Month: April 2026

A woman is supposed to obey her husband, says the law. Failure to do so could, in fact should, incur corporal punishment, adds the same law.

No, not the British law, silly. British men are supposed to close their eyes to acts of gross spousal disobedience. If they refuse to do so and dare to raise a hand against a wife and mother, they’ll end up in the nick faster than you can say ‘misogyny’, ‘domestic violence’ and ‘hate crime’.

However, there exists another legal system that doesn’t prohibit violence against women. In fact, it actively encourages it. It’s called sharia law, and it’s unequivocal on the subject:

“So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them.” (K 4:34)

Scourging is more than just a little slap, in case you’re wondering. It involves using a whip or a lash, which is guaranteed to teach a wayward wife a lesson she’ll remember until she transgresses again. At that point she’ll be ready to receive another chastisement.

You may think this sort of thing has no place in a country ruled by English Common Law, and I agree with you. But Secretary of State for Justice Sarah Sackman doesn’t.

When asked in the Commons last autumn whether she recognised sharia law and sharia courts in the United Kingdom, Miss Sackman replied:

“Sharia law forms no part of the law of England and Wales, but where people choose to put themselves before those councils – in common with Christian, Jewish and other courts of faith – that is part of religious tolerance which is an important British value.”

Ah, tolerance, that civilisational Dignitas clinic of England. Yes, dear, tolerance is lovely. All God’s children love tolerance to distraction, but some of us put a limit on it.

For example, my tolerance doesn’t extend to killing homosexuals, amputating thieves’ hands, killing or whipping adulterers, marrying more than one woman at a time, genital mutilation, treating women as merely spittoons for one’s secretions – why, I’m so intolerant that I even disapprove of scourging one’s wife, and Penelope can testify to that.

What I do approve of is equality before the law, meaning the one and only law that ought to be recognised as such in the United Kingdom: English Common Law. Since Miss Sackman is a lawyer by trade, and a KC to boot, she ought to be familiar with the concept.

As a Jewish woman, she must also be aware of some other Muslim practices that ought to put her tolerance to a test, but evidently don’t.

A week ago, four Jewish community ambulances were set alight and blown up in Golders Green, a Jewish area of London. Since the men arrested for the crime bear names like Hamza Iqbal, Rehan Khan and Judex Atshatshi, something tells me they aren’t Methodists.

Then the other day two Jewish men were stabbed in the same neighbourhood, and the suspect in that crime is identified as a 45-year-old Somali who emigrated to England as a child. It’s good to see that people can uphold their ancestral customs even after a lifetime in Britain.

There exist enough Koranic suras to justify such behaviour, and I’m sure a sharia court would acquit those arsonists and stabbers. Should British courts follow suit, Miss Sackman? To prove their religious tolerance?

Miss Sackman, who should abhor sharia law as a Jewish woman, a Briton and a Westerner, thinks it’s compatible with British values. This presents yet another opportunity for me to gloat, as I do every time a woke Leftie struggles with a conflict of pieties. Ideology usually comes out ahead of all other loyalties, religious, ethnic or moral.

How a Jew can belong to the Labour Party, whose key figures are virulent anti-Semites and whose rank and file are predominantly pro-Hamas, escapes me. But I suppose once that compromise has been made, feeling well-disposed towards sharia law isn’t that daring a leap.

However, as a connoisseuse of legal nitty-gritty, Miss Sackman may be able to find a way of reconciling certain provisions of sharia law with the law she swore to uphold. Such a task is beyond me, but then I’m neither a lawyer nor a government minister.

Take matters matrimonial for example. Some 85 sharia courts are operating in Britain, and all of them officiate Islamic marriages. However, unlike Christian and Jewish marriages, many of these, some two-thirds as a matter of fact, aren’t registered with the state.

That means a woman wed in that fashion isn’t recognised as married in English law. Should her husband die, divorce her or simply walk out, she has no legal protection. The same goes for her hubby-wubby acquiring a couple of new wives, what with sharia law permitting up to four.

In fact, a British mobile phone app for Muslims seeking to draw up Islamic wills asks users “How many wives do you have?”, listing options from one to four. Also, the app informs them helpfully that, according to sharia law, daughters get half as much inheritance as sons. I’ve heard of primogeniture, but this strikes me as unfair.

How does our tolerant Miss Sackman propose to negotiate her way around such provisions of sharia law? And oh, by the way, she piqued my curiosity by mentioning “Christian courts”. Could she please direct me to one? Is it located somewhere near the Strand, next to the Inns of Court?

Canon law has had no legal force in Britain since about 1860, and that Catholic system had held out longer than any Anglican equivalents. But then that was before tolerance was raised to the highest moral and legal virtue.  

Judging by the government’s reaction to attacks on Jews, our courts not only aren’t Christian, but they’ve lost all touch with their ancient Christian antecedents. Just compare their reaction to the terrorism in Golders Green with their response to the 2024 Stockport attacks, when Muslims were on the receiving end.

Those suspected (as opposed to found guilty) of inciting violence were quickly arrested and held without bail. When tried and found guilty, they were sentenced to long prison terms.

By contrast, the criminals who blew up those Jewish ambulances are now out on bail, awaiting trial and a clement punishment, if any. I for one am not surprised: if the woman holding one of the top legal posts in the country preaches tolerance to sharia law, it’s clear where the sympathies of our governing luvvies lie.

A two-tier legal system of parallel courts can’t be allowed to exist: sharia laws and courts must be abolished in Britain with immediate effect. In general, we must recognise that, though Islam started out as a Christian heresy, it has since developed its own civilisation, one incompatible with ours — as in totally.

Muslims living in Britain must be welcome to live according to their own ethos, but only as long as it doesn’t come in conflict with ours. When it does, it must be stamped out if British civilisation, what’s left of it, is to continue to exist in Britain. Doing so would be an attempt at survival, not a sign of intolerance. And not even a Labour cabinet can repeal the law of self-preservation.

For anything even remotely resembling this scenario to come true, we must get rid of the government in which openly subversive individuals like Miss Sackman hold top positions. And she herself ought to be forcibly divorced from her husband and married to a Somali living by sharia law. I wonder how long her tolerance will last.

Heresies, if they spread wide and last long, may eventually vanish but seldom without a trace. They leave a toxic residue that may lie fossilised for centuries – only to come alive all of a sudden and do their poisonous work.

People spreading this poison may be unaware of its origin or even of its toxic nature. They may think they enunciate orthodox tenets, when in fact reviving various fragments of an ancient heresy.

The Church managed to defeat some of the deadliest heresies, such as Arianism and Manichaeism, while learning, or rather trying to learn, how to co-exist with some others, such as Protestantism and Islam.

Putting the last two into that category may sound contentious, but not if we remind ourselves what a heresy actually is. Unlike a different religion, a heresy doesn’t reject orthodoxy root and branch. On the contrary, it retains much of its doctrine – but never all of it.

A heresy usually sets out to simplify and improve doctrine by accentuating some parts at the expense of the whole. Recognising a heresy for what it is may take a long time. Thus at least a century passed since 1517, when Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg, before it was acknowledged that Protestantism and Catholicism were irreconcilable.

Initially, Luther and even Calvin were taken at their word, as merely reformers seeking to take Christianity back to its ancient roots. Standing in the way of that noble intention were sheer incidentals, things like sacraments, ecclesiastical structure, post-Gospel revelation, priesthood, the papacy, the language and trappings of the liturgy. Calvin even denied the doctrine of free will, one of the mainstays of Christianity.

Islam too started out as a Christian heresy, in that it accepted many of the key Christian dogmas. God was one. He was the Creator. Christ was a divine man (though not God). The soul was immortal. The Last Judgement would decide the eternal destination of the soul. Whether it went to heaven or hell depended on how its owner lived his earthly life.

Just like ‘solo scriptura’ Protestantism centuries later, Islam reduced its whole teaching to a book, making it easy for believers to stay righteous and to understand their creed. Also like Protestantism, Islam dispensed with priests, replacing them with prayer leaders also acting as religious advisers.

The heresy to which recent events have drawn my attention is Manichaeism, or rather one specific branch of it, Catharism. The Cathars got their names from the Greek word meaning ‘pure’. They are also called ‘Albigensians’, after the city of Albi near Toulouse that was one of their centres.

Between the 11^th and 13^th centuries, Catharism gradually took control of southern France, posing a direct threat not only to the French monarchy but to the very survival of Catholic Christianity. The threat was both doctrinal and military.

In common with other Manicheans, the Cathars couldn’t reconcile the notion of a good and omnipotent God with evil, suffering and death. They rejected out of hand the Christian explanation of evil based on Original Sin.

Since suffering and death were evil, they couldn’t have been created by one good God. There was another, evil, God at work there, and the two deities were equal competitors. The good God was in charge of the human spirit; the evil one ruled the physical world of matter. Thus everything physical was evil. Good could only be spiritual.

Therefore, Jesus never was fully man. His physical body was merely an illusion, and the Incarnation never happened (there the Cathars were regurgitating the Docetic heresy of early Christianity). It was a fallacy, as was the resurrection of the body.

The Pure Ones, the Cathars, justified their name by renouncing the body and living the life of the spirit. Physical pleasure of any kind was the work of the evil deity: anyone enjoying food, sex (even reproductive sex), meat, wine — in fact, anything at all — was committing a deadly sin.

Many Albigensian fallacies were later revived by the Puritans and other Calvinist sects, but two of them were recently enunciated by Pope Leo XIV: the absolute rejection of war and of capital punishment.

His Holiness tried to pass those Albigensian tenets for orthodox Christianity, but I doubt he did so deliberately. It’s more likely that the pontiff was led astray by unwittingly ingesting some of the toxic Manichean residue left by the Cathars, helping it down with some secular woke misconceptions.

By the 13^th century, the Cathars had grown dangerously strong – for the same reason Protestantism wasn’t nipped in the bud three centuries later. Powerful political figures, who knew little and cared less about the essence of those heresies, realised they could advance their own cause by supporting the dissenters against their common enemy.

Thus assorted German princes used Protestantism as a cudgel they could beat the Emperor with, while Catharism provided the same weapon for southern French and Spanish potentates who saw the King of France as an enemy. Prime among them were Count Raymond of Toulouse and Peter, the King of Aragon.

Both of them used the Albigensian heresy as an ideology to inscribe on the banners of conquest. By 1209 it had become clear that the threat could only be stopped by force, and Pope Innocent III reluctantly called for a crusade.

The spiritual leader of the Albigensian Crusade was St Dominic, and the military campaign was led by one of the ablest medieval commanders, Simon de Montfort. It was he who rode with a small force of 1,000 knights to confront the horde of some 100,000 invading from Spain.

The key battle was fought on 12 September, 1213, near Muret, a small town 15 miles south of Toulouse. Montfort’s knights stayed mounted as they heard Mass sung by Dominic himself, and then rode to engage Peter’s cavalry and infantry in a textbook surprise assault. After Peter was killed, his troops were dispersed, and the battle swung the Catholics’ way.

Towards the end of the Albigensian Crusade, St Dominic founded, and Pope Gregory IX later endorsed, the Inquisition. Its original aim was to uproot Catharism, a task in which the Inquisition was, by the looks of it, only partly successful.

Various Manichean fallacies have kept popping up ever since, and we may see such throwbacks among today’s neo-Puritan sectarians demonising alcohol, youngsters refusing to eat meat – and even pontiffs preaching that war and the death penalty are “inadmissible” under any circumstances.

Do you still wonder why Anglophone conservatives gravitate towards Catholicism? I hope not.

On his visit to the US, King Charles III spoke in glowing terms about America’s “landmark anniversary year”. The mood was celebratory all around, which I find baffling.

In 1776, 250 years ago, the American colonies declared their independence from the Crown, thereby depriving the British Empire of its most valuable possession. The loss no longer rankles – let bygones be bygones and all that. But there is something incongruous about the head of the British Commonwealth feeling upbeat about that anniversary.

That’s like the President of France congratulating our PM on 18 June, the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.

Or Erdogan inviting the Polish president to join him in celebrating 12 September, the day in 1683 when the Polish king Jan Sobieski thrashed the Turks at Vienna to stop Muslim expansion into Europe (which modern European governments are trying to renew).

Or – geographically closer to His Majesty’s present location – a US president waving the Union Jack on 24 August. On that day in 1814 British soldiers burned the White House, the Capitol, the War and State Department, and the Treasury Building.

I understand the demands of diplomatic protocol, but hailing the anniversary of Britain’s defeat is going a bit too far. Come to think of it, one could say the same about the whole royal visit.

Starmer and his merry men are using the king as a parley sent out to negotiate Britain’s surrender terms… sorry, I mean to patch up the special relationship. Please, Mr President, don’t help Argentina to invade the Falklands. Please don’t remove your nuclear umbrella under which Britain feels so comfortable because her own is leaking. Please don’t slap any new tariffs on us.

That special relationship is more or less a fiction. The two countries did find themselves on the same side in the two World Wars, but during the ‘40s one could be justified in thinking that the special relationship the US enjoyed was with the Soviet Union, not the United Kingdom.

The massive Lend-Lease assistance that enabled Stalin to win the war was offered free of charge, out of the goodness of FDR’s heart. Well into the ‘60s, one could still see war-time American jeeps rolling all over the Russian countryside and watch Dakotas crisscrossing the sky.

By contrast, even though Britain fought the Nazis on her own until Pearl Harbor, she had to pay for FDR’s generosity in cash, or rather gold. The country’s gold reserves were totally depleted, but even that wasn’t enough.

On 7 December, 1940, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt, pleading that the brutally unsentimental terms on which American aid was being proffered would consign Britain to a position in which “after the victory was won with our blood and sweat, and civilisation saved, and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone. Such a course would not be in the moral or economic interests of either of our countries.”

Roosevelt acknowledged receipt and promptly collected Britain’s last £50 million in gold – in part repayment. It was only in 2007 that Britain finally finished paying off her wartime debts to the US. Some special relationship.

Reagan and Thatcher did in fact enjoy a cordial bond. However, when in 1982 the Royal Navy set sail for the South Atlantic to repel Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands, Reagan initially refused to offer any assistance, not even with intelligence data. It was only when Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger went out on a limb and provided such information on his own initiative that Reagan remembered that the relationship was supposed to be special.

Now we are on the subject of the Falklands, the other day Trump threatened to assist Argentina’s repeat performance by way of punishing Britain’s refusal to fight in Iran. That threat alone ought to have sufficed to cancel the royal visit – as a belated attempt to teach the Donald to think before speaking.

At the moment, US foreign policy is based on Trump’s personal feelings about his foreign counterparts. They are all expected to offer their labiogluteal tributes to Trump’s epic vanity, and whoever does so most avidly pushes his country to the front of the supplicant queue.

Since Milei seems to like Trump for real, he is conspicuously better at that oscular activity than Starmer, who plays along only under duress. Hence Trump is ready to join forces with Britain’s enemy, which is what Argentina was in 1982 and can become again.

If there is anything special Trump and many other Americans see in Britain, it’s her monarchy. Political affinity is only a small part of it: not only is Britain a republican monarchy, but the US is a monarchic republic. The president enjoys more executive power than a British prime minister – and infinitely more than any British monarch since the century before the American Revolution.

But the principal attraction of our royalty to Trump and many other Americans is cultural, akin to Rome feeling the cultural magnetism of Greece. Royal weddings, coronations and other displays of ceremonial pomp draw record TV audiences in the US, probably because they appeal to a latent longing for whatever it was Britain used to stand for.

Trump clearly fancies himself as an absolute monarch, and one can just see him trying on an ermine stole and a glittering crown, one hopes only in his mind. The royal visit is Starmer’s cynical attempt to get back on Trump’s good side by exploiting such sentiments.

I doubt this will work. Once that touring Ye Olde England show departs, it will be business as usual: deal or no deal. Many Americans may genuinely like Britain, but few American presidents ever do, and Trump less than most.

King Charles can talk about “reconciliation and renewal” all he wants, but he won’t make a dent in Trump’s essentially anti-British, and generally anti-European, policy. “They need us more than we need them,” Trump keeps saying, which isn’t just crass but also wrong.

America can’t maintain her global status, the sine qua non of MAGA aspirations, without her European allies, especially Britain. The lonely life of an hermetic autarky may keep America reasonably wealthy, but not ‘great’ as Trump and other imperial politicians have always understood the term.

The loss of physical European presence will mean the loss of global influence, reducing the US to strictly a regional status. This may not be such a bad thing in the abstract, but it’s unacceptable within the concrete realities of America’s whole history.

By playing to the MAGA galleries, Trump goes against these realities, and our royalty shouldn’t pander to such exploits. I’m sure King Charles knows this, but he isn’t acting as a free agent. He is there to bolster Starmer’s forlorn hopes of keeping his job, which is a lowly task for Charles the Third, by the Grace of God King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

P.S. Mulling over the possibility of Angie Rayner at 10 Downing Street, I miss Starmer already. I’ll take Marxism Lite over Full Strength any day.

P.P.S. All military experts say Britain wouldn’t be able to defend the Falklands should Argentina invade again, with Trump’s blessing.

I agree: anything even remotely resembling the South Atlantic Operation is clearly beyond us. But that doesn’t mean we have no other options. One such would be to the threat of hitting Buenos Aires with a nuclear ICBM. That sort of thing is known to work as a deterrent.     

Two men took shots at Trump in the past two days. Cole Thomas Allen did so literally; Pope Leo XIV, figuratively. Both men missed – the former demonstrably; the latter, in my view.

The nature of democracy, especially in the US, is such that a president has to make regular public appearances. Good people see that as a chance to observe their head of state in action. Bad people see it as an opportunity to kill him.

Donald Trump doesn’t make my list of favourite US presidents, not even the long list. But I thank God for sparing him from an assassin’s bullet again. Murder isn’t a proper tool of political debate – or of anything else.

A criminal firing at a major political figure has in his sights our whole civilisation, especially its cornerstone, the rule of law. That’s why I despise the smirks of Trump’s opponents, to the effect of ‘I wish he could shoot straight’. That’s tantamount to saying that it would be good to reduce the West to a mishmash of banana republics.

While we are on the macabre subject of violent death, the pontiff also took a shot at the US president, specifically at Trump’s introduction of execution by firing squad. His Holiness chose speech rather than gun as his weapon, which is a welcome improvement.

However, against every visceral instinct in my body, I again have to disagree with the pope and agree with Trump. The issue of the death penalty can’t in my view be reduced to an absolute the way Pope Leo does. Nor am I sure his invocation of Catholic doctrine is accurate – in fact, I’m sure it isn’t.

The pope set his stall by establishing his premises, and these are unassailable. “The right to life is the very foundation of every other human right,” he said on Friday, adding that, “In this regard, we affirm that the dignity of the person is not lost even after very serious crimes are committed.”

This is a canonical Christian position, which as far as I’m concerned makes it indisputable in a civilisation founded on Christian positions. Therefore, continued the pontiff, the death penalty constitutes an “attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”.

Now, this strikes me as a rather debatable point (which is the English for ‘fallacy’) theologically and as a non sequitur logically. But, before I tell you what I think on this subject, here is what two infinitely more authoritative sources thought.

St Augustine, and Pope Leo is an Augustinian, generally accepted that the state’s right to use the death penalty is based on Scripture. However, moving on from the general to the specific, Augustine insisted that the use of that right be leavened with clemency.

He urged magistrates to avoid the capital punishment whenever possible, thereby allowing condemned criminals time to repent. You’ll notice that St Augustine didn’t deliver an absolute repudiation of the death penalty. He merely said that it should be applied in extreme cases only, with magistrates keeping in mind that they are servants not only of the state but also of God.

St Thomas Aquinas went further than that in his Summa Theologica: “Therefore if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and advantageous that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good… .”

And: “It is permissible to kill a criminal if this is necessary for the welfare of the whole community. However, this right belongs only to the one entrusted with the care of the whole community – just as a doctor may cut off an infected limb, since he has been entrusted with the care of the health of the whole body.” 

This is close to my view on the subject, but, taking my lead from another great Catholic, I accept that other views may be valid too. Pope Benedict XVI, who, unlike the two subsequent pontiffs, couldn’t be accused of holding wishy-washy Left-wing views, was personally opposed to the death penalty.

However, he believed that, while abortion and euthanasia are “intrinsically evil” and leave no room for debate, there may exist a “legitimate diversity of opinion” on the death penalty.

No one could possibly disagree with that statement. And everyone should disagree with Pope Leo’s absolutist condemnation of the death penalty because it precludes a “legitimate diversity of opinion.”

Taking advantage of the licence generously allowed by Pope Benedict, I’d suggest that, rather than being an “attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”, the death penalty is their affirmation.

Precisely because “the right to life is the very foundation of every other human right”, the wanton taking of a life can’t be offset by a lengthy prison term. By executing a murderer, society doesn’t seek revenge. It seeks to safeguard its very foundations, of which the value of a human life is among the most sacred ones.

This is the principal argument, but it can be supported by others. For example, these days life in prison usually doesn’t mean life. Sooner or later the murderer may be free to murder again. Many do, as proved by the statistics of recidivist crimes.

And when life does mean life, nothing prevents the convict from murdering another prisoner: a lifer can’t be punished more severely.

Such secular points apart, how does the death penalty tally with Jesus Christ’s commandment to love even our enemies (Matthew 5: 43-48)?

Here we have to ask ourselves what love actually means in that context. Without looking at the concept from every possible angle, let’s just say that we wish to protect our loved ones from the worst that can happen and wish them the best that can happen.

Here I’d propose, again invoking the authority of every significant Christian mind of the past two millennia, that the worst that can happen to a person isn’t physical death. It’s eternal perdition. And the best thing that can happen is eternal salvation.

Hence, loving a condemned criminal, and respecting his dignity, doesn’t necessarily mean sparing his earthly life. It means praying that God save his soul and treat it with mercy in eternity. That’s why a priest always stood next to the executioner at the scaffold.

Peeking out from behind the giant figures of Augustine and Aquinas, I nod my agreement vigorously. There is nothing inherently un-Christian about the death penalty, especially for murder. However, taking my cue from Pope Benedict, I accept that some people may legitimately disagree.

Pulling the issue out of the Church and into the rough-and-tumble of secular life, the most frequent argument against the death penalty is the possibility of an uncorrectable judicial error. This argument can’t be dismissed lightly, but it can be weakened.

First, the death penalty should be reserved for extreme cases only, and, following Augustine’s injunction, judges must be instructed in that vein. Moreover, in cases where the death penalty is on the table, I’d be in favour of changing the required standard of proof from ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ to ‘beyond all possible doubt’.

Also, compared to the time of Augustine and even Aquinas, we have at our disposal much more sophisticated methods of forensic investigation. We no longer have to force a suspect to prove his innocence by marching barefoot over red-hot coals.

Dactyloscopy, the analysis of fingertip patterns, became a widespread forensic tool in the 1880s, greatly reducing the risk of wrongful convictions. And a century later, Sir Alec Jeffreys developed the first DNA ‘fingerprint’, which was then used forensically in 1986 and has since become commonplace.

Such tools reduce the risk of judicial error, but they don’t eliminate it. In this world, we aren’t blessed with perfect systems of anything, and legal judgement is no exception. This does leave room for what Pope Benedict XVI described as a “legitimate diversity of opinion” – something Pope Leo XIV is trying to shut down.

One example from my sinful advertising past, if I may. The advertising industry is extremely contentious, with arguments always frequent, loud and at times violent. But one great adman, Leo Burnett, made all his employees wear a lapel pin saying ‘Maybe he’s right’.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be out of place on the pope’s vestments either, especially when he debates policy with politicians.

To be fair, Donald Trump isn’t directly involved in the massive rip-off going by the name of the World Cup. However, his indirect influence is easy to discern.

The Donald’s view of life is based on exculpating six of the seven deadly sins (he doesn’t approve of sloth), with greed singled out as actually being the ultimate virtue.

Life is a transaction, and commerce is amoral. Things like fairness, honour, equity, underlying morality need not apply. Only legality matters, well, after a fashion. Legality is defined as not being caught.

If you can get away with it, it’s legal. And if it’s legal, it’s moral, if you insist on dealing in such antiquated notions. What’s there not to understand?

It goes without saying that, since America is explicitly devoted to the advancement of the common man, it has to be defined by commercial activity. What else can galvanise those huddled masses yearning to be upwardly mobile?

The common, average man is the same everywhere – average, after all, is synonymous with mean (spare me pedantic quibbling about the minor mathematical difference between the two). America holds no patent for mass materialism. But she is one of very few countries that have built their whole ethos on the low foundations of high economic dynamism.

Still, there are degrees to everything, as Trump’s presidency shows. He is perhaps the most culturally influential president in my ridiculously long lifetime. And Trump has laid his hands not on the Bible but on The Art of the Deal.

For those Americans who deify Trump, naked acquisitiveness has been raised to the highest virtue, with only legal statutes setting some barriers – and, if one is smart, even those can be scaled. I may be wrong: after all, my US passport is long since out of date and I haven’t even visited America in decades. But the heartbeat of America sends out pulses, and sensitive fingers can palpate them even from a distance.

Such is the backdrop to the outrageous extortion unfolding in America before the World Cup kicks off there in June. FIFA got the ball rolling by pricing the tickets for the final at a staggering $10,990.

Are you staggered? Well, try to stay upright for the best is still to come. While most institutions living off box-office receipts discourage touting (scalping, in the more accurate American term), FIFA welcomes it. After all, it takes 15 per cent from the buyer of each ticket and another 15 per cent from the re-seller.

So encouraged, touts sprang into action. Tickets for the final match at MetLife Stadium, New Jersey, are going for almost $2.3 million each. Relax, these are just the high-end seats. The penny-pinchers among you can still get a ticket for a paltry $11,000.

Even tickets for England’s three group games are being sold for tens of thousands of pounds. So if you have some 90 grand burning a hole in your pocket, you can watch those early rounds live.

But, forgive me for dousing your enthusiasm, you still have to get there. And once you’ve flown stateside, you need to sleep (ideally not rough) and eat (ideally not grass). And let’s not forget that trip from hotel to stadium – after all, if you watched the matches on the telly what would be the point of travelling?

That’s where local institutions prove they have nothing to learn about extortion from international bodies. Hotels within striking distance of the football venues have quadrupled their prices – or more. One hotel is offering rooms for the match between Mexico and South Africa at $3,882 each, up from $157 at present.

I don’t know who operates the train service between Penn Station and MetLife Stadium, but those chaps have got into the swing of things. That 30-minute journey will cost you $150, as opposed to the usual $12.90 return.

That’s a good deal compared to driving: a parking space at the stadium will cost $225. Even London can’t quite compete yet, although I fully expect Mayor Sadiq Khan to take his cue from the US.

And there I was, thinking that football is a working class game, with hotdogs and beer for panem and post-match punch-ups for circenses.

Actually, come to think of it, British working classes have come a long way if they can afford to follow their favourite teams live. A season ticket at Craven Cottage, the home of my local and mid-table team, Fulham, will set you back £3,084. One for you, one for your missus, one for the nipper, and that’s ten grand you’ll never see again.

Add to this a couple of hundred each for home and away shirts, and why can’t I be working class, Mummy? Still, whoever charges such prices in England is an exemplar of Christian charity compared to those Yanks. We do have a lot to learn yet.

P.S. While we are on the subject of the US, President Trump has announced his immediate plans for punishing Britain’s and Spain’s reluctance to come to America’s aid in Iran.

Trump has encouraged his Argentine counterpart, Javier Milei, to occupy the Falklands, promising US assistance with air cover, sea blockade and, if need be, ground troops. He has also warned that all British ships trying to run the blockade will be intercepted, boarded, cleared of crews, and then either sunk or sold for scrap.

Meanwhile Spain, declared Trump, will be occupied and incorporated in the United States as her 51^st state. All Spanish-speaking inhabitants of the US, including citizens native-born or naturalised, aliens legal and illegal, will be resettled in Spain, with the attendant costs borne equally by the US and Governor Sánchez.

Furthermore… well, I’ve made the whole P.S. up. Got you going though, didn’t I? This proves yet again that, for a parody to be believable, it must cut close to reality.

By far the most widespread types of fideism on offer in America are Protestantism, Catholicism and atheism. Which of the three is most attractive to Americans inclined towards conservatism?

Agnosticism and deism are quite popular too, but I regard them as similar to atheism and Protestantism respectively. So which of the three?

Any conservative would sweep atheism aside instantly and contemptuously. But what of the other two? The choice seems clear-cut.

Unlike Protestantism, Catholicism derives its inspiration not only from revelation, but also from the historical, apostolic and ecclesiastical tradition embodied in doctrinal and papal authority.

The past speaks loudly and eloquently to Catholics, which, for conservatives, makes it the most obvious alternative not only to modern secularism but also to Protestantism. As St John Henry Newman put it, “To be deep in history is to cease being Protestant.” Or a Left-winger, one is tempted to add.

The same goes for the aesthetic appeal of conservatism: most great composers of the past (though not the greatest one, Bach) were Catholics, as were all Renaissance artists. Above all, Catholic architecture, especially but not exclusively ecclesiastical, is more appealing to cultured conservatives than any other.

Conservative Protestants and Left-wing Catholics do exist, but in both cases they represent a triumph of natural inclinations and political beliefs over religion. Conservative Christians, particularly cultured ones, reach out to Catholicism tropistically.

For several decades starting from 1955, the nexus of American conservative revival was National Review, a bi-weekly magazine describing itself as a “journal of conservative thought”. It would have been more accurate to describe it as a journal of Conservative Catholic thought.

Not only its founder and guiding light, William F Buckley, but most of its editors and regular contributors were either cradle Catholics or converts to Catholicism. The latter group included, among others, Russell Kirk, Whitaker Chambers, Brent Bozell, Willmoore Kendall, Jeffrey Hart, Martin Liebman, Richard John Neuhaus, Clare Boothe Luce, Frank Meyer – indeed, the NR masthead of that time reads like Who’s Who in American Catholic conservative thought.

The same tendency is observable in England: cultured conservatives, especially writers, have always tended to convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism, but not the other way around. Just offhand one could name Cardinals Newman and Manning, Pugin, Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Muggeridge, Bishop Nazir-Ali et al.

Getting back to the US, it’s fairly obvious that Catholicism offers a natural home to American conservatives. Their problem is that America doesn’t offer a natural home to Catholics – neither at present, nor, emphatically, in the past.

The original 13 colonies were founded by English Puritans, for whom the Anglican Church wasn’t Protestant enough and ‘papism’ was the work of the Devil. They and other Puritan dissenters vowed to build a sort of Protestant heaven on Earth.

That undertaking immediately produced aggressive hostility to Catholicism. In 11 of the 13 colonies, Catholicism was against the law, and Catholic proselytism and public worship were capital crimes. ‘Papists’ were legally forbidden from holding public office, carrying firearms or serving on juries.

Of the 56 signatories to The Declaration of Independence, only one, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, was a Catholic, with most of the rest Protestant deists. Spread of Catholicism was one of George III’s offences listed in that document.

The wording doesn’t seem overtly religious. George III is accused of “abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies.”

In fact, this was a direct reference to the 1774 Quebec Act, according to which much of today’s American Midwest was transferred to the jurisdiction of that predominantly Catholic province. The Act was tantamount to a spread of ‘papism’, and righteous Americans were aghast.

Later, in the 19^th century, anti-Catholic sentiments were boosted by nativist ones, with large groups of Catholic immigrants arriving from Italy, Ireland and Poland. That animosity quickly became murderous, with mob violence rampant. The burning of a Massachusetts convent in 1834 and the 1844 Philadelphia riots, in which many were killed, were the better-known but far from the only outbursts.

Catholics continued to suffer legal restrictions and, even after those were removed, they found it hard to get ahead in politics. The first Catholic president, John F Kennedy, had to overcome widespread and vociferous accusations of divided loyalties. He was only elected after swearing that his loyalty to the country superseded his loyalty to the Pope.

To this day large swaths of the US population believe that there is something un-American about Catholicism and, on historical evidence, they have a point. But now you understand the dilemma constantly goring Catholic conservatives with its horns.

As conservatives, they are American patriots. As Catholics, they are supposed to be agents of a foreign power. For, to an extent to which Christianity continues to play any role in modern life, the country remains predominantly and aggressively Protestant, sectarian Protestant for the most part.

Such is the background to the ongoing conflict between President Trump and Pope Leo XIV. The pontiff condemned the US-Israeli war on Iran as being contrary to Christian, specifically Catholic, doctrine. Trump responded by telling the Pope not to pry into matters outside his remit.

I rather agree with Trump on this one, but that’s not the point. American Catholic conservatives fear that there is more to the argument than its intrinsic value. Yet again connotation comes before denotation.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Trump is motivated by Puritan sentiments. He isn’t much of a Christian, and even his MAGA fans wouldn’t describe him as a Puritan.

But the very fact that a US president finds himself in an open conflict with the Vatican must be worrying to American Catholics. They fear this may light the blue touchpaper of dormant anti-Catholic resentment, with ‘papist’ again becoming the swearword it has been for much of US history.

P.S. Alas, some Catholics readily accept Pope Leo’s take on Catholic doctrine. The other day I caught a glimpse of Piers Morgan, himself a Catholic, interviewing that objectionable woman, Marjory Taylor Greene, on the subject of the papal-presidential debate.

Greene used to be a MAGA fanatic, but she has turned against Trump over his interventionist foreign policy. Morgan tried to sit on the fence, but found that seat uncomfortable. Trying to defend Leo’s position, he said that any pope would be against war as a matter of Catholic doctrine.

Now, I don’t know whether Morgan is a good Catholic, but he is obviously an ignorant one.

Here’s a short, far from complete, list of popes who inspired or called for military action. Chronologically: Leo IV, Alexander II, Gregory VII, Urban II, Eugenius III, Gregory VIII, Innocent III, Innocent IV, Julius II (‘the Warrior Pope’).

And closer to our own time, Pope John Paul II didn’t object to a violent overthrow of communism in some Eastern European countries.

I daresay those pontiffs had a surer grasp of Catholic doctrine than Pope Leo XIV (and even Piers Morgan) has.

You don’t. No one does. Scotsmen, Welshmen, Irishmen speak English. So do Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and – after a fashion – millions in Africa and Asia.

The country that gave the world this magnificent gift is called England, not Britain. And today England celebrates her patron saint, St George, him of the dragon fame. If nothing else, the English language ought to be cause enough for jubilation.

Close to 20 per cent of the world’s population speak English, many in preference to their mother tongues. When a Norwegian talks to a Dutchman, chances are they’ll be speaking neither Norwegian nor Dutch.

When some people I know travel the world, they don’t even bother asking the locals if they understand English. The assumption is that everyone does, enough to take a food order or give directions, if not always enough to provide a satisfactory answer to the lapidary question of a travelling English football fan, “Whatcha lookin’ at, mate?”.

St George, a Greek officer in the Roman army, was born in 275 AD, in what today is Turkey. Having refused to renounce his Christian faith, he was martyred during the Diocletianic Persecution on 23 April, 303 AD, as legend has it.

He was canonised in the 13^th century, and a century later, during the reign of King Edward III, St George became the patron saint of England, a country he had never visited. The date of his martyrdom was declared a major feast in England after the 1415 Battle of Agincourt, when the English longbow triumphed over what French history books call la fine fleur de la noblesse française.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that, by generously giving her language to the world, England has emulated the self-sacrificial exploits of her patron saint. For, in common with every lingua franca in history, English is rapidly turning into a lamb sacrificed at the altar of globalism. Just look at what happened to the two languages St George probably spoke, Ancient Greek and Latin.

When a language is used internationally for mainly commercial transactions, it becomes merely a means of communication. The physical expression of a nation’s metaphysical essence is thereby turned into a glossary of useful phrases in the last chapter of a travel guide book.

People who think language is nothing but a means of communication probably also believe that man is nothing but an animal. They only see the outer shell of function, not the metaphysical core of essence.

The patois spoken throughout the world is as different from the real English language as a tower block is different from the Tower of London. Both are buildings, both were designed to house people, both have witnessed much suffering. Yet one is a soulless abomination hissing in concrete, while the other is a nation’s soul speaking in stone.

When a language is tossed into the world like a bone off the original owner’s table, it usually bounces back, hurting the thrower. All the meat of essence has been gnawed off the bone.

The language has lost its beauty, its nuance, its endless chain of allusive links and cultural references. It has turned into a functional patois even in its native habitat. Both the language and its original owners gradually lose their indigenous uniqueness. The body becomes a generic collection of limbs and organs, not the physical guardian of the metaphysical soul.

That hasn’t quite happened to English yet. If one looks hard enough, one can still find beautiful English written and spoken. The soul of the nation still occasionally shines through England’s great gift to mankind. And this soul can be reconstructed by understanding the English language properly.

Like its original bearers, English isn’t especially loquacious. It doesn’t have to be: boasting at least twice the number of words of any other European language, English thrives on precise expression. One accurate word is always on tap to do the job other languages have to do with a descriptive phrase.

English discourages and punishes the grandiloquence typical of some other languages that come to mind (sorry, Jean-Pierre). It demands modesty and self-restraint, rewarding concision more lavishly than any other language does. English is the language of unvarnished reason stripped of the outer layers of needless modifiers, redundant clauses and flowery curlicues.

It’s sheer poignant beauty communicated laconically, with a minimum of emotive fuss –  a William Byrd motet, not a Mahler symphony; an understated landscape of green fields and gently undulating relief free of violent extremes; a climate neither too hot in summer nor too cold in winter.

As I pile similes and metaphors one upon another, can you see the English soul emerging from underneath? If you can’t, it’s my fault – these may be wrong metaphors and similes. But they do work for me.

Now I’m going to say something that may anger many conservatives, those who envy the Dutch their King’s Day and Americans their Fourth of July. They’d like to have St George’s Day declared a bank holiday, and they are desperate to drape England in red crosses on a white background.

They have a point. There is indeed something aberrant about St Patrick’s Day being celebrated in England more thunderously that St George’s Day. And yes, England’s patron saint is deprived of his due pomp and circumstance for all the wrong reasons.

Many of those who refuse to celebrate St George’s Day find nothing English worth celebrating. Utterly and perversely politicised, they even shy away from the word ‘English’ with its ethnic overtones, burying their Englishness under ‘British’, a political and administrative descriptor.

One can become British by living in the country a requisite number of years (legally, for preference) and taking a perfunctory citizenship test. Yet it’s impossible to become English – one either is or isn’t. It’s the luck of the draw: one either wins what Cecil Rhodes called “first prize in the lottery of life” or one doesn’t.

For some unfathomable reason, asserting Englishness is supposed to offend other Britons, those whose lottery ticket didn’t deliver the jackpot. This is sheer idiocy having everything to do with ideology and nothing to do with real life: the only people offended by Englishness are the kind of Englishmen who read the wrong morning paper.

However, that St George’s Day receives only an understated celebration for all the wrong reasons doesn’t mean that no good reasons exist. I think they do: love of one’s country, like love of one’s family, is a keenly felt yet quiet emotion in England.

An American waving the Stars and Stripes and shouting ‘USA!’ sounds patriotic. An Englishman waving the flag of St George and yelling ‘Ingerland!’ sounds yobbish and, worse still, unnatural.

The Englishmen I know and love aren’t given to effusive emotions of any kind: they don’t scream their feelings at all and sundry. This quality of self-restraint is as appealing in the English nation as it is in the English language, that embodiment of Englishness.

As long as the English love their Englishness, I for one don’t mind a dearth of red crosses displayed in windows. And if the English no longer love their Englishness, no amount of screaming and flag-waving will cure that deadly national malaise.

“To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely,” wrote Edmund Burke and, for me, England still meets that requirement. As long as the world’s loveliest language continues to be spoken as it should be, even by dwindling numbers, England will continue to be loved the English way: passionately, deeply, poignantly – yet quietly.

Happy St George’s Day!

Let astrologists explain this coincidence. Born 29 years apart not just under the same sign, but on the same day, 22 April, were Vladimir Lenin and Vladimir Nabokov.

According to star-gazers, the two men were supposed to share some personality traits, not just a birthday or, in this case, Christian name. Oh well, if any more proofs of astrological quackery are needed, this is surely one of them.

Lenin, b. 1870, was arguably among the most evil men in history and definitely in the 20^th century. Nabokov, b. 1899, was arguably among the best novelists in history and definitely in the 20^th century.

Lenin was driven by hatred, a craving for revenge, misanthropic destructiveness not balking at mass murder. All such urges were fully realised after the Bolshevik coup: at least 15 million perished in famines, the Civil War and the CheKa cellars on Lenin’s watch (1917-1924).

The pride of Russia, her creative intelligentsia, starved to death (Rozanov et al.), were murdered (Gumilev et al.), thrown out of the country (Berdyaev et al.) or wisely managed to escape of their own accord.

The Nabokovs were in that last group. The family had no chance of surviving in Lenin’s Russia, with an orgy of what Prof. Rummel called democide, murder by category, raging at full blast. The prime categories slated for extermination were the rich and the noble – and the Nabokovs were both.

On his father’s side, the writer descended from a 14^th-century Mongol prince named Nabok Murza. Without going too deep into Russian history, let’s just say that the English equivalent of such roots would be descent from the 1066 Normans.

Nabokov’s mother, née Rukavishnikova, came from one of Russia’s wealthiest families. Her grandfather made millions from gold mines, and the future writer grew up in gentle luxury and largely Anglophile – and Anglophone – culture.

Given that background, the family had only two options: emigrating or dying a horrific death. (When mentioning the execution of prominent Russians under Lenin, encyclopaedias coyly state they were shot. If only. Compared to the way many of them died – I’ll spare you the gruesome details – a bullet would have been an act of mercy.)

Anyone who likes literature must be grateful that the Nabokovs chose the first option. However, the writer’s father, Vladimir Sr., didn’t escape a violent death. In 1922 he was shot dead at a Berlin conference by a Russian fascist.

That group, made up of ethnic Russians and Russified Baltic Germans, was active in Germany at the time. One of them, Alfred Rosenberg, went on to become the principal ideologue of the Nazi Party. But even before Hitler’s rise to power, Russian fascists had exerted an influence on the budding Nazis, mainly in the area of anti-Semitism.

Nabokov Sr., a liberal member of the short-lived Provisional Government, was hated by that group with febrile passion. It was one of them, Sergei Taboritsky, who eventually pulled the trigger. His target was the leader of the Russian liberals, Milyukov, but Nabokov tried courageously to stop the murderer and was shot three times point blank.

The young writer found himself at a loose end, having to make a transition from luxury to penury. He moved to Paris, where he lived hand to mouth, while slowly gaining fame as a Russian-language essayist, poet and eventually novelist.

An interesting touch: Rachmaninov, who was enjoying a lucrative career as a pianist, was moved by a Nabokov article, in which the writer described his ‘abject poverty’. Rachmaninov immediately sent him 10,000 francs, with a note saying, “Please consider this a loan you can repay whenever the situation you describe is no longer the case.”

Eventually Nabokov moved to England, where he studied at Cambridge and indulged his two passions: literature and lepidopterology. His career in the former is better known than in the latter, but he was equally serious about both. Over 30 butterflies are named after or by him, which is a considerable achievement.

When I called Nabokov one of the best 20^th century writers, I was exercising aesthetic judgement, not so much personal preference. For me, his work is to be admired, but not necessarily loved. Most of Nabokov’s novels strike me as exercises in unrivalled virtuosity untouched by emotional warmth.

He had a capacity for the latter, but he left much of it behind along with other possessions when fleeing Russia. Genuine feeling did sometimes shine through Nabokov’s structural and linguistic brilliance, but only when he wrote about Russia and the Russians.

His most moving books are Speak, Memory, an autobiography mainly about his childhood and youth, and Pnin, a novel describing the ordeal of a Russian émigré professor at an American university. That too had strong autobiographical elements, for Nabokov himself taught at several US universities, including Cornell. His lectures on Russian and Western literature have been published, and they are full of penetrating insights.

Nabokov’s initial job application was rejected by the Cornell administration. When other professors explained to the bureaucrats that Nabokov was a celebrated Russian writer, they replied: “So what? If we looked for a professor of zoology, we wouldn’t hire an elephant.”

A celebrated Russian writer Nabokov indeed was. His three great pre-war novels, Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift and The Defence, were written in Russian, but not as anyone knew it.

Bunin, another Parisian Russian (1870-1953), walked the path charted by Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekhov. It was as if he had eyes only in the back of his head, looking backwards into the 19^th century and – even after his own emigration – into Russia.

Every story in Bunin’s magnificent collection, Dark Alleys, unfolds as if old Russia was still there, occupied with unrequited love and the drama of parting. The stories were written in 1937-1944, when millions of Russians were dying of hunger, slave labour, executions and in various wars.

By contrast, Nabokov looked ahead of him, all the way to our century. No one had written Russian prose the way he did before he did it, and, though many have tried since, none have succeeded.  

Having moved to the US, Nabokov began to write in English, and it was in that language that he found world-wide fame and, at last, financial security. His 1955 novel Lolita became an instant hit, which was a right result for wrong reasons.

Lolita was serious literature, but it became so popular not because of its superlative literary quality but because of its treatment of paedophilia, something that appealed to a public demanding to have its naughty bits tickled.

Bunin, incidentally, got his Nobel Prize in 1933, but Nabokov never did despite having been nominated eight times.

He was a more significant literary phenomenon than Bunin, and infinitely more so than some of the other Nobel laureates I could mention from the years he was nominated (Giorgos Seferis, 1963, anyone? Shmuel Yosef Agnon/Nelly Sachs, 1966?). But perhaps the scandalous reputation of Lolita worked against Nabokov.

I can’t think offhand of another writer achieving such a stratospheric level in two languages, especially those as different as Russian and English. There have been quite a few bilingual men who were writers, but they, like Joseph Conrad, usually wrote only in their second language.

Without in any way attempting to put myself on anything like a similar level, I myself am a bilingual man, but not a bilingual writer. I never wrote anything in Russian, which is why I call myself an English writer. So much more do I appreciate Nabokov’s virtuosity in both languages.

Like most people who write in a language they weren’t born to, Nabokov was a bit of a show-off. If Russian was the language of his soul, English was the language of his mind, more of an instrument than his own flesh and blood.

Having mastered that instrument perfectly, he didn’t mind flaunting that achievement. His English prose is more complex and coruscating than Russian, and Nabokov loved playing on words, sometimes building his whole narrative on an elaborate multi-tiered pun (Pale Fire is an example of that).

On this anniversary of his birth, one he shares with Lenin, it’s hard not to notice the different niches the two men occupy in Russian history. Every town and city in Russia still has numerous statues of Lenin, with streets and squares named after that murderous ghoul.

Yet not a single Russian street is named after Nabokov, and no statues commemorate that sublime writer even in his native Petersburg. I could use this example to draw far-reaching conclusions about that country, but I won’t – for fear of being too obvious.

P.S. Russian history is replete with such biographic coincidences. To name another one: Prokofiev and Stalin died on the same day, 5 March, 1953.

As little Ed was growing up, he must have heard numerous quotations from Lenin.

Ed’s father Ralph was a Marxist academic who once pledged a personal commitment to the socialist cause at the grave of Karl Marx. By the time Ed was born, in 1969, Ralph was certain the cause had been betrayed by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites.

Those heretics weren’t hard enough, nor competent enough. Real socialism should put the velvet glove of economic excellence on the iron fist of oppression.

Lenin, Ralph’s idol, emphasised that duality in his 1920 pronouncement: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” This must have been part of the prayer-like mantras in the Miliband household, and I’m sure by the time he went to school little Ed could recite many of Lenin’s commandments by heart.

Marxists have a particular fondness for epigrammatic adages, such as “religion is the opium of the people” (Marx), or “Marx’s teaching is omnipotent because it’s true” (Lenin), or “The state is nothing but an instrument of oppression of one class by another” (Engels), or “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic” (Stalin), or “If you can’t convince a fascist, acquaint his head with the pavement” (Trotsky).

I’m sure Ralph Miliband’s house was alive with the beautiful sounds of such words to live by, and Ed has indeed been living by them ever since. However, he has let Ralph and his idols down by having so far been unable to match their aphoristic output.

Fair enough, Ed has tried his best to be a real Marxist in deed, if not yet in snappy word. When in 2010 his elder brother David was the odds-on candidate for Labour leadership, Ed sneaked in and stabbed Dave in the back, winning the coveted prize for himself.

Ed, where is your brother Dave? Sent to Coventry, or rather to the US where he made his fortune in assorted sinecures. That was less sanguinary than the internecine conflict between Stalin and Trotsky, but just as effective in eliminating a fraternal rival.

Ed then promptly lost the general election to Dave Cameron, which was a classic case of the bland leading the bland. Thereafter Ed languished on the back benches until July 2024, when he became Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero.

The title sounds ever so slightly oxymoronic, not to say moronic. After all, the concept of net zero was introduced specifically to undermine energy production, and Ed is keenly aware of this part of his brief.

In the good Marxist tradition, he clouds this destructive intent in the fog of bien pensant waffle, in this case about our use of fossil fuels threatening to fry ‘our planet’ well-done. In fact, Britain produces only about 0.8 per cent of the global CO2, compared to China’s 34 per cent and America’s 14 per cent.

However, Ed goes beyond parochial English interests to extend his protective instincts to the whole global atmosphere, and he is in no way deterred by the demonstrable fact that Britain’s contribution to it is negligible. As Stalin said, “If facts are stubborn things, then so much the worse for facts”.

Truth is whatever ‘the general line of the Party’ says it is, and, when the general line changes, so does the truth. The general line at the moment is that ‘our planet’ is overheating to a point of extinction.

Never mind all evidence to the contrary. Such as the fact that ‘our planet’ has been warmer than it is now for some 80 per cent of its known age, which started long before those petrol-guzzling vehicles began to roll off the production lines.

It’s not facts but principles that matter. And the principle that matters in this case is that fossil fuels fired up the Industrial Revolution. In its turn, the Industrial Revolution gave a boost to capitalism, that scriptural enemy of all Marxists.

Hence, what’s good for capitalism is bad for Marxism and vice versa. Continuing use of fossil fuels is undeniably good for capitalism, which is why Ed has pledged to fight those offensive substances with every ounce of his strength.

He put an end to any new drilling in the North Sea, and his tireless propaganda has made shale gas exploration unthinkable. That fracking produces earthquakes is another arrow in the quiver of Marxist anti-capitalist armoury. In fact, it’s another falsehood: the seismic events produced by hydraulic fracturing are no greater than those produced by city traffic.

However, while even Ed’s Labour colleagues are beginning to hint that perhaps a bit more drilling is preferable to electricity bills beggaring Britons, he remains steadfast.

Stepping up oil production is an obvious response to the looming energy crisis, but Marxists worship a higher truth than obvious responses. Ed’s response may be less obvious, but it shows the kind of subtlety than no non-Marxist could ever muster:

“As we face the second fossil fuel shock in less than five years, the lesson for our country is clear… the era of fossil fuel security is over.” Tell this to the Chinese and the Americans, Ed. See what Xi and Trump have to say about it.

Xi is a bit of an enigma to me, but I can predict Trump’s response: “Ed, take the words ‘off’ and ‘f***’ and arrange them in the right order.” Say what you will about the Donald, but his take on energy policy is rather the opposite of Marxist sabotage.

Here goes, class: when oil becomes scarce, should we step its production up or down? What, up? Who said that? Arrest him on the charge of global warming denial.

Re-examining Lenin’s 1920 sermon on electrification, “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country”, Ed must realise it’s hopelessly anachronistic. What’s needed at this time is another version of that maxim, but Ed seems to be struggling with that rhetorical task.

Since it hurts me to see a fellow man in such discomfort, I’d like to lend him a helping hand. How about this: “Socialism is Labour power plus the de-electrification of the whole country.” Yes, that works. What it misses in originality it gains in honesty.

P.S. A student of my Moscow university was once expelled for being better at algebra than at politics. When asked to define communism, he said, “Electrification minus Soviet power”.

Whatever the Green Party wishes to build in England, I assure you it won’t be Jerusalem. I’d venture a guess that a Gulag Archipelago would be closer to the mark.

Zack Polanski, the party leader, is quite transparent about this intention. In this he follows a fine tradition best exemplified by Messrs Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, who never bothered to conceal their plans to rid the world of the kind of people Lenin called ‘noxious insects’ and Hitler called ‘subhumans’.

Mr Polanski is just as forthright, deviating from his typological ancestors only semantically, not substantively. The group he wishes to exterminate is the millions of Britons whose political convictions lie to the right of his own. But do let’s allow the man to speak for himself:

“Before we go into complete utopia – which I’m totally there for – there are people, though, who would identify as Right-wing, or indeed even far-Right. 

“And no matter what humanity or community we put them in, they are set on destroying or pushing this toxicity.

“Do we think we can change their minds? Or is it a case of building a society that doesn’t include them?”

The last two questions are clearly rhetorical: Mr Polanski thinks it self-evident that it’s impossible to change Right-wingers’ minds — and hence desirable to get rid of them.

Such is the “complete utopia” he is “totally there for”, although ‘the shining ideal’ would have been more precise. A utopia, after all, is an unachievable fantasy, whereas the society Mr Polanski sees in his mind’s eye, one in which whole swaths of the population are wiped out by category, has enviable historical antecedents.

Thus what he’s talking about isn’t a utopia but a concrete plan he intends to realise should the Greens form the next government. Since Polanski genuinely believes that his bogeymen “are set on destroying” society with their “toxicity”, he has a point: it behoves a responsible leader to protect his realm from such venomous blights.

The matter of ‘what’ thus settled, the next question to ask is ‘how?’, and again Mr Polansky can follow the course so ably charted in the past by Messrs Lenin, Stalin and Hitler (and Messrs Marx and Engels before them).

Still, Polanski has his job cut out for him logistically: the numbers he has in mind are quite large. According to most polls, over 25 per cent of all British adults place themselves on the right of the political spectrum. Since Britain is blessed with just over 55 million adults, the group targeted for exclusion may number close to 14 million.

Messrs Lenin, Stalin and Hitler proved that such numbers are achievable, given the talent and application, but the task is by no means easy, especially if we consider the proportions involved. Macîas Nguema in Equatorial Guinea and Pol Pot in Cambodia did manage to murder a third of their populations, but their countries were much less populous than Britain.

Still, as Lenin put it, “There is no fortress that Bolsheviks can’t storm”. So how does Mr Polanski propose to go about the task of cleaning the British Augean Stables of conservative refuse?

Since we already know that any hope of re-educating conservatives would be forlorn, the list of available exclusion options is narrow.

First, many incorrigible villains can be forced to emigrate. Second, those who choose to ignore that option must be killed either quickly, by bullet or torture, or slowly, by hunger and neglect in what Engels called “special guarded places”, and what Lenin – and, following him, Hitler – re-named ‘concentration camps’.

To be pedantic about it, Lenin and Hitler didn’t really coin the term, nor invent the concept. It was practised by the Spanish in Cuba, the British during the Boer Wars and by the Americans during the Philippine War.

Yet Lenin, Stalin and Hitler are owed the honour of proving that ‘concentration camp’ could really be a euphemism. Their camps were there to exterminate, not just to concentrate, and this is probably what Mr Polanski has in mind.  

Lest you may think that his pronouncement was merely a rhetorical flourish uttered without serious aforethought, let me remind you that exactly the same allowances were made by the target groups in Russia and Germany.

Exterminate all educated classes? Surely not, said the Russian clergy, intelligentsia and aristocrats. Kill all Jews? It’s just a figure of speech, said German Jews and simply decent people. All of them forgot the difference between civilised leaders and cannibalistic tyrants: the former relate their utterances to conventions of decency; the latter don’t.

Evil despots, those aspiring or already in power, must be taken at their word because they are seldom bashful about their plans. If Polanski says he wants to build “a society that doesn’t include” conservatives (or, in other words, excludes them), that’s exactly what he’ll try to do given the chance.

The way the Green Party is polling at the moment suggests he may well get that chance. Even if the Greens are unlikely to win a general election outright, they may still gain a large presence in Parliament either on their own or in coalition with Labour.

Since the British electorate has on many occasions shown its tendency to self-harm, that possibility can by no means be discounted. Somehow not many people realise that the likes of Polanski aren’t misguided idealists but evil ghouls.

Decorticating their pronouncements would go a long way towards acquiring such understanding, so I beg you: open your ears and listen to wicked ideologues. They do mean what they say.

P.S. Speaking of leaders who tend to run off at the mouth, I have two questions.

First, is it ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ or ‘Trump’s Derangement Syndrome’?

Second, when Trump ends a war that then restarts, only for him to end it again, does it count as one war ended or two? The latter is better: the Donald can easily run up the score so high that the Nobel Committee will have to sit up and take notice.