Month: April 2026

Is there a third way? Do we need one? If it existed, would it be superior to the two obvious ones? Two brilliant friends, GK Chesterton (1874-1936) and Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) answered yes to all three questions.

Both men were Catholics. Belloc was one from birth; Chesterton converted from Anglicanism in 1922 largely under Belloc’s influence. Both of them were Catholic thinkers, not just thinkers who happened to be Catholics.

This means they were largely guided in their thought by Catholic doctrine and social teaching. Central to the latter were the concepts of subsidiarity and solidarity.

Subsidiarity means delegating all tasks to the smallest and lowest feasible unit, whereas solidarity represents commitment to the common good and shared collective responsibility for one another. Combining the two principles would prevent both statist oppression and atomising individualism.

Any society following these principles politically would inoculate itself against the rise of an omnipotent central state, that essence of socialism when stripped of its bien pensant cant. Localism would triumph over centralism, with most power devolving to local bodies. At the same time, the concept of solidarity would maintain social stability, preventing the appearance of an indigent proletariat.

That way the structural principles of the Church would be transferred onto society at large, preventing both political tyranny and economic exploitation. But how would a national economy function under this system, which Belloc and Chesterton called ‘distributism’?

In common with Hobbes and Locke (both rather the opposite of Catholics), they associated freedom with property ownership. Without owning property and disposing of it as they saw fit, people would never be able to act as free economic agents – even if they were free politically.

What Chesterton and Belloc understood by property was essentially land and other productive assets. As England emerged out of the Dark Ages and into the Medieval period, land in the country was roughly divided into three categories.

Lords, colloquially called squires, owned somewhere between 20 and 30 per cent, those who worked on that land de facto owned about as much again, paying the legal owner, the landlord, a minimal corvée in labour or in kind. The rest was common land.

The Crown, the monasteries and the Church were among the largest landlords, but their economic power was balanced by the squires and the peasants. This was what Belloc and Chesterton called the distributive state.

However, that balance was destroyed by the Reformation, which both writers regarded as the greatest and enduring catastrophe England had ever suffered – not only religiously, but also socially, economically and culturally.

Henry VIII seized monastic lands and the wealth accumulated by the monasteries. But that’s not where the confiscatory orgy ended. Also dispossessed were many guilds, cooperatives and small private holdings, which instantly destroyed the equilibrium England had enjoyed.

The intention was for that wealth to pass on to the Crown, but most of it in fact passed into the hands of the already wealthy lords, whose wealth and power effectively doubled overnight. Suddenly, rather than owning about a quarter of the productive assets, they got hold of half of them. Suffering in the process were not only peasants and artisans, but also the Crown itself – new property came packaged with new power.

The emerging dominant class took over most of the political, legal and military institutions, supplying MPs, ministers, magistrates and generals. The Crown was growing weaker, which set the scene for the revolutions in the next century.

The new class, which Belloc calls capitalist, became a mighty and divisive power in the country, depriving many dispossessed people of property, that foundation of liberty.

In France, the country of Belloc’s birth, transition from the Dark Ages to the Medieval and early modern periods was handled differently. Centralism there rode roughshod over localism.

More and more power was concentrated in the king’s hands, with aristocrats relinquishing their hold on the provinces and effectively becoming nothing but courtiers, the king’s entourage.

When their revolution came, a century and a half later than in England, aristocrats were culled en masse without affecting adversely life in the provinces. Tangible power there already was in the hands of the emerging middle class, with the upper class finding itself at a loose end and irrelevant.

Belloc and Chesterton regarded medieval England as their ideal of social, political and economic organisation. They saw correctly that history could have unfolded differently: the collapse of a distributive society wasn’t pre-determined.

In his 1912 book, The Servile State, Belloc bemoaned the rise of what he called capitalism, with economic power concentrated in few hands, and most of the people reduced to proletarian servitude – even though they could still act as political agents. But that liberty was hollow in the absence of property ownership.

Chesterton’s 1925 book, The Outline of Sanity, makes all the same arguments. Both writers, neither of whom was an economist, argued that it wasn’t the Industrial Revolution that produced capitalism in England, but roughly the other way around.

By 1700 or so England had already become a sharply stratified capitalist society, and new tools, such as the steam engine and the power loom, made the stratification worse. New tools and new industries required new investment, and that could only come from the already wealthy classes, whose power thereby grew exponentially.

Much of the terminology Belloc and Chesterton use, such as capitalism, socialism, private or collective ownership of the means of production, regrettably came from the Marxist glossary. This sounds grating until one realises that the two writers abhorred the Marxist ideal of an omnipotent central state lording it over a powerless people.

Their principal desiderata were individual liberty and dignity, and they didn’t see how these could be achieved with either political slavery to the state or wage slavery to the capitalist. They felt that some principles of a distributive medieval society could be transplanted into the modern soil.

I find their work both interesting and touching in its idealism. They were right in saying that the rise of a small propertied elite would inevitably lead to widespread resentment. As a result, people would become receptive to socialist fantasies, trading even their political liberty for some sort of collective security magnanimously bestowed by the central state.

However, at the moment some two-thirds of Britons own their homes, and about 60 per cent own shares (mostly through pension funds). Their standard of living is beyond anything Belloc and Chesterton could imagine.

Yet neither this property ownership nor a wide spread of relative prosperity has prevented the rise of a mighty central state passing and enforcing dictates over every aspect of public and private life.

The two writers believed that, as a society grows more capitalist (or more socialist), it becomes weaker, and so far I’ve seen little to disprove their observation. However, I can’t see how a modern economy could be organised along distributive lines, and neither, I suspect, would they.

Still, the outpourings of such powerful minds are always worth reading in search of the gems strewn about their pages. Such a search will always be rewarded even if some of their ideas sound naïve and out of touch with our time.

Or look at it the other way: much to its detriment, our time is out of touch with Belloc and Chesterton.

This isn’t to say that Harry causes modern ills. He only personifies some of them, providing an illustration so vivid that they are laid bare in all their hideousness.

On his visit to Australia, Harry tried to convey a royal stature to which he probably, and his wife definitely, is no longer entitled. The Australian public was given the impression that Harry came as a son of their head of state, rather than a greedy chap on the make trying to ‘monetise’ his family links.

Those links can indeed be lucrative, and this is the part of his royal descent Harry likes. What he rejects is the duty of service inherent in royal privilege.

Nothing new or unique about that: many people don’t mind getting something for nothing. About a quarter of Britain’s working age population subsist on state handouts, so Harry isn’t short of an understanding audience.

The leading cause of their idleness is ‘mental health issues’, such as stress, depression, anxiety and general nervousness. The cynic in me has to believe that this popularity of emotional instability is largely caused by the ample opportunities for malingering such conditions provide. It’s easier for clinical tests to disprove liver failure than a persistent bad mood.

Grief, sadness, stress are and always have been inalienable parts of the human condition, but only our deracinated modernity sees fit to medicalise them to such a ludicrous extent.

Having lost God and unable to develop their own inner resources, people – millions of them – are happy to demand long-term disability benefits so they can wallow in their misery (real or, as often as not, imaginary or, worse still, feigned) without the distraction of work.

Doctors are happy to oblige for various reasons. First, they want to avoid violent rows erupting in their surgeries, which tends to happen when stupid, brutish people feel they are being denied their just deserts.

Second, doctors themselves are modern people. Their brains too have been scoured of any critical faculty by decades of psychobabble propaganda, and they don’t want to come across as cold-hearted scoundrels denying succour to their suffering fellow men.

Such is the background against which Harry thrives in his highly remunerative capacity of a mental health guru. He has milked the loss of his mother to its full pecuniary potential, secure in the knowledge that few people would dare question the legitimacy of a middle-aged man still reeling from a childhood trauma.

Losing one’s parents is indeed traumatic, but most people manage to cope with that tragedy with the passage of time. Diana was killed almost 30 years ago, meaning that Harry is no longer entitled to the lachrymose grief he is so adept at turning into cash.

This is how he explained his feelings to the Australian multitudes. Every word is so precious that I hope you’ll forgive a long quotation:

“After my mum died just before my 13^th birthday I was like: ‘I don’t want this job. I don’t want this role wherever this is headed, I don’t like it.’

“It killed my mum, and I was very much against it, and I stuck my head in the sand for years and years. Eventually I realised – well, hang on, if there was somebody else in this position, how would they be making the most of this platform and this ability and the resources that come with it to make a difference in the world?

“And also, what would my mum want me to do? And that really changed my own perspective.”

Now, Harry, now in his 40s, is an Old Etonian later educated at Sandhurst. Therefore he has no business talking like an underprivileged teenager from a bad council estate, but evidently in some cases even expensive education fails to leave a mark.

Someone ought to remind this royal Peter Pan that referring to one’s mother as ‘mum’ ought to be off limits for anyone old enough to vote. And the locution ‘I was like’ instead of ‘I thought’ or ‘I said’ is childhood slang to be shunned by anyone who has children of his own.

Note also Harry’s referring to his royal status as a “platform”, enabling him “to make a difference in the world”. The ‘platform’ of the royal family can indeed make such a difference, but not by acting as a launchpad of psychobabble exhibitionism.

A member of that family can use the authority of his constitutional position to unite a nation being rent asunder by divisive ideologies. He can act as a walking, ideally also talking, symbol of his realm’s continuity, tying together its past, present and future. He can do his utmost to strengthen the Commonwealth. Most important, he can embody the strengths and virtues of the national character and tradition.

In short, he can do all those things that Harry’s grandmother did, and his father is trying to do, with so much dignity and honour. Yet Harry takes his cue not from them, nor from his paternal grandfather or his aunt, but from his ‘mum’, a self-serving woman as short of mind and morals as she was long on conniving manipulation and ‘I-want-to-be-me’ egoism.

If Harry genuinely thinks it was her royal status that “killed his mum”, he is even dumber than he looks and sounds. She was killed in a road accident, riding in the back of the car with her revenge lover, one of a legion she had taken to punish the royal family for reminding her of her duties.

Harry is right about one thing though: his ‘mum’ would do exactly what he is doing. She wouldn’t have missed this glorious opportunity to turn her idiotic complaints about her family’s obsession with public service into a lucrative publicity stunt.

Actually, I think Diana has come back as Meghan, who displays all the same manipulative qualities and similarly offsets a deficit of intelligence with a surfeit of perfidy. Sigmund Freud would have a field day: the Oedipus Complex exists and it’s working overtime.

The man Nabokov called ‘the Viennese quack’ insisted that men subconsciously seek a mate who possesses similar traits to their mothers. Freudians call this ‘sexual imprinting’, with early childhood experiences setting the template for adult attraction.

I don’t know whether little Harry wanted to copulate with his mum, kill his dad and poke his own eyes out, but Meghan is so similar to Diana that one has to accept that, in this isolated case, sexual imprinting does work.

What’s worrying is that, though Harry was made to relinquish the HRH title, he still remains a prince, fifth in the line of succession.

I’m not sure what could be done about that: a royal status is after all acquired by birth, not merit, and a good job too. So I’m afraid that Harry and Meghan will continue to annoy those of us who wish the monarchy well, doing the same thing his ‘mum’ did so well: hurting our vital institution.

Yes, I know that ‘free’ medicine is a misnomer. Or at least it would be if we lived in a sane world.

However, in the world we do live in, ‘free’ means nationalised. And nationalised medicine means that the state oversees transactions between patients and doctors, using public funds to pay for them.

Thus ‘free’ doesn’t mean we don’t have to pay for medical care. It actually means we have to pay more than we would if medical care weren’t ‘free’.

The money the state uses to pay for medicine comes from our taxes or, less directly, from promiscuous borrowing. The latter produces a high inflation rate, which is an income tax by another name. And taxation is a reliable instrument of state control.

Thus, ‘free’ medical care only serves to increase state power over the individual, which makes the term a glossocratic lie. It reflects the state’s powerlust, not its concern for public health.

That medical care can be used as an instrument of tyranny has been demonstrated by every political state in history, not least by Nazi Germany. Reading about Hitler’s medicine, one can’t help noticing parallels with today.

Firm believers in nationalised medicine, the Nazis showed how it could be used for crowd control. Like today’s bureaucrats, they emphasised preventive medicine, with nutrition featuring prominently in their health propaganda.

Every German had a duty to look after himself, thereby prolonging the part of his life when he could continue to serve the state. Likewise, in today’s state medicine the need to relieve financial pressures on the state’s purse can be neatly converted into a blanket dictate on citizens’ lives.

Conditioned to accept the edicts of the state, Britons don’t cringe upon hearing from yet another health official yet another admonition of their dietary habits. “And exactly what makes this your business?” is a question seldom asked. But if it were asked, the truthful answer wouldn’t be far removed from the Nazi rationale: the good of the state.

(Almost 40 years ago, when I moved to Britain from the US, I argued with a good friend of mine, a doctor who in those days wouldn’t hear a critical word uttered about the NHS.

I was fuming about the law making it illegal not to wear a seatbelt. My argument was that, by not buckling up, I risk harming no one but myself, and it’s not the state’s business to protect people against themselves.

But it is the state’s business, countered my friend. If you get hurt, you’ll cost the NHS a lot of money, meaning the state has a right to insist you protect yourself. That, I objected, is the strongest argument against the NHS I’ve ever heard. My friend thought I was crazy.)

The Nazis waged an anti-smoking campaign that would be the envy of today’s Britain. It was the Nazis who first established the link between smoking and lung cancer, and hence banned women from smoking (allowances had to be made for men, most of whom were in the foxholes). As a result, lung-cancer statistics in Germany continued to be better than in other Western countries for a couple of decades after the war.

Like many other forms of research, this proceeded from the starting point of an axiomatic assumption, in this case that smoking had to be bad because the Führer was good, and he didn’t approve of lighting up.

Chemical additives and preservatives were roundly castigated by the Nazis, wholemeal bread was depicted as morally superior to breads made from blanched white flour. And neither Wes Streeting nor Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was even born yet.

Like today’s bureaucrats, the Nazis promoted vegetarianism (practised by Hitler, Hess and many others), and Göring personally banned medical experiments on animals.

Since the Nazis were godless, animals were to them not principally different from humans, and were in fact superior to some. Hitler loved his Alsatian Blondie more than any woman in his life; in today’s Britain veterinary medicine is organised better than the care of humans.

Of course, Nazi doctors were involved not just in preventive medicine but also in such less benign pastimes as eugenics and enforced euthanasia. It’s comforting to observe how medicine in today’s West is inching in the same direction.

Euthanasia, in particular, is custom-made for our statist, godless modernity. One can’t open the papers these days without reading a thinly veiled lament about the burden placed on the fragile shoulders of state medicine by an ageing population.

This is a paradox, for tireless propaganda of healthier ‘life styles’, coupled with advances in pharmaceuticals and hygiene, is designed to help people live longer. In reality, it’s designed to increase the power of the state but, when medicine is used for that purpose, one can’t be had without the other: life expectancy will grow.

This creates a vicious circle: the state uses medicine to advance its own good by tightening its control on citizens’ lives; but as a corollary to this, the state hurts itself by creating a multitude of old free-loaders who do nothing but sap the state’s resources. Euthanasia is the logical way out, and never mind the effete arguments against it based on the outdated notion of the sanctity of human life.

The British are unhappy about waiting lists at hospitals, caused by a chronic shortage of hospital beds, but they miss the point. State medical care doesn’t need hospital beds to perform its principal function: control over people’s lives.

In fact, fewer hospitals were built in Britain during the first half-century of her nationalised medicine (the NHS was launched in 1948) than in the 1930s, hardly the most prosperous decade in British history.

As modern states of every variety have demonstrated, in order to be truly successful, state control has to extend to people’s private lives, not just public activities. Glossocracy can achieve this end by itself – for example, by brainwashing people into believing that there exists a valid moral distinction between driving after two glasses of wine or three.

Very much in the news at the moment is the pathetic state of Britain’s defence. Consecutive governments have systematically sabotaged defence spending while at the same time pumping more and more money into welfare.

It’s true that, at £330 billion a year, our welfare spending is five times the size of our defence budget. Yet somehow the NHS is spared similar comparisons, even though its annual cost of £242 billion is only a third less than welfare expenditure.

Divest those two culprits of just 10 per cent of their loot, and we could double our defence spending. But you don’t believe that will ever happen, do you?

All such anomalies have the same origin: the nature of the modern political state wielding glossocratic tools like equality, humanitarianism and fairness to put its foot down. Such a state lives or dies by its power to dispossess large numbers of people as a means of supporting, and therefore effectively enslaving, the growing numbers of parasites dependent on the state for their livelihood.

However, bureaucrats willing to empower such a state at the expense of defence are after fool’s gold. A disarmed Britain can easily fall prey to foreign predators who can replace the power of our bureaucrats with their own.

Any number of dystopic scenarios spring to mind, and you can easily think of your own. But any such scenario will have the same basis: the state’s urge to impose servitude on the people, and the people’s readiness to exchange their real freedom for illusory security.

Welfare and nationalised medicine are perceived as factors of security and therefore cherished. Defence of the realm, on the other hand, is a factor of freedom and therefore spurned. And the state is happy to go along, knowing that its power will continue to grow.

Both the people and the state are on a losing wicket: the people will surrender their liberty to the state, the state will eventually relinquish its power to a stronger foreign state.

As Ben Franklin once put it, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” And neither is exactly what they end up getting.

That’s it. No more doubt. The diagnosis is indisputable: Trump is mad. The AI image of himself as Jesus Christ that he saw fit to post proves it.

Well, at least believers will no longer support Trump because he claims to be a Christian. No Christian I’ve ever met, and I’ve met quite a few, would ever have posted such a blasphemous picture.

Christians who have an acerbic tongue in their head may occasionally blaspheme, and I’m man enough to admit that I myself have been guilty of that on occasion. But what Trump did goes beyond any old blasphemy. As his erstwhile acolyte and now critic, Marjorie Taylor Greene, put it: “It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an Antichrist spirit.”

There I was, thinking that Mrs Greene is so odious that I could never possibly agree with her on anything. I still consider her odious, but she has a point there.

However, I don’t think Trump is an energumen possessed by the devil. The truth, I’m afraid, is more prosaic: he is getting more and more deranged.

So much so that he doesn’t even realise he is alienating his core support, conservative Christians. That’s not just bad Christianity or simply bad taste. It’s bad politics.

I realise (hope?) Trump isn’t going to contest another election, but he is queering the pitch for those of his MAGA associates who harbour presidential ambitions. Being close to Trump may turn out to be a kiss of political death. And if you don’t believe that, ask Pierre Poilievre and Victor Orbán. They’ll tell you.

The former was certain of victory in Canada, the latter hoped for one in Hungary, but then Trump campaigned for both. As a direct consequence they both lost, and Poilievre’s closeness to Trump was more perceived than real.

I wonder how JD Vance feels about his boss’s foray into AI imagery. Vance is clearly manoeuvring himself into the position of heir apparent, which means that, in the good tradition of US politics, he must stress his Christian credentials.

The Christianity JD wears on his sleeve, Roman Catholicism, is the wrong kind in the judgement of the predominantly evangelical religious Right. But the issue is less divisive than it was, say, in the 1950s. Faced with the onslaught of atheism, Christians of all denominations close political ranks behind fellow believers, even slightly misguided ones.

But I wonder how old JD is going to reply to the question that will be bound to pop up at every press conference: “Mr Vice President, how did you feel about that notorious AI image?”

Vance would then have either to disavow Trump, upsetting MAGA enthusiasts, or dismiss it all as a joke, upsetting just about everybody. Some choice. As Mr Hobson would say, “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

The image was another salvo Trump fired in his on-going battle with Pope Leo XIV, who had the temerity to take issue with Trump’s war on Iran. Trump has responded with one deranged rant after another, eventually deciding that words alone wouldn’t do the trick.

The pontiff wouldn’t be silenced. In his latest criticism, one that provoked Trump’s pictorial reaction, His Holiness regretted that: “Too many people are suffering in the world today. Too many innocent people are being killed. And I think someone has to stand up and say there’s a better way.

“I will continue to speak out loudly against war, looking to promote peace, promoting dialogue and multilateral relationships among the states to look for just solutions to problems.”

A worthy intention, that, but one that strikes me as slightly naïve for this world’s politics. As Golda Meir once put it more realistically, “You can’t negotiate peace with people who want to kill you.” Iran’s powers that be definitely want to obliterate Israel and at least hurt the West as badly as they can, and their efforts to acquire nuclear weapons to that end won’t cease. Under such circumstances, any talk about “promoting dialogue and multilateral relationships” seems misplaced.

The confrontation between the pontiff and Trump brings back the memory of the late Middle Ages in Italy, when two factions, the Guelphs (supporters of the pope) and the Ghibellines (supporters of the Holy Roman Emperor) were at each other’s throats.

Typologically, Pope Leo is closer to those medieval pontiffs than Trump is to any Holy Roman Emperor, but some similarities are discernible. Actually, Trump’s criticism of the Pope isn’t entirely groundless in substance. But its form, both verbal and pictorial, is sheer madness, clinically speaking.

Trump’s latest incoherent 1,000-word rant alone is enough for men in white coats to rush in with their stretchers and straitjackets. One of the bizarre claims Trump made was that Leo wouldn’t be pope but for him. “He was only put there [on the list of candidates] by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump.”

I don’t think the Donald is sufficiently familiar with the papal job requirements. Dealing with US presidents certainly isn’t one of them, let’s just leave it at that.

Neither should it matter to the Church very much what Trump thinks of its head, but someone has forgotten to tell him that. “I don’t want a pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, BY A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and Creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.”

Irrelevant if true, I’d suggest. I don’t think Pope Leo has a problem with low crime rates or an exuberant stock market. He objects, in my view wrongly, to the very idea of waging war on Iran.

Stating moral objections to war in general falls under the papal purview, although I don’t think out-and-out pacifism is theologically sound. Great Christian thinkers from Anselm, Augustine and Aquinas onwards certainly didn’t think so either.

But levelling criticism at this war specifically, from a bien pensant position of “promoting dialogue and multilateral relationships” really ought to be left to Guardian readers and writers. Jesus Christ, whose Vicar the Pope is, did say: “My kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36).

That means it’s higher than this world, and I wish His Holiness didn’t descend to squabbles with the likes of Trump. As for the latter, someone ought to remove him from the White House before he harms himself and others.

The man has gone way beyond malignant narcissism, an endearing trait Trump has displayed his whole life. He is certifiably bonkers now, incapable of considering the consequences of his words and deeds.

I wonder how long it will be before Republicans, even the MAGA types, turn against Trump. They may not want to support him to the bitter end if the end does look unpalatably bitter. I’m not sure many of them will be willing to put their political careers on the line for the sake of their increasingly unstable leader.

A revolt must be coming, but I don’t know if that will produce the two-thirds majority in the Senate required to impeach. Wait and see, is my usual refrain when it comes to Trump.

In 1878, the Russo-Turkish War was going badly for the declining Ottoman Empire.

The Russians were conquering one province after another and steadily advancing to the gates of Constantinople. The perennial strategic aim of the Russian Empire, gaining control of the Straits (the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, that is, not the one of Hormuz) and a permanent access to the Mediterranean.

Such objectives were at odds with Britain’s interests, which point had been emphatically made to Russia on several previous occasions, including the relatively recent Crimean War of 1853-1856. Russia had been soundly thrashed by a small Anglo-French-Sardinian expeditionary force, which outcome is rather glossed over in Russian historiography.

Russia didn’t quite learn that lesson, came back in 1877, and by February next year the Russian forces reached the outskirts of Constantinople. A quick refresher was needed, and Prime Minister Disraeli was happy to provide one.

He ordered a Royal Navy squadron into the Dardanelles and Sea of Marmara, which spelled an instant end to Russia’s aspirations. The message was loud and clear, and it was eminently believable for being frighteningly evocative.

In that undertaking, HMG enjoyed enthusiastic public support. In pubs all over the country, thousands of thirsty Britons were belting out a patriotic song written by Hunt and first sung by MacDermott:

We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do….
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too!
We’ve fought the Bear before… and while we’re Britons true!
The Russians shall not have Constantinople…

The song not only enriched the English lexicon by adding the word ‘jingoism’, but, more important, it also captured the public sentiment and gave an accurate statement of Britain’s standing in the world.

The Royal Navy could then project Britain’s power all the way to the Straits, 2,220 miles from our shores. However, as if to prove that 148 years is a long time in geopolitics, today it can’t even patrol the Channel, practically our internal waterway.

We now have no ships, no men and no money – or rather whatever money we do have we’d rather spend on millions of Britons pulling a sickie, not on the defence of the realm.

Now, I realise that Britain no longer is, nor can possibly aspire to be, the mighty global empire she was in 1878. However, having lost the empire, Britain didn’t have to throw self-respect the same way into the bargain.

We are no longer “Britons true”, which is why the same Bear mentioned in the MacDermott song is openly cocking a snook at an impotent Britain unable even to guard the Channel. First, the Russians sent warships to escort their sanctions-busting ‘ghost fleet’ through.

And last week they sent three submarines to sabotage our underwater cables. While that was going on, Britain’s solitary destroyer, HMS Dragon, was dividing its time between repair docks around the Mediterranean and lying at anchor without, God forbid, upsetting the Iranians and their friends.

Apart from that destroyer, the almighty Royal Navy that once enabled Britannia to rule the waves can boast one submarine and two frigates ready for action. No wonder Putin is sneering at us.

Senior defence sources admitted that the Royal Navy can’t really meet “operational commitments”. Translated into mufti, this means Britain has no navy to speak of. Pathetic doesn’t begin to describe it.

Meanwhile, our government talks tough while carrying no stick at all. Last month, Starmer announced that, if Russia continued to sail her tankers through the Channel, the Royal Navy would board and seize them.

A worthy intention, this, but it turns out that, in order to act on it, the UK would need the help of the French navy to give our marines a ride to those offensive tankers. Any patriotic Briton, even a co-opted one like me, has to wonder who won the Battle of Trafalgar.

I can’t find a simile to describe the depth of this humiliation. It’s like French champagne houses seeking the help of British winemakers to get the grape mix right… No, that’s too weak.

And the worst part of it is that the French actually spend less on defence than we do. That little datum takes the story beyond merely matters martial and into the area of rife corruption besetting British public administration.

By corruption I don’t mean the odd backhander greasing a palm or two, but something worse: cavalier negligence and disregard of fundamental duties. That’s the only explanation of why Britain only has 75 warships while France has 120, 25 of them frigates and destroyers capable of carrying helicopters.

It’s not just the navy either. The French armed forces have 240,000 active personnel, while we have 74,000. One can’t help wondering how the French make their defence budget go so much further. It’s that corruption again, which concept is in Britain conveniently reduced only to petty things like bribery and purloining. If only.

Our government should remind itself of what it’s for. Appearances to the contrary, the purpose of government isn’t increasing its own power, corrupting the populace with handouts and enforcing a subversive ethic at variance with our whole civilisation.

Its first, second, third and tenth purpose is protecting the people and their freedom from enemies without and criminals within. It’s only after that purpose has been achieved that, way down on the list, other duties come in – and no, systematically turning a nation of shopkeepers into a nation of shoplifters isn’t one of them.

Forget 1878. Even in 1982, Britain was able to send a task force of 127 ships to the South Atlantic to protect the sovereignty of the Falklands, 8,000 miles away. Today we can’t even protect the sovereignty of our own seashore, a national humiliation for which we only have ourselves to blame.

For it’s British voters who every few years go to the poll booths like lambs going to the slaughter, national slaughter that is. They vote in one criminally negligent government after another, selling their birthright for a pot of ideological message – and I don’t just mean Labour administrations.

I still remember David Cameron, Tory PM in 2010-2016, announcing yet another swingeing cut to our armed forces. Britain didn’t really need a large army and navy, he explained in his usual inane manner. The nature of modern warfare was such that those traditional entities had become obsolete.

What had become obsolete is Messrs Blair, Cameron, Sunak, Starmer and other corrupt and corrupting spivocrats we call leaders. I do hope Britons realise this and do something about it before it’s not the Royal Navy boarding Russian ships, but the latter landing invasion forces in Kent.

P.S. A propos of nothing, this reminds me of the old story about a society lady returning to London after a voyage around the world. When asked what she thought of the Dardanelles, she replied: “Loved him, hated her.”

P.P.S. Happy Easter to all my Orthodox readers.

When I was little, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas was among my favourite books, and I still remember the text well.

What on earth does that adventure novel of delayed-action revenge have to do with Trump, I hear you ask. Nothing really, except for one episode.

Trying to ruin a banker who had betrayed him years earlier, Monte Cristo bribed a telegraph operator to transmit a false message. At that time, in the early 1840s, Spain’s former king Don Carlos (or Carlos María Isidro Benito de Borbón y Borbón-Parma, for short) was exiled to Bourges, a lovely medieval city in central France.

Bonds issued on the Spanish loan were riding high, and the treacherous banker had invested millions in them. The false message Monte Cristo elicited from the telegraph operator said that Don Carlos had escaped from his exile and was on his way back to Spain to reclaim his throne.

The Spanish bonds plummeted instantly, and the banker had to dump them, losing a fortune in the process – only to see the securities soar again the next day, when the hoax was revealed for what it was.

Things have changed since then: Spanish monarchs have been reduced to ceremonial figureheads, France no longer has the power to imprison them, telegraph has been replaced by more sophisticated means of communication. But one thing remains the same: financial markets are still extremely sensitive to political vicissitudes.

It’s by this circuitous route signposted with literary allusions that we’ve arrived at Donald Trump and his resemblance to the vindictive count. It’s hard not to notice that Trump tends to change his mind overnight about vital political developments.

He’s going to attack Venezuela; no, he isn’t. Yes, he’ll attack Venezuela to effect a regime change. No, he’ll only kidnap Maduro to start with, and then he’ll see. He has kidnapped Maduro as a prelude to occupying the country. No, he isn’t going to occupy Venezuela, he’ll just change her regime. No, he’ll keep the old regime in place as long as it strikes an oil deal; or perhaps he’ll nominate himself president or king of Venezuela.

Then came Iran, and the same kaleidoscopic picture was painted every day: victory won; no, not quite; ground invasion imminent; no, not yet; turn all of Iran into a car park; on second thoughts, perhaps not; open the Strait of Hormuz; or rather form a joint venture with Iran to collect tolls from passing tankers; ceasefire agreed; ceasefire not quite agreed; the war is over; the war is only beginning.

One gets the impression of a terribly indecisive, vacillating president who doesn’t really know what he’s doing or talking about. But have you noticed something? The Monte Cristo Effect (and I’ll claim copyright for this coinage) is still exactly the same as it was almost 200 years ago.

Every time Trump changes his mind, the financial markets, especially those dealing in oil shares, react like the patellar tendon reacts to a neurologist’s hammer testing the patient’s reflexes. Now, just imagine knowing exactly what Trump is going to do or say an hour before he does or says it.

Or in other words, knowing in advance whether the shares of oil companies will go up or down? You’d be speed dialling your broker faster than you could say ‘insider trading’. The broker then would either short the stock or take a long position, with you emerging much richer each time.

It stands to reason that those dear to Trump, his family and close associates, would be privy to such information, and nothing about their characters would suggest that they’d miss these golden opportunities. The Donald himself wouldn’t be averse to turning a quick buck by merely saying one thing today and another tomorrow.

If I were in charge of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, I’d certainly let my curiosity get the better of me. An inquisitive chap by nature, I’d launch a quiet investigation into the investment patterns of the Trump entourage, plotting them on a graph.

Then I’d plot another curve of Trump’s declarations that led to the markets dipping or rising and see whether the two curves followed the same trajectory. That’s it, job done, curiosity satisfied – I don’t know what I’d do next. I’m not the SEC chairman after all, and neither am I a senior law enforcement officer.

But I’d be astounded if someone within the SEC and perhaps the FBI displayed similar curiosity. I doubt that would be the heads of those organisations, who are probably Trump’s appointments and loyalists. But someone lower down the pecking order just might take a peek surreptitiously.

I don’t know what kind of results such an investigation would yield, and I certainly believe in the old principle of innocent until proven guilty. However, and this is a salient point, one can detect nothing in Trump’s character that would make such suspicions demonstrably groundless, as they would be with, say, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher.

Looking at Trump’s biography, one doesn’t get the impression that honour was among his primary motivators. For example, when critics reminded him of the numerous bankruptcies his businesses had suffered, Trump’s response was: “That only proves I’m smart”.

It’s true that the owner of an insolvent business seeking Chapter 11 protection against creditors chooses a smart way out of his predicament. But it’s not an honourable way: the creditors who acted in good faith end up losing a fortune, often getting 10 cents on the dollar if they are lucky.

I’ve also heard people who operated in the same property development markets say that Trump was less than honest with his suppliers, often refusing to pay the full amount stipulated. When the suppliers protested, his stock response was “Sue me”. That they wouldn’t do, knowing that Trump could make any litigation drag on for ever, something they couldn’t afford.

This is only hearsay, but, even if you are a fully paid up MAGA enthusiast, can you honestly say that this isn’t something Trump would ever do? No, I didn’t think so.

Honour and morality have no place in Trump’s world, circumscribed as it is by transactional activities. Hence his betrayal of the Ukraine, preceded by some sort of a joint-venture deal for the exploration of the country’s natural resources. Hence his willingness to dismantle NATO for strictly financial reasons. Hence his keeping Venezuela’s evil regime in place in exchange for oil concessions. Hence also his mooted idea of profiting from the tolls at the Strait of Hormuz, something that has no justification in international law.

Hence also his use of Witkoff and Kushner as his ubiquitous emissaries in negotiations involving both the Ukraine and Iran. These chaps aren’t qualified even to broach any issues other than purely financial ones – and these are exactly the areas they do discuss. Nothing else matters very much.

Some time ago I posted an article entitled How Does He Get Away with It?, and the question still remains.

The America I remember was always alert to malfeasance in political office. Congressmen used to be raked over the coals for taking a few thousand for raising certain issues in the House, for example. Here we are probably talking billions, and yet the law enforcement agencies are maintaining their thunderous silence — for the time being.

Should Trump lose some or all of his political power, my guess is that all hell would break loose. I’m sure he knows it – the Donald is indeed smart that way. I wonder how this knowledge will affect his behaviour in the remaining three years of his presidency. Well, at least we don’t have long to wait for an answer to this question.

Similarities among the three leaders are nothing short of eerie. Differences exist too, of course, but they are environmental, not personal.

Putin operates under no legal restraints whatsoever, Orbán under some, and Trump under quite a few. But these are differences among the three countries, not the three personages.

However, looking at the trio’s outlook on life, the way they operate, the nature of their mass appeal, one is tempted to check their birthdates to make sure they didn’t come out of the same womb at the same time.

Starting from the end, it’s the nature of their popular appeal that is especially interesting. All three demonstrably elicit cult-like devotion among numerous supporters in their native habitats. Yet I also know quite a few Englishmen and Frenchmen who profess admiration for the trio with genuine gusto.

One is tempted to ascribe such an excess of emotion to a shortage of information, but that’s not the case. The people I have in mind may not know all there is to know about the trio, but they are certainly familiar with the facts in the public domain.

But facts have little effect on their feelings. These burn bright either in the ultra area above reason or in the infra area below it. These chaps will hear you out, nod their agreement at everything you say, but then flash the condescending smile of a gnostic. You aren’t privy to their higher knowledge; you can’t possibly understand.

Trying to get to the bottom of this, one has to draw historical parallels, sweeping aside the usual objections that every epoch is sui generis. True, when seeking such parallels one must exercise caution, always making allowances for time and place. But time and place only affect ways in which human nature reveals itself, not the nature itself, which remains stubbornly constant.

Contrary to Spengler’s somewhat Buddhist belief, history isn’t cyclical but linear – unlike a circle, it has a beginning and an end, moving steadily from the former to the latter.

However, the line of progression isn’t straight: history zigs and zags through endless peaks and troughs, leaving few things untouched. Since this has been going on for some 5,000 years that we know of, everything that could have been tried has been tried. One just needs to know where to look.

Thus it’s obvious to me that interbellum Germany is a microcosm of today’s West. True conservatism existed there, and it left an invaluable cultural evidence of its presence (in this connection I always recommend the book Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, a conservative disgusted by Nazism and ultimately killed by it). But it had lost all social and political influence.

Naturally conservative Germans found themselves without a political home. They reacted emetically to both the socialist waffle of the Weimar Republic and its feeble, ideologically driven attempts to heal the wounds of Versailles by government fiat.

Conservatives rejected out of hand the socialist corporatism of Weimar and its shrill rhetoric, which today we’d call ‘woke’. But only two other options were on the table: Nazism and communism. The choice seemed to be not between good and evil, but between two evils.

Those unwilling to choose either had to go into exile by escaping either to another country, like Thomas Mann, or into their own cloistered existence, like Reck-Malleczewen. The latter tried to ignore the Walpurgisnacht outside, only to find out that it wouldn’t ignore him.

The situation in today’s West is similar, though not identical, to Germany c. 1933. Real, intuitive conservatives find themselves at a loose end come election time. They too are nauseated by the present-day version of left-wing Walpurgisnacht and appalled by the systematic destruction it wreaks on everything they cherish.

At some point, the level of vomit reaches up to their collective gullet, and they need treatment urgently. Any medicine will do: natural conservatives become ready to swallow any anti-emetic whatsoever, however bitter and unsavoury it might be.

Moreover, there’s no persuasion like self-persuasion. If the nausea subsides for a while, conservatives convince themselves that the medicine is actually quite tasty or, if it isn’t, a spoonful of rhetorical sugar can help it go down.

In come the political version of Mary Poppins: Messrs Putin, Orbán, Trump et al. They say things conservatives feared they’d never hear again, extolling ‘traditional values’, such as patriotism, common sense, private enterprise, low taxation, national rebirth, Christian morality – the whole menu of virtues treated as vices in a world shaped by woke, socialist guff.

None of the three chaps is perfect, but hey, he who is without sin… and all that. Who cares what the medicine tastes like as long as it works? Conservatives aren’t blind to the trio’s vices, but they are ready to forgive them for the sake of the bigger clinical picture.

Except that the longer those so-called populist leaders stay in power, the more there is to forgive. People begin to notice that, operating within their local constraints, such as they are, the three begin to resemble mafia bosses more than statesmen.

They choose their entourage on the basis of personal loyalty, not competence. They give legal institutions as wide a berth as the local conditions allow. They use their position to enrich themselves, their families and cronies. They do some of the things they promised, but undo them by acting with unaccountable voluntarism.

And they place loyalty to one another above their duties as leaders of sovereign nations. All three despise Western leaders not only for their ineptness (such contempt is widely justified), but also for their refusal to kowtow to the trio by offering tributes and labioglutal ‘respect’.

Putin is the spiritual leader of the trio, lighting the path to the kind of mafioso autocracy the other two envy but can’t yet achieve as completely as they’d like. Trump openly admires Putin, and has done for years.

The Russian chieftain has achieved a perfect blend of authoritarian government and organised crime, using the former to facilitate the latter. As his regime inched ever closer to an out-and-out fascist dictatorship, Putin systematically enriched himself and his acolytes, turning them into billionaires and himself into probably the world’s richest man.

Trump still can’t shed some constitutional tethers, but he does the best he can. One day, possibly soon, his shenanigans while in office will explode into a massive scandal. The billions Trump and those close to him made from ‘deals’ dependent on his position will then come to light as, I’m sure, will the origin of his affection for Putin.

Hungary being a new democracy, Orbán doesn’t have to be coy about his being a Putin agent, not just an admirer. Investigations by Christo Grozev’s outfit The Insider revealed that Orbán’s victorious presidential campaign in 1998 was largely financed by the Russian mafia boss Semyon Mogilevich, who at the time operated out of Hungary.

Since the Russian mafia is an aspect of the Russian government, Orbán knows he owes his position to Putin. And no one can accuse ‘Vityok’ (so known in Russia) of ingratitude.

Orbán does all he can to sabotage Europe’s support for the Ukraine. He has vetoed the EU’s £78 billion loan for the Ukraine, tried to block sanctions against Russia and in general has acted as Putin’s vassal, not to say agent.

A recently published transcript of his October phone conversation with Putin quotes Orbán as saying: “In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.”

That line, “I am at your service”, was repeated by Orbán’s foreign minister Szijjarto to his Russian counterpart Lavrov. A leaked phone conversation suggested that such services included supplying to Moscow what Brussels called “strategic information on crucial issues”.

In other words, just as Putin is threatening an invasion of Europe and the latter is belatedly rearming, a country at the heart of the EU collaborates with the enemy.

Orbán is standing for re-election at the moment, and Hungarians seem to have had enough of his service to Putin. Mass demonstrations all over Hungary carry placards saying “Russians, go home”, the slogan of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Orbán’s Fidesz party is trailing, and Trump felt duty-bound to help his ideological sibling as best he could.

He sent VP Vance to Hungary, where JD accused Brussels of “disgraceful” interference with the elections. He then proceeded to show what he meant by urging Hungarians to “stand with” Orbán, that staunch defender of family values, national identity and “Christian heritage”. In other words, a close friend of Trump and an agent of Putin.

Thanks to Orbán’s championship of family values, Hungary has been named the EU’s most corrupt country. And in the rule of law category, Hungary is ranked 79^th in the world, below Kazakhstan.

One can’t really blame Messrs Trump, Putin and Orbán for acting in character – any more than one can blame dogs for urinating in the street and chasing cats around the corner. But one can blame societies that have made the rise of such characters possible.

This is what happens when real traditional values are neglected and mocked, when conservatives abandon their principles for the sake of joining the ‘in’ crowd. They’ve forgotten Goethe’s admonition: “Of freedom and of life he only is deserving/ Who every day must conquer them anew.”

Our trio isn’t the disease but a symptom of one. And this disease is self-inflicted.

So the Iranian civilisation lives to fight another day. Just hours before Trump’s ultimatum expired, the two sides agreed to a two-week ceasefire.

They then began to negotiate a more permanent arrangement on the basis of a ten-point plan put forth by Iran. For that special occasion, her new Supreme Leader, the son of the old one, left the coma in which, according to Trump, he had been for weeks.

Or perhaps Mojtaba Khamenei was dead, I’m not sure which. If so, he rose again, which is most appropriate during this season. One way or the other, he put his signature on the ten points.

“’They are very good points –  and most of them have been fully negotiated,” announced Trump jubilantly. The deal, he added, was “a total and complete victory”.

If so, I’m anxious to find out what a total and complete defeat would look like. For, from where I’m sitting, Iran’s “good points” look very much like the terms of surrender dictated by the victor to the vanquished.

Let me stipulate straight away that we are at the beginning, not the end, of the negotiations. Hence I can comment only on the ten points that Trump likes so much that he chalks them up as yet another triumph of his tenure, possibly the best Peace Deal every SECURED by any US PRESIDENT or any other World Leader.

Sorry, I may be jumping the gun there, for Trump hasn’t yet described the ten points in such terms. But I can confidently predict he will – why break the stylistic habits of a lifetime?

However, on the basis of the information we know already, what was actually achieved during the 39 days of hostilities and endorsed by the ten-point deal to end all deals?

First, Iran agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz for the duration of the ceasefire. That’s welcome news, and the oil markets certainly think so. On the other hand, the Strait of Hormuz was already open before the war started. Moreover, oil tankers could pass through it for free.

However, according to the ten points, each will now have to pay a $1 million toll for the privilege, with Iran’s control over the waterway to be chiselled in stone. Hence, the US will lose something she had before, and Iran will gain something she never had before.

What else? The US will be obligated to compensate Iran for the damage and withdraw all her troops from the region. That sounds to me like America’s ceding a vital strategic position, one she has enjoyed for decades.

Also, the US and her allies must undertake to lift all sanctions on Iran, those first imposed by Jimmy Carter in 1979. Again, Iran’s gain is the West’s loss. As a result, Iran will get richer and stronger, with something telling me she won’t devote her new resources to strictly humanitarian ends.

And, the most glaring concession: the US and her allies must recognise Iran’s right to uranium enrichment. Granted, Iran promises not to use her newly and openly enriched uranium for producing nuclear weapons. That’s all right then – surely the ayatollahs’ word is their bond.

Still, I can’t help wondering what else Iran needs enriched uranium for, considering that the country has the third largest oil reserves in the world (trailing only Saudi Arabia and Venezuela). They have enough energy sloshing underfoot not to want to spend billions on all those reactors, centrifuge cascades and nuclear power plants.

So forgive me for sounding incredulous, but that good and fully negotiated point spells bad news for Israel first and, second, whichever Western country the ayatollahs dislike most. Why, it could even be the US, baptised the ‘Great Satan’ by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 and going by that nickname ever since.

I think Trump should add an eleventh point to the list he likes so much: Iranians must promise not to scream “Death to America” at every public gathering and official function. If Iran agrees, that will be another triumph produced by the self-appointed Dealmaker-in-Chief.

As things look now – and again I must disclaim that we don’t know what will happen in a fortnight and what kind of agreement will actually emerge – America has suffered an embarrassing defeat, not unlike the debacle of the Vietnam War.

Then too the US won a military victory, which, however, didn’t save her from a resounding political defeat. The Vietcong was totally wiped out during the 1968 Tet Offensive, which American ‘liberal’ media malevolently depicted as a defeat.

From then on, it wasn’t Vietcong guerrillas but the regular army of North Vietnam fighting on, and the US had the means of annihilating that enemy too. Military means, that is, not the political ones and nor the will required.

When Trump was issuing his apocalyptic threats to bomb Iran into the Stone Age, destroy her energy infrastructure (something the Geneva Convention identifies as a war crime) and in general obliterate Iran’s civilisation, he was labouring under the same restrictions.

The US, ably assisted by Israel if no one else, had the military means to act on those threats. What Trump emphatically didn’t have was the will to pay the price.

Notwithstanding his deranged and obscene threats and his acolytes’ dark hints about possible nuclear strikes, everyone knew that real victory could only be achieved by a ground invasion. Trump found out what his predecessors and counterparts always knew: you can’t defeat an evil regime from 30,000 feet up in the air.

The US and Israeli air offensive on Iran was spectacularly successful as an exercise in using aerial power. The generals, pilots and weapon designers did their job, and they did it well. So, by the way, did the US Air Force and army in Vietnam. Yet that war was lost, and so – as things look now – has been this one.

It’s clear that in war as in peace Trump was flying by the seat of his pants. He started the hostilities without first setting realistic and achievable objectives. At the beginning, the possibility of using ground forces wasn’t considered even remotely.

If it had been, airborne and other forces would have been deployed in the region before the bombardment began, just in case they might be needed. But Trump, the Greatest Strategist Ever, thought he could bring Iran to her knees by aerial devastation and a popular uprising it would inspire.

The devastation did happen, but no revolution materialised. Yes, Iran’s military capability was severely degraded. But then everyone knew she was no match for US power in anything resembling regular warfare. But Iran is ruled by a terrorist regime, and it fights by terrorist means.

It can wreak havoc by firing cheap drones at America’s allies in the region, threatening to destroy their economies. It can also blackmail the world by dropping a few mines into the Strait of Hormuz and threatening to plunge the world into a recession from hell.

As for its destroyed navy, air force and industrial base, Iran will rebuild them faster than Trump seems to think. China is generous with her proxies, and Iran won’t be short of either money or technology. Plus her own revenue streams will reach maximum flow, what with the Strait tolls and no sanctions.

America, meanwhile, has lost much of her international prestige, and the cruel acronym TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) is on many people’s lips, including in America herself. NATO, the most successful defensive bloc in history (and this isn’t a Trump-style hyperbole) lies in ruins, evil tyrants such as Putin and Xi are getting more and more emboldened.

And Iran’s appetite for international terrorism is certainly more ravenous than it ever was, which is saying a lot.

Meanwhile, just hours ago, Iran stopped oil tankers reluctant to pay a king’s ransom to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, launched a drone strike on a Saudi oil pipeline and demanded Israel cease her attacks on Lebanon.  

A total and complete victory indeed. The question is: for whom?

Before taking our places in the pews, we checked on the music to be played during the liturgy. Turned out it was Palestrina, Taverner and Bach – our church is laudably traditional.

True enough, the Palestrina and Taverner were indeed sung, but Bach was replaced with the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. That was like replacing paschal lamb with thin gruel.

One of many English eccentricities is an overblown affection for Handel, often in preference to Bach. Handel was doubtless a great composer, but he missed the chance of becoming even a greater one when he moved to England at age 27.

England had reached her musical peak in the previous century, and by the time Handel arrived, English tastes had begun to run towards the lighter, not to say frivolous, end. George Frideric was happy to oblige – I suppose that was a condition for naturalisation.

Bach, who was born in the same year as Handel, wisely stayed in Germany and continued to write sublime music without ever catering to popular tastes. Schopenhauer must have had Handel and Bach in mind when he explained the difference between talent and genius: “Talent hits targets no one else can hit; genius hits targets no one else can see.”

As it was, Handel wrote many fine pieces, although Messiah isn’t one of them. I suppose it would be just about passable had it not been played to death by millions of giftless hacks, including those wielding original instruments with a marked absence of originality. By now, the Hallelujah Chorus, especially, sounds downright trite.

That minor gripe aside, the Latin Mass was wonderful – only Latin can match (exceed?) the grandeur of the liturgical English language of the 16^th and 17^th centuries. And Fr Paschal Ryan’s homily was perfect, based as it was on John 20: 1-10.

On hearing from Mary Magdalene that Jesus’s tomb was empty, Simon Peter and another disciple, “the one Jesus loved”, rushed to the tomb to make sure for themselves. But didn’t Jesus love his other apostles too, not just John? Fr Paschal (an aptronym if I ever saw one) asked that question, which gave him an opening to talk about God’s love being shown in different ways to different people.

And so on in the same vein, the whole homily revolving around words like ‘resurrection’, ‘grace’, ‘love’, ‘life everlasting’. The oration was emotionally moving and intellectually satisfying: that’s what an Easter homily should be like.

However, the Most Rev Dame Sarah Mullally, the Archbishop of Canterbury seems to disagree. “Today, as we shout with joy that Christ is risen, let us pray and call with renewed urgency for an end to the violence and destruction in the Middle East and the Gulf,” she preached.

And the Most Rev Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York, added his own anathema to the “literally pointless conflict consuming the Middle East”. Literally as opposed to figuratively, Your Grace?

Speaking from the central balcony of St Peter’s Basilica, His Holiness Pope Leo also told us to “implore the Lord to grant his peace to a world ravaged by wars and marked by a hatred and indifference that make us feel powerless in the face of evil”.

Mercifully, Pope Leo didn’t specify the region he had in mind, but the implication was clear. I must come out in defence of the US and Israel: accuse them of anything you like, but they are certainly not indifferent in the face of evil.

All God’s children want that “violence and destruction” to end, but the more discerning ones wouldn’t be happy with just any old end. Those who see that war as one fought against the spread of evil believe victory is the only acceptable outcome of the hostilities.

This in no way contradicts the traditional Christian teaching on just war: wars are evil, but they must be condoned if they prevent a greater evil. That issue has been settled in the church since the time of St Ambrose (d. 397) and St Augustine of Hippo (d. 430).

Attempts by modern churchmen to read pacifism into Scripture are rooted not in theological rigour but in ideological zeal. One could indeed cite any number of peace-loving passages from both Testaments, but there is no shortage of  bellicose ones either. (I’ll spare you a thesaurus of appropriate quotations.)

That’s why church doctrine is so vital: the greatest minds in history have taken centuries to work such conundrums out, to show that, while Scripture is sometimes paradoxical, it’s never contradictory.

The Pope not only called for the end of all hostilities but also helpfully suggested how that end could be achieved: “Let those who have weapons lay them down. Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace. Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue.”

Quite. A dialogue with the ayatollahs will stop their evil shenanigans promoting terrorism and genocide. A dialogue with Putin will stop Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine. All it takes is a kind word and perhaps a hug.

I wonder if His Holiness is angling for a position on Trump’s negotiation team, perhaps to replace either Witkoff or Kushner. If so, he’ll quickly realise that Ambrose and Augustine were right: some evil can only be stopped by violence, regrettable though it might be.

P.S. Trump knows it, although I’m not sure about his heartfelt Easter message either: “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F*****’ Strait, you crazy b*******, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

I think it was terribly wrong: F*****’ should have been a lower-case ‘f’. And just five asterisks and an apostrophe after the ‘F’ mean that the final ‘g’ was dropped. That’s a bit blue collar for a statesman, wouldn’t you say? 

(This is my go-to Easter message, used before and recycled. I don’t think I could improve on it appreciably today, certainly not with everything else that’s going on. So I hope you’ll agree that repetition can be the mother not only of all learning, but also of some jubilation. I do, however, regret that King Charles reserves his congratulatory messages for Eid, not Easter. )

No one can name a year, a century or an age that changed man and his world for ever.

But it’s easy to say which day did just that. Easter Sunday, 1,993 years ago today (probably).

Hellenic man had always struggled with death, its finality, its cruelty, its nothingness. Death seemed to render life meaningless, deprive it of any sense of purpose.

Life itself had to be regarded as the purpose of life, and the Hellenes, weaned as they were on logic, couldn’t fail to see a self-refuting paradox there.

To be sure, there were all sorts of Orphic fantasies about afterlife, but that’s what they were and were seen to be – fantasies.

And then, on this day, 1,993 years ago, people weren’t just told but shown that, just as there is death in life, so there is life in death.

Now they knew there was no such thing as a happy ending to life. If it was to be happy, it was not the ending.

There had never been such rejoicing, never such an outburst of hope, liberation and energy. Not only did imitating God in Christ become man’s moral commitment. The ability to do so became his ontological property.

Man was no longer a short-term lodger in life; he became an eternal occupant. He could now imitate Christ not only by being good but also by being creative. And create he did.

Thus, on this day 1,993 years ago a new civilisation was born, the likes of which the world had never seen, nor ever will see. More important, a new family came into existence.

Universal brotherhood became a reality: all men were brothers – not because someone said so, but because they all had the same father.

This unity was a bond far stronger than even the ordinary, what is today witlessly called ‘biological’, family. And it certainly betokened a much greater concord than any worldly alliances, blocs, contracts, agreements, political unions – or for that matter nations or races.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus,” explained Paul, making every subsequent, secular promise of equality sound puny and vulgar.

It has not always worked out that way. Just like the ancient Hebrews who were dispersed because they broke God’s covenant, the world pushed aside the lifebelt divinely offered.

It hoped to find unity in itself – only to find discord, devastation and the kind of spiritual emptiness for which no material riches can possibly make up.

But the lifebelt was not taken away. It still undulates with the waves, still within reach of anyone ready to grasp it.

This makes today the most joyous day of the year – regardless of whether or not we are Christians, or what kind of Christians.

On this day we can forget our differences and again sense we are all brothers united in the great hope of peace on earth and life everlasting. We can all, regardless of where we live, rejoice on hearing these words, ringing, thundering in whatever language they are spoken:

Christ is risen!

Le Christ est ressuscité!

Christus ist auferstanden!

Cristo ha resucitado!

Cristo è risorto!

Kristus on üles tõusnud!

Kristus er oppstanden!

Xристос воскрес!

Chrystus zmartwychwstał!

Kristus vstal z mrtvých!

Cristo ressuscitou!

Kristus ir augšāmcēlies!

Christus is verrezen!

Χριστὸς ἀνέστη!

Krisztus feltámadt!

Kristus är uppstånden!

Kristus prisikėlė!

Kristus nousi kuolleista!

Hristos a înviat!

INDEED HE IS RISEN!