Month: March 2026

Britain has sacrificed her defence for the sake of having the worst health service in Europe. But, to be fair, not just for that.

The sacrifice has also been made to bribe an increasingly decadent and work-shy population into voting in the worst governments ever, Tory or Labour. Another costly item is having 11 per cent of the population on disability benefits.

That’s more invalids than Britain had in the wake of either World War, but then Britons have become so much more fragile. Just think: after D-Day anniversary celebrations in Normandy a few years ago, several British journalists had to be treated for PTSD – with bemused nonagenarian veterans looking on.

In addition to spending 11 per cent of GDP on healthcare, we spend another 10 per cent on welfare payments (excluding pensions), and that proportion is climbing steeply like a jump jet, of the kind we no longer produce.

No country living within her means could afford such generosity. Since the welfare state is beyond any cuts and above any criticism, we borrow hand over fist to pay for it. This year it’ll cost us up to £126 billion to service the national debt. If Britain paid her way, we could triple the defence budget (currently about £61 billion a year).

Actually, it’s not just squandering money and borrowing rapaciously to make up the deficit. France actually spends some 15 per cent less on defence, but her navy is larger than ours. The same Royal Navy that deployed 127 ships in the Falklands conflict now boasts a meagre 13 warships, one of which is about to be scrapped.

Yes, we have two aircraft carriers to France’s one. But her solitary carrier strike group is now in the Middle Eastern theatre, whereas our two are sitting in port – partly for maintenance, partly for the lack of sailors. And the single destroyer Starmer has magnanimously agreed to dispatch to the Middle East won’t get there for at least a fortnight – because of the same shortage in personnel she hasn’t even sailed yet.

The Royal Navy under Drake protected England from the might of the Spanish Empire. The Royal Navy under Nelson protected England from the French Empire. The Royal Navy under Cunningham protected England from the Third Reich. Yet today’s rump Royal Navy can’t even protect a few acres of British sovereign territory on Cyprus.

(Our humiliation deepens every day: now even Spain, Italy and Holland have sent their warships to the Mediterranean. Actually, during the Second World War, Italy had one of the biggest and most modern navies in the world. Yet her navy stayed bottled up in port for the duration, scared to come out and engage the few Royal Navy warships patrolling the Mediterranean. Good old days, eh?)

One has to reach the painful conclusion that the French are more efficient than we are, which is borne out by personal observation. Just compare the public roads in France and Britain and you’ll see that, although both nations pay exorbitant taxes, at least the French get their money’s worth. (I’m talking strictly about public administration here, because France’s overall economy is no better than ours.)

We take pleasure in saying that French public administrators are corrupt, and indeed it’s easier there to smooth one’s way through their system with a timely backhander. But our public administrators are more malignantly corrupt at the more vital levels: by being grossly, some would say treasonously, incompetent, they corrupt the very essence of statehood.

This creates a vicious circle of corruption: the state corrupts the population, the population corrupts the state, and round and round she goes, with an ever-growing radius. Narrowing the circle never works. Only breaking it would provide a way out, but neither the governors nor the governed have the will to do so.  

Blaming Labour for all our ills is a time-honoured sport, but socialists merely take advantage of the openings society provides. The difference between the two main parties, as they so far have been, is that of degree, not of kind.

Neither the Tories nor Reform is committed to breaking the vicious circle. And though occasionally politicians of the so-called parties of the Right make vague noises about the need to strengthen our defence, the echoes of those noises disappear into the ether and nothing ever gets done.

No party is committed to dismantling the corrupting welfare state, to the “basic features” of which the true-blue Tory Peregrine Worsthorne, former editor of The Sunday Telegraph, wanted all Britons to pledge “loyalty” as far back as in 1958.

Not even the Tories realised then, and haven’t since, that loyalty to the welfare state is at odds with loyalty to the country. For what is disloyalty if not stripping the country of her defences, now deemed unaffordable?

The problem isn’t unique to Britain, although it’s more virulent here than in some other Western countries. All the major ones, including the US, are spending more on servicing the national debt than on defence, although the gap in America is less gaping than here.

I don’t think that, because things happen, they were bound to happen. I don’t believe in determinism of any kind.

However, I do believe that ideas and the actions they inspire have consequences. The more undesirable ones could be mitigated or even nipped in the bud while they are still in the early stages. But, if allowed to fester for too long, they may well become irreversible.

Hence I am convinced that unbalanced democracy of universal suffrage was bound to produce over time a situation similar to the one we face now.

Tocqueville, to whom I refer more and more often these days, was a great champion of that political system. But if you read his 800-page book on the subject, you’ll find dispersed at regular intervals warnings about the concomitant dangers. One of them he flagged more often than others: in the absence of an enlightened electorate, universal suffrage will sooner or later turn into universal suffering.

The America he wrote about had 12 million inhabitants, whereas today she has 350 million. While today the only qualifications required for voting are age and citizenship (this one seems to be ignored in Britain), in those days all sorts of other restrictions existed that more than halved even the relative size of the electorate.

Obviously, when tens of millions of people vote, which is the case in most major Western countries (over 48 million Britons are registered voters), Tocqueville’s condition of an enlightened electorate becomes hard to satisfy.

And it becomes impossible to satisfy when public education has to be squeezed into the Procrustean bed of egalitarianism, which one may regard as either an inevitable consequence of universal suffrage or its cause. And human nature being what it is, unenlightened people will always vote for anyone who promises them more freebies and jam today.

They haven’t been trained to realise that, say, a free medical system is an impossibility: nothing in life is free. Free NHS means that it’s funded by the state out of taxes and burgeoning money supply. This is far from being the only or the best system of financing healthcare, but unenlightened voters either don’t know this or don’t care. “We are proud of our NHS” was one of the first things I heard when moving to England.

Quite. And we are also proud of the welfare state in general. But are we equally proud of collapsing public services that don’t really serve? Of defence that doesn’t really defend? Of education that doesn’t really educate? Of politicians manifestly unqualified to govern?

We aren’t. And yet we’ll throw our arms up in horror should anyone suggest that democracy of universal suffrage is bound to produce decades of incremental deterioration, eventually leading to the calamities I’ve mentioned.

When a system is fundamentally flawed, no amount of tweaking will fix it. Hence we are for ever stuck with successive governments that see defence as an unaffordable luxury and the welfare state as an ironclad necessity. Let’s just hope we’ll never have to pay for this with millions of lives.

To paraphrase Alexander Pushkin ever so slightly, “Of course, I despise my government head to toe – but I am offended when a foreigner shares this feeling.”

Correction: my contempt for our governing Marxist cabal is so boundless that this time I can’t even take offence at Trump’s criticism of it. He is right, a thousand times over.

Trump said last night: “I’m not happy with the UK. This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.”

Forget Churchill, Mr President. Starting from Robert Walpole, Britain had 57 prime ministers before Starmer, and not one of them was as craven, incompetent, mired in legalistic casuistry and plain stupid as he is. I miss John Major’s intellect, Theresa May’s decisiveness and Liz Truss’s fiscal acumen. Hell, and I thought these words would never cross my lips, I even miss Tony Blair.

Starmer’s first reaction to the US-Israeli assault on Iran was to state that Britain wanted no part of it because the action violated “international law”. Now, every law has its letter and its spirit, with the two sometimes going their separate ways.

The letter of the law is its precise wording, while the spirit reflects its morality. Alas, the two sometimes diverge but, in civilised countries, they shouldn’t diverge too far. In this case, the US-Israeli action is so amply justified morally and strategically that only an idiot would see it as illegal.

Just compare the two on-going wars, Russia’s on the Ukraine and the US-Israel’s on Iran. Both can be held to violate the letter of international law, but Russia had no moral or strategic justification for her brutal and unprovoked assault on a country she intends to erase off the map. That makes Putin and his gang war criminals who murder hundreds of thousands for nefarious reasons. No sane observer would accept Putin’s claim that he acted in self-defence.

The same hypothetical sane observer would instantly see that the US and Israel acted for precisely that reason. Not only is Iran’s regime evil, but it’s aggressively evil. Its stated objective is to dominate the Middle East and to annihilate the only civilised Western country in it.

For 20 years now that regime has been developing nuclear weapons, by-passing international sanctions and acting in cahoots with other evil regimes, those of Russia, China and North Korea. In parallel, it spawned several terrorist organisations, notably Hamas and Hezbollah.

While its main target is Israel, Iran is considered the “foremost state sponsor of terrorism, providing a range of support, including financial, training, and equipment, to [terrorist] groups around the world… .” This statement by the US State Department can’t be contested.

As Iran’s response to the attack shows, her regime regards not only the US and Israel as its enemies, but also all Middle Eastern countries allied to the West, if only in a marriage of convenience. This makes Iran a direct threat to Western, specifically American but also British, interests in the region.

Thus, if Russia’s attack on the Ukraine is an act of evil, unprovoked brutality, the US-Israeli attack on Iran is a preemptive act of self-defence. As such, it’s in accord with the spirit of international law, and it takes a fanatic of casuistry to argue it violates the law’s letter.

Starmer’s appeal to international law is just a cop-out, an attempt to hide behind legalistic jargon his cowardice and fear of upsetting his Muslim electorate. But Trump wasn’t finished:

“The UK has been very, very uncooperative with that stupid island. That they gave away and took a 100-year lease… what’s that all about?” I shan’t repeat all the epithets I’ve so far applied to Starmer and his coterie, but that’s what it’s all about.

Trump’s remark referred to Starmer’s idea of a good deal. He wants to hand the Chagos Islands, a British territory in the Indian Ocean and home of the Diego Garcia UK-US base, to China’s proxy Mauritius, only then to lease the base back for £35 billion.

It’s unfathomable, but when Starmer found out about the impending assault on Iran, he refused to let the US Air Force operate from British bases, including Diego Garcia. It’s only after Iran’s drones targeted the British Akrotiri base on Cyprus that Starmer graciously agreed to grant the US some limited use of British bases for strictly “defensive purposes”.

But the ultimate humiliation came later. An attack on a British base had to draw the country into the conflict, if only kicking and screaming. After all, protecting British interests around the world is a great part of what the British state is for.

And still Starmer dawdled – until Macron, who also believes that the US and Israel “acted outside international law”, nevertheless sent an aircraft carrier group to the Mediterranean to help out a beleaguered British base. Greece also offered help – France! And Greece! Two countries that must possess the naval power Britain lacks.

All Britons have to be writhing with shame and disgust. A great naval power of Drake and Nelson, one that ruled the waves for 500 years and in fact relied on naval superiority to defend her freedom, had to depend on the largesse of France and Greece to protect her vital outpost.

“Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves/ Britons never, never, never will be slaves,” ring the words as proud as they are geopolitically sound: without Britannia ruling the waves (or at least holding her own), Britons may well become slaves.

Starmer doesn’t see the link. But even he had to do something as the French carrier was moving in. Begrudgingly, Starmer agreed to dispatch HMS Dragon, a Type 45 destroyer with counter-drone capabilities.

Better than nothing, I suppose, but why not carrier groups? If the French can do it, what are we, foie haché? Ah well, there’s the rub.

Our wave-ruling Royal Navy possesses two aircraft carriers (the US has 11). Both of them are currently marooned in port, “for maintenance”.

Now the two carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, were commissioned in 2017 and 2019 respectively. By the standards of such giant 65-tonne vessels, both ships are brand-new. And yet neither of them is sea-worthy at the moment, which brings into question the quality of British ship-building.

What if it were not an Iranian drone hitting Akrotiri, but a Russian missile hitting London? Never mind that.

Rear Admiral Chris Parry called Labour’s response to the crisis “strategically illiterate.” “The Government has been shamed into this token, paltry effort by the actions of other countries such as France and Greece,” he said. There is one Briton who feels the shame. I’m sure there are millions more.

Joining the conflict at full pelt would be a just, legal, moral and generally proper thing for Britain to do. The situation is drastically different from Blair docilely following George W Bush into Iraq in 2003. That war was indeed illegal because it was unjustified by any strategic considerations.

Moreover, American neocons inspired that war effort with their ideological appeals to nation-building and creating a fully-fledged democracy in every tribal backwater of the world. This time around, there’s no such talk, no American neocons (some of whom I happen to be related to) fighting tears at the sight of Muslim peasants queuing up at voting booths.

Trump and Defence Secretary Hegseth specifically said no such idiocy is on the agenda. This is an effort to defang one of the main sources of evil in the world, and godspeed to the US and Israel.

Having said that, perhaps Trump will now consider toning down his anti-NATO rhetoric and especially his anti-NATO actions. He can’t expect to have it both ways: denigrating NATO as a useless, archaic setup and treating Article 5 as strictly optional if not yet defunct, while at the same time demanding assistance when needed.

“They need us more than we need them,” Trump likes to say, and he is right. But that doesn’t mean the US has no need for her NATO allies, so I hope he changes his tune. And I also hope Trump, the US arsenal and the world economy have enough wherewithal to stay the course.

The West simply can’t countenance defeat. If it comes, it’s not just Britain that’ll have to hang her head in shame.

Just a few years ago this question would have been silly. Everyone knew the Greens were fanatics of the environment, with everything such zeal entailed.

Scientifically, green is the colour of chlorophyll, the pigment in leaves and grass. But poetically, green symbolises pristine, unspoilt nature, the way it used to be before humans befouled it. Hence the expression ‘God’s green earth’, freely bandied about even by those Greens who don’t believe in God, which is to say most of them.

The Greens translated that nature worship into a whole raft of policies that, if put into practice, would be guaranteed to drop the first world below the standards of the third. Even net zero was too, well, capitalist for them. They’d settle for nothing less than absolute zero: no hydrocarbons, full stop.

Essentially that meant reversing the Industrial Revolution, powered as it was by coal and later oil. As far as the Greens were concerned, we should produce energy the way our forebears produced it: by wind, sun, water and supposedly two pieces of flint rubbed together.

Advocacy of extreme Left policies followed naturally. Since greedy capitalists insist on raping nature for profit, both capitalism and profits had to be condemned. In the absence of bourgeois avarice, what remained was equality for all, as extreme a form of socialism as was possible to achieve before the cold, starving human race died out.

All things considered, that made the task of political taxonomists easy. Everyone knew what the Greens stood for. Most people saw them as oddballs, an extremist, half-mad minority permanently resident in the lunatic fringe.

But then the Greens came up on the political rail by winning the Gorton and Denton by-election, leaving Labour languishing in third place, also behind Reform. The victorious campaign struck most observers as incongruous: environment was hardly mentioned.

It was as if the Greens forgot they were supposed to be green. Instead their strategy was to appeal directly to the Muslims who make up 18 per cent of that constituency. A minority, you might think, but one that can swing elections if voting as a bloc.

The Greens were astute enough to realise this, which is why much of their campaign literature was in Urdu, the language spoken in Pakistan and by the predominantly Pakistani Muslim minority in Britain.

(As an aside, I’d be in favour of a law making English the only allowed language of political and official communications. NHS patient literature, for example, is currently translated into 200 to 450 languages, at a cost that could probably make nurses well-paid.

And my political point is that those who can’t understand the language of a country shouldn’t take part in deciding its politics. As the Texas governor Miriam ‘Ma’ Ferguson put it in the 1920s, “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.” Unfortunately, she didn’t mean it as a joke.)

The well-trodden path to the Muslim heart lies through visceral hatred of Israel (of Jews in general, if truth be told); championship of all anti-Israel, which is to say pro-terrorist regimes and causes; and removal of all restraints on immigration, specifically Muslim. The Greens shaped their campaign accordingly and won.

Nor was it just a peculiar part of Manchester that could be swayed that way. National polls put the Greens way above Labour and only a whisker below Reform. If the general election were held today the Greens would gain around 100 seats, not enough to be kings but enough to be king makers.

Following the US-Israeli offensive on Iran, pro-Iran demonstrations have broken out all over the country, with the Greens leading from the front. Incidentally, calling these demonstrations pro-Iran is a misnomer. The mob supports not Iranian people but specifically the Revolutionary Guard terrorism fronted by the mullahs.

What exactly is the attraction? After all, Islam frowns on some Green policies, such as legalising all drugs including crack and heroin, decriminalising prostitution, removing all restraints on pornography.

Above all, the Greens are fanatically feminist, whereas Islam is, well, not quite. Specifically in Iran, women must cover their heads and bodies in public on pain of corporal punishment. They can’t get a passport without written permission from their husbands or guardians. They aren’t protected by any laws from domestic violence. Laws governing marriage, divorce and child custody heavily favour men.

One can just see British feminists, Green or other, marching in support of women’s rights in Iran and chanting “Down with misogyny!”. Instead, the polls show that the Greens draw much of their support from women, mostly feminist ones.

This is what I call a conflict of pieties. The cause of Islam is closer to the Green heart than the cause of feminism, and the Greens are prepared to forgo the latter for the sake of the former.

Thus, the party must re-orient itself, but – and I’m happy to make this helpful suggestion – no re-branding is necessary. For green isn’t only the colour of nature; it’s also the colour of Islam.

It was Mohammed’s favourite colour. He felt green symbolised paradise and the garments worn by the righteous admitted there. That’s why many national flags of Muslim countries, including Iran, feature green among their colours.

Incidentally, virgins get a free pass to paradise even if they commit capital offences. To prevent such incongruity, the Iranian regime demands that prison guards rape condemned women before execution, to make sure a virgin doesn’t slip through. One would think Green women would find it hard to reconcile such practices with their rooting for Iran’s regime, but any clash between two pieties is an elimination contest. And it’s Islam that has made it to the finals.

All this is good knock-about fun that one likes to have at the expense of assorted lefties. But that’s all it is, for the essence of the matter is different. The Greens aren’t inspired by their love of anything, be it nature, Islam, Iran or Palestinians.

The more extreme a Left-wing movement, the more evident it becomes that its true inspiration isn’t love but hatred. And the Greens are as extreme as they come. That’s why they aren’t bothered by espousing what seems to be mutually exclusive causes. Such causes are only mutually exclusive in what they advocate – not in what they hate.

The list of the Greens’ bogeymen is long: capitalism and Jews as its embodiment (according to Marx); Israel as a first-world country stubbornly resisting extermination at the hands of her third-world neighbours; the West as the hatchery of capitalism; NATO as the West’s cutting edge; US as an ally of Israel and hence complicit in the latter’s criminal efforts to protect herself; the West in general, as the oppressor of lesser, especially racially diverse nations.

The leader of the Greens, Zack Polanski, is living proof of only the illusory nature of any inner conflicts in his party’s ideology. He himself is both Jewish and homosexual, which doesn’t prevent him from touting a regime that happily murders both groups.

As long as a regime hates what Zack hates, which is Britain with her history and ethos, along with everything the West stands for, he’ll do his best to champion it. Hatred trumps any personal considerations, which is known to be the case with fanatics.

Opinion polls are fickle, and one hopes that the Greens’ current showing is merely a statistical blip. Such things have happened before: a marginal party jumps out of the water, only then to sink without a trace (Nigel Farage should also beware).

Even so, the situation is frightening. It’s just possible that the rise of the Greens adumbrates the downfall of Britain qua Britain, a malignancy eating away at the country’s body politic. If so, run for the hills (but not, on present evidence, for Dubai).

The title of Kierkegaard’s first and perhaps most famous book was Either/Or.

He was talking specifically about choosing between a life of aesthetic hedonism or one of ethical commitment, but the title contains a lesson that applies to life in general and the war on Iran in particular.

Alas, the lesson is too often ignored. We consider one possibility in isolation, forgetting that it’s usually an alternative to something else. It’s only by weighing one against the other that we can judge the wisdom of an action.

This truism is roundly disregarded by those who take issue with the assault on Iran undertaken by the US and Israel. Actually, ‘take issue’ is an understatement – no one does that any longer. ‘Hysterically attack’ is more accurate.

Don’t Trump and Netanyahu realise that their action may plunge the whole Middle East into a blood-soaked chaos, compared to which the Iraq War will look like a warm-up exercise? Do they want a Middle Eastern war of all against all, with millions dead and more millions inundating Europe and the US?

The answers are, yes, they realise and no, they don’t want. But they must have gone through Kierkegaard’s binary choice and considered what would happen if Iran was allowed to go about her business unmolested.

Quite apart from murdering Iranians, Iran’s business, in case anyone has forgotten, is promoting terrorism and fomenting hatred all over the world, but specifically against Israel and her allies, especially the US. To that end, Iran’s regime, with a little help from its Russian friends, has been developing nuclear weapons and means of their delivery.

Other countries possess such WMDs, but so far they’ve been wise enough not to use them. Iran’s chieftains can’t be relied on to display similar wisdom. The moment they acquire nuclear bombs, they’ll attach them to missiles and hit Israel – to begin with. Other targets, countries the mullahs and their Revolutionary Guard wire-pullers regard as satanic, may also be in their sights.

Those target countries that have a nuclear capability, specifically Israel, will surely respond in kind. The whole region will be plunged into a nuclear war, with consequences as horrific as they are unpredictable.

I’m the first to accuse political leaders of self-serving cynicism, and it’s indeed possible that Trump and Netanyahu resorted to this time-dishonoured trick of diverting public attention from domestic problems. Trump especially may want to counteract his recent Supreme Court debacle and possibly some forthcoming news from the Epstein files.

However, it’s also possible that Trump and Netanyahu know something we don’t about Iran’s nuclear programme. It’s that either/or again.

It’s true that George W. Bush and Tony Blair lied about Iraq’s WMDs to get the US and Britain into an ill-advised war. But unlike them, neither Trump nor Netanyahu defines the war objective as turning Iran into a US-style democracy complete with a bicameral parliament, independent judiciary and a bill of rights.

That was a toxic neocon fantasy, one kind that Trump isn’t given to. His stated casus belli is that Iran’s regime is evil (true); Iran presents a palpable danger to the region, especially America’s staunchest ally, Israel (true); Iran also presents a danger to the US herself (possibly true, but unlikely); Iran is close to developing nuclear weapons (true, depending on how one defines ‘close’).

So far so good. But, once we’ve got the casus belli out of the way to everyone’s begrudging satisfaction, then the fun starts. The kick-off question is: What’s the finis belli, chaps? How do you expect the war to end?

Regime change is on everyone’s lips, which is always nice when the regime in question is as venomous as Iran’s. However, no evil regime in modern history has ever been unseated by aerial power alone. The Allies dropped almost three megatons of explosives on Germany, but that only softened the ground for those proverbial boots, not obviated the need for them.

Neither the US nor Israel seems to be planning a ground assault: the US because it lacks the will; Israel, because it lacks the means. Iran, after all, has a population of 93 million and a territory almost seven times the size of Britain’s.

Trump is counting on a popular uprising breaking out in Iran, and in fact he has called for it. This is a daring call, considering that just a couple of weeks ago Iranian troops slaughtered tens of thousands of people who had gone out into the streets in answer to a similar appeal from Trump.

Having said that, Iranians are more civilised than Iraqis, and hence more of them loathe theocratic tyranny – especially since real power there is in the hands of fascistic Revolutionary Guards. There must be a lot of steam pressure building up under the surface, and there is every chance it may burst through. Then again, it may not. It’s either/or.

Another possibility is that the US and Israel don’t expect a regime change in Iran. All they may want is degrading Iran’s capability to do mischief internationally. To serve that more limited aim, they may merely look to destroy Iran’s air force, missile launchers, nuclear capability and the industries that could replenish such losses.

The long-term objective may also be turning Muslims against one another, along the lines of divide et impera. The Middle East seems ready for that.   

Westerners tend to lump all Muslims together, but in fact the religious makeup of the Middle East is similar to its weather: mostly Sunni, but sometimes Shiite. None so hostile as divergent exponents of the same creed, and Iran has proved that point yet again by expending her limited missile arsenal on hitting five-star hotels in Dubai and airports in Abu Dhabi.

Their vindictive aim is to make the region undesirable for foreign investors, including those in the Trump family. The Emirates in particular depend on such investors and expats, at least 240,000 of whom are wealthy Britons seeking tax shelters. They may change their mind when they have to start thinking of bomb shelters instead.

This has to bring Arab states into some sort of coalition with the US and the rest of NATO, which will be one positive outcome of the war. But not if the decapitated regime in Iran does a Hydra and grows new heads to replace those severed by American missiles.

History shows that, when the US enters regional conflicts, she seldom stays the course for the long haul. Not a single war America has fought since 1945 has ended in an unequivocal victory; most have ended in defeats, with or without face saved.

Bertie Russell would insist that this doesn’t necessarily mean each subsequent war would follow the same pattern, and for once he’d have a point. But a general tendency is observable. All in all, this war may or may not prove as futile as, say, the Vietnam War or the one in Iraq. It’s either/or.

It pains me to be unable to be more definitive, but my crystal ball has gone cloudy. No one, I suspect not even Trump, really knows where the war is going and how it will end. However, the war must have something to recommend it, considering who has condemned it.

Leading the way is Putin, the fascist dictator; Xi and Kim, the communist dictators; and, for a bit of local colour, Jeremy Corbyn, the aspiring Marxist dictator.

Putin had the gall to send this note to the Iranian president: “Please accept my deep condolences in connection with the murder of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Seyed Ali Khamenei, and members of his family, committed in cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law.”

Putin appealing to human morality and international law is a bit like Hitler calling for racial equality, but KGB thugs don’t get irony. Neither do Chinese communists who have decried “a serious violation of Iran’s sovereignty and security, a trampling on the aims and principles of the UN Charter and the basic norms of international relations”.

Trump and Netanyahu must be doing something right. We’ll just have to see whether or not their effort will produce a worthy result. It’s either/or.