tutu, objectionable.

Mandela was a communist and a murderer who rose to the leadership of the ANC. On his watch, his minions killed, looted and tortured on an industrial scale. And Tutu threw his weight behind every woke cult in Satan’s creation, which he successfully combined with virulent anti-Semitism.

Still, the thought never crosses my mind to abuse sculptural or pictorial representations of either gentleman in any manner. But suppose it did? What if I got tried for pulling down Mandela’s statue in Parliament Square? Do you think any jurors in the land would acquit me on the grounds of my sincerely held political convictions?

All this leads to the conclusion Melanie didn’t reach, leaving that to her readers’ own imagination: given the current conditions, the jury system can no longer work as an instrument of justice.

Much as it pains me to say so, it ought to be replaced by bench trial. That wouldn’t guarantee that justice will be done either, but the odds would improve. Even though judges are subject to the same general trends, there are still enough of them out there who know and respect the law, putting it above their own predilections.

But don’t ask me how such a transition could be achieved. I don’t know. But I do know that something must be done if the rule of law is to survive.