Month: March 2026

I took a photograph at the Royal Marsden Hospital this morning, and the egalitarian in me writhed in pain. The sign on the door said ‘Prayer Room’, in English and Arabic. Another sign in the same two languages said ‘Ramadan Mubarak’.

On the one hand it’s good to see that one of London’s top hospitals caters not only to the physical needs of its patients, but also the spiritual ones. I for one am happy that our hospitals provide prayer rooms, especially because some patients are ready to shuffle off this mortal coil (one problem with Shakespeare is that he used so many clichés).

Since the Royal Marsden specialises in oncology, replace ‘some’ with ‘many’ – in spite of all the pharmacological advances, many cancer patients aren’t long for this world. Some of such unfortunate souls are in need of the kind of solace that only God can provide, and it’s good to have a dedicated area where a believer can ask for solace and redemption in peace and quiet.

Christians, Jews and Muslims can… hold on a moment. Muslims can, but Jews and Christians can’t, not as far as the Marsden administration is concerned. That’s why the sign is in English (London is in England after all) and Arabic only.

This doesn’t necessarily exclude Christians for one can safely assume that, in London, most of them understand English (especially now that Eastern Europeans are going back home in droves, correctly surmising that their economic prospects will be brighter there).

Actually, the same applies to Jews who, studious people that they are, tend to have some command of English even if they couldn’t hear Bow Bells in their infancy. However, both Jews and Christians must feel excluded since only the Muslim festival is singled out for acknowledgement.

‘Ramadan Mubarak’ says the sign on the door, which I think means ‘Blessed Ramadan’ rather than a reference to a former president of Egypt, and it looks lonely on its own. It’s begging for company, which could be provided by wishes of a happy Easter and a happy Passover, rather important festivals in the other two Abrahamic religions.

Granted, Passover proper starts in a week and Easter in three weeks, four in the Eastern rite, while Ramadan is ending in a couple of days. But the month preceding Easter and Passover is considered holy in both Christianity and Judaism. (In Christianity it’s called Lent; in Judaism, Chametz.)

Still, an expectation of equal time doesn’t strike me as unfounded. The situation, by the way, isn’t unique to the Marsden. I feel qualified to generalise since I’m rather well familiar with London hospitals, having been an in-patient in 11 of them and out-patient in more.

In every one of them, you could be forgiven for forming the impression that the hospital is in Jedda or Abu Dhabi rather than London. The vast atrium in the Charing Cross hospital, for example, is densely covered with Islamic frescoes and decorative patterns.

Every hospital I know pretends it caters mostly to Muslim patients. This can’t possibly be the case even in London, where Muslims make up only (!) 15 per cent of the population.

That’s a sizeable minority, but a minority nevertheless. If they vote as a bloc, which Muslims tend to do, they can elect their co-religionist as mayor, but, as recipients of secondary medical care, they still remain a minority.

One has to reach a melancholy conclusion that we are so fearful of discriminating against Muslims that we happily discriminate in favour of them. Moreover, we seem to think that failure to issue official communications in every language spoken by recent arrivals at these shores constitutes racial discrimination.

When it comes to rampant wokery, the NHS predictably leads the way. Some of its communications are translated into over 120 languages, and most leaflets into over 30.

It’s nice to be welcoming to other religions and cultures, as long as such magnanimity doesn’t lead to compromising our own. We can argue till the immigrants go home about nations, what they are, how they coalesce, what the essential adhesives are.

But most of us will agree that a common culture spearheaded by language is a sine qua non. A nation in which foreign, often alien, groups demand and get equality of culture and language, is a moribund nation, one bent on suicide.

It makes sense that all public and official communications in England should be in English only. If some residents of the UK can’t understand the language of the land, perhaps they ought to consider relocating to other climes where they wouldn’t be at a linguistic disadvantage.

Alternatively, they could learn enough English to fend for themselves in our largely monolingual country. After all, if they chose to live here, there has to be something about Britain they like. Surely, whatever it is, some command of English is essential to appreciating it properly.

As for giving Islam precedence over Christianity and Judaism, this is another suicide attempt of a nation convinced it no longer deserves to live. Our civilisation, after all, is called Judaeo-Christian, with no reference to Islam anywhere in sight.

Racial and religious discrimination is nasty. But discriminating against one’s own nation, with its traditional culture, language and religion is collective suicide. It may be gradual but nonetheless final for it.

P.S. About a year ago, I wrote about the incipient personality cult of President Trump. One source I relied on was Gustave Le Bon’s classic Psychology of Crowds.

There are so many things about that book I find abominable that, when I was young, I would have tossed it aside, possibly in the bin, and never given it another thought. But as I grew older and arguably wiser, I learned to look for the wheat in every book and ignore the chaff.

Le Bon’s book is a case in point. If one can restrain one’s annoyance, one can find numerous gems in his pages, not just that proverbial cereal.

As you know, Le Bon talks about crowds always charging a steep price of admission. Its members have to toss their own reason, critical faculties and morality into a giant cauldron where they become ingredients of a homogeneous mass. At that point the crowd becomes putty in the hands of strong leaders (it’s not for nothing that both Mussolini and especially Hitler quoted Le Bon profusely).

“The leaders we speak of,” writes Le Bon, “are usually men of action rather than of words. They are not gifted with keen foresight… They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous excitable half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness.”

Sound familiar?

The other day Trump and his retinue held a collective prayer meeting at the Oval Office. Trump sat at his desk with the best expression of mystic transport he could muster and hold long enough for the camera to do its job.

A dozen or so people behind him, cabinet members and White House staffers, were laying their hands on Trump’s shoulders, and I for one was deeply moved – to run out of the room, with my hand to my mouth.

This wasn’t an expression of true religiosity. It was a photo-op with a fundamentalist Protestant dimension. However, if Trump or some of the extras are indeed fundamentalist Protestants, they must know their Bible.

Hence they remember Galatians 6:7, where Paul says: “As you sow, so shall you reap”. This proverbial quotation goes a long way towards explaining Trump’s current predicament.

I’ve had countless arguments with MAGAlomaniacs among my American friends who seem to believe that the US can go it alone with no need for any NATO allies. One point I often made and they inevitably rejected was that Trump’s behaviour in general and his treatment of America’s allies in particular may lower the country’s global prestige.

“We don’t care about that,” retorted one of my interlocutors, with a smirk turning into laughter. Now it turns out his mirth, an echo of his idol’s pronouncements, was misplaced.

America needs her allies after all, for even the almighty US Navy on its own can’t seem to keep the Strait of Hormuz open to shipping. However, European NATO members are in no hurry to accede to Trump’s request for assistance.

He is predictably irate: “If there’s no response or if it’s a negative response, I think it will be very bad for the future of NATO”.

Does this mean that a positive response would paint NATO’s future in nothing but luridly bright colours? Not according to, well, Trump, as he was before a need for joint action arose.

Ever since 1987, when he first published his political views in a series of newspaper ads, Trump has taken little trouble to conceal his contempt for NATO and all its members. This started a crescendo that, during his second term, culminated in a rousing finale of derision.

European NATO members, thundered Trump, are nothing but freeloading spongers on the US. They refuse to “pay up” (fund their own defence), instead choosing to spend money on welfare, immigrants and all sorts of degenerate, distinctly un-American practices.

Push come to shove, Trump was shouting, they had always refused to fight shoulder to shoulder with Americans. In fact, 457 British soldiers died during America’s latest foray into Afghanistan. And the 2003 US-led Coalition of the Willing included Britain and Poland from the start, with a dozen other European countries joining in later.

Far be it from me to accuse a US president of lying. So let’s just say charitably that Trump is misinformed — or else got carried away. This, however, doesn’t mean that all of his accusations are unfounded.

His arguments tend to be monochromatic and expressed in the terms one can overhear in any dingy bar close to chucking-out time. The real issues are more involved, and they require a more nuanced discussion.

For it isn’t true that America has been beggaring herself to protect Europe from all kinds of nasties, mainly Russia. In fact, ever since America became “the arsenal of democracy” during the Second World War, she has been clipping the coupons of being a great industrial power and the world’s financial hub.

Still, it’s true that Western Europe’s reluctance to build up its own defences is negligent, borderline criminal. While Poland and the Baltics have been feverishly arming themselves to resist a likely Russian aggression, the Western part of Europe has been regrettably lackadaisical in that respect.

Prodded by Trump, Western European countries have belatedly undertaken to boost their military spending, but they are sluggish in acting on that commitment. Germany recently broke the mould, but Britain, for one, talks big while carrying a cream-puff stick.

Serious, constructive criticism was definitely called for, but – and this is something my MAGAlomaniac friends don’t understand – what matters isn’t only substance but also style. It’s one thing gently to remind an overweight friend of the benefits of sensible diets, quite another to call him a ‘lard arse’.

But Trump doesn’t do understatement. He sees Europe as an anachronistic, moribund irrelevance and clearly prefers to do business with serious players, such as Putin. He has never treated any European leader with the same admiring deference he reserves for the mass murderer in the Kremlin.

Whenever they incur his displeasure, he hits them with rude harangues and blackmailing threats. At other times, he ignores them.

Nor is it just style. Trump has described NATO as “obsolete” and its Article 5 as strictly optional, hinting in the process that he may withdraw the US from the Alliance at the drop of a hat.

To stop being “ripped off” by greedy Europeans, Trump hit all of them with punitive tariffs, while doing his level best to ease the sanctions on Russia. Moreover, he has threatened two NATO members, Canada and, more credibly, Denmark, with military invasion.

This alone is enough to show that, in his mind, NATO is already defunct as a meaningful alliance. Or rather that’s how Trump felt before Americans began to pay through the nose for petrol. They still pay about a third of European prices, but still – filling stations have been known to be a major factor of domestic politics.

When opening the Strait of Hormuz became an economic and political necessity, Trump found a use for NATO: “We have a thing called Nato,” he said. “We’ve been very sweet. We didn’t have to help them with Ukraine. Ukraine is thousands of miles away from us . . . But we helped them. Now we’ll see if they help us. Because I’ve long said that we’ll be there for them but they won’t be there for us. And I’m not sure that they’d be there.”

Right. So America didn’t help the Ukraine out of respect for international law and the genuine need to stop Russian aggression. Such incidentals don’t matter because the Ukraine is so far from America that the US has no dog in that fight. The US only agreed to help out of the kindness of Trump’s heart.

Actually, the bulk of US aid was delivered to the Ukraine under that devil incarnate, Joe Biden. Under Trump, direct US aid stopped, and European countries have to pay cash on the nail for American weaponry, which they then transfer to the Ukraine.

Anyway, applying the same geographical logic, why should we send our ships to Iran, seeing it’s thousands of miles from Britain? Moreover, when our nonentity of a PM belatedly agreed to send a warship to the Middle East three days into the war, Trump dismissed him like an inept servant.

The war, he said, was won in one day. We did that without Britain, so she can keep her ships. Now, 17 days later, the war is still going on, and Britain is needed.

Starmer’s refusal to take part in the war from the beginning was craven and stupid. Britain and the rest of Europe have a vested interest in putting paid to Iran’s regime and keeping the shipping lanes open for oil tankers.

Moreover, the whole point of NATO is that it imposes moral and contractual obligations on its members to act together. “That’s what allies are for,” as Margaret Thatcher put it in the context of another war.

We must act, and we must act now. But, once the conflict is over, perhaps NATO countries should call a conference to remind one another, and explain to Trump, how vital NATO still is. The Alliance has been protecting the West since 1949, and the need for such protection is now as urgent as ever.

No country, not even one as powerful as the US, can take on evil regimes one on one. As Ben Franklin famously said in a different context, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

… to all those who celebrate it as such, and even those who don’t.

In the spirit of conciliation, I must point out that you don’t have to be a Christian to call this day by its traditional name. Nor do you have to know it’s celebrated on the fourth Sunday of Lent, three weeks before Easter.

But you do have to be what our American friends call a ‘liberal’ (meaning illiberal) to refer to this holiday as Mother’s Day. And you must be what my Texan friends used to call a ‘pinko prevert’ to celebrate the ludicrous Women’s Day on 8 March.

The problem with Mother’s Day is that it’s a new-fangled modern, secular term that should set any conservative’s teeth on edge. And Women’s Day isn’t just modern and secular but out-and-out socialist, which ought to cause revulsion in any conservative heart.

None of these attitudes involve any rationalisation, only the post-rationalisation of something sensed intuitively. This is a reliable test of conservatism – if your knee jerks at the right moment, you are one of us. If it doesn’t, more work is required.

Should you need my help, it’s always at your disposal, usually every day. But if you want real help, drop into your local apostolic church next Sunday. Perhaps asking the priests about the meaning of Christian holidays wouldn’t go amiss either. And you don’t even have to tell him I sent you (if it’s a her, you’re in the wrong place).

Meanwhile, once again, Happy Mothering Sunday!

So is an open-ended law. So is a law where the proscribed activity is ill-defined. So is a law that’s so manifestly unjust that most people ignore it. So is a law that jeopardises the groups it’s supposed to protect.

You may think that ‘evil’ is an overstatement. Perhaps you’d rather opt for a more meiotic, more, well, British adjective, such as ‘ill-advised’, ‘unhelpful’ or ‘unwise’. However, I insist: laws that fall into the categories I mentioned are evil.

When a state issues a proscriptive law, it increases its own power while diminishing individual freedom pari passu. In a civilised country, this truism imposes certain requirements on all laws.

They must be just, necessary, precisely worded, objectively defined, enforceable without resorting to measures that are worse than the crime – and as few as they possibly can be without compromising law and order.

When laws fail to satisfy such requirements, they are tyrannical and therefore evil. No understatement, no equivocation – evil is an accurate description of such despotic diktats.

This preamble takes us to another new legal travesty currently being prepared by the government’s Working Group. It’s going to introduce a new acronym without which our legal lexicon is woefully incomplete: AMH, which stands for ‘anti-Muslim hostility’.

The Working Group has its work cut out. The impossible task before it is finding for AMH a niche in our legal codes that’s not already occupied by other laws.

‘Islamophobia’ has been tried and found wanting. As classically educated semantic rigorists like my friend Peter Mullen never tire of pointing out, ‘phobia’ stands for irrational fear.

Hence a chap who mentions in passing that Mohammad was a paedophile is supposed to be irrationally scared of Muslims. But the opposite is true: he is brave to the point of being reckless. By levelling that technically correct accusation, he risks having his head cut off if some pious and testosteronally active Muslims are within earshot.

That etymological conundrum made HMG seek another law, one built on a semantically unimpeachable definition of the transgression. In fairness to our government, which is often accused of being slow on the uptake, it always acts with remarkable alacrity whenever yet another bureaucratic sinecure has to be created.

Out went ‘Islamophobia’, in came the Working Group, and verbal acrobatics began at a ferocious tempo. AMH, as it turns out, means committing or encouraging or failing to report any criminal acts involving unlawful discrimination against Muslims.

Such acts include, but are not limited to, the “prejudicial stereotyping of Muslims… as a collective group defined by fixed and negative characteristics”. Yet the Working Group stressed that this is only the starting point.

The definition will “evolve”, but whatever emerges at the other end of that evolution has to be a redundant and therefore evil law.

We already have laws criminalising physical assault. We have other laws specifically criminalising assault for racial or religious reasons. We have still other laws banning discrimination on racial or religious grounds. We have a whole raft of laws proscribing verbal abuse involving threats of violence, targeted harassment, stalking or hate speech intended to cause alarm, distress or fear of immediate harm.

What’s left then? One thing only: an attack on free speech. Treating as a crime any statement a Muslim may not like, such as pointing out that marrying a six-year-old girl constitutes paedophilia. Or, on a more elevated level, that Islam is a patchwork quilt of a religion, essentially a Christian heresy with bits of Judaism and Zoroastrianism sewn in.

Or really anything the complaining party identifies as cause for complaint. In the spirit of the English Common Law, such open-ended interpretation has a precedent: the infamous Macpherson Report of 1999, an inquiry into the 1993 racist murder of Stephen Lawrence.

At the time a need arose to define a racist incident, and Macpherson obliged: his report defines it as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”. Sorry I mentioned the English Common Law: that definition constitutes a vicious mockery of any civilised legal system.

It’s for a good reason that Themis, the Greek goddess of law, is always depicted blindfolded. A just law is blind to any considerations other than objective proof of guilt or innocence. ‘Objective’ is the key word: the criteria involved are strictly factual and impersonal. A law that’s not evidence-based, one that defines guilt as anything the plaintiff perceives as such, is unjust, tyrannical and therefore evil.

Speaking of tyranny, how will the police know that an act of AMH was committed? The Working Group is happy to explain: the law will operate by “empowering people to report incidents”. This means the law can only be enforced by turning millions of people into snitches.

Here I’d like to draw your attention to the words “the victim or any other person” in the Macpherson Report, which evidently serves as the blueprint for the AMH farce.

A Muslim may not be offended by someone on a bus talking about Islamic terrorism, but another passenger may be because… well, just because. That sensitive soul will be “empowered” to report the incident. Take it from me: the next step will be criminalising witnesses who fail to report AMH.

How do I know? Oh well, you see, I spent the first 25 years of my life in a country that had such laws on the books. That produced millions of snitches who happily denounced anyone they disliked: their spouses’ lovers, overachieving colleagues, wags telling inappropriate jokes.

Those laws were complemented by others, those we called “knew but didn’t tell”. Such articles turned concerned citizens into sprinters: having heard a risqué political joke, they’d all rush to the phone, knowing that only the winner of that race would be spared a ‘knew but didn’t tell’ punishment.

Such laws corrupt societies for generations to come after they’ve been repealed: knowing that your best friend may kill you by a false denunciation doesn’t really foster mutual trust and social cohesion.

‘Knew but didn’t tell’ laws have existed in Russia at least since the reign of Ivan the Terrible (d. 1584), but in those days the snitch was the first one to be tortured as a way of establishing the veracity of his accusation. Under the Soviets, that practice was dropped: they didn’t care whether or not the accusation was truthful. “Give us a man; we’ll find a law” was the working principle there.

By the sound of it, His Majesty’s Government doesn’t care about justice either whenever its sense of woke propriety is offended. But why just AMH? How about AJewishH and AChristianH?

The comedian Jimmy Carr tells anti-Christian jokes with a venom typical of lapsed Catholics. When asked why he denies Muslims the benefit of his humour, he replies: “Simple. They could kill me.” Arrest him: the statement is AMH.

And while you are at it, also arrest Richard Dawkins, whose 2006 book The God Delusion is replete with both AJH and ACH.

Thus, he describes the God of the Old Testament as: “…jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

As for the New Testament notion of God sacrificing his son to redeem mankind, Dawkins considers it “one of the most repugnant ideas ever to occur to a human mind”.

And in 2013, Dawkins tweeted that “Islam is the greatest force for evil in the world today.” That’s AMH if I ever heard it.

Lock him up and throw away the key, say millions of offended Jews, Christians and Muslims. Or barring that, stop coming up with new legal obscenities like AMH.

Such laws are redundant, ill-defined, open-ended, unenforceable and unjust. That makes them tyrannical and therefore evil.

First, I’d like to thank President Trump for kindly, if unwittingly, providing most of the text for this article.

To begin with, yesterday he issued an emotional, and amply justified, criticism of Iran’s regime: “Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today… They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47^th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!”

I probably could have put it better myself, in form. But in substance, the numerological reference apart, I couldn’t agree more. Iran’s regime, from 1979 onwards has been so evil that no invective about it would sound exaggerated.

It does take scumbags (possibly but not necessarily deranged ones) to declare the annihilation of another nation, our ally, as its long-term objective. It also takes scumbags to sponsor terrorism all over the world, arming, training, and funding murderous gangs.

It definitely takes scumbags to oppress their own population, obliterate free speech, murder dissidents and issue draconian prison sentences for something as innocent as a mildly critical post on social media.

Only scumbags would try to blackmail the world with threats of further terrorism, possibly involving nuclear weapons.

Speaking from a strictly occidental perspective, who but scumbags would hate the West with unmitigated passion and threaten to draw it into a deadly conflict?

So now you know why I welcome every word in Trump’s statement about Iran. But have you noticed something?

Every word about Iran’s offences also applies in spades to Putin’s regime. There are some distinctions between that and Iran’s regime, but no substantial difference.

Putin is every bit as evil as the ayatollahs, as oppressive inside his country and as – or even more – aggressive to its neighbours, as committed to annihilating at least one nation, as threatening to the West or rather more so: Russia is a nuclear power after all.

Granted, for that reason Trump can’t treat Russia the way he is treating Iran. I hope my American friends won’t be upset with me, but in general the US has been rather a flat-track bully for decades. American presidents have desisted from bombing strong, especially nuclear, powers, and wisely so.

But nothing should prevent the leader of a great Western nation, and one expressly aspiring to become even greater, to issue clear moral statements about Putin’s frankly fascist regime — and about the indicted war criminal Putin personally.

The mass murderers, kidnappers, looters and rapists in the Kremlin amply merit sobriquets like ‘scumbags’, rivalling the ayatollahs for that dishonour.

However, the image before my eyes is Trump applauding wildly as Putin walks the red carpet from his plane at Anchorage. No leader of a country allied with the US has ever rated such treatment, way in excess of normal diplomatic protocol.

Nor do I think Trump has ever described Putin in pejorative terms. If you wish to know in what terms Trump has described Putin over the years, here’s a short chronological sample. It starts from 2007, when Putin declared his life’s ambition was to reverse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century”, that is to rebuild the Soviet empire.

“Look at Putin – what he’s doing with Russia – I mean, you know, what’s going on over there. I mean this guy has done – whether you like him or don’t like him – he’s doing a great job in rebuilding the image of Russia and also rebuilding Russia period.”

“Putin has also announced his grand vision: the creation of a ‘Eurasian Union’ made up of former Soviet nations that can dominate the region. I respect Putin…”

“[W]ill he become my new best friend?”

“I think he’s done a really great job of outsmarting our country.”

“When I went to Russia with the Miss Universe pageant, he contacted me and was so nice.”

“They treated me so great. Putin even sent me a present, a beautiful present…”

“I believe Putin will continue to re-build the Russian Empire.”

“Putin has become a big hero in Russia with an all-time high popularity.”

“You look at Putin, who is absolutely having a great time. … Russia is like, I mean, they’re really hot stuff. And now you have people in the Ukraine – who knows, set up or not – but it can’t all be set up, I mean they’re marching in favor of joining Russia. … But Russia, I mean what he’s [Putin] done for Russia is really amazing. And he’s done it by outsmarting our country at every single step.”

“I spoke, indirectly and directly, with President Putin, who could not have been nicer, and we had a tremendous success.”

“Putin is a nicer person than I am.”

“I will tell you, in terms of leadership, he is getting an ‘A’…”

“It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”

“He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader, you know…”

“I said he was a strong leader, which he is. I mean, he might be bad, he might be good. But he’s a strong leader.’”

“If he says great things about me, I’m going to say great things about him. I’ve already said he is really very much of a leader.”

“I always knew he was very smart!”

“President Putin called me up very nicely to congratulate me on the win of the election. He then called me up extremely nicely to congratulate me on the inauguration, which was terrific.”

“While I had a great meeting with NATO, raising vast amounts of money, I had an even better meeting with Vladimir Putin of Russia.”

“We have had a very, very good relationship. And we look forward to spending some pretty good time together. A lot of very positive things [are] going to come out of the relationship.”

“This is genius. Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine – of Ukraine – Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. So, Putin is now saying, ‘It’s independent,’ a large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper. … Here’s a guy who’s very savvy. I know him very well – very, very well.”

“The problem is not that Putin is smart, which, of course, he’s smart. The real problem is that our leaders are dumb.”

“I think he’ll keep his word. I’ve known him for a long time now, and I think he will [halt hostilities in the Ukraine]. I don’t believe he’s going to violate his word. I don’t think he’ll be back when we make a deal. I think the deal is going to hold now.”

“Let me tell you: Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia.”

This is a brief selection that could be easily made longer. Not a word similar to ‘scumbag’ anywhere in evidence – one detects respect, amity, even barely concealed admiration.

Hence, in Trump’s mind, Putin’s regime has to be benign whereas Iran’s is evil. I’d like to see the set of moral and geopolitical criteria Trump applies to this comparative characterisation. If a difference between the two evil regime exists, it’s that Putin’s is infinitely more dangerous for being more powerful.

Trump’s double standard explains why, in the midst of America’s just war on Iran, he responded to the highly predictable oil crisis by ringing his savvy best friend Putin and striking a deal with him.

Countries, specifically India, will no longer be punished with sanctions for buying Russian oil, and US sanctions on Russia will be eased – allegedly temporarily but in reality permanently.

Coupled with the rocketing oil prices, Russia will get a huge influx of money for its war chest, which is bad news indeed for all her neighbours, not just the Ukraine. Thus a president who vowed to end Russia’s war on the Ukraine within 24 hours, has 14 months later done all he could to enable Putin to fight on indefinitely.

Linking this development directly with Trump’s favourable opinion of Putin would be going too far, one hopes. This would imply collusion, which isn’t an accusation to bandy about lightly.

But I’d dearly like to hear Trump identify the more salient differences he detects between the two evil regimes, and specifically between their chieftains.

You won’t find a greater enthusiast of gender equality than me. I do have my misgivings about using the word ‘gender’ to denote anything other than a grammatical category, but let’s not quibble about semantics.

It’s the thought that counts, and equality of men and women is the noblest thought of all, or just about. Mind you, that men and women are equal doesn’t mean they are identical.

That’s why male and female athletes compete in different categories. A crossover is rare, and it usually occurs only in games like chess, where men’s greater speed and muscular strength don’t come into play.

Something else does though because, whenever women compete in high-level unisex tournaments, they get thrashed. Only one woman in history has ever been able to compete against the best men players, and at the moment there isn’t a single woman in the top 100.

If men and women competed together in the same tennis tournaments, no woman would probably make it into the top 1,000, but at least – and my egalitarian heart rejoices – they get equal prize money in the majors. Yes, they spend half the time on court, meaning their pro rata pay is twice as high. But hey, that’s what equality is all about.

But why are we talking about trivial pastimes like sports? Why not talk about the loftiest heights to which the human spirit can soar? And, jokes aside (you do realise that everything above was said in jest?), that’s where true, rather than bogus, equality reveals itself.

Take music, for example. Historically, one has to come to the woeful conclusion that musical composition isn’t quite a women’s thing. I can’t think of a serious woman composer in the stretch between Hildegard von Bingen (d. 1179) and Sofia Gubaidulina (d. 2025).

(A few years ago it became fashionable to insist that Clara Schumann was every bit her hubby-wubby’s equal, but the same people probably believed that a woman can be born with a penis, prostate and basso voice.)

However, if women are distinctly underrepresented among composers, they hold their own among performers. They are still outnumbered among the great ones, but many can more than hold their own.

Jacqueline du Pré was one of the best cellists I’ve ever heard, Anne-Sophie Mutter is a good violinist (if not quite as good as her career, but stop me before I come across as a misogynist), and the list of superb women pianists is long: Maria Yudina, Clara Haskil, Myra Hess, Marcelle Meyer, Marguerite Long, Anne Fischer, Martha Argerich.

We can do as many actuarial calculations as we wish, but this isn’t a numbers game. It’s clear that the gap between male and female performers, if it exists at all, is nowhere near as wide as among, say, chess players.

That’s why international music competitions don’t segregate men and women. They compete against one another, and many women have won top prizes. Yet again my egalitarian heart rejoices, this time without a shadow of sarcasm.

However, that same inner organ has just skipped a beat. The cause of this cardiac problem is La Maestra International Competition for Women Conductors currently under way at the Philharmonie de Paris.

The competition is billed as “a premier biennial event at fostering gender parity”, and you could see me holding the left side of my chest even as we speak. For ‘parity’ is one step up from ‘equality’, as any strict semanticist will tell you.

‘Equality’ means unhindered opportunities for everyone to excel; ‘parity’ means everyone excelling to the same extent. It’s possible (though in my view undesirable) to legislate for equality, but not for parity. Parity can’t really be ‘fostered’; it can only be achieved by talent and application.

When a need for ‘fostering’ arises, the implication is that, in this case, women conductors don’t have what it takes to succeed on the strength of their own ability. What can be more condescending than that? More detrimental to the very cause inscribed on the banners of La Maestra, ‘gender parity’?

This is yet another validation of a law to which there are no known exceptions: Any ideology always produces results different from those intended. The likelihood of the results being not just different from, but opposite to, those intended is directly proportional to the zeal with which the ideology is pursued.

Feminism is one ideology that provides piles of irrefutable evidence in support. Ever since it was proclaimed orbi et urbi that, a few incidental and correctable physiological features apart, men and women are no different from one another, things have been going from bad to worse.

Just as ‘sexism’ was persecuted, at times prosecuted, with hysterical zeal, women were busily turning themselves into sex objects more than ever before. Just look at the way today’s liberated women dress.

Skimpy skin-tight clothes leaving little to imagination have left the domain of balls and dinner parties to enter the one of office attire. Back in the 1950s it wouldn’t have occurred to a woman to wear a décolleté dress or blouse to work; in the 2020s it’s the norm (just look at women news announcers).

Let’s go back to the concert platform and look at YouTube videos of the great, pre-emancipated, women pianists I mentioned earlier. Not one of them played in a revealing concert dress – they clearly expected the audience to follow their sublime music, not their undulating breasts.

Then compare them to today’s queen of women pianists, Yuja Wang. If she raised the bottom of her dress or lowered its top one inch, she could be arrested for indecent exposure. (I use the word ‘compare’ loosely, for there can be no musical comparison there. Unlike those wonderful pianists, Wang, digitally gifted though she is, lacks the essential spiritual, intellectual and musical qualities that used to be required in professional performers.)

Back in 2011, I wrote an article entitled A Star is Porn, in which I quoted this passage:

“She is the most photogenic of players: young, pretty, bare-footed; and, with her long dark hair and exquisite strapless dress of dazzling white, not only seemed to imply that sexuality itself can make you a profound musician, but was a perfect visual complement to the sleek monochrome of a concert grand… .”

I commented: “This isn’t the description of a budding lap dancer at The Juicy Lucy bar in a bad part of town. Rather, the cited passage comes from a review of a piano recital at Queen Elizabeth Hall.”

Not bad after half a century of fire-eating feminism. Rather than refusing to be seen as sex objects, women seem to be doing their level best to come across as nothing but the sum of their parts. This encourages not just sexism, but misogyny, a crime only matched by transphobia in modern mythology.

But then that’s how ideologies work.

Nothing could be easier. Just promise them they won’t be stuffed this Christmas and they’ll be happy. You see, since turkeys aren’t known for their foresight, they won’t realise that what’s on offer is merely a stay of execution, not a full pardon.

You expect such obtuseness from avian creatures, not from the metaphorical turkeys flapping their wings in the House of Lords. Yet their Lordships have just gobbled up the human equivalent of the offer mentioned above.

On behalf of a grateful nation, they voted to kick the remaining 92 hereditary peers out of the upper House. Even those noblemen themselves voted in favour of that political suicide – not just theirs but also Britain’s.

Why were they so meek? Because they were promised life peerages, which will enable them to stay in the Lords until they die. Since their average age is about 70, a generation later the House of Lords will be prostituted to such an extent that it’ll closely resemble a house of ill repute.

You may surmise from my tone that I regard this development as catastrophic. So I do – and so should anyone who has any affection for our constitutional history, or any understanding of how critical the constitutional backbone is to Britain’s body both politic and civic.

The House of Lords goes back at least a millennium, to the times of the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot, the Norman Curia Regis and other councils of elders. That alone should have made it off-limits for modern vandalism – if an institution has lasted that long, it must have something going for it. But this line of thought belongs to the past.

The Lords has evolved over the ages to become an essential component of our constitution. Largely thanks to this hereditary chamber, by the 19^th century England had achieved a balance of power that most foreign countries envied, a few tried to emulate, and none really managed to do so.

The balance was perfect: the monarch’s power (still considerable, if already greatly diminished at the time) was counterbalanced by the elected lower chamber, with the hereditary and therefore unelected Lords making sure that neither end of the seesaw shot up.

The Lords served to dull the edge of populist demagoguery that, combined with an ever-expanding suffrage, threatened to turn British politics into a travesty. It was the peers’ job to keep the Starmers of this world away from the levers of power, and they managed to do so for a long time.

The assumption, proved correct over centuries, was that the constitutional mix should include an element impervious to politicking. Since the hereditary peers owed their position to neither popular whim nor partisan interests, and since they had no fear of losing their posts, they could legislate strictly in national interests, not their own.

Britain is a monarchic republic, not a republican monarchy, like the US and France. An empowered aristocracy is essential to our politics, while it’s no accident that one of the first laws passed after the American and French revolutions eliminated all titles of nobility. Aristocracy is meaningless in the absence of a monarch, but then a monarch is equally meaningless in the absence of aristocracy.

Even though our kings have no executive power, they still have a vital if subtle role to play in the constitutional balance. Most of their power has been delegated to the Commons, but some of it has been vested in the Lords. Without the legs of serving aristocracy to stand on, monarchy becomes a purely decorative knick-knack, as is the case, say, in the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries.

None of this is to denigrate the political systems in any of the countries mentioned. Political virtue is like Rome, to which, as we know, many roads lead. America chose one path, France another, similar one, but Britain stuck to her own road laid out before France became France and long before the first European settlers landed in America.

Alas, Britain has proved vulnerable to anno domini. When modernity triumphed, political power gradually passed into the hands of either ignoramuses or out-and-out vandals.

They have been bleating about the Lords being an undemocratic outrage for decades. This reminded us that, if patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel to Dr Johnson, democracy has to be the first one.

One such scoundrel cum vandal was Tony Blair who in 1999 called hereditary peers an “anachronism” and expelled 600 of them from the Lords. All peers, according to him and his ilk, must be either elected or appointed, making them beholden to the same self-serving give and take as MPs in the Commons.

That put paid to the House of Lords as it was meant to be, reducing it to a pale imitation of the US Senate. At the same time, Blair also vandalised our ancient legal system by creating an unnecessary, redundant and therefore pernicious institution: the Supreme Court.

If those nincompoops love American institutions so much, why not turn our counties into states and apply for incorporation into the USA? I’m sure Trump would be open to the idea, although perhaps not: the US welfare budget would have to go stratospheric.

It’s also useful to remember that American colonists arrived at their political setup by an armed rebellion against Britain. Those who want to transplant US institutions into British soil are also rebelling, although I’m not sure they know against what.

Now the remaining 92 hereditary peers are also on their way out, and our governing gang are triumphant. This latest act of constitutional vandalism, said Lords Leader Baroness Smith, keeps the promise Labour made in their manifesto.

“We have a duty to find a way forward,” she said. Quite. No matter what lurks at the end of the way: forward locomotion is its own reward to these nonentities.  

Bidding good-bye to our ancient institution, the Earl of Devon struck a wistful note.

“I think this House, Parliament, and the public more widely will miss us,” said the man whose family has held a seat in the Lords for 900 years. But then: “I’ll be happy to return, but on merit, not by dint of my hereditary privilege.”

Obviously, His Lordship has learned nothing from his family’s illustrious history. What chance do your average Tom, Dick or Harry, or rather Keir-Angie-Rachel, have? But here’s something else for them to ponder.

Our monarchs also reign “by dint of hereditary privilege”. Perhaps they too should be made elective, rising to Buck House strictly on ‘merit’, seen as such by Keir-Angie-Rachel.

Better still, let’s replace our king with a president. Now there’s a bright idea – and don’t think for a second it hasn’t crossed the minds of our constitutional vandals.

Exploding bombs have not only effects but also side effects. Some of them are intended and predictable, others are neither.

However, one side effect of the ongoing war on Iran (what Trump calls an “excursion”) was so certain that no self-respecting bookmaker would have accepted any bets. Oil prices were sure to shoot up steeply.

Not only were Iran’s sanctioned exports going to stop altogether, but such a massive turmoil in the oil-producing region was guaranteed to affect supplies from the whole Middle East. Considering that the region produces some 30 per cent of the world’s oil, the law of supply-demand was going to come into play, and that law hasn’t yet been repealed.

Thus, when pushing the button for a massive aerial assault on Iran, Trump could be certain that oil prices would soar. The increase was bound to be sizeable because – and this was another predictable, nay certain, development – oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz were going to come to a stop, or as near as damn.

Since, for all of Ed Miliband’s efforts, world economies are still fuelled by hydrocarbons, these economies, and people who keep them running, would suffer. Household bills would go up, living standards would move in the opposite direction, and the natives would be restless.

That much was a given. Hence plans ought to have been prepared to make up the deficit or, barring that, at least to explain to the people of the countries involved that the on-going ‘excursion’ is actually a war whose outcome is vitally important.

Trump had to be in no two minds about that because, had he thought otherwise, he shouldn’t have started the war in the first place. So what plans did he have in place to deal with public unrest over a few extra pennies on a gallon of petrol?

Simple. If Iran and the Middle East in general begin to run dry, and America’s oil production can’t replace that supply on its own, then other sources must be found. Enter Russia, the world’s third largest oil producer (and second-largest producer of gas) extracting more than twice as much black stuff as Iran does.

There is a slight catch though. Following its brutal aggression against the Ukraine, Putin’s regime is the world’s pariah. Sanctions imposed by civilised countries have limited recipients of Russian hydrocarbons to China, India and, on a smaller scale, Hungary.

And Putin himself is an indicted war criminal, the pariah dictator of a pariah country in the eyes of the world. Not necessarily in Trump’s eyes though.

His view of Russia and her aggression against the Ukraine is demonstrably different from the rest of the civilised world. He sees the war as strictly a local conflict, one of no significance for the US and hence for anyone other than the Ukraine, full stop.

Trump will keep up appearances, express his regrets about such violence, but he does mean it when he calls Putin his friend. Also a role model, I dare say: Trump would dearly love to govern the way Putin does and bitterly regrets being unable to do so.

While paying lip service to the Ukraine’s independence and maintaining some limited support for her valiant defence, Trump has been looking for ways to bring his friend Vlad in from the cold. In that spirit, he issued an invitation for Putin to join Trump’s ridiculous Board of Peace, thereby offering him a seat at a table that ought to be off-limits for dictators waging brutal wars of aggression. Some peace.

It’s against this background that Trump’s phone call to Putin must be viewed. Yesterday the president of a country regarded as the leader of the free world sought advice on Iran from a KGB thug presenting a great threat to freedom everywhere, not just in his neck of the woods.

“I had a very good call with President Putin,” Trump told a press conference.” Good for whom exactly? Funny you should ask, but Trump was ready for trick questions:

“We’re also waiving certain oil-related sanctions to reduce prices. So we have sanctions on some ​countries. We’re going to take those ​sanctions off until this straightens ⁠out,” he said.

Which countries would they be, Mr President? Cuba? North Korea? Syria? Don’t interrupt the president when he is in full flow. Let him go on:

“Then who knows, maybe we won’t have to put them on; there’ll be so much peace. But when the time comes, the US Navy and its partners will ​escort tankers through the Strait if needed.” No doubt. But what does Putin have to do with that? Does the US Navy need his permission to do its job?

Actually, Trump’s use of the future tense is a bit coy. Last week, the US already put in force a ‘temporary’ waiver on India’s purchases of Russian oil. And yes, my quotation marks around ‘temporary’ communicate a certainty that the waiver will remain come what may.

Not only that, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the US could free even more Russian oil from sanctions – meaning all sanctions will be removed regardless of how the war in the Ukraine is going. Hence Trump is ready to remove any link between sanctions and the war that caused them in the first place.

If Russia is allowed an unimpeded access to the oil markets, and hydrocarbons are her principal source of revenue, Putin’s regime will get steroid injections enabling it to intensify and expand its aggression. Trump is clearly not bothered by that: it’s only America’s allies who will be on the receiving end, not the US of A.

As long as there’s enough cheap petrol for Americans, why not let a fascist regime get away with mass murder? It’s not Americans who are being killed after all.

In parallel, Trump has hinted at a possibility that I’ve feared all along. He seems to be ready to declare victory in his ‘excursion’ and go home, leaving Iran’s evil regime in place and more rabid than ever. Moreover, it’s now led by a man who lost half his family to American missiles – how likely do you think he’ll be to talk peace?

Putin’s regime will be de facto decriminalised and join forces with China to rebuild Iran’s industry and re-tune her war machine. That may take a few years, and Russia too may need some time to roll over the Ukraine, then to catch her breath before the next round. But that will be the next US president’s headache, not Trump’s.

Some of what I’ve written is conjecture, which would be unnecessary had Trump stated unequivocally what the strategic objectives are, what would constitute victory, what long-term prospects are in store for the world. Yet none of this information was offered.

Instead the president comes across as erratic and solipsistic as he is on most other subjects. It’s all down to him: he will decide when it’s time to declare victory in Iran, and he’ll decide what constitutes a victory. He’ll decide whether or not Putin should remain in the cold. And if he decides to swap the Ukraine for Russian oil, then he’ll do so.

The picture emerging out of this mess seems gloomy, and I hope I’m wrong. However, this scenario is far from being implausible, I’m afraid. Very afraid.

The war on Iran is just and strategically sound. One only wishes it weren’t Trump waging it.

Then again, to use Trump’s chosen mode of expression, ONLY FOOLS would expect him to put his more objectionable traits on hold at a time of crisis. It’s not just a leopard’s belligerence that the president may match, but also the animal’s inability to change its spots.

One of Trump’s metaphorical spots is a tendency to shoot from the lip in volleys of insane braggadocio. By way of illustration, just compare these newspaper reports, two days apart.

7 March – Trump yet again paraded his command of grammar by writing in his favourite medium: “Iran, which is being beat to HELL [it’s ‘beaten’, Mr President, this side of the truck stops on I-495], has apologized and surrendered to its Middle East neighbors, and promised that it will not shoot at them anymore. This promise was only made because of the relentless U.S. and Israeli attack.”

9 February – headline in The Mail: Iran Unleashes Huge Overnight Attacks on Gulf States.

It definitely behoves a wartime leader to rally his troops and the whole population with fiery rhetoric. And ONLY FOOLS would hold the odd rhetorical flourish against such a leader. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that inspiring oratory is the essential part of the job at a time like this.

The actual conduct of the war is best left to professionals, with the civilian government offering little beyond setting strategic objectives before the war and providing oversight during it. But it’s not generals but politicians who unite the people, calling on them to bear the inevitable hardships for the sake of the common cause.

Churchill was one of the best practitioners of that art. His three 1940 speeches, “We shall fight on the beaches”, “Blood, toil, tears and sweat” and “This was their finest hour”, arguably contributed more to victory than Monty’s battlefield acumen did.

Granted, Britain’s circumstances were different – the country was fighting for its survival. Hence Churchill’s oratory can only offer a general pattern for future generations, not a verbatim blueprint. But the general pattern includes an injunction against uttering obvious bilge, easily perceived as such by the public.

Trump possesses none of Churchill’s language skills. After all, while Trump has failed to win the Nobel Prize for peace, Churchill earned one for literature. And as a political orator, Churchill bears comparison with Demosthenes and Cicero, not any modern politician.

But even modern politicians should have enough nous not to make themselves laughingstocks, especially at wartime. For when guns are firing, a president or prime minister personifies his country. If he comes across as a buffoon, so will the country.

So which is it, Mr President? Did Iran surrender and promise to desist or, to quote today’s report, “Iran has unleashed a huge attack overnight on countries in the Gulf, with Bahrain experiencing the highest number of casualties since the beginning of the war. 32 people were injured in an Iranian attack on Bahrain’s island of Sitra, the interior ministry said, after Bahrain’s Bapco refinery was hit by drones overnight”?

As a result of that ‘surrender’, oil and gas prices have soared, with petrol prices at the pump heading in the same northward direction. Since Americans tend to be rather sensitive to such developments, a soothing word was necessary.

Trump was happy to oblige, and I can’t find fault with his message. Such an increase, he wrote on Truth Social (too often coming across as Untruth Asocial in his able hands) is “a very small price to pay for USA, and World, Safety and Peace. ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY.”

True in substance, but the form doesn’t evoke Churchill. It falls even short of Dubya’s customary standards. For millions of Americans doubtless regard the price they have to pay for this war as exorbitant, and they ain’t seen nuthin’ yet, in Trump’s idiom. It would take a rousing, kind, intelligent message to inspire them, to assuage their fears. Instead they got a harangue.

Like most promises of a blitzkrieg, Trump’s earlier bravado seems to be ill-founded. The conflict is beginning to show signs of turning into a protracted war of attrition, with all the hardships this may entail.

About 20 per cent of the world’s oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which at its narrowest point has the width of the Channel from Dover to Calais. Choking it off is a relatively easy task even for Iran’s military.

Should that happen – and for all intents and purposes it has happened already – Americans and the rest of us would have to suffer economic problems potentially bordering on deprivation. The cost of shipping will head for the stratosphere, and it may take a proverbial mortgage to fill up an average car tank.

I agree with Trump: this price is worth paying if the war ends in victory. But what does victory actually mean?

For Iran isn’t Venezuela. It won’t be enough to decapitate its regime but leave it in place if it promises to behave itself. It won’t even be enough to destroy Iran’s armament and nuclear industry, army, air force and navy.

Given resolve, all of these can be rebuilt with some help from Iran’s friends, namely Russia and China. One of them may even give Iran a nuclear device or two ready-made. And the resolve of that evil regime isn’t in doubt, as its choice of the new supreme leader proves.  

Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is no longer with us, is widely regarded as an extremist even by the standards of the Revolutionary Guard. It remains to be seen whether he’ll accept the post, but the very fact that it was offered suggests that the regime is ready for a long-haul battle at any cost.

Are Americans? Is Trump? Since I believe this war is just, I hope so. But I wish someone were to give Trump a crash course in wartime leadership. When a nation is hurting, bragging rights can easily turn into wrongs.

Yesterday several analysts did what analysts do: analyse. The object of their scrutiny was the on-going war in Iran, specifically why it broke out and what are its strategic objectives.

One such expert, Haviv Rettig Gur, correctly dismissed the ridiculous notion that it was Israel that was trigger-happy, with America simply tagging along out of solidarity. Though he didn’t quite put it in those words, that version of the events must have come from the same school of thought that teaches that Jews run the world.

Israel may well be a beneficiary of this war, bit she isn’t its initiator. The experts agree that the war has to be viewed in the context of global confrontation between the US and China. The minor matter that’s to be settled is whether the world order will continue to be based around America, or will China usurp that role.

Not to cut too fine a point, Iran is China’s proxy in East Asia, even more so than Venezuela was her outpost in South America. A strike against Iran was thus one against China, and the aim was to limit China’s influence in that part of the world.

It was China (among others, but we’ll come to that later) that built up Iran’s military capability to threaten the Middle East and especially Israel, America’s ally that Iran is constitutionally committed to annihilating. It is also China that helps Iran to bust international sanctions and continue to export her oil, if at knockdown prices.

China buys some 1.4 million barrels of Iranian crude a day, about 80 per cent of the total output. Partly thanks to that, the communists have built up reserves of a staggering one billion barrels. That would enable China to carry on for 100 days in case the US Navy imposes a blockade following China’s attack on Taiwan.

Without that oil revenue, which amounts to about a quarter of Iran’s budget, the regime wouldn’t be able to pay its army and security forces, nor provide essential staples for the people. In other words, it would collapse.

China is supplying Iran with state-of-the-art military technology, including supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles specifically designed to be impervious to the defences deployed by American carriers. Judging by the failure of Iranian air defences to knock down a single American or Israeli warplane nor to sink a single ship, we are talking about China’s, not America’s, state of the art, but still.

Iran’s aggressive posture in the region, aided by her transparent intention to produce nuclear weapons, seems to be an essential prong in China’s hybrid war for global dominance. It also diverts America’s attention from the Far East and, now the war has got out of the hybrid stage, it forces the US to commit much of her military capability, and deplete much of her ordnance stocks.

This simplifies China’s task should the communists act on their perennial threat to do to Taiwan what they’ve done to Tibet and are doing to Hong Kong. The omens are quite sinister at the moment, as the analysts are agreeing in chorus.

But, as Princess Diana would say, there are three in this marriage. I was surprised to see one word missing in the articles I read yesterday: Russia. Yet Russia is also China’s proxy, in Europe, just as Iran is in West Asia. The relationships aren’t identical, but neither are they drastically different.

Russia too has to sell her oil to China at dumping prices, which fills the reservoirs of the latter and keeps the former afloat. In the process Russia begins to resemble China’s vassalage more and more. By some estimates, over two million Chinese are colonising the Russian Far East, getting cheap mining concessions, building townships and in general acting towards the locals the way the conquering Mongols treated the Russians in the 13^th century.

I don’t know whether Russia’s assault on the Ukraine was prompted by China, but she certainly has a vested interest in it. This grows the longer the conflict goes on, for the same reason as with the Iran war. The West is diverting its attention and depleting its arsenal, indirectly putting its halfhearted support of the Ukraine at the service of Chinese imperialism, not just Russian.

Iran is to Russia what Russia is to China: a de facto dependency and a strategic ally. In fact, that relationship was formalised in the 2025 Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.

The partnership also includes China, and the three evil regimes have held several joint naval exercises in the Strait of Hormuz. And Russia is another major supplier of arms and military technologies to Iran. Again, it’s testimony to the superiority of American capabilities that the US and Israeli air forces achieved air dominance in the on-going war so easily.

But there is one rubric of military hardware that Iran, Russia and the Ukraine more or less pioneered jointly: long-range attack drones. And this is one area of technology in which Iran and Russia may be ahead of the West.

Both countries are reshaping the landscape of modern warfare, with Russia doing so on a vastly larger scale, but with Iran’s assistance. Iran and Russia are both able to fire salvos of suicide Shahed-type drones in swarms, which makes defence problematic.

It’s widely known that Tehran is supplying Russia with thousands of Shaheds. But what is less publicised is that Iran actually helped Russia to build a Shahed factory. The Russians have added a few targeting and navigational bells and whistles, but by and large they are using Iranian technology.

Russia will be soon churning out 1,000 drones a day, each to be used as a weapon of mass terrorism against Ukrainians. That way the Russians can keep their expensive missiles for striking against sturdier targets.

The Russians have paid Iran somewhere between one and two billion dollars for that murderous assistance, but I’m sure they regard it as money well-spent. And of course Iran is ratcheting up her own production of drones the better to terrorise her neighbours.

I’ve forgotten to credit Russia’s and Iran’s partners in this criminal activity. For many drone components, those ‘bells and whistles’ I mentioned so flippantly, come from China and, one hopes unwittingly, the West. These mostly off-the shelf components include the engine, fuel pump, GPS, semiconductors and antenna parts.

Both Iran and especially Russia are displaying enviable ingenuity in bypassing international sanctions. The Russians bring to the task their long experience in money laundering, one of the KGB/FSB’s specialities.

Just as the West was gasping with delight at glasnost and perestroika, and issuing inane books about the ultimate victory of liberalism ending history, the KGB, as it then was, was busily creating a network of shadowy brass plates, dummy corporations and untraceable offshore shelters.

Now Russia, in cahoots with Iran, is putting that naughty experience to good use by busting sanctions on the export of military technology. New trading companies are being set up all the time and, as one lot are found out, another batch come in, making a mockery of any sanctions.

The phrase ‘expensive missiles’ I used above must be giving sleepless nights to Pentagon planners. For Americans are downing Iranian drones with Patriot missiles, a wasting asset. A side that uses missiles costing $4 million each to down drones costing $20,000 a pop is on a losing wicket, and I’m sure Pentagon officials have their calculators in working order.  

This is where the Ukraine can help America, partly paying back for the begrudging and diminishing support the US has been providing for the Ukraine’s defence. The country is ahead of the US in drone technology, but even more so in the tactics of using – and resisting – drones in battlefield conditions.

The Ukrainians have developed anti-drone drones that cost even less than their targets, and they’ve learned how to use defensive nets that can greatly reduce damage. The jackboot is on the other foot: while Western specialists used to train the Ukrainian army for years, the Ukrainians can now train the West in the use of drones for both attack and defence.

Godspeed to the Ukraine in her heroic fight against one form of evil, and godspeed to the US and Israel in their valiant effort to stop another. But it’s actually the same evil: China, Iran and Russia are thick as thieves. Or rather murderers.