Month: October 2024

“Please remember: be careful what you wish for. The right to die can become a duty to die.”

So wrote Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, in a letter to Catholic parishes. Britain’s senior Catholic cleric urged people to write to their MPs and oppose the assisted dying bill to be debated in the Commons next month.

In the medical profession, he added, we could witness “a slow change from a duty to care to a duty to kill.” His Grace is right to issue this call, even though (I’m tempted to say ‘because’) most people disagree.

In a recent poll, two-thirds of the respondents supported the bill, with only 20 per cent opposing it. Since Catholics make up only 8.3 per cent of the population, one clearly doesn’t have to share His Grace’s faith to find oneself in the moral minority.

This stands to reason. The case against doctors legally killing patients doesn’t have to rely on denominational affiliation to be solid. In fact, it can be made without a single reference to divine authority, although perhaps not by a prelate who has to stay within his remit.

His Grace proved that by using the thin-end-of-the-wedge argument: if euthanasia becomes legal, sooner or later it will become compulsory. Doctors will start killing more and more people, either of their own accord or under pressure from suffering patients and their families.

The bill would allow terminally ill adults within six months of death to seek something incongruously called medical help: suicide by doctor. This proposal has holes big enough to drive an ambulance through.

To begin with, in many cases doctors don’t know how long a terminal patient has left to live, or whether he is indeed terminal. Take it from me, for I’m a dead man writing.

Some 20 years ago no one thought I’d survive my Stage 4 cancer. A consultant stereotypically named Donald McDonald told me: “Your prognosis is poor.” Since his accent was also stereotypical, the death sentence sounded more like “Your prognersis is pure”, but I understood.

Under the terms of the proposed bill, that would have made me eligible for a lethal injection, and something in Dr McDonald’s dour delivery suggested he would have been happy to administer it. That would have deprived you of the subsequent decades of my vituperation.

You might say that, since I didn’t specifically ask to be killed, I was off limits. Ideally, you’d be right, but in this life we aren’t blessed with ideal situations. People are fallible, and the more their fallibility is encouraged, the worse it gets.

The experience of Holland, which in 2000 became the first previously civilised country to legalise euthanasia, shows that doctors have quite a bit of latitude on the issue of consent. For example, one Alzheimer patient there asked to be euthanised. However, at the last moment she decided she didn’t want to die after all and began to kick and scream. But she was overpowered and killed anyway.

As to the sheer numbers, in 2022 there were 8,720 reported cases of euthanasia in Holland, an increase of 1,000 on the previous year. By now the annual death list must have grown into five digits, though it must still be lagging behind Canada, where one in 20 deaths is caused by assisted suicide.

Advocates of the bill insist that nothing like that can possibly happen in Britain, which strikes me as jingoistic. Such people insist, on little evidence, that Britons are so much more sensible than Canadians that euthanasia would be practised only in extreme cases, when the patient is suffering badly and the doctor can guarantee that the poor chap won’t last beyond six months. That strikes me as ignorant.

For exactly the same things were said in 1967, when the Abortion Act was passed. Though abortion was – and remains – still illegal, the new law provided a legal defence for the woman and her doctor in some exceptional cases, specifically when the woman’s physical and mental health was at stake.

That was de jure. De facto, however, any woman can now claim mental anguish at the very thought of having a baby and get an abortion on demand at up to 24 weeks of gestation. Some 250,000 take advantage of the opportunity every year, turning abortion into just another form of contraception.

The wedge only showed its thin end in 1967, but those with some moral sense and understanding of human nature were trying to stop that outrage by reminding people of the overall shape of that tool. They were shouted down just as opponents of the euthanasia bill will be shouted down now.

The bill will certainly pass, and an ever-accelerating cull of wrinklies will begin. If the example of Canada, Holland and Belgium is anything to go by, the notions of both unbearable suffering and terminal diseases will be constantly inflated, until they explode into deadly shards. Patients suffering from, say, clinical depression will be deemed proper candidates for the needle, as they are in those countries already.

Now I’m going to contradict what I said earlier by mentioning God, but only tangentially. You don’t have to espouse any religion to know that both our morality and legality have Judaeo-Christian antecedents. These days most people may not know this, but that’s the basis of all the laws protecting our persons and property.

The injunction against the taking of a life without due process is perhaps the most seminal of such laws, and surely even rank atheists must know this. They may not agree that, since it’s God who gives us life, only he can take it away. However, they – and many generations of their families – grew up with the understanding that a human life is inviolable.

Eroding this understanding will have far-reaching and, what’s worse, unpredictable social consequences by numbing people’s minds and cauterising their moral sense. A society may withstand chipping away at some of its traditional structures, but it won’t survive undermining its own foundations.

Interestingly, the same people who are fanatically committed to both abortion and euthanasia invoke the sanctity of human life whenever the subject of the death penalty comes up. They offer all sorts of spurious arguments, usually citing the possibility of forensic error leading to an irreversible punishment.

That possibility can be reduced to zero by, for example, tightening the required standard of proof in cases where the death penalty is on the table. Changing ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’ to ‘beyond all doubt’ would eliminate the possibility of an innocent man being executed, while preserving the social benefits of justice done and seen to be done.

The only argument against the death penalty that I find valid is the corrupting effect it has on the executioner. A man whose job is to kill defenceless people, even if he does so legally and they richly deserve their fate, has to suffer some psychological damage. He is thus punished without due process, something that our jurisprudence abhors.

Now, if this argument works (and I do think it has some merit) for someone whose job is to kill, surely it works even better for someone whose job is to treat. Turning doctors into executioners has to corrupt them and the whole society, and it may find the ensuing erosion unbearable.

However, abortion on demand and euthanasia have become articles of progressive faith, and there’s no point arguing against the proposed bill on merit or by appealing to traditional morality. Those two-thirds of the population who support the bill don’t do so because they’ve carefully weighed the pros and cons. They do so because they’ve been brainwashed to hate traditional morality for being just that, traditional.

This is called anomie, and it’s the dominant condition of modernity. Now, that’s what I call a terminal disease, and it has become endemic.

Various protesters continue to attack paintings at the National Gallery, which most people will agree isn’t a nice thing to do.

However, if one is so inclined, the National Gallery offers a wide choice of possible paintings to slash, cover with a photograph or throw some soup on. As a keen student of statistical probabilities, I’d think  that, should targets be chosen at random, Rembrandt or Velázquez  would be as likely to be vandalised as Van Gogh.

However, just hours after two Just Stop Oilers were sent to prison for attacking Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, last week three of their comrades threw some more soup at two versions of the same painting, one from 1888, the other from 1889.

Now, the National Gallery exhibits 2,300 paintings, most of them masterpieces. Though I’m not an expert on soup-throwing, I’d still suggest that any one of them should do as an outlet for a bubbling social conscience. Moreover, a red splodge on, say, the bare bottom of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus could serve the additional purpose of protesting against the objectivisation of women.

Another can of Campbell’s tossed at the face of any religious personage, say Zurbarán’s St Francis, could also act a multi-purpose protest against oil (in this case the paint), religion and Israel as a throwback to the Old Testament. This last one is a bit far-fetched, but it can do at a stretch. Just let your imagination run free.

Such exciting possibilities, and still youngsters from Just Stop Oil and, this time, Youth Demand, unerringly chart a path to those Sunflowers time after time. This takes any possibility of random choice out of consideration, says the statistician in me. What we are witnessing is a clear bias, and I must get to the bottom of it.

Could it be that Israel’s stroppiness caused by colonial capitalism and also warm weather caused by my diesel BMW are mere pretexts? What if – and please don’t discard this possibility out of hand – those youngsters are merely making an aesthetic statement?

It’s just possible that their tastes in art are as retrograde as mine, and they believe – as I do – that all those post-Impressionists (not to mention the multitude of other -ists) owe much of their renown to extra-artistic factors.

Specifically Van Gogh is a fine painter, but that’s not why he fetches higher auction prices than the other, better, artists I’ve mentioned. I suspect that, should he have retained a full complement of facial features, Van Gogh wouldn’t be outselling Botticelli or Cranach.

(Years ago I dropped into Christie’s to look at their pre-auction display. The reserve price of a beautiful – and large – Cranach painting was one-fifth of the cheapest post-Impressionist on offer.)

At some time in the second half of the 19^th century, art veered off the traditional path of Western culture. In fact, it used that path for a doormat. New artists didn’t care about expressing aesthetically the spiritual essence of our civilisation – in fact, they explicitly rebelled against it.

Since wiping collective feet on Western tradition has since become a sine qua non, modernity detects a kindred spirit in Van Gogh, and a spot of self-mutilation doesn’t go amiss either. Alcoholism, drug addiction or ideally suicide also add to artists’ mass appeal. Dying of old age in one’s own bed is oh-h-h so yesterday.

These young lovers of canned soup must feel the way I do… No, forget that. You are right: my explanation is too off-the-wall. Having said that, another couple of Youth Demanders yesterday pasted a photograph of a crying Muslim woman on a painting by Picasso, not, say, Vermeer.

Again, aesthetically speaking, some may think the photograph was an improvement on the original content of that frame. But enough aesthetics – let’s talk politics.

Youth Demand insist that all arms supplies to Israel be summarily stopped and, in a seemingly unrelated fashion, that all new oil and gas production be cancelled. ‘Seemingly’ is the operative word there because different protests aren’t really unrelated. They are bound together by hatred of the West – not just of what it has become but what it has been from inception.

Lest you may think it’s only Muslims who wish to annihilate Israel and everyone in it (sorry, I mean to free Palestine), one of the two photo-pasters was a Jew by the unlikely name of Monday-Malachi Rosenfeld.

This 21-year-old is a politics and international relations student, which these days is another way of saying an impassioned hater of everything the West has ever stood for. To prove that, Monday said this on Wednesday: “I’m taking action because as a Jew, I feel like it’s my duty to call out the genocide being committed in Gaza. I want the world to know this isn’t in the Jewish name and I want to see a free Palestine.”

Okay, Monday, you’re off the hook. No blood guilt for you, mate. As a Jew, you see nothing wrong in millions of other Jews living every day in fear of extinction under a rain of rockets falling on their heads. But let’s agree on what “a free Palestine” means, the other side of sloganeering.

Happy to help with the translation: it’s fully synonymous with “from the river to the sea”, which in its turn is synonymous with exterminating 7.2 million Israeli Jews, going Hitler a million better.

Perhaps neither aesthetics nor politics has much to do with this. It may be just the anomie of youthful rebelliousness coming to a boiling point and bursting out.

However, such fervour diminishes with age. My friend Tony, who worked for years as prison psychiatrist, observed that inmates who stay inside past their 35^th birthday hardly ever reoffend. The solution offers itself: all those firebrands should be sentenced to a term equal to 35 minus their age.

Monday-Malachi should thus be looking at 14 years in the slammer. The humanist in me thinks that may be too steep for disfiguring a painting, especially a modern one. But then I think of bono publico, and the humanist falls silent.

Having previously served as Minister of State for Culture in Blair’s government, David Lammy was appointed Shadow Foreign Secretary in 2009.

“At a time when Britain is recasting itself on the world stage, I look forward to setting out Labour’s vision for a values-led foreign policy based on cooperation and internationalism,” announced Mr Lammy on his appointment.

What kind of values would they be, minister? That question doubtless was on many lips, and Mr Lammy set out to provide a lighthearted answer by appearing on Celebrity Mastermind just a few days later.

Now, if his goal was to re-emphasise his credentials in both culture and foreign affairs, not to mention such less recondite disciplines as arithmetic, that stint was only a qualified success.

Oh well, let’s forget understatement. Lammy’s appearance was in fact rather embarrassing, and not just for him personally.

Asked what was the surname of the married scientists Marie and Pierre who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1903 for their research into radiation, Mr Lammy answered: “Antoinette”.

One should single out the salient points of this reply. First, our former Culture Minister thought Marie Antoinette was still around in the 20^th century, busily working on research into radiation.

That means he didn’t have a clue who she was and, by inference, was ignorant of the key events in French history. This is a double whammy for his nous in both culture and foreign affairs. In that context, it’s even superfluous to mention Mr Lammy’s ignorance of the basic history of science – every schoolboy should have heard of Pierre and Marie Curie.

Another question on a related subject was: “Which fortress was built in the 1370s to defend one of the Gates of Paris and was later used as a state prison by Cardinal Richelieu?” “Versailles,” answered the former Culture Minister. His knowledge of geography was as sound as that of history: Versailles is in Paris, as far as Mr Lammy was concerned, and he had never heard of the Bastille.

He then opined that it was Red Leicester rather than Stilton that was the usual cheese to accompany port, but that’s excusable. Mr Lammy is a Labour politician after all, and his unfamiliarity with ‘posh’ tastes must have appealed to his core support.

The same excuse could have worked for his not knowing that the highest gallery of theatre seats is called ‘the gods’. Only the toffs know such arcana, and a Labour politician can’t come across as a toff even if he is, which Mr Lammy isn’t.

However, he was running out of excuses. Asked who succeeded Henry VIII on the English throne at the age of nine, Mr Lammy answered: “Henry VII”. That showed his unwavering commitment to equality: Mr Lammy was equally ignorant of French and English history.

Still, even if he had never heard of Edward VI, he should have sensed intuitively that VII was unlikely to succeed VIII, on general grounds. That knowledge could have been picked up in kindergarten, even if that was the last level of Mr Lammy’s education, which it wasn’t.

But never mind ancient history or indeed arithmetic. The next question dealt with events only six years prior to Mr Lammy’s tour de force, and they had immediate relevance to his foreign policy remit: “Which country’s so-called ‘Rose Revolution’ of 2003 led to the resignation of its president Eduard Shevardnadze?”

Mr Lammy nominated Yugoslavia for that role, a year after Georgia had been attacked by Russia in an attempt to quash the very revolution that the Shadow Foreign Secretary had evidently never heard of. Even so, he should have known that Shevardnadze could only be a Georgian name, but that’s a minor matter, comparatively speaking.

Moving across the Atlantic, Mr Lammy didn’t know that Purple Heart was the American military decoration for those wounded in action. That sort of thing may upset our sensitive American cousins enough to ruin the special relationship, provided Mr Lammy is familiar with the term. (No big deal if he isn’t; it’s quite meaningless these days.)

One might think that Mr Lammy’s educational credentials included nothing but the School of Hard Knockers followed by Screw U. Well, one might think wrong.

He attended The King’s School, Peterborough, founded by Henry VIII, who was then succeeded by Henry VII. After studying law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Mr Lammy was called to the bar in 1994. He then became the first black Briton to study at Harvard Law School, where he received a Master of Laws degree.

This raises questions not only about Mr Lammy but also about the educational standards at those venerable institutions. But such inquiries will have to wait until we’ve contemplated the more urgent matters.

For this year Shadow has been removed from his title – Mr Lammy is now in charge of Britain’s foreign policy. He thus takes his place in the roll call of his impressive predecessors: Castlereagh, Canning, Palmerston, Salisbury, Grey, Curzon, Balfour, Eden, Bevin – and I’m sure I’ve left quite a few out.

These men gave Britain a prominent place in the world’s political geography, but not all of them were equally accomplished. However, I’m willing to bet that none of them would have been defeated by questions coming out of a school primer. And I’m sure all of them knew that VIII came after VII, not the other way around.

Do let’s concede that a TV quiz show isn’t the right testing ground for a foreign secretary. Generally speaking, not knowing much trivia shouldn’t be held against Mr Lammy. Specifically speaking, however…

Let’s be kind and call him not uneducated but differently educated. He did answer correctly a question involving Oprah Winfrey, which would have made me search in vain for a friend to call who might know who on earth she was. Let’s be even kinder and allow that in the intervening 15 years our Foreign Secretary has learned that Marie-Antoinette and her hubby Pierre didn’t win the Nobel Prize for physics.

Having got kindness out of the way, now let’s be realistic. Let’s use Mr Lammy as the starting point of inductive extrapolation into the level of the people who run the country.

So here’s another Mastermind question: Where and how are they going to run Britain? Answers: A. Aground. B. Into the ground. C. In circles. D. Rugged. E. For the hills.

If you need to call a friend, I’m available. But whatever you do, don’t call David Lammy.

Vlad Putin turned 72 yesterday, and yet again I failed to wish him many happy returns. Very forgetful on my part, a sign of old age no doubt.

Neither did I remember to give Vlad a present, but then what do you give a man who has everything? Palaces, yachts, tens of billions stashed away offshore – Vlad’s possessions would defeat any sycophant racking his brain for a gift that might please Bunker Boy.

In any case, even if Vlad were still a yacht or a palace short, I couldn’t afford to give him such a present. Nor, truth to tell, would I want to. Yet even his closest associates, all billionaires in their own right, must find it hard to touch the right chord in their chieftain’s heart.

But then who says a birthday present has to be a valuable material possession? Poets, for example, have been known to write immortal sonnets for their beloved, and surely this is a better idea than an M&S gift card or even a piece of jewellery. Those of us who believe in the primacy of the spirit know that while material joy is transient heavenly joy is transcendent.

Putin’s cronies know it too, which is why they like to commemorate Vlad’s birthday by tugging on his heart’s strings. Thus, on the day Vlad turned 54 in 2006, they murdered Anna Politkovskaya, his bitter critic.

To be fair, they probably didn’t stumble on that gift idea all by themselves. Vlad might have dropped a hint to that effect, possibly paraphrasing Henry II by saying: “Who will rid me of this meddlesome journalist?”

For Anna Politkovskaya was indeed a journalist, and she was as meddlesome as they got. Hardly a day went by without Vlad having to wince as he read her reports on the second Chechen War, where the Russians were rehearsing the population-control concepts they are currently putting to such profitable use in the Ukraine.

Politkovskaya constantly shuttled between Moscow and Chechnya, visiting refugee camps filled with indescribable misery that she nevertheless managed to describe most poignantly.

I visited one such camp in 1995 BP (Before Putin) and the harrowing experience will stay with me for ever. But unlike me, Politkovskaya had the ear of a vast Russian audience, and she was writing her accounts at a time Vlad was firmly ensconced in the Kremlin.

Moreover, it was precisely the Second Chechen War, started in 1999, that put Vlad in the seat formerly occupied by Stalin. Since Russia still had a semblance of public opinion in those days, the public had to be sold on the idea of an obscure KGB officer as the leader.

To that end, his KGB colleagues blew up several Russian buildings together with all their inhabitants, blamed that outrage on the Chechens and used it as the pretext for another war. The gullible public was thus made aware of the pressing need for a strong leader, and who can be stronger than an officer in the outfit that had murdered some 60 million Soviet citizens?

Criticising the Chechen War was thus tantamount to criticising Vlad himself. And not merely criticising – it was bringing into doubt his very legitimacy. No wonder Vlad had to pop antacids and analgesics every time Politkovskaya put her poison pen to paper.

Granted, she was beaten to the full account of those building explosions by Litvinenko and Feltshinsky who published the book Blowing Up Russia in 2002. But since those reprobates lived outside Russia at the time, it was harder to get to them.

(Harder but not impossible. In fact, Vlad’s people managed to murder Litvinenko in London, just a month after Politkovskaya. Call it a belated birthday present.)

But even though Politkovskaya lived in Moscow, she still had the gall to publish her 2004 book Putin’s Russia, in which she dissed Vlad all the way to higher doses of aspirin and antacids. So, to repeat my earlier question, what do you give a man who has everything? The answer is, Politkovskaya’s head on a platter.

That’s just a figure of speech. The intrepid journalist wasn’t beheaded. She was shot dead in the lift of her block of flats. But the timing was perfect: 7 October. Vlad must have managed to contort his features into a grin-like grimace.

Now, it would be unfair to suggest that Vlad only has friends in Russia. In fact, his brand of strong leadership fascinates many admirers in such places as North Korea, China, Iran and The Mail on Sunday. Some of such sentiments are genuine, others spring from convenience, but they are all fervent.

And let’s be honest: Vlad is a real friend in need. Whenever a rogue country or a terrorist group needs support, moral or material, Vlad is there to help out. His arsenal and chequebook are always open for organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah and, say what you will about Muslims, but ingrates they aren’t.

Vlad rubs their back, they’ll rub out his enemies – and none are more mortal than the West, including Israel. So would it be preposterous to suggest that Hamas’s sadistic foray on 7 October, 2023, was also a birthday present for Vlad?

It has certainly proved even more precious than the murder of Politkovskaya. That act had a purely aesthetic value, but no strategic kind. Hamas, on the other hand, provided an invaluable diversion by kicking off a war to distract the West’s attention from the Ukraine.

Now you understand my predicament. Much as I’d love to give Vlad a birthday present, I can’t really murder anyone. And nothing less seems to do.

Anyone who criticises our justice system when it doesn’t do its job must praise it when it does. Hence I doff my hat to the judges who sent several Just Stop Oilers down.

Last Friday, two of those zealots were sentenced to terms of up to two years for throwing tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers in 2022. The judges evidently couldn’t see the logic of holding the painter responsible for warm weather or indeed for the use of hydrocarbons.

However, I do see the logic of taking such fanatics off the streets before they start throwing bombs at people rather than soup at paintings. Personally, I’d lock them up for life, just to be on the safe side.

However, Will McCallum, co-executive director of Greenpeace UK, disagrees. As far as he is concerned, the sentence is “a draconian and disproportionate punishment for a protest that caused minor damage to a picture frame.”

It’s only a hunch, but I suspect Mr McCallum would feel the same way even had the canvas itself been terminally damaged. However, if he weren’t a deranged fanatic, he’d know that in such legal matters it’s also the thought that counts.

Or, more precisely, the criminal intent. If someone shot at a crowd but only managed to cause a couple of flesh wounds, he’d still be charged with attempted murder and punished accordingly. He could have killed even if he didn’t do so. By the same token, the two Oilers clearly intended to damage Sunflowers, and it wasn’t a form of art criticism.

Five of their accomplices were also sentenced for blocking the M25, the ring road around London that carries 200,000 vehicles a day, 15 per cent of the UK’s motorway traffic. Progressive people the world over were up in arms, and French papers accused the UK of denying freedom of expression.

Right. I get it. Trying to disfigure a painting in the National Gallery and holding thousands of people hostage on a motorway are innocent exercises of free expression. All I can say is that yet again progress-junkies show a lamentable lapse in logic.

I’d like to help them out of that intellectual conundrum. Chaps, the term ‘freedom of expression’ omits a modifier that reasonable people assume can be taken for granted. That word is ‘legitimate’, as in ‘freedom of legitimate expression’.

Since climate fanatics don’t seem to take that implicit adjective for granted, the whole phrase is rendered meaningless. If disfiguring a museum exhibit or preventing law-abiding people from going about their business is free expression, then anything is.

Murder, for example, may be construed as free expression of pent-up anger. Theft, as free expression of the urge to redistribute wealth. Rape, as free expression of sexual desire. In other words, what we are observing here is a characteristic tendency of the Left to make words mean so much that they end up meaning nothing.

We are currently seeing another version of free expression all over the country. As the anniversary of the Hamas sadistic massacre of Israelis approaches, London and other major Western cities are overrun with pro-terrorist demonstrations. The marchers express themselves by screaming support for the terrorist organisations proscribed by law for being just that, terrorist.

The slogans exhibited on their placards range from anti-Israeli to frankly anti-Semitic, which too is against the law. It’s that omitted modifier ‘legitimate’ again.

Yet I for one feel warm gratitude for the marchers, as I always do for people who vindicate my innermost beliefs. The one relevant to the business at hand is that all anti-Western fanatics, whatever their ostensible gripe, are united in the same cause: hatred of the West.

One pro-Hezbollah placard held aloft yesterday made that point clear: “British Museum. Paint it red. Over 100,000 dead”.  The reference to soup-throwers is unmistakable, as is the solidarity of all such evil anomians regardless of their pet whinge against our civilisation.

The marchers didn’t restrict themselves to merely rooting for Hamas and Hezbollah. They made sure they left no one in doubt that any enemy of the West was their friend. Thus their placards also expressed their support for Houthi bandits who fire rockets at passing ships.

They tried to express that sentiment not only freely but also poetically: “Yemen, Yemen make us proud. Turn another ship around”. ‘Proud’ and ‘around’ don’t really rhyme but, as I said, it’s the thought that counts. Never mind versification, feel the passion.

A similar fanatic outside the White House in Washington D.C. yesterday showed the right way forward by becoming the real trailblazer of pro-terrorist support. I use the phrase advisedly because he tried to self-immolate by setting his own arm ablaze.

This form of free expression has something going for it: if all such zealots set themselves on fire, they’d rid our cities of undesirables and, as a side benefit, provide a cheap source of alternative energy. All we’ll have to do is point them towards the areas where wind farms and solar panels fail to heat people’s homes adequately.

London police made 16 arrests yesterday, and I hope our justice system will continue to send those champions of free expression down. But Starmer finds himself in an invidious position. On the one hand, he has to ignore his own feelings and voice some opprobrium of the on-going flouting of the law.

On the other hand, 44 per cent of Labour voters support the marchers’ cause, as opposed to a mere 10 per cent of those who appreciate Israel’s right to defend itself (the corresponding numbers among Tory voters are eight and 36 per cent), with the rest uncommitted. As a professional politician, Starmer may disregard his own feelings up to a point, but not the feelings of his core constituency.

He is therefore unlikely to deny their freedom of expression, as they see it. As I see it, freedom of expression is either meaningless or pernicious unless it coexists with freedom from expression, some of its extreme and illegal forms.

Without this proviso, free expression may easily turn into a civilisational suicide pact, a sort of undignified Dignitas for the whole society. Having said that, I don’t quite see tweedy and Barboured crowds marching through London and chanting “Freedom from expression” – even though this may be a good idea.

“But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.”

So wrote Edmund Burke, perhaps the greatest political mind these Isles have produced. Like his many other adages, this one builds on the past to prophesy the future.

What we are witnessing today isn’t so much the diminution of liberty but its corruption: too little of it where it’s vital, too much where it’s harmful. Modernity can’t find the right balance because it looks down on the past with contempt.

Yet many political realities we take for granted today were born in the Middle Ages. That the rulers as well as the ruled are to be subject to legal and moral restraints is one such reality, and perhaps the most important one.

While in the Hellenic world every new official document expanded the public domain at the expense of the individual, the great legal charters of the mediaeval world aimed to protect the individual from the despotism of the rulers. The Charter of Liberties, Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights were only the culmination of this development; its beginnings go back centuries earlier.

Tracing them back step by step, we’ll arrive at their provenance in the Christian doctrine of the autonomous individual as the focus of earthly life. While early Christians didn’t use the term ‘human rights’, they wouldn’t have been unduly bothered had an intrepid stranger explained what the term meant. By contrast, Plato or Aristotle would have thought the stranger not so much intrepid as mad. People to them only had rights as citizens, not as mere human beings.

The modern system of representation has ancient roots as well, and it was from barons’ councils that our modern parliaments have evolved. In pre-Norman England it was the Witenagemot, the assembly of the kingdom’s leading nobles, convening after a king’s death to choose a successor. That was, to name one instance, how Harold Godwinson took the throne, which he then lost to a Norman arrow in 1066.

The same can be said about the system of adjudication and property protection, whose historical antecedents go back to the Old Testament but whose political embodiment was mediaeval. Above all, during the Middle Ages the individual could feel relatively secure behind the wall of local institutions patterned on the family. Parish, village, guild, monastery, cooperative, neighbourhood and even the family itself had their autonomy generally respected.

Originally created mostly for the purpose of keeping people safe from encroachment by central government, in time such institutions assumed the role of the formulator, educator and custodian of the social and moral order. It was such institutions that gave physical shape to the three pillars on which, according to Burke, government should rest: prejudice, which is intuitive knowledge; prescription, which is truth passed on by previous generations; and presumption, which is inference from the common experience of mankind.

The social and moral order maintained by the church and familial institutions was by definition conservative – its origin was assumed to have been derived from the word of God, and that word wasn’t subject to change. For the same reason, the church is (or rather ought to be) ipso facto a conservative institution – its function is to preserve the tradition that’s not only two millennia old but is also based on eternal and immutable truths.

Politically too, the church either has to eschew progressivism or betray its own function in earthly life, that of acting as social adhesive, moral judge and mediator of salvation. The first means staying intertwined with secular society; the second, rising above it; the third, eventually leaving it behind.

While the second and third are self-explanatory, the first in the mediaeval world meant mainly ensuring that the patchwork quilt of numerous, and often competing, familial groups wouldn’t threaten social cohesion. The danger was inherent: it could be assumed with certainty that various groups would at times pursue clashing ends.

Whenever their secular interests were pulling them apart, the church would step in to remind, say, the warring clans that at the highest possible level they had more to bring them together than to tear them apart. Without this moderating, conservative role played by the church, familial institutions would never have added up to a cohesive society.

The political realm outside that familial order was always fluid and tactical in its modus operandi. Rooted not in ideology but in expedience and custom, it wasn’t so much chiselled in stone as drawn on quicksand. While personal relationships within a family clan were constant, the political relationships among various elements of the feudal political order changed all the time.

Such fluidity wasn’t then, nor is now, contrary to real conservatism – it is in fact its essential characteristic. Burke said as much when commenting that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation”.

Change was aplenty in feudal times: a vassal could become stronger than his lord, or the latter richer and more powerful than his prince. The formal bonds among them might have survived the shifts, but the vessels would be empty – the contents were no longer there.

Geographic demarcation was equally fluid: a lord could switch his allegiance from one prince to another, taking his land into another domain. Or else he could become a prince himself, claiming new lands and rearranging the political geography of his region.

Thus no nations could have appeared, at any rate not in our modern sense of territorial, political, economic, legal, cultural, ethnic and linguistic unity. The genitive designation of the Holy Roman Empire as that ‘of the German Peoples’ referred to religious and cultural commonality only, not to an entity definable in clearly drawn geographical terms. Even England, whose geographic limits are defined naturally, remained an agglomerate of independent provinces throughout the Middle Ages.

Weak or at least limited central government had neither the strength nor the inclination to encroach upon the autonomy of local institutions. Though it sometimes had to regard them as competitors and act accordingly, an all-out attack was unthinkable until a mighty absolute state appeared and began to put its foot down.

The triad of state, church and family (along with family-like institutions), with the last two at least holding their own against the first, was then destroyed. The state emerged victorious. And once the protective wall of intermediate institutions was swept out of the way, the state’s power over the individual could be reliably predicted to gravitate towards becoming absolute at some point.

The conclusion is clear: the social and moral order of Christendom is incompatible with a political triumph of central over local institutions. Since such a triumph always involves the subjugation of the personal to the collective, and therefore some enslavement of the individual, it could only be achieved at a cost to such institutions.

The ultimate cost was their demise, which was the levy no traditional state was prepared to pay. For the modern state, however, it was cheap at the price.

Modern democracy is inseparable from central government riding roughshod over local pluralism. Strip the word ‘democracy’, as used today, of its armoured shell of demagoguery, and it becomes synonymous with limitless centralisation, leaving people unprotected from the encroachments of an impersonal, omnipotent state run by an increasingly corrupt bureaucracy.

Hence a democracy unaccountable to a transcendent authority and uncontested by competing forms of government is incompatible with the traditional moral and social order in the West. That’s what Burke meant and what we have forgotten.

The upshot is clear: read Edmund Burke, ladies and gentlemen – and weep.

If I were president of Argentina, I’d be baring my teeth in a mirthless, threatening smile. One slight push, or just a tacit threat of one, and the Falklands will again become Lousy Wine (I assume that’s what Malvinas means in Spanish).

The prime minister of Spain has a reason to smile too. If the mighty power of Mauritius could yesterday claim the Chagos Archipelago from Britain, then what’s Spain, chopped hígado? It’s time those upstart British residents of Gibraltar learned that word means liver in Spanish.

British overseas territories are up for grabs, a point Labour made crystal-clear yesterday. By ceding Chagos to Mauritius, 2,000 km away, Starmer has effectively delivered it to China that treats the island nation as its colony. And he did so while dispensing with the annoying inconvenience of a Commons debate.

Quite apart from any general considerations, the Archipelago’s largest island, Diego Garcia, is home to the joint UK-US military base. It’s a key strategic hub for Anglo-American operations in the Indo-Pacific region.

And not only there. Suffice it to say that US bombing raids on both Iraq and Afghanistan were launched from Diego Garcia. The base would also be critical for the allies to help out Israel in case of an all-out war with Iran.

We are retaining the use of the base for the next 99 years, but if the whole Archipelago is crawling with Chinese ‘advisers’, operating Diego Garcia will become logistically problematic – terminally so in case of China’s attack on Taiwan.

Chagos has been British since 1965. When Mauritius became independent in 1968, Britain paid the new state £3 million for the Archipelago, roughly the equivalent of £50 million today, which should have spelled the end of the matter in eternity. But it didn’t.

The International Court of Justice in 2019 and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in 2021 offered an advisory (meaning non-binding) opinion that Mauritius has a valid claim to the islands. Any responsible British government would have ignored that opinion, and in fact even the semi-responsible Tories did so.

Yet Starmer must be asking the same question when he wakes up every morning: “How can I harm Britain today?” Yesterday’s reply came in the shape of throwing away a vital British territory.

HMG claimed yesterday that the abject surrender reflects its “enduring commitment” to the rule of law. In fact, I can only repeat what Americans always say about the Panama Canal: we paid for it; it’s ours. Also, the rule of law in Britain means the rule of British law, not the rule of international bodies largely controlled by wicked regimes.

The most powerful such regime is Communist China, the key part of the new axis of evil also including Russia, Iran and North Korea. And, unlike their impatient, trigger-happy Russian vassals, the Chinese are pursuing a long-term strategy of subjugating the world.

They are systematically taking control of the Third World and making heavy inroads into the other two. The weapons the Chinese are using at the moment are mostly economic, with their colossal military build-up held back in reserve for the moment. But the Chinese keep dropping heavy hints that it’s still there, ready for use if some countries prove recalcitrant.

Their strategy is familiar to any chess player. If asked how a game can be won, most people will mention checkmate. But that’s not the case. In fact, the higher the players’ level, the rarer that outcome. Most games end when one side realises its position is hopeless because the opponent has gradually accumulated a decisive advantage. The player then resigns, stops his clock and the two shake hands.

China is playing a similar long game, except that there is no clock ticking away and no handshake awaits the losing side. What awaits is subjugation and tyranny. Thus, ceding strategic territory to that evil regime with global ambitions, which is effectively what Starmer has done, means emboldening it and others to go on an even wider foraging excursion.

It’s true that old-style socialists were at daggers drawn with communists – none so hostile as divergent exponents of the same creed. But Starmer’s socialism isn’t old-style, and the distance between Labour radicalism and Chinese communism has grown shorter. One difference is that the Chinese seem more committed to private enterprise.

There exist other differences as well, but it’s a fair bet that the Starmer-Corbyn lot don’t feel an intuitive revulsion at the sight of any communist regime. They may instead feel some emotional affinity for their Chinese comrades who remain just that, even if they overdo government by fiat.

Delivering some of our vital strategic industries, such as communications, to the Chinese is criminal negligence. The same goes for making territorial concessions to the Chinese or their allies. That’s sheer irresponsibility, or would be nothing but that if it weren’t overlaid with latent sympathy or at least the absence of principled rejection.

Such meekness also sends wrong signals to the likes of Argentina that has never accepted its 1982 defeat over the Falklands. Should the Argentines feel like having another go, it’s not immediately clear what Britain could do about it this time around. After all, our limp-wristed leaders have been steadily debauching Britain’s defence for decades – and Starmer may yet prove to be the worst of them all.

However, as things stand, even a leader combining the resolve of Churchill and Thatcher would find it impossible to put together a naval task force similar to that of 1982. Our two carriers, HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Queen Elizabeth, set sail the other day for training exercises and equipment trials. Neither is fully battle-worthy, and neither has a full complement of planes. The first few F-35s arrived only a couple of days ago and will take time to bed down.

The only way of scaring the Argentines off is to communicate in no uncertain terms Britain’s commitment to defending the Falklands with overwhelming force, intercontinental if need be. But that kind of deterrent only ever works if the adversary takes such threats seriously. Delivering British territories piecemeal to evil regimes doesn’t exactly communicate single-mindedness of purpose.

One can only hope that Javier Milei, president of Argentina, is a secret Anglophile. He may be at that, but I’m sure Spain’s PM Sánchez isn’t.

Don’t know about you, but every morning I open the papers with trepidation. What else will Starmer do next? Raise taxes? Already done. Drive crowds of wealth generators out of Britain? Sorted. Leave our armed forces unable to protect us? Taken care of.

There don’t seem to be many new areas for our Labour government to explore. But I trust them implicitly: when it comes to hurting the country, this lot will always find a way.

That was the date in 1932 on which the last free interbella elections were held in Germany. It was also the last chance to stop the Nazis, who had lost much of their earlier support.

The NASDP was still on course to score heavily, but a bloc of the Socialists and the Communists could have it outvoted. The Nazis knew it, and their diary entries at the time were suicidal – they were bankrupt and, if they lost, they would never be able to launch another electoral bid. Time for a bottle of schnapps, a revolver and a farewell note to the liebschen.

The forecasts were accurate. Conservatives led by Hindenburg came in first, but the old man was on his last legs, and everyone knew it. The SPD and the KPD together did receive 1.5 million more votes than the Nazis. Yet the Nazis were still ahead because the two Left parties weren’t together.

The socialists, by far the larger party, had sought a bloc with the communists. Had they succeeded, it’s almost certain that the Second World War would have been prevented.

Alas, while the SPD was an independent party, the KPD wasn’t. It was Stalin’s puppet, and Stalin’s plans didn’t include a peaceful Germany. He wanted the Nazis to take over the country and use her as what Lenin had called “the icebreaker of the revolution”.

He knew a Nazi Germany would attack the West sooner or later, with the war exhausting both sides whatever the outcome. Stalin would then ride in on his white steed and take over a ruined Europe. What was Lenin’s fantasy could become Stalin’s reality, and he wasn’t about to throw it away.

So the KPD was told to forget any blocs. Its leader, Ernst Thälmann, obeyed the order, thereby eventually buying himself a one-way ticket to Buchenwald, where he was killed in 1944. The Nazis seized power in 1933 and, well, you know the rest.

Far be it from me to compare Britain circa 2024 with Germany circa 1932: the differences are too obvious to mention. No British party, whatever its parliamentary majority, is likely to create anything near the catastrophe that befell Germany and the rest of the world back in the 1930s. However, there also exist some similarities, and these aren’t too obvious to mention.

Our ruling party, Labour, is enjoying a vast parliamentary majority delivered to it by Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system conspiring with the mind-numbing incompetence of the Conservative Party.

Fundamentally, the latter springs from the Conservatives’ disavowal of conservative policies, abandonment of conservative principles and, as a result, forfeiture of conservative competence in matters economic. Essentially, the Tory Party had become Labour Lite, and there was always the danger that the public would opt for Labour Full Strength.

When in the previous general election, Labour fielded a rank communist, Jeremy Corbyn, and the Tories countered with charismatic Boris Johnson, that outcome was deferred for a few years. However, it couldn’t be prevented.

The Tories ditched Johnson, who really didn’t have much except charisma going for himself. They eventually replaced him with Sunak who was much less appealing without being much more conservative. Labour, on the other hand, came to its senses, replaced Corbyn with Starmer, who knew how to make bogus moderate noises, and won by a landslide.

Having done so, they took the support of about 20 per cent of the electorate for a ringing mandate and immediately began to drive the country on the road to destruction. The mighty Tory Party has been reduced to a rump faction unable to provide genuine opposition.

It owes some of its misfortune to the emergence of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party that cost the Tories some 100 parliamentary seats. Had they kept those 100 seats, they still would have lost, but by a smaller margin. That would have enabled them to put some brakes on Labour’s drive to the precipice and also to harbour some hopes of resurgence.

Like the German Left in the 1930s, the British Right (if the Tories qualify as such) was split and ready for plucking. However, whatever mess Labour will create over the next five years, it’s far from certain that either the Tories or Reform will be able to oust Starmer on their own.

The Reform Party is trying to appeal to the conservative spirit of the British people, but that spirit has largely evaporated. Nigel Farage’s key message is immigration, which he wants to reduce to a barely noticeable minimum. That strikes a chord with much of the electorate, but single-issue parties hardly ever form governments.

Farage knows it too, which is why he harmonises his main theme with secondary subjects, lower taxes and defence. These traditional Tory policies also appeal to many voters, and they sound good to most.

However, once the echoes of the sound have died out, scrutiny will start. To get to the target of three percent of GDP, our defence budget will have to grow by about £30 billion. Lowering tax revenue even by a modest 10 per cent would shave some £82 billion off the Exchequer’s receipts. We are looking at what Labour politicians call a budget hole, to the tune of at least £112 billion. How will Farage fill it?

I hope he has a plan, but somehow I doubt it. But even if he does, sound economics dictates a sweeping reduction in spending across the board, starting with social projects and proceeding to blaspheme against the sainted NHS.

In other words, the only proven way of achieving the targets of Reform’s rhetoric would be to pursue the whole raft of conservative policies, trying to boost economic growth and hence tax revenue. However, I’m not convinced the British public has an appetite for going conservative to that extent. Decades of rabid socialist propaganda have produced the intended corrupting effect.

Thus one would think that a merger, or at least an electoral bloc, of Reform and Labour Lite, aka the Tories, would dilute conservatism to a point where our brainwashed and dumbed-down electorate would find it palatable. However, just like the Left parties of Germany’s past, I can’t see any rapprochement between the two Right-ish parties of Britain’s present.

Farage has already declared he’d never agree to any bloc with the Tories, and I think he means it. After many years of trying, he has finally gained a seat in the Commons, as a leader of a small but up-and-coming party. Reform will never become king, but it could well become king maker, thus gaining power beyond its numbers.

At the same time, Mr Farage barely conceals his contempt for the wishy-washy Tories, who have delivered the country to raving Lefties in moderate clothing. That feeling is enthusiastically reciprocated, what with the Tory mandarins, federasts almost to a man, hating Farage for the role he played in Brexit.

The last time we had an electoral bloc was in 2010, when Cameron and Clegg brought together the Tories and the LibDems. However, the two parties were much closer together: politically, Cameron and Clegg were dizygotic if not quite identical twins. Even so, the alliance was short-lived.

Whoever is elected to lead the Tories in the on-going free for all will still be Labour Lite and hence opposed to everything Farage stands for. Then again, either leader would rather be the big man in a small pond, even if the pond ends up the size of a puddle. The leader’s chair would be too small to accommodate two egos.

I do hope the two parties will find some arrangement they could live with, for without it the harrowing prospect looms of Labour running unopposed for a generation, to devastating effect.

Study late-Weimar German history, chaps, would be my advice. You may learn that, unless you hang together… well, you won’t hang separately, like Thälmann. But neither will you win, and all of us will end up losers.

I’m not suggesting that the two countries have decided to join forces against the European Union. As things stand, I doubt Iran and Israel can see eye to eye on any cause.

But the unfolding conflict in the Middle East may soon make Europe see the two countries as accomplices. As a result of Iran’s continuing aggression against Israel, both direct and by proxy, a new refugee crisis beckons, and the EU is ill-equipped to handle it.

As it is, the ideological attempt to create a bloated pan-European Leviathan is failing – and largely because of the fallout from an explosion of Muslim immigration. For all the fiery speeches, the EU is constitutionally and philosophically incapable of solving this problem.

Europeans have learned to shrug with indifference when observing the steady empowerment of the EU. Most members are net recipients of EU funding, and few people will reject handouts on a matter of principle. Some nod their agreement at tirades about compromised national sovereignty, but the masses are quite complacent about that sort of thing.

Comparing, say, France with pre-Brexit Britain, one detects a similar demographic breakdown. The intelligentsia are predominantly pro-EU and the common folk are just as predominantly anti. Yet one detects little appetite in France or elsewhere in Europe for actually leaving the EU, as opposed to making it less bossy and meddling.

Should France get a referendum similar to ours in 2016, it’s hard to tell which way it would go. But this is futile speculation because the French upper classes will block any such development, and they have more power in their country than their British counterparts have in theirs.

One would think the EU should therefore be quite secure and so it would be – but for one nagging issue: porous borders and the ensuing influx of Muslim immigration.

That influx is threatening to flood the political mainstream in Europe, sweeping away the pro-EU sentiments residing therein. Because – and let me make perfectly clear that, as founder and chairman of the Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism, I deplore such attitudes – Europeans don’t mind a bit of diversity, but they dislike too much of it.

When they see their neighbourhoods overrun with people who talk funny, dress eccentrically and behave oddly, they begin to complain first, rebel second. That gives an open goal to the big hitters on the national-populist fringe, and they are beginning to score heavily.

Just the other day the Austrian Freedom Party ran away with the national elections, and its parteigenossen from other countries have either done the same already or are threatening to do so in the future. Another million or so arrivals from the Middle East may well tip the balance in their favour.

As it is, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Geert Wilders in Holland, Viktor Orbán in Hungary are already in charge, while the National Rally in France and AfD in Germany are close to electoral victories. Even in the Anglophone countries close to my heart, Britain and the US, unchecked immigration is a key electoral issue for nationalist candidates.

Those European parties that run the anti-immigration issue up their flagpole aren’t the best friends of the EU. The idea of a single European state governed out of Brussels by grey-faced bureaucrats goes against the grain of nationalism or even patriotism. For the sake of consistency if nothing else, the nationalist parties must make anti-EU noises to the point of disavowing that organisation.

Hungary and Poland lead the way, but Holland and Italy aren’t far behind – for now. However, the situation is changing by the day. Up to a million Lebanese have already been displaced by the on-going conflict, and most of them are fleeing to Syria.

Something tells me they don’t see Syria as their final destination. In fact, they are certain to take the path to Europe well-trodden by millions of others. Nor is it the only path: Turkey is another popular stopover on the way to France or Germany.

Why can’t Saudi Arabia or the UAE take them, you may ask? Aren’t Muslims duty-bound to offer hospitality to their brethren in distress? They are but they don’t. One detects no willingness on the part of the rich Islamic states to open their doors to immigrants from Lebanon, Syria, North Africa and Gaza.

They haven’t forgotten what such hospitality did to Lebanon in 1975-1990, when a beautiful and westernised Middle Eastern country was turned into smouldering ruins by the Civil War caused by Palestinian immigrants. If there is one thing the Saudi and Gulf Arabs cherish as much as money, it’s social tranquillity. They obviously know something Europeans don’t.

So far the EU has tried to curtail the influx by bribing the governments of Turkey and Syria to limit the outflow. That has kept the numbers of new arrivals down to millions, as opposed to tens of millions. Yet even that has proved too heavy a burden for Europe’s fragile finances to bear.

Neither Turkey nor Syria is among Israel’s best friends. Europe is, or at least pretends to be. That stance may make those two countries reluctant to offer the EU a helping hand at its time of need. Hence a new migrant crisis looms large over Europe, with unpredictable consequences.

Much as I despise the EU and the ideology behind it, I’m not going to gloat over its misfortune. Its financial troubles – and France has just announced a deficit spinning out of control – affect us as well, what with the growing economic globalisation.

But what I really dread is a Europe of countries run by nationalists of various political hues. Nationalism by definition presupposes not only the love of one’s own country but also hostility to those of a less fortunate nativity.

A Europe run by national-populist parties will become a powder keg, and the conflict between Israel and Iran threatens to hoist such parties to power. By this, I certainly don’t mean to imply that Iran and Israel are equally complicit in creating this fraught situation.

Iran is the indisputable aggressor, while Israel is fighting for her survival. Yet both an anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic animus is strong if still largely dormant in Europe. Most anti-Semitic outrages there are committed by refugees from Muslim countries or their children.

However, most nationalist parties in Europe have anti-Semitic antecedents. Some have tried to live that heritage down, but the sentiments thrive at the grassroots. That’s why, as such parties gain more power, their countries may well turn against Israel. I don’t know how soon or how strongly, but such a development is likely.

Meanwhile, the refugee crisis continues to fester in Europe, and it’s threatening to blow it apart. I’ll be on hand to tell when that happens, but you’ll probably know it without my help.

Baroness Theresa ‘Darling Bud’ May has delivered a rousing oratory waxing indignant about the likes of Trump and Farage who describe climate change as a “hoax” or a “scam”.

You could see me wiping my brow even as we speak. Since I only describe it as a swindle, I find myself outside the range of Darling Bud’s slings and arrows. That’s why, rather than feeling defensive, I can sit back and reflect on her remarks dispassionately.

The first thought that comes to mind is that susceptibility to cults is inversely proportionate to the level of culture. And this is one telling difference between a religion and a cult. The former heightens one’s ability to acquire culture, the latter nips it in the bud.

(G.K. Chesterton said the same thing with epigrammatic precision: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything”.)

This observation is true of individuals, and it’s equally true of societies. That stands to reason.

An essential part of culture is discrimination, and I’m using the word in its proper, rather than political, sense. A cultured person has an ability, both innate and acquired, to tell right from wrong, good from bad, true from false, beautiful from ugly, intelligent from stupid, credible from incredible, plausible from impossible.

His ability to discriminate makes him impervious to any newfangled orthodoxies. Before he accepts them as such, a cultured person will cast a critical eye over them to make sure they fall on the left side in each pair I listed in the previous paragraph.

If upon such scrutiny he finds them wanting, a cultured person will reject such orthodoxies out of hand, regardless of how many people accept them. Conversely, an uncultured person will avidly gobble up any thin gruel of an idea as long as it caters to his hunger for a higher purpose. Because he needs to believe in something, he is ready to “believe in anything”. Including such unscientific, ahistorical nonsense as a climate catastrophe awaiting the world unless the western part of it destroys its economy with ‘net zero’.

I don’t know whether Baroness May has any religious faith but, if she has, it hasn’t in her case fulfilled its civilising potential. Either she genuinely worships the cult of global warming or, as a politician, accepts that it has already graduated to the status of orthodoxy, and I don’t know which is worse.

Most zealots will react angrily, possibly violently, to anyone who dares to argue against their cherished cult. Rather than being seen as a sensible individual coming up with well-reasoned arguments, such a naysayer will be regarded as a heretic or apostate. And no aspiring politician wants to be cast in any such role: there’s no applause awaiting and, more important, few votes.

When I ill-advisedly find myself arguing against exponents of the climate cult, I always ask a lapidary question: “Have you read a single book on the subject?” So far I’ve received a single yes answer to that question, which made me ask a follow-up: “Which one?”

The next reply I received, “What the **** does it matter?”, confirmed what I knew already. My interlocutor, along with most people, arrived at his belief without having taken the trouble to study the subject. Like most modern, which is to say uncultured, people, he suffers from the deadly combination of high passion and low knowledge.

In what sounded like self-laceration but was meant to be a scathing attack, Darling Bud lashed out at the “out-of-touch elite” that uses the climate change debate “to fight a culture war”. This brought to mind the canonical story of a thief running away at full pelt from his pursuers and shouting “Stop thief!” louder than anyone else.

Having set up her stall, Baroness May then proceeded to fill it with pseudo-evidential goodies. One such is the economic bonanza that net zero will create: “When the sceptics say that the green transition will cripple business, we say they could not be more wrong. Study after study shows that the transition to renewable energy will unlock global market opportunities worth trillions of dollars over the next decade alone – with businesses in every world region able to capitalise.”

Show me your study, I’ll show you mine. And mine will demonstrate convincingly that, even if we assume that wind farms and solar panels will eventually provide enough domestic energy, they will never be able to sustain a strong industry. Since the need for industrial output will persist for ever, industry jobs will go to countries that ignore Western cults.

The other day I experienced acute schadenfreude when I read an article calculating that the cost of running an electric car is already twice that of a petrol or diesel vehicle. And that’s before millions of batteries go zonk.

Though Baroness May isn’t as far as I know a communist, she operates in the same idiom. The cost of energy is climbing up steeply, and households are already reeling under the impact. But Darling Bud wants them to grit their teeth and accept today’s pain for the sake of the glittering future awaiting tomorrow. Or perhaps the day after. Or maybe never – it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is keeping faith in the cult.

In the same spirit, she then attributed everything awful in life to global warming, showing a creative ability to construct chains of causality out of thin air. Modern slavery, for example, is a direct result of warm weather.

Those who couldn’t keep up with the runaway train of her thought were treated to a staggering explanation, link by causal link. Because of warm weather, “life becomes a matter of survival from one day to the next, and into that picture come the criminal gangs making money out of human suffering. Because these situations make people more vulnerable to being trafficked and taken into slavery.”

Darling Bud then added a few touches of colour by telling her audience some harrowing stories of a 53-year-old Romanian electrician forced into the sex industry and a seven-year-old girl sold into slavery and forced to sleep with dogs, one hopes only literally.

All because of global warming, Baroness? If you have to ask, you don’t worship the cult.

One could offer her any number of facts showing this swindle for what it is. Such as that warm and cold periods have always alternated, and climate has been warmer than it is now for about 85 per cent of history, or that the warm peaks have produced periods of the greatest prosperity.

But that would be a pointless exercise. Cults are impervious to facts or reason, and their worshippers, such as our former PM, neither activate their own minds nor appeal to anyone else’s. They just scream their harangues, and in this regard the supposedly grown-up Theresa May is no different from that evil Swedish child with learning difficulties.