Month: May 2026

The title may be misleading in that I never knew Claudine Longet, nor anyone who might have known her, nor anyone who… well, you get the picture. It’s just that Longet, a minor French actress and singer who died at age 84, was a signpost in my life.

In 1976, when she first made the front pages of the world’s major papers, I was still coming to terms with life in the West. Having left Russia in 1973, I lived in Houston at the time, still trying to figure out how the West worked.

Miss Longet didn’t come to the world’s attention because of her modest talents. Rather that happened because she shot and killed her lover, the champion skier Spider Sabich. That happened in Aspen, which might as well have been on Mars as far as I was concerned.

I had only a vague notion of the place. All I knew was that Aspen was a Colorado ski resort fancied by celebrities, which is to say by people I had never heard of.

Apparently, both Sabich and Longet qualified as such, although I couldn’t tell them from Adam and Eve, respectively. That gap in my education didn’t survive unfilled for long. The case was the talk of the town. There was no escape, it was in every newspaper or TV newscast and at every dinner party as a topic of incessant gossip.

Thus I couldn’t help finding out that Longet was a divorced wife of the crooner Andy Williams, who was adored by everyone, but unknown to me. Her photos showed she was good-looking, but not sufficiently so to disturb my sleep.

The shooting incident later inspired a song by the Rolling Stones, and there I found myself on firmer ground: I had heard of them and knew they were some kind of rock group. No, of course I had never heard any of their songs, need you ask?

But I did hear that one because the case had piqued my curiosity. “Now only Spider knows for sure,” the song went, “But he ain’t talkin’ about it anymore/ Is he, Claudine?/ There’s blood in the chalet/ And blood in the snow…”.

The song came a couple of years after the event, but the only piece of verse I recall from 1976 was a limerick in National Lampoon: “There once was a girl named Longet/ Who flew into Aspen to stay./ Along came the Spider/ And sat down beside her,/ And she blew the poor f***er away.”

I thought the limerick was quite funny, and I was proud of myself for getting the cultural allusion. But my understanding of Western, specifically American, legality was still too sketchy for me to get my head around the subsequent trial.

The circumstances of the crime seemed fairly straightforward to me. Actually, the Rolling Stones got it wrong: there was indeed blood in the chalet, but not in the snow. Longet shot Sabich point-blank in his bathroom, killing him on the spot and therefore rendering him unable to have one last run on the slopes.

However, because Longet claimed the gun went off by accident, she was only charged with reckless manslaughter, not homicide. Some accident, I thought at the time – and still do.

Any gun owner knows the mantra: don’t point a weapon at anything you don’t intend to shoot. To kill Sabich with such brutal efficiency, Longet had to carry the weapon into the bathroom, which struck me as odd. One doesn’t think of such places as pistol ranges.

Then she had to aim her .22 Luger at Sabich and pull the trigger. Even assuming she didn’t mean to do so, it was still manslaughter, if one with extenuating circumstances. Or so I thought.

Anyway, even the charge of reckless manslaughter called for a stiff sentence, up to 10 years, according to the obituaries. However, Longet claimed she only asked Sabich to teach her how to use the safety-catch. Alas, before he could give her the benefit of his superior expertise, the gun discharged all by itself, with no human agency involved.

Buying that story should have involved not just suspension of disbelief but discounting disbelief even as a remote possibility.

Longet fired her shot from three feet, and the bullet hit Sabich in the stomach. That meant she had to hold the weapon at her waist, pointing at her target. Had she merely wished to ask for a quick lesson in gun handling, wouldn’t she have held the pistol chest high to hand it to Sabich?

The prosecutors asked many such questions, also pointing out that the body’s position on the floor, prone and facing away, didn’t tally with Longet’s story. But the prosecution was hamstrung because much of its evidence was ruled inadmissible.

One such piece of evidence was Longet’s highly explicit diary that the prosecution desperately wanted to present. The document must have suggested malice aforethought, for otherwise the prosecution wouldn’t have been as determined to include the diary as the defence was to exclude it.

But the police seized the journal without a proper warrant, which kept it out of the proceedings. Then Longet’s blood tests showed a high content of alcohol and cocaine, but those tests too were ruled inadmissible because they had been improperly administered.

In the end, the judge told the jury it had the option of convicting Longet of the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide, a misdemeanour. The jury jumped at the chance, and Longet was sentenced to 30 days – no, not years, don’t be silly – and told she could serve it at a time of her choosing.

Such a derisory sentence was largely due to the impeccably sound rhetoric of her co-counsel. Who could resist such arguments as “ she never believed that this tiny little bullet could hurt anybody”?

Unlike artillery shells, all bullets are more or less tiny. Hence, extrapolating from that argument, the claim was that Longet didn’t believe guns could kill. That should have called for lifelong commitment to a facility for the criminally insane.

Anyway, if she didn’t think guns could hurt anyone, what was the point in owning one in the first place? And if she didn’t think a bullet could hurt, didn’t that prove indirectly that she meant to fire it?

But the other argument mentioned in the obituaries was even better: “This is not an inanimate object over here,” orated her co-counsel. “This is a woman who is living, breathing, and suffering. Mentally hold her hand. And ask yourselves: Guilty? Or not guilty?”

Yes, but that living, breathing woman killed her living, breathing lover by firing that tiny inanimate object through his pancreas. So what was the point exactly? Well, whatever it was, that demagoguery carried the day.

When I read about that at the time, I was aghast. I simply couldn’t believe how far the law could veer away from justice. The thought that some procedural mishaps and spurious arguments could get a murderer off the hook was unbearable to me.

Since then I’ve mitigated my position somewhat. It’s good to have a penal system that can not only punish a criminal, but also protect his ancient rights. If cops could seize evidence without due process or, worse still, tamper with it, it’s not only criminals but also ordinary citizens like you and me who’d feel unsafe. Having lived in Russia for 25 years, I can attest to that.

However, reductio ad absurdum could kill even any sound system stone-dead. Pushed to its logical extreme, even the postulates of presumed innocence and reasonable doubt can shatter against the wall of casuistic nitpicking.

Looking at two celebrity trials in the US, those of Longet and OJ Simpson 20 years later, one is bound to lament the law served, but justice abused.

Had I sat on that Aspen jury, I would have replied to the counsel’s question with an unequivocal “guilty as Cain” (or rather his sister that naughty boy later married). But because that trial made me ponder law and justice, the Western concept thereof, I’m grateful to Longet, in an odd sort of way.

Claudine Longet, RIP  

The Second World War ended 81 years ago – true or false? If you are anywhere but in Russia, definitely and verifiably true. However, if you have the misfortune of living in Russia, false on all counts.

First, you ignoramus you, what’s that with the Second World War? Russia fought the Great Patriotic War, and don’t you ever forget it.

This is an important distinction: the Second World War started on 1 September, 1939; the Great Patriotic War on 22 June, 1941. Until then the Soviet Union had been faithfully pursuing a policy of peace.

Admittedly, it pursued peace in rather eccentric ways. First, following the 1939 (Non)-Aggression Pact with Hitler, the Soviets annexed Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bessarabia and Bukovina, along with the eastern half of Poland. But fair enough, since those invasions succeeded without a shot fired, perhaps you can’t say Russia was at war.

But then things got more interesting. After the Nazis attacked Poland on 1 September, 1939, the Second World War officially started. But the Soviets took no part in it, and if you say anything different, you could go to prison in Russia.

What about the Soviet attack on rump Poland from the east on 17 September, 1939? I hear you ask. Yes, I’ll grant you that 3,000 Red Army soldiers were killed then, and some 10,000 went missing.

But unlike the German and Polish casualties, these had nothing to do with the Second World War. Stalin was merely helping out his ally Hitler, that’s all. A fallen German or Polish soldier was killed in that war. A Russian soldier was, well, just killed.

Then there was that conflict with Finland in the winter of 1939-1940. Considering that the Red Army lost some 500,000 men there, one has to agree begrudgingly that it was indeed a war. But it had nothing to do with the Second World War in which capitalist countries were fighting one another. Stalin’s Winter War was just a pursuit of peace by other means.

If all those little conflicts (what’s a few hundred thousand casualties here or there?) were less than wars, the Great Patriotic War was much more than just a war. As far as Putin’s Russia is concerned, it’s the most significant event in the history of Russia, possibly the world.

And that’s another reason the opening sentence above is false. As far as the Russians are concerned, that war never ended. It lives on in the heart of every Russian – or is supposed to on pain of lengthy imprisonment.

The whole ideology of post-Soviet Russia is based on that 1945 victory over Nazi Germany. All over the country, one can see placards, bumper stickers and ensigns screaming “We can do it again!” They mean it too. The war on the Ukraine isn’t just a war on the Ukraine.  

With a characteristic Russian disdain for detail, they adorn those rousing words with the imperial St George’s ribbons, which during the Great Patriotic War were only used by Gen. Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army. This raises the question of what exactly they can do again.

Over a million Soviet soldiers joined Vlasov to fight Stalin on Hitler’s side. One can infer that a repeat performance would involve over a million Russian soldiers deserting (or being taken prisoner) and then joining, say, the Ukrainians fighting against Russia. But no, let’s not make too much of that little design error. We’ve all made mistakes, haven’t we?

Anyway, my subject today isn’t Putin’s turning that great tragedy of 26 million Soviets perishing in Stalin’s war into a ghoulish state ideology. It’s not even about Soviet complicity in the Second World War, which Stalin entered as Hitler’s ally.

It’s the way the Soviets treated their veterans, which was so different from the way the Americans treated theirs. Here one has to make an important distinction between any old Soviet veterans and returning POWs. In every civilised country, such lucky survivors are treated as heroes. Not in Russia though.

Historically, the Russians took a dim view of their soldiers who had fallen into enemy hands and then came back. Most of the time, returning POWs were officially seen as deserters, and unofficially as people contaminated by the West and therefore in need of fumigation.

To that end, when the 16^th century Polish king Stefan Batory released 2,300 Russian POWs, they were all summarily slaughtered on return. This fine tradition had survived until modern times when Stalin declared, “There are no Soviet POWs, only traitors”.

He practised what he preached: most of the returning POWs during the Russo-Finnish and Russo-German wars were shot, imprisoned or exiled (my father was fortunate to have fallen into the last category). It’s useful to remember we’re talking millions of people here.

To cite one example, as a tribute to the tradition going back to Ivan the Terrible, when, after the Winter War, the Finns returned to Russia 5,700 Red Army POWs, they were all taken to an Arctic island never to be seen again.

But what about those brave soldiers who hadn’t ‘betrayed’ their country by being taken prisoner? Surely they were treated with the same care and respect as American veterans were treated in their country?

Not quite. At this point, I stop being a writer and become a translator. This is what an article I read this morning says:

“On 1 January, 1948, following ‘numerous requests from USSR citizens’, pensions for military decorations were cancelled. So was free travel on public transport for decorated veterans. So was any priority in receiving residences.

“Education became very expensive – back in 1940 Stalin introduced tuition fees for secondary schools and universities. Secondary schools charged 200 roubles a year, universities cost 400 roubles in Moscow, Leningrad and republican centres, and 300 in other cities (tuition fees were abolished only in 1956, after Stalin’s death).

“In addition, destitute people were robbed by the confiscatory money reform of 1947. [Redenomination swapped all cash into new roubles at 10 to 1. That wiped out whatever meagre savings people had.]

“About 10 million soldiers came back from the front as invalids to one extent or another. Some 775,000 had debilitating head wounds, 155,000 lost an eye, 54,000 were blind, 3,000,000 lost one arm, 1,100,000 both arms, hundreds of thousands lost one leg or both. Many invalids were physically incapable of working and had to beg.

“To combat those decorated invalids, in 1948 the government issued a directive ‘On the relocation to remote regions of persons malevolently shirking work in agriculture and living in an anti-social parasitic manner’. Invalids, war heroes, began to be deported from major cities.

“In 1951 Stalin ordered that the problem be solved radically, by ‘voluntarily-forcibly’ [whatever that means] shipping all invalids caught begging to guarded facilities [aka prisons].

“By contrast, in the USA:

“FDR signed the 1944 G.I. Bill establishing benefits for returning veterans of the Second World War. Among the benefits were university and college scholarships.

“As a result, by 1947 veterans made up 47 per cent of all college students. Within the framework of that law, 7.8 million veterans took advantage of scholarships, with 2.2 million going to colleges and universities and another 5.6 million to other institutions. Historians and economists regard the G.I. Bill as a major political and economic success. It made a significant contribution to the preservation of America’s human capital and boosted the country’s long-term economic growth.

“Veterans were also given an unemployment benefit of $20 a week [about $400 today]. Four billion dollars were allocated for that and also to help veterans find employment. Special hospitals for veterans were built. Discounted mortgages and credits were introduced. An inexpensive suburban house in the US cost about $8,000. A war veteran could buy it for $400, and millions of veterans’ families began to live in their own houses.”

Those bygones weren’t allowed to remain bygones. Throughout the 1990s, Moscow (the only Russian city I visited then) was overrun with ‘Afghan’ beggars. They weren’t actual Afghans but impeccably Russian veterans of the Soviet 1979-1989 war on Afghanistan.

However, many of them did find gainful employment as Mafia enforcers and hitmen during the gang wars that put Al Capone’s Chicago to shame. This means Russia has something to look forward to.

While there were only about 650,000 trained ‘Afghan’ killers let loose on Russian cities, some 2,000,000 veterans will come back when Putin’s excursion into the Ukraine finally ends. Some 200,000 of them will be career criminals who won a commuted sentence in exchange for killing Ukrainians.

Those Russians who still remember the orgy of violence in the 90s do some mental arithmetic, multiplying those incidents by at least three. They know that crime and begging will be the only career options available to the veterans. Guess which they’ll choose, those who still have a full complement of limbs, that is.  

Good taste can suppress a bad thought, but not the other way around. Nothing can suppress bad taste, nor even keep it from inflicting damage that goes far beyond mere aesthetics.

One can easily attack all the warped orthodoxies of modernity from a purely commonsensical position, but it’s even easier to do so on aesthetic grounds.

Just look at every constituent of wokery: feminism, LGBT fanaticism, ‘hate’ crimes (as opposed to love crimes?), abortion, euthanasia, net zero fanaticism, obsession with race, hatred of history posing as ‘anti-colonialism’, DEI, cultural appropriation and so forth.

Using sequential logic to get to the bottom of such aberrations isn’t difficult, but it would be a total waste of brain cells. One can ponder rationally only rational ideas, which none of those above is. It’s better to dismiss those travesties out of hand simply because they are all in bad taste.

But here’s the real problem: bad taste is the new good taste. Tastelessness has been raised to a virtue, and it didn’t just happen yesterday. Bad taste is the formative impulse of modernity.

This brings to mind Diana Vreeland (d. 1989), the long-time editor of Vogue magazine. When she once said, “nothing is as communicative as bad taste”, she meant it positively. Bad taste was to her something to celebrate, not decry.

Good taste was boring, predictable, staid, whereas bad taste betokened imagination, creativity and flamboyance (“It’s hearty, it’s healthy, it’s physical”). It also kept publications like Vogue in business, she could have added but didn’t.

It’s the very nature of modernity that has turned bad taste into a pandemic leaving in its wake the corpses of everything beautiful, noble and honourable. The pandemic is triggered by an aggressive virus: modern societies are all dedicated to the advancement of the common man, which doesn’t sound like a bad idea at first.

However, when that goal is pursued with fanatical zeal and unrelenting consistency, the common man, rather than benefiting from civilisation, begins to shape it. That human sub-species gains the power to impose his tastes, urges and goals on the whole society – with devastating effects.

If you look at all modern democracies – with so few exceptions that I can’t think of one offhand – you’ll see how effectively and irreversibly the common man has established his despotic rule.

This goes for politics too. The common man is so self-satisfied that he is incapable of electing his superiors. He doesn’t believe anyone is, nor possibly can be, superior to him, which is why he elects nonentities shaped in his own image as enthusiastically as he rejects them soon thereafter – only to replace them with other nonentities.

This doesn’t mean the common man’s interests shouldn’t be represented in government. The problem is that modern democracies end up representing not the common man’s interests but his wishes, which has been known as the recipe for disaster since, well, for ever. Burke wrote something to that effect, and he died in 1797.

If you look at the two current leaders of the most populous Anglophone states, the US and Britain, you’ll find any number of policies they disagree on. Trump has quite a few worthy ones; Starmer, none that I can discern.

Yet it’s tedious trying to find rhyme or reason in either case, or lament their absence. Intuitive aesthetic rejection ought to come more naturally: both men are bone-crushingly tasteless, each in his own way.

If Trump had any aesthetic check valve built in, he wouldn’t be saying 90 per cent of the things he says, nor doing half the things he does. When it comes to Starmer, raise both proportions to 100 per cent. For example, if he had a modicum of taste, he wouldn’t be clinging so greedily to his job, having caused serious damage both to his party and, more important, to his country.

One could sympathise with his stubbornness if he fought his detractors tooth and nail because he knew that any possible replacement would be even worse. There would even be a certain elegance to that stance.

But Starmer is motivated by nothing but naked self-interest and powerlust fuelled by the realisation that, without his job he’d be less than zero, a negative value. What can be more tasteless than this combination of egoism and insecurity?

If Starmer is an egoist, Trump is also an egotist, and both are in bad taste, elucidating different facets of that noxious vice.

Unchecked democracy is an ideal political tool for the common man’s ascendancy; unchecked commercialism, a perfect aesthetic one. And unchecked practice of all seven deadly sins, falsely extolled as an expression of individuality, has subjected society to the implicit moral code of the common man, one based on asocial selfishness.

This morning I came across a Nabokov quotation, and I like things he said more unequivocally than the books he wrote. In his autobiography, Speak, Memory, Nabokov defined tasteless people as: “Those who know Pushkin from Tchaikovsky’s disgusting libretto, weep over Italian operas and like paintings that ‘tell a story’.”

It was on aesthetic other the any other, grounds that Nabokov instantly rejected Bolshevism, as did Bunin, the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize. Other celebrated Russian writers of the time, such as Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetayeva, Blok, Andreyev, tried to find a balanced view by putting the positives on one side of the seesaw and the negatives on the other. Nabokov and Bunin just winced squeamishly and ran for their lives.

The intellect can be fickle, whereas good taste tends to be infallible – even when judging matters of the mind and spirit. If blessed with good taste, atheists wouldn’t remain atheists; Lefties wouldn’t remain Left; the woke wouldn’t remain woke.

And, of course, the 2026 BBC Proms wouldn’t make Henry Wood spin in his grave by including such highlights as Marvin Gaye: Prince of Soul, Under African Skies from Simon’s Graceland, and Enchanted: Alan Menken’s Music for Disney.

That catering to popular tastes destroys art is easy to show, but it isn’t especially hard to demonstrate a similar tendency in every walk of life, including politics. Diana Vreeland must be smiling proudly, wherever she is. Her view of life has been amply vindicated.

P.S. Speaking of rotten taste, could someone please explain to our hacks that ‘fortuitous’ isn’t the posh way of saying ‘fortunate’, ‘risqué’ isn’t the posh way of saying ‘risky’ — and saying ‘posh’ isn’t posh. Also, girls trafficked by Epstein were his ‘victims’, not his ‘survivors’. He didn’t try to kill them.

P.P.S. No one with good taste would have forced King Charles III to deliver that awful speech at the Opening of Parliament. But more on that tomorrow.

The little matter of attribution first: St Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) paraphrased so many aphorisms first uttered by St Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) that it’s often hard to know where credit is due.

Whenever that’s the case, I’ll attribute their words of wisdom to AA, just to be on the safe side.

This is a disclaimer designed to forestall accusations of ignorance likely to come from pedantic readers wishing to take me down a peg – pedants love soft targets after all.

So here are two seminal adages I’ll attribute to AA not to play favourites. First, “I do not seek to understand so that I may believe, but rather, I believe so that I may understand.” (Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam.)

Second, AA’s definition of culture as “faith seeking understanding”. (Fides quaerens intellectum.)

Many a subsequent thinker has correctly interpreted these epigrams as affirming the primacy of faith over ratiocination as a pathway to God. Many a subsequent Protestant thinker has used that unassailable position to advance into a minefield strewn with blanket denials of intellect as a tool of approaching God.

When the sublime Russian pianist Maria Yudina said, “Music is my way to God, although I know other ways exist too,” her admirers, me included, applauded her wisdom. All roads may or may not lead to Rome, but many roads definitely can lead to God. However, if music is allowed to act in that capacity, why should the mind be disqualified?

Notice that both statements by AA specify understanding, cultural or intellectual, as the desirable product of faith. Faith is the be all, but it doesn’t have to be the end all.

It can be though. Many people are no more capable of grappling with theological arcana than they are capable of decorticating a Bach fugue. Such people just say “I believe” and leave it at that. I respect such staunch believers (even though most of them are Protestants), a feeling they don’t invariably reciprocate.

“We can’t understand God”, they say, and they are right. As I say too often, a higher system can understand a lower one, but not the other way around. Yet we can seek understanding, in the hope that such a quest can lead us to faith or raise us to its new height and greater refinement.

We may not be able to rationalise, but we can always post-rationalise. Isn’t this roughly what AA meant?

This brings to mind apocryphal stories involving Archimedes’s bathtub, Newton’s apple and Mendeleyev’s dream. Archimedes was said to be taking a bath when he realised that submerged objects displace water equal to their volume. Newton was supposedly hit on the head by a falling apple, which gave him a headache and a grasp of gravity. And Mendeleyev is said to have seen his periodic table in his dream.

People who peddle such fables usually forget to mention that the three scientists then spent innumerable days of hard slog, trying to express their flashes of inspiration in a scientifically intelligible form.

Similarly, Galileo once said that God created the universe as a book written in the language of mathematics. But it was people like him who realised this and translated that divine book into the concrete realities of geometrical shapes, algebraic formulas and trigonometric relationships.

Do you see what I’m getting at?

For a believer, faith is to religious understanding what a hypothesis is for a scientist. When a physicist embarks on a search for yet another sub-atomic particle, he starts from an act of faith. He has to believe that particle exists, and that belief inspires all his subsequent experimental work. It’s his faith, aka hypothesis, that opens a door through which he can enter the world where his sub-atomic particle may reside.

In exactly the same way, theological thought hides behind a closed door that can only be opened with the key of faith. This is another way of paraphrasing AA’s epigrams.

All this is basic stuff. Only especially obtuse Protestants will reject such notions, insisting on solo scriptura and all such nonsense. Why think if the Bible says it all? Quite.

But the Bible says not only “turn the other cheek”, but also “I came not to send peace, but a sword”. It says “love thy father and mother”, but also “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”

How do we reconcile such mutually exclusive statements, Mr Obtuse Protestant? Any way we choose, is it? You have your interpretation, I have mine, and either of us is either right or wrong. We are both entitled to our opinion.

It’s this sort of solipsistic anarchy that predictably turned the Reformation into the anteroom of atheism. But now I’m going to enrage my Protestant friends even more, by pushing the analogy between faith and hypothesis a bit further.

A scientist possibly doesn’t seek an exorbitant research grant because he is sure that particle exists. He thinks it may or may not exist, and he doesn’t mind spending a lot of time, effort and money to find out one way or the other.

In the end, he may not prove that particle exists, the same way he can prove that molecules exist. However, looking at the behaviour of other particles, he may detect some irregularities that can only be explained by the presence of another particle in close proximity. He is therefore sure that particle exists, because only its existence can explain all the pre-established facts.

That’s how the planet Neptune was discovered in 1846. Noticing odd un-Newtonian deflections in Uranus’s orbit, French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier concluded they could only be caused by the presence of another planet nearby. German astronomer Johannn Gottfried Galle then found Neptune within one degree of the predicted location.

Proceeding in a similar fashion, an agnostic may set himself the intellectual task of proving or disproving God’s existence. Yet such proofs can’t possibly exist, if by proof we mean the irrefutable, laboratory-standard outcome of a forensic investigation. By any sensible definition of God, he is transcendent and hence beyond human understanding.

However, even though our agnostic will be frustrated in his search for proofs, he’ll be rewarded by a discovery of numerous indications. He’ll stumble on any number of facts that can’t be ascribed to any other source than God.

Music may certainly be one of them, and that’s what Yudina meant when identifying her art as a pathway to God. Anyone who fails to hear God speaking through, say, the slow movements of Bach’s Italian Concerto or Mozart’s K488 is lost to faith or, for that matter, music.

Music aside, only the presence of God can explain things that are manifestly beyond the reach of natural science. What’s a mind? What’s a thought? Why are objects like wheat stalks, tree leaves or even our fingers structured according to the golden section?

(By the way, so is most music, Mozart’s specifically, even though one can’t see the composer making protracted calculations to that effect by moving his quill along lined paper.)

A man can thus come to believe God by a simple weighing of intellectual pros and cons, eliminating all possibilities but one. As that great theologian Sherlock Holmes put it, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.

Messrs Anselm and Augustine would reject this line of thought out of hand, and perhaps they would be right. But I’m not so sure. I rather agree with Yudina or, to cite a more authoritative religious source, Blaise Pascal, who said many sage things in spite of being a Jansenite.

Pascal wrote in his Pensées, echoing a similar thought in Jeremiah, “You would not seek me if you had not already found me.” (“Tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne m’avais trouvé”). It shouldn’t matter whether one seeks with one’s heart, as Jeremiah put it, or with one’s mind.

The very desire to seek God, by whatever means, proves that God has already touched the seeker with a gift of grace. AA spoke the truth, but theirs wasn’t the whole truth. No one’s is, except God’s.

What a pathetic show that Victory Day parade was. No armour, no ICBMs, practically no planes except a few aerobics performers flying antediluvian SUs.

Now that the Ukrainians have drones and missiles with enough range to rain on that parade, Putin decided not to risk turning Red Square into a scrapyard of charred tanks. It’s not as if there was a shortage of armour around Moscow.

Ever since Ukrainians learned how to use tanks for target practice, most of those Russian machines have been deployed a safe distance from the front line. However, Putin wisely judged that they wouldn’t be safe in central Moscow yesterday. Russian air defences are too permeable, for all the recent technological advances.

The absence of tanks and rockets was neatly complemented by the near-absence of foreign dignitaries. Even the presidents of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan didn’t want to attend, and Putin had to beg them to make an appearance. Beg, not threaten to inflict the proverbial ten plagues – he knew his threats wouldn’t be taken seriously.

Zelensky’s threat was taken very seriously though. He hinted several times that his own missiles just might take part in that parade, to celebrate the occasion with some festive fireworks. That forced Putin to beg – that dread word again – Trump to ask Zelensky to desist. The Donald was only too happy to oblige, if only to show that his words still carry weight with the Ukraine.

They really don’t. It’s just that Zelensky has probably heard the old chess adage (attributed to Aron Nimzowitsch) saying that a threat is stronger than its execution. That particular threat was made credible by a Moscow upmarket high-rise having been hit on Tuesday, just a couple of miles from Red Square.

Then of course Putin had to deliver a speech, in which he described NATO in roughly similar terms to those Stalin reserved for the Nazi invaders in 1941. That dastardly alliance, explained Vlad, is “funding and supporting” the Ukraine’s aggression against Russia, which doesn’t prevent “our heroes” from advancing.

“Our heroes” haven’t done much advancing lately, nor indeed over the past 12 years. All they have to show for their heroism is a measly 20 per cent of the Ukraine’s territory.

The Red Army took less than a year to take all of the Ukraine in 1944, and the Nazis were no slouches in defence. Putin ought to have done himself a favour by shutting up, not to encourage people to draw such comparisons.

But he doesn’t feel he has to practise self-restraint: the Russians have been brainwashed so thoroughly that they will believe any rubbish uttered by their chieftain. Why, they even believe it was the Ukraine that attacked Russia, not vice versa.

Even so, one has to admire the nerve it takes to make that claim ad urbi et orbi. The orbi is a great deal less credulous than the urbi, and one can just hear people say, “Yeah, right. It was the Ukrainian army of murderers, rapists and looters that swept into Russia to destroy her as a sovereign nation and subject her population to genocide. Of course it was, who could’ve ever doubted that.”

I was especially moved by the sight of North Korean troops goosestepping through Red Square. Some 14,000 have been sent by Kim to die for his doppelgänger in the Kremlin, and about half of them have duly done so.

The parade’s Tannoy announcer praised them for their “mass heroism, selflessness and courage”, displayed in expelling “neo-Nazi invaders” from the Ukraine. I get it: Ukrainians invaded the Ukraine, and it takes Kim’s slaves to reclaim their ancestral land some 4,500 miles from Korea. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

The whole obscenity lasted just 45 minutes, and Putin spoke for only 10 minutes. Let me tell you, wit isn’t the only thing brevity is the soul of. It can also be the soul of a despot knowing that his end is near and being unable to do anything about it.

Putin ended on a bravura note: “Victory has always been and always will be ours.” Tell that to the marines, Vlad. Provided you have any left.

P.S. They say there’s always the first time for everything, and this morning at Mass I found a confirmation of that truism. That’s the thing with truisms: they usually earn that status by being true.

Until this morning. I had never in my life heard Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues (or rather just one Fugue, No. 4 if I’m not mistaken) played as liturgical organ music. Now I have, and all I can say is it didn’t sound out of place even though it was followed by Byrd, Monteverdi and Bach.

Tyrants of every hue, be it autocratic, totalitarian, democratic or liberal-democratic, have a vested interest in keeping the population ignorant. They remember that, for the one-eyed man to be king, he first has to blind everyone else.

That’s why British grammar schools, all state-funded, were destroyed in the 1960s. Anthony Crosland, Secretary of State for Education (1965–1967), famously declared: “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f***ing grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland”.

He was as good as his word, or almost. If there is something Left-wing tyrants are good at, it’s breaking something that works well for most people and replacing it with something that sounds good to evil ideologues.

Britain’s three-tier education system was a burr under Labour’s blanket. Grammar schools were elective, only admitting children who did well in 11-Plus examinations. Those less capable went to technical or secondary modern schools, where the accent was more on practical skills than on recondite academic disciplines.

The lines separating the tiers were fluid: underachieving grammar school pupils could be sent down, while gifted secondary modern pupils could move up. As a result, some 20 per cent of the population were well-educated, with the rest literate, numerate and more than capable of fending for themselves in the rough-and-tumble of grown-up life.

That wasn’t good enough for Left-wing tyrants. Where was equality in that system? If it was the last thing they did, they were committed to one system for all, with everyone emerging equally ignorant and equally corrupted by wicked brainwashing.

Now, by chance I happened to glance at the curriculum of one of Moscow’s top grammar schools before the revolution, the Polivanov gymnasium. Gymnasia were an equivalent of English grammar schools: elective, state-funded and usually successful.

Pre-revolutionary gymnasia provided a much better education, certainly in the humanities, than post-revolutionary universities. I can attest to that, having been fortunate to know several old alumni of those schools who made me ashamed of my university training.

The Polivanov gymnasium was a venerable Moscow institution. Its graduates included poets Valery Bryusov and Andrey Bely, Leo Tolstoy’s children, the world chess champion Alexander Alekhin and many other illustrious figures.

Polivanov himself defined his mission as “forming personalities capable of serving the common good with the gift of their individuality; capable of choosing a field they love, being inspired only by work directed towards virtue.”

So what kind of curriculum would serve this goal? If you’ve had children in school, read this and weep.

The Polivanov curriculum was designed for nine years. Taught in first form were Scripture, the Russian language, calligraphy, reading, arithmetic and French. In second through fourth forms, these were complemented with Latin, Greek, German, algebra, geometry, geography, Russian history and general history. Fifth form also featured courses in stylistics, literary theory, history of ancient literature. Sixth form added rhetoric, folklore, ancient Russian literature, physics. Taught in the last two forms were history of Russian literature, foreign literature, logic, basic calculus, cosmography. Drawing and PE featured throughout, and there were optional additional courses in most disciplines.

I imagine the curricula of top grammar schools in England, circa 1900, weren’t a million miles away. Even later in the century, grammar schools still functioned well. Some of the best-educated men among my friends were grammar school boys back in the day.

All this just goes to show how progress works. Today’s comprehensives ditch most of those arcane, elitist courses contributing to the exploitation and enslavement of the working classes, women and off-white races.

Instead pupils in modern British comprehensives bone up on such invaluable disciplines as sex education (with an accent on sexual mechanics and condom studies), systemic racism, gender studies, critical race theory, equity and diversity classes, implicit bias, ‘queering’ of science, social and political activism – along with ‘decolonised’ traditional subjects, such as natural science, history, geography and maths.

Many, not to say most, graduates of such progressive schools end up moving their lips when reading and being unable to figure out the change from a tenner when buying a £7.55 item. But they are ready to man the barricades of class war, or else serve as its storm troopers.

They don’t become the typological British equivalents of those old Russians whose school was committed to “forming personalities capable of serving the common good with the gift of their individuality”. They become the equivalents of the ghouls who murdered those educated chaps, banged them up in death camps or drove them out of the country.

The joke is on Anthony Crosland, Shirley Williams and other gauleiters of the comprehensive mayhem. They managed to annihilate a system based on meritocracy and replaced it with one based on plutocracy. Instead of an elite based on intellect and education, they ushered in an elite based on money. Pretending to seek equality, they created a much worse type of inequality.

For people who can afford to spare their offspring the delights of moron-spewing comprehensive indoctrination have to send them to fee-paying public schools. Since the state is no longer prepared to fund academic excellence, parents have to do so themselves.

The fees for top schools are out of sight for most parents. Typically, they run upwards of £70,000 a year. Multiply that by, say, three, and you’ll agree that only wealthy people can afford to educate their children properly.

Perhaps ‘properly’ is an inappropriate word; ‘marginally better’ would work more accurately. The Polivanov standards, along with their English versions, aren’t really on offer in public schools either.

The problem is that any dominant system based on fraudulent principles will inevitably corrupt all minor systems supposedly independent of it. The UK National Curriculum, mandatory for all schools, leaves little room for public schools to manoeuvre. They still have to cram their pupils’ heads full of ideological bilge, with serious academic subjects hogging the margins.

Let’s add parenthetically that universities fail to plug the holes left by secondary schools. The cretinous idea that half the population should receive higher education was first introduced by Tony Blair and faithfully followed by subsequent cretins. As a result, few universities can even approach the standards set by the grammar schools, never mind universities, of yesteryear.

And then ignoramuses educated in that fashion march to the ballot boxes and vote in transparent subversives like Labour and the Greens, parties committed to turning Britain into today’s answer to post-revolutionary Russia.

But don’t let me get going on my pet subject of ‘democracy’, that mendacious modern misnomer for ochlocracy channelled into ideological conduits by evil men.

P.S. Addressing the scaled-down Victory Day parade in Red Square, Putin described 9 May as “the most important day in our calendar”.

What happened to Christmas and Easter? There I was, thinking that Russia is committed to ‘traditional values’, as behoves what Peter Hitchens considers “the most Christian nation in Europe”.

First, an admission: I’m scared of dogs. But not in the sense you may think: I have no fear of being attacked and bitten by a dog.

I’m scared not of what dogs may do, but of what they represent. That fear resides in the far recesses of my mind and it hardly ever comes out. It did the other day though, and I was terrified.

Sitting opposite to me on the tube train was a woman with a corgi. The dog sat quietly at the woman’s feet and stared at me with its unblinking eyes.

Now, the competitor in me won’t let anyone stare me down, man, woman or beast. So, for lack of anything better to do, I stared back and we stayed transfixed on each other’s eyes for some 15 minutes until the train arrived at Parsons Green and I got off.

I wouldn’t say that staring contest was the scariest thing in my life. But it was right up there with the time some 55 years ago, when Maj. Sazonov, KGB, summoned me to Lubyanka for an avuncular chat about my seditious behaviour, ill-becoming a young Soviet man. At that time, I was served an intimation of physical mortality.

The other day on the District Line, by contrast, I was reminded yet again that the immortal soul exists and man alone possesses it. Not that I ever believed anything else, but, looking into that corgi’s eyes, I no longer just believed. I knew, the same way one knows that grass and trees exist.

Now, if it’s true that the eyes are the window to the soul, I’m a Peeping Tom of no mean attainment. I’ve always been so keenly interested in people’s eyes that I’ve often been embarrassed when caught staring. After a long life of such ocular voyeurism, I’ve seen them all, every colour, every size, every expression from mirth to love to indifference to fury, every shade of intelligence from sharp to bovine.

Some of those windows were wide-open to reveal the soul behind them, some were barely ajar, as if protecting the soul from visual intruders like me. But I never doubted the soul was there, in spite of occasionally cracking silly jokes, when pretending to seek reconciliation between ‘creationists’ and ‘evolutionists’.

Debates along those lines were quite popular back in the ‘80s, and I used to reassure the two groups that they were both right. Some people, a minority, were indeed created by God and endowed with the immortal soul. Others, most as a matter of fact, did evolve from the ape, which they prove by espousing half-baked theories. Incomprehensibly, that conciliatory stance earned me the anger of both sides.

But, as I said, I was only joking. I wasn’t always a Christian but I always believed in the immortal soul within every human body.

I didn’t yet know what the purpose of human life was, but Bach’s fugues taught me there had to be some transcendent purpose. Since, by definition, it was unattainable during physical life, the soul had to outlive the body – it was a logical deduction, irrefutable as far as I was concerned, flawed as a pedantic logician would argue.

I’ve met many evil men in my life, including the aforementioned Maj. Sazonov, but I’ve never met one who’d make me doubt the existence of the soul. What kind of soul is a different matter, but it’s always there, shining bright or glimmering dull through that window.

My interest in human eyes never extended to other species. Until that episode on the District Line the other day, I had never cast more than a fleeting glance at the eyes of any animal. Then I spent 15 minutes looking at the perfectly round eyes of that pretty corgi, and I got a mighty fright.

For there was no expression in them. None. The dog’s demeanour was generally friendly, it was as well-behaved as befits the breed so beloved of our late Queen. But its eyes weren’t friendly. Neither were they hostile, threatening, bad- or good-natured. They were just convex, mahogany-coloured disks with no irises that might as well have been painted on a piece of wood.

They weren’t a window to anything because there was nothing behind them, not even a hint at any other than a purely biological life. Hence that pretty corgi is infinitely closer to a plant than to a human being, even one as flawed as Richard Dawkins.

It can move, but so can tumbleweed blown across a field. It can make sounds, but so can a stream. It needs food and water, but so does a potted geranium. It’s a thing, not a being.

Even the argument that dogs too are God’s creatures doesn’t cut much ice with me. Those original proto-dogs might have been, but a corgi owes its existence more to man-made breeding techniques than to any divine design. No, that corgi is just an inanimate object on four short legs.

That realisation was nothing new to me, and by itself it was insufficient to give me a fright. But now I’m going to say something that may make me sound insane, yet I promise you I’m not (still, any nutter would say that, wouldn’t he?). What I’m about to describe isn’t a product of rational thought gone awry. It’s merely a feeling, but none the less scarier for that.

Staring into the corgi’s eyes, I blanked out the rest of the animal. For a while I didn’t see the dog’s silky fur or endearingly proportioned small body. All I saw were those convex mahogany disks, and for a second I thought — nay, knew — I was looking at the devil.

I mean to anthropomorphise neither the dog nor indeed the devil. I’ve never tried to imagine Satan as a being in flesh and blood. But riding on that District Line train, I did so for the first time: the corgi’s eyes were exactly what, for that moment, I imagined the devil’s eyes to be. Devoid of any expression, neither cold nor warm, neither kind nor mean, a window not into the soul but into gaping nothingness.

Now, some of my best friends are dog lovers, treating them not as pets but as members of the family. They give those devil’s spawns human names, talk to them (I don’t just mean saying things like ‘heel’, ‘sit’ or ‘fetch’), kiss them. Some of my friends treat their dogs as children surrogates, those with no need for surrogates treat them as little friends.

I used to be like that myself, when I was very young. As a child, I once spent five summers in a row being looked after by an old couple who had four dachshunds. The old couple were nice strangers, but strangers none the less, and there were no children around I could play with. I was a lonely boy during those summers, and the dachshunds were my sole friends and playmates. I was passionately, almost hysterically, attached to them – but then it was time to grow up.

Would you agree that people who still feel that way in their adulthood are Peter Pans refusing to leave their childhood behind them? I don’t know, and I couldn’t make a convincing case one way or the other.

But I can describe what I felt on that train, irrationally but strongly. Staring into that corgi’s eyes, I thought for a second I had seen the prince of this world. Then I forced my field of vision to widen and saw a cute puppy wagging its tail. But I resisted the temptation of saying “Good boy”.

Joseph de Maistre’s spiffy aphorism proves the inadequacy of spiffy aphorisms when they are used in lieu of boringly systematic thought.

“Every nation,” he said, “gets the government it deserves”. This rings true, doesn’t it? We may argue whether or not this statement applies to autocracies, but it certainly works for democracies. We get what we vote for, and that’s all there is to it.

If we make a mistake, we can correct it next time, in whatever number of years have to pass before the next election. Until then, we must grin and bear it. We can moan, whinge, swear, throw fits, write scathing articles, but that’s it, as far as corrective measures are concerned.

Granted, armed rebellion could be an effective corrective measure, but that would mean throwing the constitution in the bin. If we did that, we’d be a different country altogether. If Britain is to remain Britain, we have to suffer the worst and most subversive government in our history for another three years. At least.

I shan’t bore you by listing all the horrendous damage this government has caused. The only thing it seems to have done effectively is reversing the largest democratic vote in British history, that to leave the EU. But even this positive note reeks of negativity, doesn’t it? That’s like congratulating a bankrupt on squandering his fortune. Well done, Nige, who could have thought.

Yes, we do get what we vote for. But, and here I have to disagree with one of my favourite political thinkers, that doesn’t mean we get what we deserve. And it certainly shouldn’t mean we must suffer the full consequences of our 2024 voting for another three years.

Looking at the catastrophe visited on Britain by this evil and incompetent Marxist government in less than two years, the calamity it will cause before 2029 is out doesn’t bear thinking about. What we deserve isn’t this government but deliverance from it.

Yes, our electorate made a mistake. But it’s not an unforgivable error of judgement. For one thing, the people didn’t have a clear-cut choice, a binary one between good and bad.

I’m fairly certain that a real Tory Party would have breezed through that election by a landslide. But it wasn’t a real Tory Party that was on the ballot, but a pathetic travesty that, during its 14 years in power, had become indistinguishable from New Labour.

Its record of incompetence and corruption was so plain for all to see that the electorate simply had to vote against it. Not for Labour – against the kind of Labour the Tories had become.

I wrote at the time that the only effective slogan for the Tories would be “We are the lesser evil”. But that was just a joke: voting masses don’t think in such terms. If the ruling party is perceived as inadequate, it won’t be saved by claiming, however correctly, that the opposition is even worse. “Tories out!” was the collective roar of the irate electorate, and even some intelligent people joined the mighty chorus.

That has proved to be a bad mistake, as some of us knew it would. But it doesn’t mean people deserve to suffer the worst consequences of their slip-up – they don’t deserve to see their country sink into a hole so deep that it would take generations to climb out, if at all.

Allow me to illustrate the point by a few examples. A lifetime smoker presents with emphysema just as an alcoholic suffering from cirrhosis of the liver is wheeled into the same hospital.

A pulmonologist takes one look at the coughing smoker, shrugs and says, “Nothing I can do. It’s your own stupid fault.” And his hepatologist colleague echoes him by saying to the drunk, “You have only yourself to blame. I’m not going to treat you; you deserve all you get.”

It’s the doctors’ duty, one they took an oath to uphold, to try saving their patients even if the latter have brought their misfortune onto themselves. People oughtn’t to be made to suffer for their mistakes more than they have to.

Moving along from such hypothetical medical examples to some sensible political equivalents, a system of governance ought to be designed in such a way that people won’t be made to pay too dearly for their voting mistakes. Safety valves must be built into a political system that would be activated when the machine begins to sputter and belch smoke.

It should be possible to remove a clearly subversive government before it subverts too much. Barring that, even if that government remains in place, it must be prevented from doing irreparable harm. No system could guarantee against a downturn in various indicators, but a sound system ought to be able to prevent a plunge into an abyss.

If you think this is stating the blindingly obvious, you are right. Moreover, such political thinking has been regarded as axiomatic for 2,500 years, since the time of Messrs Pericles, Plato and Aristotle.

Every sensible political thinker since that time has known that a government’s mission isn’t to create heaven on earth. It’s to prevent hell on earth. To that end, a successful nation should never rely on a single source of power. It’s not only the economy that’s improved by competition, but also governance.

No political arrangement can exist in its pure form without degenerating into something unsavoury. Echoing Aristotle, Machiavelli argued in his Discourses that, when their purity is intransigently maintained, a principality turns into a tyranny, an aristocracy into an oligarchy and a democracy into anarchy. For a political arrangement to last, and for liberty to thrive, a state must combine the elements of all three known forms of government.

However, as Marie-Antoinette’s milliner said when unveiling a new hat design, “everything new is well-forgotten old.” What Machiavelli argued was already old hat at his time, and my calls for a synthetic constitution distinctly lack novelty appeal.

For Britain already had such a successful constitution, and in fact seduced much of the Western world into following suit. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the government was typically formed by the elected Commons, but its power to do harm was checked by both the Crown and, even more so, the hereditary House of Lords.

That perfectly balanced system has fallen by the wayside. The Crown has been deprived of the last vestiges of its power, and the Lords has been steadily emasculated to the point where a formerly virile institution has become a pitiful eunuch.

What we have instead is dictatorship of the Commons, with any government holding a large majority proceeding to do whatever it pleases, without feeling any restraining hand on the scruff of its neck. That this dictatorship goes by the misnomer of democracy only makes it more mendacious than other types of dictatorship, not morally superior.

Tocqueville, who, unlike de Maistre, was well-disposed towards democracy, was aware of its potential for a special kind of tyranny: “It [democracy] does not tyrannise,” he wrote, “but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

I thought I’d remind myself and you of this sage warning before joining that “flock of timid and industrious animals” to walk across the road and vote Tory in our local elections. I know I deserve better, but I’m not going to get it, am I?

Being innately averse to embarrassment, I usually avoid making political predictions. That’s a game one can’t win.

Get a prediction wrong, and even one’s best friends permit themselves mockery of the most scathing kind. Get something right, and one shares Cassandra’s fate of being ignored.

The only time I couldn’t contain my prophesying urges was in the early nineties, when just about every conservative pundit was high on glasnost and drunk on perestroika. Some of them were ignorant of basic facts; even those who weren’t didn’t understand the nature of the Soviet regime.

I was writing articles in small-circulation conservative journals saying that what was happening in Russia wasn’t a history-ending triumph of liberal democracy, but merely a transfer of power from the Party to the KGB.

The blueprint for that scheme was drawn by Lavrenty Beria, who believed, correctly, that the MGB (as it then was) was a more subtle weapon in the war against the West. He advocated a version of Lenin’s NEP: allowing more private enterprise, disbanding collective farms, increasing the production of consumer goods – even allowing the two Germanies to unify.

Then, under the guise of that liberalism, the MGB would slowly undermine Western institutions, recruit a whole army of the kind of people Lenin unkindly called ‘useful idiots’, seduce the West into disarming by pretending to be committed to eternal peace. And then Russia would pounce.

Shortly after Stalin’s death, Beria presented his ideas to the Politburo. Those Party apparatchiks took several minutes to catch their breath, after which they indulged in the communists’ favourite method of political debate by having Beria killed.

Yet his ideas didn’t die, being subsequently transferred like a relay baton from one KGB chief to the next until one of them, Andropov, became the Supreme Leader in 1982. A faithful disciple of Beria, he began to put his plan into practice. However, knowing he was dying, Andropov hand-picked a successor he trusted to complete the work.

Gorbachev, who owed his whole career to Andropov and was in cahoots with the KGB in general, took over three months after his mentor died and, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumph of Beria’s perfidy.

Most people considered my take on the situation eccentric, those less kind thought I was mad. Even though many of my critics told me later they had been wrong and I had been right, I put my crystal ball away – my brittle psyche couldn’t handle accusations of madness lightly.

That preamble is supposed to make you appreciate even more that I’m now going to break that habit and make three predictions about the local elections coming on 7 May. I doubt any of them will induce anyone to accuse me of emotional instability.

My three predictions, arranged in the descending order of certainty are: 1) Labour will suffer a bloodbath across the country, 2) Starmer will resign as a result, 3) We’ll end up missing him because his successor will be even worse, difficult though that possibility is to imagine.

My order of certainty descends, but not too steeply. The first prediction is based on the polls. Such surveys are often unreliable, but not when they point, as they do now, at a catastrophic defeat. So take it as read: Labour will be thrashed.

My second prophecy is almost as certain. Starmer is already hanging by a thread, and no party leader can survive the kind of trouncing Labour will suffer on Thursday.

And yes, I do believe that every realistic alternative to Starmer mooted so far will be even worse, even more destructive, even more anti-British. Those who will doubtless cheer Starmer’s demise and call him evil will be quickly reminded that, as ever, even greater evils exist.

Starmer and all his possible successors are Marxists, no doubt about that. Yet anyone who, like me, had to spend years studying the history of Marxism will know that this evil doctrine is like booze, whose strength varies from 3 per cent thin beer to 96 per cent pure ethanol (please don’t try to drink the latter without talking to me first: there is a technique involved that must be followed on pain of serious oesophageal damage).

Starmer is essentially a feeble-minded apparatchik weaned on Marxist fallacies but not fanatically devoted to them. In fact, he may not even realise he is a Marxist: the dogma has lodged itself in his viscera, bypassing what’s known as his brain.

His possible replacements are different. Andy Burnham, who may insinuate himself into a safe Labour seat and launch a leadership challenge, proudly calls himself a socialist. And specifically? What kind of socialist, Andy? Oh well, if you insist: “redistributive, collectivist and internationalist”. So how are you different from Marx and Lenin then? That tactless question was never asked, probably because the interviewer knew the answer.

Ed Miliband seems to angle for the keys to 11 Downing Street, not 10, probably believing he could do greater damage as chancellor, not PM. Ed is widely known as a net-zero fanatic prepared to save the planet by ruining the country.

But that’s not giving Ed full credit for his febrile Marxism. He also wants to make the 50 per cent top tax rate permanent, introduce a new financial transaction tax, limit top salaries by state fiat, implement a living wage policy and create a ‘National Care Service’. In other words, to turn Britain into a socialist state totally, as opposed to predominantly.

Both Andy and Ed criticised Tony Blair for not being Marxist enough, whereas in fact he only camouflaged his Marxism with Beria-like perfidy.

Wes Streeting wants to come in on the right rail, pretending not to be a Marxist at all. However, he has mentioned his desire to increase corporation tax, while throttling businesses with a whole raft of new employment rights.

Like all other candidates, those who are proud of being socialists, Streeting is a committed internationalist. In 2018, he declared that Brexit would answer people’s concerns about sovereignty and migration but would cause significant economic harm.

He was only half right: his government’s efforts, and his personal contribution, did cause economic damage that they then mendaciously ascribed to the fallout of Brexit. But migration has, if anything, got worse, while Streeting and his friends are busily sweeping away the few crumbs of sovereignty Brexit granted.

“We should be honest with our country,” Streeting once said, “that we also rely on attracting people from overseas… .” Quite. Such as 100,000 Somalis making a sizeable contribution to the crime rate and hardly anything else.

In his own health brief, Streeting explained we must replace hospital doctors with social workers. He put it in the Aesopian language of ‘three shifts’: “from an excessive focus on hospital care to more focus on neighbourhood and community services; from an analogue service to one that embraces the technological revolution; and from sickness to prevention.” As I said, replacing hospitals with community centres.

And on the issue especially close to his innermost feelings, Streeting stated that “trans women are women, trans men are men”. Such is the right end of the Labour Party, which brings us to the (retarded) people’s favourite: Angie Rayner.

Angie wears her working-class origin with pride, which suggests that her idea of a working class woman is a council estate slag who gets pregnant at 15 and leaves school, never to return. She then does no work other than climbing the greasy pole of union and Labour politics, becomes known for getting falling over drunk in public places (such as the Commons bar), and describing her parliamentary colleagues from across the aisle as “a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute pile… of banana republic… Etonian … piece of scum”.

Transgender rights, Black Lives Matter, Hamas – you name a subversive cause, Angie supports it. “I’m a socialist!” she screamed the other day at the Commons bar before staggering into a door with such force that it had to be taken off and repaired. Mine’s a Laphroaig, Ange, what are you having?

Please, Sir Keir, try to hang on for a while longer. You know how badly you’ll be missed.

Trump didn’t really need a pretext to start withdrawing US troops from Germany. But he still took advantage of one helpfully provided by the German chancellor Friedrich Metz.

The latter spoke out of turn when declaring that Iran was “humiliating” America, and Trump didn’t seem to have a “clear strategy” to end the war. Poor Metz forgot that no one gets away with telling the morbidly sensitive US president he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

It’s Metz who doesn’t “know what he’s talking about”, retorted Trump and threw his toys out of the pram, or rather 5,000 US troops out of Germany. That was just the beginning, he said. “We are going to cut way down, and we’re cutting a lot further than 5,000,” and this is one promise Trump is likely to keep.

Essentially, Metz’s unfortunate turn of phrase forced Trump to do what he wanted to do anyway – leave Europe to her own defensive devices. This has been Trump’s obsession since his first visit to Moscow in 1987.

Displaying the kind of consistency that Ralph Waldo Emerson called “the hobgoblin of little minds”, Trump stated that theme then and has been recapitulating it regularly ever since. All those wily Europeans rip America off by making her fund their defence while they themselves get fat on all that loose cash.

That European countries have been neglecting their own defence is beyond doubt, and Trump was right to point that out. When he became president, he was also right to insist European NATO members increase their defence spending – or else.

Or else what? Or else America will leave NATO, threatened Trump, putting paid to the alliance that secured peace in Europe for several post-war decades. That’s like introducing the death penalty for traffic violations.

When communicating such messages, Trump takes little trouble to conceal how much he, justifiably, despises both European leaders and, despicably, their countries. This includes Britain, no matter how enthusiastically Trump applauds the performance of the Ye Olde England travelling royal show.

Most European countries responded to Trump’s admonishments by increasing their defence spending, with four of them, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, going beyond the GDP proportion the US herself spends. Germany, too, increased her spend by a quarter to 2.3 per cent of GDP – still not enough, but a step in the right direction.

Just to make sure the next step will be more painful, Trump has announced he was raising tariffs on cars imported from the EU to 25 per cent. Now the motor trade is the centrepiece of the German economy, similar to financial services in Britain and agriculture in France.

There too Trump has shown the same hobgoblin consistency: he has been moaning for decades about the unbearably high presence of German cars on American roads. What do those Mercs and Beemers have that our Caddies and Lincolns don’t? he kept asking.

The short answer is that they are better cars, as I can testify after switching from GM, Ford and AMC products to Audis and BMWs 40 years ago. The time-honoured method of competing with superior imports is to make the domestic equivalents as good. The stupid, vindictive method is to protect inferior domestic industries with extortionist tariffs.

Trump’s protectionism isn’t just vindictive but also stupid because it ends up punishing American consumers, who are already suffering from the skyrocketing fuel costs and general price increases. But it’s not just Europe’s car manufacturers who will bear the brunt of Trump’s anti-European policies. It’s also Europe’s defences.

These are being hit with the double whammy of US troop withdrawals and new tariffs on the vital European, especially German, industry. This has caused a predictable reaction in the EU – and perhaps a less predictable one within Trump’s own party.

That is, to the extent to which he considers the Republican Party his own. Trump’s core support comes not from the Party at large, but from the MAGA section within it. And it increasingly appears that this section is shrinking.

Senator Roger Wicker and Representative Mike Rogers, Republican chairmen of the armed services committee in their respective Houses, warned that the current salvo in Trump’s war on Europe risks “sending the wrong signal to Vladimir Putin”.

European allies are heeding Trump’s demand to increase their defence spending, they added, but “translating that investment into the military capability needed to assume primary responsibility for conventional deterrence will take time.”

The second statement is unassailable, but the first one is open to debate, starting with the definition of “the wrong signal”. Trump’s signal to Putin may be wrong as far as Messrs Wicker and Rogers are concerned, but it again shows that consistency Emerson disparaged so scathingly.

Everything that Trump has so far said to and about Putin shows he holds the Kremlin ghoul in much higher esteem than any European leader. It hasn’t been just words either.

While Biden’s administration increased US military presence in Europe, adding 7,000 more troops, Trump is winding it down. The same goes for America’s support for the Ukraine: Biden was doing the bare minimum, but he was indeed doing it. Trump isn’t: over the past year US assistance for the Ukraine has petered out to almost nothing.

The signal Trump is sending to Putin is clear: if you can, take the Ukraine, Vlad. Hell, take all of Europe, see if I care. Serves those hoity-toity Europeans right for ripping America off all these years.

As far as Trump’s overall geopolitical thinking can be inferred from his exceedingly erratic foreign policy and self-contradicting statements thereon, he is an imperialist par excellence. He seems to have nothing but contempt for smaller sovereign nations not packing a sufficient military punch.

The ideal map of the world he seems to see with his mind’s eye is zones of influence divided among three global empires: America, China and Russia. Essentially, two of these, America and China, are the super-empires vying for supremacy, with Russia and her potential European vassals holding the balance of power.

Admittedly, the Donald hasn’t vouchsafed to me his ideal of the world. But this kind of view is the only one that makes sense of his actions and pronouncements.

Looking beyond his erratic meandering, one can discern either such an overarching geopolitical concept – or none. Neither possibility can be discounted, but do remember: underneath it all Trump is nothing if not consistent. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sense of the word.