Month: May 2025

Since Trump first started uttering statements in public, he has been obsessed with tariffs. Over the past 40 years or so, the obsession has gradually turned into a mania.

Any country that had a trade surplus with America was ripping her off, such was Trump’s understanding of economics. And even countries like Britain that had a trade deficit with America were plotting to turn it into a surplus so that they too could start ripping America off.

The only way for America to protect herself against such predators was to hit back with punitive tariffs, thereby making America great again. Entreaties by conservative economists, such as Milton Friedman, were falling on deaf ears.

He and his University of Chicago colleagues were arguing that a country’s economic strength is defined by her imports, not exports. It’s when the former exceed the latter that a country has a favourable trade balance.

After all, if a butcher can afford to spend more on vegetables than a greengrocer can spend on meat, which one is doing better? Those bastards who are ripping America off, that’s who. No rational arguments could dislodge Trump sitting astride his idée fixe.

During his first term at the White House, when Trump was still compos mentis, he introduced a 25 per cent tariff on steel imports and declared victory: he saved 2,000 American jobs. Happiness all around; tariffs had done their job.

So they had, but that wasn’t quite the job Trump had in mind. True enough, 2,000 jobs of steel workers were saved. And then what happened?

A tariff is a tax imposed on both foreign exporters and domestic consumers because it makes the goods, in this case steel, more expensive. The trouble is that 80 times more Americans were (and continue to be) employed in steel-using industries than in steel-making ones. The cost of doing business went up in those industries, and redundancies ensued.

Some 77,000 of them, which equalled a net effect of 75,000 American jobs sacrificed at the altar of Trump’s mania. Now, Trump may be becoming deranged, but not so much that he has forgotten Einstein’s caution that, if you continue to do the same thing over and over again, you can’t expect different results.

In his current tenure, the president has taken those wise words to heart and refused to do the same thing over again. Rather than persevering with 25 per cent tariffs on steel, he has doubled them to 50 per cent. And now the new generation of Friedman’s colleagues at the University of Chicago are again warning that the measure will harm US consumers and cost US manufacturing jobs.

General Motors has already announced closure of plants in Maryland, Michigan, Ohio and Ontario, citing steel tariffs as part of the reason. Trump has winced at that development, yet has so far failed to do anything about reversing his bungling raid on the economy. But don’t despair: these days the Donald reverses his decisions as often as he brushes his dentures.

At the same time, he has announced his “Big, Beautiful Bill” of sweeping tax cuts accompanied by only token reductions in public spending. This is another crazy idea, and if he wants to find out how crazy, he ought to study Liz Truss’s tenure as Britain’s PM and why it only lasted 49 days.

This is something that even his closest acolytes know. In fact, when Elon Musk left DOGE the other day, he correctly stated that a bill can be either big or beautiful, but not both. Economic experts – but what do they know, eh? – are confidently predicting that any attempt to put this bill into practice will add four more trillion to the already existing national debt of 36 trillion, while pushing annual deficits over seven per cent of GDP.

No wonder credit rating agencies have stripped America of its top AAA rating, and investors are now charging five per cent interest on America’s borrowing. This can only rise if Trump persists in his amateurish bungling, and America is already paying a trillion dollars a year to service her national debt.

Musk cuts a frustrated figure. Say what you will about him, but he can add up with the best of them. Unfortunately Musk found out the hard way that his mathematical ability counts for nothing when it comes to negotiating his way around the political Beltway.

He took his job at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) fully intent on fulfilling his task of cutting two trillion a year off public spending. Alas, Elon had to discover that, for all his business acumen, when it comes to DC politics he is a rank amateur.

He, and his former boss Donald, should read the book The Triumph of Politics by David Stockman, Reagan’s head of OMB. He too attacked a similar task, albeit it with smaller targets, only to find himself buried under an avalanche of Washington mandarins.

Stockman realised it’s impossible to introduce large tax cuts without similarly huge cuts in spending. These he was unable to achieve, but neither Musk nor, more important, Trump learned from that experience.

As a result, Musk claims only $175 billion in savings, but even that amount doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The actual figure is probably half that but, even if Musk’s sums are correct, considering the gargantuan size of the federal budget, $175 billion falls within the range of a rounding error.

Many years ago, there was an exhibition of amateur art at the V&A. The clever poster advertising it said, “Noah’s Ark was designed by an amateur. The Titanic was designed by a professional.” I’m sure the headline worked as a way of drawing punters in, but the implied idea manifestly doesn’t work in politics.

Expertise gained in making cars, launching rockets or, for that matter, manipulating the US bankruptcy laws to one’s benefit doesn’t translate to the political arena.

This is a difficult idea to sell to today’s public paper-trained to believe that an expert in one area has to be an expert in all. Hoi polloi take on faith political ideas mouthed by various actors and pop stars whose credibility is boosted by the time they spend on TV screens.

Trump knows this, which is why he has successfully turned a negative into a positive, a standard weapon in the arsenal of any adman. Yes, I’m an outsider, he shouts at every turn. That’s why I can work miracles. I was on TV, wasn’t I?

Hence at least 20 members of his administration stepped into their jobs straight off the screens of Fox News and other media outlets. Most of them are puerile eccentrics, putting it mildly, who even lack the capacity to learn on the job, as Stockman eventually did. But then he was a bright young economist to begin with.

To be fair, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, is a grown-up economic professional and there are a few others. Yet their influence is negligible because Trump wants sycophants around him, not intelligent advisors. By all accounts, the latter have to turn into the former if they want to stay in their jobs.

One word out of turn, and their wildly erratic and unpredictable boss can sack them with the same ease he paraded in his TV show The Apprentice. Hence they wisely tell their boss things he wants to hear, pretending they don’t realise how deranged he is becoming.

The American presidential democracy can’t oust a bungling president as efficiently as Britain’s parliamentary democracy can get rid of a bungling prime minister. But it has other, mostly legal, ways to protect itself.

That’s why, as Tocqueville spotted with his eagle eye two centuries ago, political problems sooner or later become legal in America. The courts have already tried to stop Trump’s tariff madness, with him so far being able to slow them down with appeals. Yet it doesn’t take a genius to realise that legal challenges will be coming thick and fast.

And, if the Americans’ standard of living shows a decline, as most economists are predicting it will, after the mid-term elections Trump may become a lame duck president unable to push his madcap ideas past a hostile Congress and obstreperous courts.

That situation will be fraught with such dangers not only for the US but for the whole residually free world that it’s hard to wish for it. Yet we may have no choice.

According to our chief legal officer, Attorney General Lord Hermer, anyone who thinks Britain should withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is a Nazi.

That made me aware of another aspect of my personality, for I too hold that view. I don’t know whether Lord Hermer regards this belief as a sufficient condition for being a full-fledged National Socialist, but if he does, I’m half a step removed from buying a brown shirt and screaming “Sieg heil!”.

Lord Hermer described people like me as those singing a siren song that doesn’t even have any novelty appeal. “This is not a new song,” he explained.

“The claim that international law is fine as far as it goes, but can be put aside when the conditions change, is a claim that was made in the early 1930s by ‘realist’ jurists in Germany most notably Carl Schmitt, whose central thesis was in essence the claim that state power is all that counts, not law.”

Schmitt was indeed a Nazi philosopher, although one not without certain nuances. His political thought was authoritarian and statist, a platform from which he criticised liberal democracy. Schmitt came up with the notion of a “state of exception”, essentially meaning that the law laid down by the ruler may supersede the rule of law.

He became a hugely influential political and legal philosopher, but characteristically his influence is now mostly felt on the intellectual Left, through such Frankfurters as Benjamin and Adorno. At this point I become confused.

Specifically, I can’t decide how unimpeachable my Nazi credentials are. Yes, I think Britain should leave the ECHR – mea culpa, guilty as charged. And yes, I too criticise liberal democracy at times – another mea culpa.

Yet I know for a fact that I’m not a statist. In fact, my problem with liberal democracy is precisely that it inexorably leads to growing political centralisation and hence greater state power. And I certainly don’t believe that the government and its leaders should be exempt from the rule of law.

Oh yes, I almost forgot – I despise every word ever uttered by any member of the Frankfurt School. I’m mildly surprised though that these thinkers, most of whom were Jewish, found so much in common with Carl Schmitt, a rank anti-Semite. Statist anti-Western ideology must trump even tribal loyalties then.

So can I please be absolved of the charge of Nazism? I believe in a small state whose power is limited by law. Schmitt didn’t. I also believe in individual sovereignty vested in, but not usurped by, a sovereign parliament. Schmitt didn’t. I believe not in a strong leader but in a strong society. Schmitt didn’t.

Yes, his notion of ‘exception’ isn’t without merit, as long as the outer limits of exception are set by law and are so narrow as to exclude peacetime altogether.

At wartime, the central government may have to assume emergency powers outside the rule of law, and that’s where Schmitt’s ‘realism’ is justified. At all other times, however, his realism is tantamount to statism run riot, which is rather the opposite of my own political thought.

You could see me wipe my brow even as we speak. I’m not a Nazi after all, this is one conclusion I gratefully reach. Another conclusion is that Lord Hermer is a half-witted demagogue who doesn’t have a clue about Britain’s constitution, which is an unfortunate lapse for someone in his position.

People who, like me, want Britain to leave the ECHR aren’t insisting “that state power is all that counts, not law”. On the contrary, the opposite view that law is all that counts, not state power, is much closer to our convictions. However, we believe that the law that counts should be laid down by our sovereign parliament accountable to the British people, not by a socialist supranational bureaucracy accountable only to itself.

In fact, by committing Britain to the yoke of the ECHR, the state increases its power pari passu with its diminishing accountability. The outcome of that arrangement is paradoxically much closer to Schmitt’s idea of a state, in spirit at any rate.

Like all Leftist demagogues, Lord Hermer tries to make up for his understated intellectual ability with fiery rhetoric designed to stigmatise, not to persuade. That lot use words like ‘Nazi’ or ‘fascist’ to describe anyone they don’t like, the vermin mostly found on the political Right.

That’s like simpleminded conservatives branding every liberal a communist, although there the distance between a communist and, say, Lord Hermer is shorter than that between a constitutional monarchist and a Nazi.

He also equated the ECHR with international law, in essence saying that leaving the former means refusing to recognise the latter. That’s like equating the EU with Europe, as in “If you are a Remainer, you hate Europe”.

I heard that charge levelled at me by a chap who hadn’t crossed the Channel in 40 years, didn’t know a word in any European language, was ignorant of European culture – and yet called himself a European, unlike me. “How are you any more European than me?” I asked, to which he replied: “You are a Remainer”. The argument had thus come full circle, and that circle was truly vicious.

International law comes not from a bunch of Continental jurists banging their heads together but from an intricate system of treaties, blocs and alliances – and of course from the Western concept of legality that goes back to the book I doubt Lord Hermer has ever clapped his eyes on.

Historically speaking, Britain has nothing to learn about human rights from the French, Germans et al., whose own relatively recent record in that department is less than exemplary. This view, and I realise Lord Hermer will be surprised, is fully compatible with our ancient constitution.

If he persists with bandying ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi’ about, Lord Hermer ought to be reminded of the old saying about a teapot and a kettle. And, to make sure no cliché is left unused, what goes around comes around.

“Black lives matter.” Had someone said this to you 10 years ago, you would have felt genuine concern for the chap’s mental health.

What a stupid thing to say. Of course they do. And grass is green, ice is cold and water is wet. Why state the bleeding obvious? What do you expect me to reply, that black lives don’t matter? Any human life is invaluable and inviolable. Surely that goes without saying?

However, this statement would today elicit a different reaction because connotation has triumphed over denotation. Whoever utters that phrase now means something other than what he says.

Chances are that same chap has never uttered a word of protest when some ten million black lives have been lost in assorted Central African genocides over the past few decades. The deadliest massacres have been perpetrated in the Congo, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda – and one is currently under way in Sudan. Yet not a peep from any ‘community leaders’ and their rent-a-mob flock.

However, in 2020 thousands of rioters slashed and burned their way through American cities when a drug-addled criminal, George Floyd, was accidentally killed by a white policeman trying to arrest him. And no riots break out in America when thousands of blacks are killed every year by other blacks.

In other words, black lives don’t really matter in any absolute sense. They only begin to matter when taken by whites, especially those popularly seen as lackeys to the establishment. Thus concern for black lives is only a smokescreen laid to conceal the real meaning underneath.

Or look at net zero, another issue that excites certain swaths of public opinion. I’ve seen chaps with degrees from venerable universities sputter spittle over the issue. Yet there is not a shred of evidence supporting the underlying popular myth of global warming.

Any disinterested climatologist will tell you that 1) CO2 is a trace gas in the atmosphere, and the anthropogenic part of it is a trace gas within a trace gas, 2) the Earth goes through regular cycles of warming and cooling, while for 85 per cent of its lifetime the temperatures were higher than they are now, 3) the cycles are mostly caused by solar, volcanic and marine activity, with anthropogenic CO2 playing a role so negligible that it can be safely disregarded.

And so on ad infinitum, pile upon pile of scientific data. But no rational arguments will ever make a dent in the resolve of those who are prepared to destroy Western economies for the sake of a scientific fallacy.

One can respond rationally only to the face value of a statement, not to the sub-cortical animus behind it. Yet this subtext is all that matters. Saving ‘our planet’ is another puff of the same smokescreen laid to hide some nefarious designs taking shape behind it.

If you need any more examples, take your pick. Any cause cherished by our vociferous classes will do, such as the pro-Hamas campaign gathering momentum throughout the West, especially on campuses and in major cities.

You can argue until the sacred cows come home that this whole issue is ridiculous. After all, millions of people became displaced after the Second World War, including those hundreds of thousands of Jews who built the State of Israel. Tens of millions of refugees have been forced to migrate since, mostly from the downmarket parts of the world.

Yet the Palestinian Arabs, those who refused to live in Israel, are the only group still claiming refugee status decades later.

Israel, the tiny oasis of the West, is surrounded by populous Muslim states, most of them wealthy and all of them capable of accommodating their co-religionists. They don’t though, do they? Instead they are happy to see that enclave of wild-eyed deracinated Jew-haters drumming up support all over the West.

Every time ‘Palestinians’ commit yet another terrorist atrocity, either in Israel or elsewhere in the West, there’s a gasp of indignation lasting about two days. This is followed by months of incessant riotous protests against the victims trying to defend themselves.

Again, it ought to be obvious to any unbiased observer that the real issue has nothing to do with the protesters’ declared ends. Many of the idiots chanting “From the river to the sea” don’t even know which river and which sea. Their mouths may be screaming “Free Palestine”, but an unrelated message thunders in their viscera.

More examples? Thought you’d never ask. This one is more specifically British than generally Western. It has to do with the EU, a contrivance that still commands affection within certain tiers of the population, especially those in government, the media and, again, on campuses.

Spearheaded by Starmer’s cabinet, they are trying to override the greatest democratic mandate in British history and push the country back into the EU by stealth. Again, what’s so special about a single European state that’s worth sacrificing Britain’s sovereignty for?

Economy? But Britain on her own is doing better than most EU members, even though the full benefits of economic independence have been squandered by a succession of our awful governments.

Defence? One of the most pernicious arguments is that Britain should join forces with the EU to resist Russian aggression. Yet we already have one military bloc, NATO, to which both Britain and all EU countries, other than Austria, Ireland, Malta and Cyprus, belong. It has its structure, lines of communication, allocation of resources, well-rehearsed procedures.

Granted, the US is at the hub of that ganglion and lately she has been quite fickle. Still, it’s easier to refashion some of the systems within the old and trusted bloc than to create a new one, which may or may not prove viable.

Yet our membership in this superfluous concoction will entail many concessions to EU laws and regulations. So many that one is tempted to think this is the real purpose of membership, another desideratum covered up by a billowing smokescreen.  

It’s impossible to put forth a sensible argument in the hope of persuading anyone to abandon all those silly notions. For one can argue only against arguments, not the subcutaneous animus lurking underneath.

All those slogans may be inscribed on the flags of modernity, but carrying them into battle are people who don’t care about the face value of any slogans. They care only about their own hatred of our whole civilisation – not just of what it has become but of what it has always been over the past two millennia. None of it deserves to survive, as far as they are concerned.

They’ll happily expunge millions of lives, black, white, yellow or polka dot, as long as the object of their loathing is destroyed too.

They’ll dance on the ruins of every Western economy destroyed not by CO2 but by that net zero madness, provided the ‘capitalism’ they detest is buried under the rubble.

They’ll champion the Palestinian cause and then abandon it sharpish, once the only oasis of Western civility in the Middle East has been wiped off the map.

They’ll drag Britain back into the EU not because they think Britain will be better off, but because the great British institutions lovingly nurtured over centuries will bite the dust as a result.

Such is the order of the ongoing battle, and if we continue to attack the giant slogans everyone can see and hear, we’ll only be charging meaningless windmills. Our enemy isn’t the smokescreen, but the militant malcontents who hate everything we love.   

P.S. Both world markets and US courts abhor Trump’s tariffs. Yesterday the latter ruled them illegal, while the former responded to the ruling with an exuberant surge.

Displaying a touching concern for democracy, the White House appealed the decision, saying, or rather screaming, that “unelected judges” have no right to curb Trump’s attempts to alleviate what he calls a “national emergency”.

I have a solution. If Trump refuses to recognise any other than an electoral mandate, he should put the tariffs to congressional vote, as the US Constitution demands. If the two Houses vote in favour of the tariffs, that’s it, job done. Yet if they vote against, it may be difficult to argue that they aren’t elected either.

As the presidential plane landed in Hanoi, Brigitte Macron was videoed striking her stunned hubby-wubby under the chin.

The incident has received much publicity worldwide, yet some vital angles have been left uncovered. That’s understandable because no one knows for sure what caused that violent outburst, nor how often Mme Macron has to discipline Manny in that fashion.

When hard data aren’t available, one has to resort to conjecture reinforced by observation. As Sherlock Holmes explained to the hapless Dr Watson, there’s a big difference between seeing and observing, and most of the shocked onlookers saw but failed to observe.

To begin with, since the video is less than two seconds long, we don’t know whether what we saw was a single punch or part of a combination. I rather think the latter because the blow showed some pugilistic expertise.

Many commentators described it as either a slap or a push in the face. But it was neither. As anyone with experience of street fights will tell you, Brigitte struck Manny under the chin with the heel of her palm. I don’t know if she is indeed a man, as rumour has it, but she certainly throws a punch like a cage fighter.

This is one of the premier blows in the repertoire of violence, designed to inflict damage on the adversary while preserving the attacker’s knuckles from the likely damage of a fist punch.

If delivered with enough force, the blow can break the target’s neck, but I doubt Brigitte had a lethal intent. More usually, the open-palm uppercut is delivered to make the target lean backwards, leaving the lower part of his body exposed.

That’s why that distracting uppercut is usually followed by a knee in the groin, and I suspect that’s what Brigitte delivered, although the video was cut off before Manny bent forward, his face contorted in agony. The next blow in that combo would have been a chop on the back of the neck, but let’s not overindulge in guesswork.

From as much as I could lip-read, Manny moaned, “What’s this for, maman?”, to which Brigitte seems to have replied, “If I knew what it’s for, I’d have killed you, mon petit.”

Inadvertently though, Mme Macron served the noble cause of equality between the sexes, correcting the imbalance in the coverage of domestic violence. While much attention is paid to wife-beating, husband-beating receives much less publicity, although it too is rife.

Judging by that lip-read exchange, Brigitte wasn’t punishing Manny for any particular transgression. It’s more likely that the chastisement was meted out prophylactically, as part of a regular disciplining regimen.

Considering that the couple started their relationship when Manny was a 15-year-old schoolboy and 40-year-old Brigitte his mistress, in more ways than one, such interpretation isn’t far-fetched. That age difference has led some unworldly individuals to accuse Brigitte of paedophilia, but that shows woeful ignorance of French laws.

In fact, 15 is the age of consent in that naughty country, and Mme Auzière, as she then was, wasn’t committing statutory rape. However, she could have still found herself on the wrong side of the law by having sex with someone under her authority.

I could give you a long list of British teachers, both male and female, serving time for that sort of thing, but there is no point. Unlike the straitlaced Britons, the French are notoriously laissez-faire in such matters, so do let’s bin all that talk about paedophilia once and for all.

However, a marriage that got off to that kind of auspicious start probably has an element of domination to it. After all, before seducing Manny, Mme Auzière must have had many occasions to tell him to keep quiet in class (“Ferme-la, mon petit”) or even give him six of the best.

Admittedly, I don’t know if corporal punishment was as widespread in French schools as it was in British ones at the time. But if it was, this would put the current incident into a context of long standing.

Judging by the reaction in French social media, many people chose to put a political spin on the punch. According to them, Mme Macron was expressing her disagreement with her husband’s policies, in fact her revulsion with his whole tenure, a feeling widely shared across the nation.

Such people insist that the accompanying dialogue was rather different from the one I think I lip-read: “C’est pour la France, mon petit!” “Mais maman…” “Ferme-la!”

In any case, one chap wrote that Brigitte had done what all of France (toute la France) would have liked to do. I suppose there is always room for such partisanship but, inept though Manny undoubtedly is, Descartes is supposed to have postulated that “all knowledge comes from comparison between two or more things.”

It pains me to admit this, but compared to Sir Keir Starmer, Manny is an intellectual colossus and a statesman of no mean attainment. This, however, is a dubious compliment: the bar is set so low that there is no need to jump – one can simply step over it.

Some other commentators took Manny at his word and gave credence to his statement that the vicious punch was part of normal spousal horseplay. They even implied that it could have been part of an elaborate sex routine.

Now, though one wouldn’t put anything past the French, one has to doubt that the presidential couple would practise S&M in full view of several onlookers equipped with smartphone cameras. Anyway, I didn’t see my task today in reaching a definitive conclusion.

Rather I merely wanted to explore all the possibilities, leaving it for you to choose the likeliest one. I do wonder, however, if Lady Starmer has had any hand-to-hand combat training.   

“There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so,” said Hamlet, a victim of two pandemic blights: relativism and solipsism. Both eventually led to the belief that no absolutes exist outside each man’s own perception of the world.

When applied to matters philosophical, religious, cultural and generally civilisational, relativism is deadly. Yet when applied to politics, it’s essential. A government that obtusely refuses to budge on political principles may be as harmful as one that has no principles at all.

The same policies may be good or bad depending on the situation and the rationale behind them. Tariffs are a case in point.

They are fool’s gold when introduced for purely economic reasons, as a way of making the economy stronger. The opposite effect is much more likely.

Modern economies are driven by markets, and markets are ultimately driven by consumers. Since tariffs raise the price of imports, and economic autarkies no longer exist, consumers suffer and markets rebel.

President Trump finds this out every time he goes crazy on tariffs: markets just won’t wear it, and it’s impossible to disfranchise them in a market economy. Each time this happens, Trump backs down, as he did yesterday, magnanimously allowing the EU an extra month to relocate its export manufacturing stateside.

Chances are, come 1 July, he’ll back down again. Hitting America’s best allies with 50 per cent tariffs on top of those that exist already is bound to elicit retaliation in kind, and no one ever wins a trade war. Everyone loses, every economy comes out the poorer.

Yet politics doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, live by economy alone. Sometimes economic suffering may be justified, and has to be endured, by strategic necessity, in which case economic first principles must be set aside for a while.

Hence tariffs can have an important role to play in the drama of geopolitical strategy. They can reward good behaviour, punish misbehaviour and discourage future lapses in conduct. That’s why I have to praise senators Lindsey Graham, a Republican and Trump’s golf chum, and Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat.

Appalled by the continuing slaughter of Ukrainian civilians, they introduced legislation to hit with crippling secondary sanctions countries keeping Putin’s economy afloat. These include a 500 per cent tariff on any country that buys Russian oil, gas, uranium and other products, and I hope Xi is listening. He’ll have to choose between being Putin’s friend and America’s trading partner, a choice that can only go one way, as things stand at the moment.

Apparently, at least 70 senators support the bill, which means they can override a possible presidential veto. The situation in the lower House is less clear-cut, and there Trump could expect to kill the bill by vetoing it.

But will he veto it? Since, contrary to what Bertie Russell thought, the past is the only reliable predictor of the future, one has to fear he will.

Trump has said many times that sanctioning Russia could cause Putin to walk away from peace talks, which argument is defeated by a simple question: What peace talks? Those in which Putin has been expertly giving Trump the run-around, stringing him along while continuing his murderous war?

One hates to accuse a president of the United States of bad will, but it’s hard to explain this president’s actions and statements in any other way. For example, when Trump introduced sweeping tariffs in the first days of his White House tenancy, he exempted Russia – but not his European allies and nor, tellingly, the Ukraine.

However, barring NATO’s direct military involvement, the only way for the West to stop the fascist onslaught on Europe is to cut off the economic lifeline of Putin’s regime. The senators seem to realise this, but the statement Trump issued yesterday, after the largest aerial attack on Kiev in this war so far, makes one doubt he does.

“I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him,” wrote Trump. “He has gone absolutely CRAZY!.. Missiles and drones are being shot into Cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever.” 

Putin hasn’t gone “absolutely CRAZY”. He has always been absolutely EVIL, which has never prevented Trump from having “a very good relationship” with him, too good for some tastes. Yet the notion of evil doesn’t sit comfortably with the modern idea of progress, with the world supposedly going from strength to moral strength.

It’s more natural for today’s lot to ascribe evil acts to emotional instability rather than an immanent flaw in human nature revealing itself as savage brutality in extremis. Yet chaps like Stalin or Hitler weren’t mad – they were rational and consistent evil-doers. So is Putin.

In his very next sentence Trump contradicted himself. Putin, he wrote, “wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it”. That’s reason enough, wouldn’t you say? Massive morale-sapping attacks on civilians are the stock in trade of modern wars.

Using this tactic isn’t a symptom of madness. It’s a result of cold-blooded calculation.

Americans didn’t nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki because of the cities’ military importance, did they? Without passing judgement one way or the other, that was done to save American lives that would have been lost in trying to take the Japanese islands one by one.

Whether Putin is crazy or evil or both, surely his intention of swallowing “ALL of Ukraine” ought to be thwarted, if only because it’ll be much costlier to stop the Russian juggernaut once it rolls over the Ukraine and beyond. So can we expect the president to endorse the bill? Not so fast.

Because Trump then offset his opprobrium of Putin by displaying ill-advised even-handedness. Contrary to all incontrovertible evidence, the president likes to insist that both Putin and Zelensky are equally culpable in igniting the war, especially Zelensky.

Thus, he wrote, “Likewise, President Zelenskyy is doing his Country no favors by talking the way he does. Everything out of his mouth causes problems, I don’t like it, and it better stop.”

President Zelensky is trying to rally his country in its heroic effort to resist the invader who “wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it”. Hence Trump’s statement is yet another variation on the same theme: there’s nothing to choose between Putin and Zelensky. The former is guilty of attacking, the latter of not capitulating (having first provoked Putin, there Trump also echoes the Kremlin dictator).

One suspects that Trump’s real problem with Zelensky isn’t “everything out of his mouth”, but everything that isn’t: sufficiently ardent gluteal obeisance to the Donald. And the scenic route to his heart has to start from that point of departure, which non-negotiable condition Zelensky hasn’t fully grasped.

I hope that the emerging bipartisan support for the Graham-Blumenthal bill will hammer some sense into Trump, on this issue at least. Whether or not it does, it’s good to see that some people in DC see this war for what it is: a barbarian assault on the West, not just the Ukraine.

Behavioural similarities between Don Trump and Don Corleone are increasingly hard to ignore, although some differences still persist.

For one thing, people were only expected to kiss Don Corleone’s hand. Then Don Trump is a loudmouthed bully who speaks in a language of insults and threats, whereas Don Corleone spoke softly but carried a big lupara.

Then again, Don Corleone made people an offer they couldn’t refuse, whereas Don Trump, for all his deal artistry, often makes them an offer they can’t possibly accept (or, due to his use of the English language, even understand).

Such as his current offer to destroy European exports with 50 per cent tariffs unless those smelly American-hating foreigners move their production stateside by 1 June. Now, I don’t know if Don Trump has ever visited a factory but, if he has, he must know it takes longer than a week for a manufacturing facility to up sticks and move across the ocean lock, stock and barrel.

Even without the benefit of first-hand experience, Don Trump must realise that what he is demanding is an impossibility. Hence his ultimatum isn’t so much an opening move in a negotiation as a blackmailing ploy.

“Okay, EU,” he seems to be saying, “you can’t do that, I guess. But what can you do for me, to wet my whistle? Gotta be something big or your exports will sleep with the fishes.”

EU Trade Commissioner Sefcovic replied the only way he could: “EU-US trade is unmatched and must be guided by mutual respect, not threats. We stand ready to defend our interests.”

That means both sides are going to the mattresses, you put our exports into a hospital, we’ll put yours into a morgue. As always, it’s the foot soldiers, in this case consumers, who’ll bear the brunt of hostilities. The cost of at least some of those tariffs will be passed on to them, but that’s not the only casualty they’ll suffer.

Markets all over the world have again headed south, as they always do when Don Trump starts blackmailing other countries. This means people are taking yet another hit on their savings, investments and pensions. Don Trump’s mafioso tactics will affect at least two-thirds of all Americans, which is roughly the proportion of the population involved in securities markets.

Add to this the long-suffering bond markets, and the picture gets even darker. Every time Don Trump practises his art of a blackmailing deal, investors get out of US government bonds. As a result, the US has to pay higher interest rates on her sovereign debt, and the country has already lost her top AAA credit rating.

Another similarity between Don Trump and Don Corleone is that both put the family above all else, although the latter’s understanding of the word went beyond just his next of kin. Both relied on their sons as the most trusted lieutenants.

Don Trump’s sons, Don Jr and Eric, are busily cultivating the fields he has ploughed. They are striking billion-dollar deals all over the Middle East, with office towers, hotels, golf courses and other facilities to be built – with the host countries picking up much of the costs.

Jared Kushner, married to Don Trump’s daughter Ivanka, has built a $5.5 billion empire (emirate?), mostly in the Middle East. He has thus done considerably better than Don Corleone’s son-in-law did (remember your Godfather?), and he has even managed to break through his partners’ zoological anti-Semitism. You Sheik mine, I’ll Sheik yours, is the order of the day, and never mind parochial animosity.

All those camel drivers know to stay on Don Trump’s good side. This they’ve proved over the past couple of weeks.

Don Trump visited that part of the world recently, and a most productive visit it was too, for the US possibly and in the distant future, for his family definitely and straight away. His sons were getting writer’s cramp signing all those deals on his behalf, and the Don himself got his whistle wetted to the tune of a $400-million jumbo jet, appointed in his favourite style, early King Farouk.

His regime in Israel had to be shunted aside, much to its capo’s indignation. But that capo has only himself to blame: where are his billion-dollar tokens of appreciation for Don Trump? Where is his rispetto?

Whenever Don Trump has to deal with foreigners, he acts in the Don Corleone mode. Bully those who can be bullied, pacify those who are too strong to bully, betray those he sees as insignificant, be comfortable only with his fellow mafiosi, even those hostile in the past. They speak the same language, go after the same quarry, and they don’t have the silly scruples of civilians.

Well, I think this metaphor has expanded to its outer limit. The trouble with President Trump is precisely that his fiefdom isn’t a mafia family, but a great Western country that’s the linchpin of the world order that emerged out of the Second World War.

Trump’s corrupt bungling leaves that world order in a maelstrom of chaos reigning in every walk of life: economy, defence, diplomacy, alliances. Under his aegis, America is rapidly running out of friends – his demonizing the country’s friends and allies as its enemies is turning out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If the world doesn’t end up in an economic meltdown and a war of all against all, it’ll be in spite of Trump’s efforts, not thanks to them. This leaves only a few questions to ask, which is what I’ll do even though I don’t propose to have the answers.

One: How did a man like that ever end up as president of the United States?

Two: If he was the better option in two elections (and he was), what does it say about the current state of democracy in America and elsewhere?

Three: How can he continue to get away with corruption on such an epic scale? The MAGA lot made a huge brouhaha about the corruption of the Biden family, but his son Hunter only used his father’s position to help himself to the odd million or two. With Trump’s family, the scale is greater by orders of magnitude, and yet the word ‘impeachment’ hasn’t yet crossed anyone’s lips.

Four: is there any way of stopping Trump before he plunges the world into an unmitigated disaster, economic, military or both?

Five: and this one is ever so slightly facetious. Can Don Trump do the Brooklyn-Italian accent? As a native New Yorker, he should be able to without much trouble. That would be true to style.

“How could anyone possibly object to sexual-suppression chemicals being given to convicted sex offenders?” This question is rhetorical to Judith Woods who asks it in a Telegraph article.

Anticipating that some such naysayers are still on the prowl out there, she then preempts their ridiculous objections:

“Now, I am quite sure there are Dear Readers out there crossing their legs who are also really very cross at my upbeat tone. I will, of course, be accused by various chaps of sexism for my attitude towards emasculation. To them I say this: any woman, which is to say the vast majority, who has been sexually assaulted will have a very different perspective on the sanctity of a man’s genitalia.”

This last statement is as irrelevant as we’ve learned to expect from our columnists, especially – and I know I’m about to commit a crime of misogyny even though it’s not meant as such – those as young and pretty as Miss Woods.

I have no doubt that such victims would be happy to cut off their offenders’ genitalia with a dull butter knife. I’m equally sure that the nearest relations of a murder victim would gladly see the killer flailed alive. This certainty, however, falls short of an argument any reasonably intelligent person would recognise as such.

This whole subject has come up because Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood is rolling out a voluntary pilot scheme for the voluntary chemical castration of sex offenders in 20 prisons. Should the scheme prove a success, it’ll become mandatory.

Now Miss Mahmood describes herself as a “devout Muslim”, meaning, inter alia, that for her the notion of mutilating criminals rests on a sound scriptural foundation. Yet those of us brought up in a different tradition may indeed object to this scheme, even at the risk of incurring Miss Woods’s scorn.

Some objections are based on our moral and legal tradition, meaning they will be dismissed out of hand. But for old times’ sake, punishment may deprive a criminal of his liberty or even life, but it must not deprive him of his dignity because doing so offends the Western concept of humanity.

We should no more castrate rapists than we should cut off thieves’ hands, a common practice in some cultures. Such punishment doubtless prevents re-offending, but this train of thought will be derailed on its slippery slope. What about criminals convicted of GBH (grievous bodily harm)? Should they have their limbs amputated, those used in the commission of the crime?

We don’t do such things and neither should we castrate sex offenders, chemically or surgically. If their crime is serious enough and there is a palpable danger of recidivism, they should stay in prison for ever.

Some obvious objections to the scheme are less abstract. To begin with, the concept of a sexual offence has lately shown most remarkable elasticity. Thus, in 1900, there were merely 24 prisoners serving time for sexual offences in Britain. Today they account for 21 per cent of our prison population, or about 20,000 in absolute numbers.

Discounting the possibility that over the past century British men have developed such uncontrollable libido that they force themselves into women on an industrial scale, one has to believe that these days a sexual offence is defined rather more broadly.

Miss Woods hints at a possible outer limit of this definition by writing: “A shocking number of men joke about sexual depravity.”

I can confess to this from personal experience for I too have committed this verbal indiscretion, and more than once. Miss Woods doesn’t say that repeat offenders like me should be arrested, but the general tenor of her article suggests she’d welcome such an outcome.

At present, however, she is talking specifically about rape, not an unfortunate attempt at humour. And that crime is according to her more pandemic than Covid: “Every one of my girlfriends will openly say they know someone who has been raped (for a troubling number that “someone” is themselves)…”. [It should be ‘she’, not ‘they’, but I did tell you the author is young, meaning undereducated.]

So that’s where she got the idea that a “vast majority” of women have fallen prey to sex offences. What’s a vast majority anyway? Almost every one? Pull the other one.

Far be it from me to accuse Miss Woods of dishonesty, but my experience is different, and so is Penelope’s. We don’t get around as much as Miss Woods probably does, but then we are much older. Hence it’s a fair assumption that between us we’ve known as many women as she has – yet only one of them was a rape victim.

I have, on the other hand, had an academic colleague who was sentenced to five years for having consensual sex with a girl a few months short of her 18^th birthday, which was the age of consent in Russia at the time. I’ve also read of many cases in more civilised countries when men had rape charges thrown out, but not before they had served time in prison.

According to the law that evidently didn’t exist in 1900, if a man doesn’t stop as requested at any moment during even a consensual sex act, he is a rapist. I don’t want to shock you with salacious details, but sometimes a man can’t stop in mid-stroke even if he wants to. No matter: off to the pokey with him.

Patting a woman’s rump or planting an unwanted kiss on her lips would nowadays be classified as a sex crime, not just a show of boorish manners. I don’t know if such offenders get custodial sentences but, if they still don’t, rest assured they soon will. I rather think castration would be a tad too severe in such cases, don’t you?

Miss Woods does have concerns, “primarily about the way this treatment has been linked to the early release of prisoners in order to free up spaces in our overcrowded jails. The idea that simply taking medication would allow serious sex offenders to walk free early and spend less time behind bars is absolutely unacceptable.”

For once I agree: it is indeed unacceptable. But what’s the point of chemical castration otherwise? To prevent a rapist from forcing himself on his fellow inmates? Warders? Prison doctors? Visiting lawyers? And why would a prisoner agree to chemical castration if he is staying in prison anyway? It’s that deficit of logic again.

Miss Woods herself states throughout her article that the purpose of this barbaric idea is to prevent an ex-con from raping a swath through womankind once he has been released. If her purpose was to confuse me, she has succeeded.

Chemical castration involves administering two drugs, a serotonin inhibitor, to prevent a chap from thinking dirty thoughts, and a testosterone suppressor, to prevent him from acting on such thoughts. Here my confusion deepens.

The feminist line, that leitmotif of chick-lit and, by the looks of it, also chick-punditry, is that rape has nothing to do with sex, not in any primary sense at any rate. It has all to do with hatred of women accompanied by a desire to dominate and abuse them violently.

I’ve always struggled with that line, thinking that, if such were the case, it would be easier and far less messy simply to beat a woman up. A few quick punches, 10 seconds max, job done – another woman has been dominated and violently abused. Why go through the rigamarole of… well, you know the time-consuming steps involved in rape.

But if this line doesn’t work for me, it clearly works for feminists like Miss Woods. So how would that problem be solved by suppressing a criminal’s libido? He’d simply choose another way of expressing his misogyny, all the way up to murder. He isn’t after instant sexual gratification, is he now?

The next step would be turning an offender into a vegetable with frontal lobotomy, pace One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That procedure would certainly deter re-offending but, I repeat, we don’t, or at least shouldn’t, do such things in England. And if we start doing them, it won’t be England any longer.

Contrary to the common misconception, the Duke of Wellington never said “The battle of Waterloo was won in the playing fields of Eton”, although he might have uttered some words vaguely to that effect.

What he definitely did say was, “It is quite impossible for me or any other man to command a British Army under the existing system. We have in the service the scum of the earth as common soldiers.”

Arthur Wellesley, not yet the Duke of Wellington, expressed that uncomplimentary view of his men in 1813, after they had gone on a rampage of looting following the Battle of Vitoria in the Basque Country.

The “existing system” he was referring to was conscripting into the armed forces mainly the uncouth lower classes who easily gave way to their savage instincts. One has to believe, however, that an army made up exclusively of Old Etonians would have been rather outnumbered in the Peninsular War.

‘The scum of the earth’, on the other hand, did rather well in Iberia and even better two years later in Flanders, where they routed Napoleon, if with some help from their Prussian friends. It’s true though that there is a pent-up feral streak running through swaths of the British lower classes, something not always easy to keep in check.

It takes a war to channel such savagery into useful conduits, but we haven’t had a real one for a while. So the pressure builds and builds, until it finds an outlet and bursts out.

To illustrate that tendency, over the past few days some 80,000 heirs to Wellington’s men went on their own rampage in Spain, again choosing the Basque Country as their arena. This time though it wasn’t Vitoria but Bilbao, where two English teams, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur were contesting the final of the Europa League.

I don’t know what bright spark came up with the idea of two English sides squaring off in Spain. The site was chosen well in advance, but surely there has to be enough sensibility in the system to allow for an ad hoc change of venue.

Be that as it may, the arithmetic worked against the organisers. The seating capacity of the Bilbao stadium is just over 50,000. Supporters of each team were allocated 12,000 seats, 24,000 in total. Even assuming that the locals boycotted the event, and only English fans bought up all the remaining seats, that still left at least 30,000 chaps at a loose end in Bilbao.

Why did they travel at all then? If they were going to watch the game on television in some smoky Bilbao bar, they could have stayed at home, watched the match on a big screen down the pub, drunk their 15 pints and still come out ahead compared to the cost of travel.

Intrepid bar owners in Bilbao, aware of the unquenchable thirst of English visitors, slyly doubled the price of beer, correctly assuming that the chaps would drink their fill anyway. What happened then makes me repeat the earlier question. What did they travel for?

Since it was more comfortable, less bothersome and much cheaper to watch the match at home, many of the football supporters clearly didn’t descend on Bilbao to support football. They went there in search of an outlet for all that pent-up ferocity that appalled Wellington at Vitoria, but served him well at Waterloo.

They found what they came for. Thousands of yobs whacked out of their minds (pissed as farts, in their own idiom) went on an orgy of vandalism, violence and general mayhem. Café furniture was thrown, traffic lights were destroyed, the lower storeys of balconied houses were stormed as if they were some medieval fortresses.

Police eventually ordered bars in the area to close at around midnight, earlier than usual, but by then our countrymen had already been drinking for almost 12 hours, enough time to prime themselves for the Battle of Bilbao.

Reports say that none of the locals were killed, but they were all thoroughly disgusted. When interviewed, they swore they had never seen so many people so drunk and so disorderly. The implied comparison is damning, for Spaniards are neither shrinking violets nor especially abstemious.

Their own working-class men are sturdy hombres, but they seem not to have the savage lurking in their breast and looking for every chance to bust out. Makes you proud to be British, doesn’t it?

At the time the Iron Duke made his cruel assessment of the working classes, they were quite different from today’s lot. The nastier elements among them were controlled, at least at peacetime, by no-nonsense law enforcement; and their natural instincts were mitigated by the church, which almost a third of them attended regularly at that time.

That proportion is now a third of that at best, close to zero at worst, and I’m sure it’s negligible among those who elevate their football team to a quasi-divine status. And as for our law enforcement, the less said about it, the better. A herd of yobs on a stampede through the city centre mainly go unpunished – provided they abuse everyone equally, regardless of race.

Too many incidents like that, and English teams may again be banned from European competition, as they were in 1985-1990. Yet the First Law of Thermodynamics says that energy can’t be destroyed, only altered. Should that ban happen, the feral energy of our hoi polloi will be splashing out in our own cities even more than now.

Meanwhile, one regularly sees ‘No English’ signs in bar and restaurant windows all over Europe, and it’s not just football fans who inspire such preemptive practices. English stag parties and increasingly hen ones are known for their talent at reducing a civilised establishment to a credible replica of Hitler’s bunker after an Allied raid.

There are any number of measures one could propose to curtail the more savage impulses of our masses, but suggesting them would be a waste of time. Changes to our education, general culture, law enforcement, social mores would have to be more sweeping than any government would ever even contemplate.

Perhaps what we need is another war, for our lads to terrorise enemies rather than the good citizens of foreign and domestic cities. I’m sure Putin will oblige if we ask him nicely.

The other day, Moscow authorities unveiled a life-sized bas-relief panel of Stalin in one of the central tube stations. The panel is a replica of the original sculpture, People’s Gratitude to the Leader and Commander, destroyed in 1966 during the destalinisation campaign.

According to Marx, “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce”. Be that as it may, but my own history has indeed come full circle.

My early childhood was overshadowed by Stalin, literally so on high holidays. We lived in the very centre of Moscow, where the Soviets developed a clever trick to remind us of true divinity.

They’d project a giant image of Stalin onto the cloud cover and every night illuminate it with floodlight beams. There he was, bigger than the biggest buildings in Gorky Street, brighter than the brightest star, overlooking his charges from high above, a deity sometimes wrathful, more rarely merciful, but always divine.

“How did they do that, Mummy?” “I don’t know, but isn’t he wonderful? We must all be thankful to him.”

Since I was only five when Stalin died, I was deemed too immature to offer the requisite gratitude, “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for my happy childhood”. But I do remember feeling sad that I’d never see him alive. The mummified figurine lying next to Lenin in the Red Square Mausoleum wasn’t a satisfactory substitute.

Another three years, and history ended. Not in the way Francis Fukuyama so foolishly opined 40 years later, but in the sense that Stalin personified and encompassed Soviet past, present and future. Stalin was Soviet history, and in 1956 it was erased with him.

Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes (of which he himself was a major perpetrator) and Stalin’s personality cult (replacing it with his own). Overnight the landmarks signposting history began to disappear.

Stalin’s statues were being taken down and either destroyed or tucked away for future use. Places named after Stalin were being renamed, and even Stalingrad, né Tsaritsyn, became Volgograd. From now on, quipped Moscow wags, Stalin would be known as Joseph Volga.

When mummified Stalin was taken out of the Mausoleum, I was 14 and already an anti-Soviet vermin in the making. The destalinisation campaign was in full swing, but that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted the whole diabolical contrivance to bite the dust.

By the time it did, in 1991, I had been out of the Soviet Union for 18 years, happy to confirm the old adage that true beauty is best perceived from afar. A few more years, and that long-distance observation began to yield a curious phenomenon. Stalin was making a gradual comeback.

Prodded by Kremlin propaganda, more and more Russians began to hanker after the past, as embodied by Stalin. I wouldn’t call it nostalgia because neither they nor increasingly even their parents had lived under Stalin. It’s something deeper than that, the historical Russian craving for one strong hand on the tiller while the other one is cracking a whip.

Stalin’s redux gathered momentum and accelerated no end under Putin, who increasingly sees himself, and is seen by his flock, as Stalin Mark II. When reminded that Stalin murdered 60 million of his subjects, the new worshippers wave such petty gripes away.

He had to be as tough as the times dictated, they shrug. And anyway, that number is exaggerated. Khrushchev only owned up to 20 million. Oh well, that’s all right then. (The Russians are notoriously lackadaisical about keeping such statistics. If you wish to know how the number of 60 million was arrived at, I’d recommend Prof. Rummel’s books Lethal Politics and Murder by Government.)

Putin’s Stalinist propaganda glosses over the bloodiest reign in history, concentrating instead on the rabble-rousing ultra-patriotic message Putin sees as vital to his own reign. Statues and busts of Stalin, those presciently kept in storage for decades, are again going up all over Russia, to educate the populace in the martial spirit deemed essential at present.

Understandably, this process picked up after Russia invaded the Ukraine in 2014. At least 100 new statues have since adorned the Russian skyline, while Stalin is being glorified as an effective manager and, above all, the great military leader who won the Second World War singlehandedly.

The Russian Orthodox Church, whose hierarchy are bearded and cassocked KGB agents, is doing its bit. Stalin’s moustachioed visage now appears on numerous icons, reinforcing the message of divinity I remember from my early childhood. Blasphemy, what blasphemy? No such thing in a country gone rabid.

Quasi-serious Russian historians try to put forth various simulacra of sensible arguments. It’s wrong, they say, to rewrite history on the spur of the moment. Yes, Stalin was a bit rough at times, but above all we must recognise his achievements.

Anyway, didn’t Churchill say, “Stalin took Russia with horse and plough and left it with an atomic bomb”? Well, actually Churchill didn’t, even though various billboards around Russia claim he did. The phrase comes from the book Russia After Stalin by Isaac Deutscher, Stalin’s Marxist biographer.

The USSR did win the war with Stalin as Commander-in-Chief, continue those advocates, and they are even prepared to admit the Allies played some minor role in that victory. What they’d rather not admit is that Stalin started that war as Hitler’s ally, which he remained for two years, but then there are limits to people’s flexibility.

And yes, one has to agree with them that Stalin is a significant part of Russian history. And no, he shouldn’t be written out of history books, as he more or less was under Khrushchev. However, there exists a big difference between keeping Stalin in history books and putting him on hundreds of pedestals for the brainwashed population to worship.

Hitler, after all, was also part of German history, which fact is probably acknowledged by German historians. (The qualifier ‘probably’ refers to the tendency of woke modernity to expurgate historical figures it finds objectionable.) Yet one doesn’t see any statues of Hitler adorning Berlin or Vienna, with Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer etched on the pedestal.

Alas, what one does see in Vienna’s central Schwarzenbergplatz is a revolting Soviet War Memorial, densely covered with Stalin’s quotations about the Red Army bringing freedom to Europe. I hope that obscene eyesore, erected by the Austrian Communist Party during the Soviet occupation, will one day be removed.

However, tributes to Stalin will enjoy a long life in Russia, under Putin or his successors. That Georgian tyrant captured the essence of Russia, and the people will be eternally grateful – just as they are in that bas-relief.

Perhaps ‘understands’ is the wrong word. It implies a prior intellectual effort, and I don’t think Sir Keir is capable of such exertions.

Yet on a purely visceral level he understands the nature of modern politics better than his Leave opponents – and I mean real Leavers, not people like Boris Johnson who saw the light purely for career reasons.

Starmer’s surrender to the EU has caused a predictable outcry in all the expected quarters. The prime minister is accused, correctly, of betraying Brexit and, also correctly, of being a lackey to the eurocrats across the Channel.

Leavers, which tag applies to all my English friends, say that Starmer has ignored the democratically expressed will of the people. That’s true, considering that more Britons voted to leave the EU than have ever voted for anything less. Starmer, my friends continue, has surrendered a chunk of British sovereignty, and so he has.

Yet all of it is irrelevant when seen against the background of the current version of Western democracy. I mean its subtext, not text; its connotation, not denotation; its undercurrents, not its undulating waves.

Democracy has succeeded in some things, but it has failed in perhaps the most vital one. It no longer elevates to government those fit to govern. This is a deadly disease and, like everything else about modernity, it’s progressive.  

Tocqueville – and he was a champion of democracy – warned against this with his usual prescience. But he missed one detail: he thought the onset of this disease was a possibility rather than a certainty. It was the latter though, an inexorable result of a steadily expanding franchise and the concomitant laxity in the demand for proper qualifications to take part.

“I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office,” wrote Tocqueville, “but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.” (Replace ‘the United States’ with ‘the West’, and the prophesy would be just as accurate.)

It ought to be remembered that Tocqueville formed his ideas of American statesmen on the basis of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, to name but a few. One wonders what the Frenchman would say today, observing modern politicians in action. The reliable guess is he would feel that what has come true was not his prophesies but his nightmares. The former, after all, were always leavened with optimism.

Modern politicians don’t persuade people to vote for them. They trick them into doing so by making promises they have neither the means nor indeed the intention of keeping; by telling people what they want to hear, not the truth.

They unfailingly claim an undying commitment to democracy, and this isn’t a lie, although neither is it the whole truth. They do appreciate democracy, but only as so many rungs on the ladder they can scale to power.

When they get to the top, our newly elected leaders justifiably fear they will be found out. Hence they strive to put some serious acreage between themselves and the people who have elected them.

They seek to remove every remaining bit of power from the traditional local bodies, which stay close to the voters, and to shift it to the centralised Leviathan, claiming all the time that the people are governing themselves.

The subsequent transfer of power to international bodies, which is to say as far away from the national electorate as geography will allow, is a natural extension of the same process. This explains the otherwise inexplicable rise of the European Union, for one has yet to hear any rational argument in its favour. 

Thus expanded franchise inevitably leads to greater centralisation, and for that reason it is wrong to complain, as today’s conservatives so often do, that growing centralisation undermines democracy. This is like saying that pregnancy undermines sex.

The burgeoning political centralisation of modernity also reflects a deeper trend, that of reversing two thousand years of Christendom and reverting to idolatry and paganism.

People have been hollowed out, their metaphysical certitudes removed or inverted, the resulting vacuum filled with idols whose selection is left to individual choice independent of any group affiliation or loyalty. Falling by the political wayside is the familial localism inherent to Christendom.

It has been replaced with hysterical adulation of central government, leading in extremis to totalitarianism. In an important way, however, all modern states are totalitarian, in that they seek control over areas hitherto seen as being off-limits for governmental meddling. In that sense the differences between, say, the USA and the USSR are those of degree, not principle.    

While perpetrating centralisation run riot, the ostensibly democratic, but in fact neo-tyrannical, state acquires more power over the individual than any monarch ruling by divine right ever saw in his dreams.

French subjects, for example, were shielded from Louis XIV by several layers of local government, and the Sun King wielded more power over his loftiest courtiers than over the lowliest peasants. The King was aware of this, and his famous pronouncement on the nature of the state fell more into the realm of wishful thinking than reportage.

Modern ‘democracies’ never tire of insisting that sovereignty resides with the people. Yet they, along with their ultimate supranational extensions, consistently demonstrate how far this is from the truth. Britain is the only country where the ruling elite couldn’t ignore the popular vote against European federalism, for the time being.

David Cameron agreed to the 2016 referendum only because he was sure people would vote Remain. They didn’t though, in spite of all major media, especially broadcast, campaigning for that vote with unabating vigour and maniacal persistence. Yet our EU gauleiters sensed that enough of the British political ethos was still extant to make it impossible for them to ignore the vote.

Not so with the democratically held referenda in Denmark, Austria and Ireland. In the first instance, the Danes rejected the Maastricht Treaty. In the second, Austria voted in Jörg Haider, who today would be described as far-right. In the third, the people of Ireland voted not to ratify the Nice Treaty on the enlargement of the EU.

In all three cases, the European Union, that great champion of pooled democracy, put its foot down and its boot in. People’s choice is all fine and well, provided it’s the choice the elite favours at the moment. Otherwise, people will have to choose again – and keep choosing until they get it right.

Removing sovereignty from the people and vesting it in supranational institutions is the keenly felt imperative of modern mainstream politicians, regardless of their party affiliation. Sovereignty, as they understand it, must run away from the national electorate all the way to the national capital – and then keep running until it finds a safe haven beyond the nation’s reach.

Starmer, with his unerring instincts of a career apparatchik, senses this in his subcortex. That region of the brain is responsible for sensory processing, which functions in lieu of reason and, push come to shove, overrides it completely.

In that, he and the whole nomenklatura to which he belongs resemble animals who are also driven by their innate instincts. Hence they act without choice, just like dogs who drink from puddles and chase cats because their DNA tells them to do so, not because they have rationally weighed the pros and cons.

Our apparatchiks’ instincts demand that they drift towards Brussels, towing the whole country behind them. Since they couldn’t dismiss the Brexit referendum outright, they have to rely on the subterfuge of rejoining the EU by a series of stealthy incremental steps, each seemingly insignificant.

Should acting that way jeopardise their power, another instinct may take over, that of political survival. In that case they may slow down, or even temporarily discontinue, that drift. But barring such a threat, they’ll continue on their meandering path.

They won’t be stopped by any appeals to reason, morality or especially the traditional political culture of Britain – any more than a dog will listen to sensible arguments about the inalienable feline rights of cats.

These people can’t be persuaded; they can only be ousted. And I don’t mean Starmer or any other particular politician – the whole political cabal must be unseated.

But a distinct danger exists that such an upheaval may throw away the baby of political tradition with the bathwater of political corruption. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.