Author: Alexander Boot

‘Hybrid war’ is often in the news these days. The papers use this term to describe the Russian strategy of combining military aggression with information warfare.

The impression an uninitiated reader may get is that this is a novelty developed by Putin’s strategists in the FSB. True, that attempt to rape and seduce the West alternately or even simultaneously was indeed concocted by that organisation.

But this happened not in the 2020s but in the 1920s, when that sinister setup was still called the Cheka. Since then that state within a state has undergone seven or eight name changes. But neither its evil essence nor its strategy has ever changed for over 100 years.

Both, however, have always displayed great elasticity in responding effectively to the vicissitudes of foreign and domestic politics. The core was immutable; the periphery wasn’t.

Outside observers who can’t trace this continuity or even realise it exists have no chance of understanding modern Russia. They are destined to remain for ever exactly what Lenin called them: useful idiots.

This breed reacts with enthusiasm to every zig and zag of Russia, accepting each at face value. Useful idiots don’t realise they are being duped – after all, no one has ever done it to them on such a scale for so long.

It all started in 1920, when the Bolsheviks felt they were already strong enough to KO the West with a quick punch. The Red cavalry yelling “On to Berlin and Paris!” rode west, but only got as far as Warsaw where Marshal Pilsudski’s horsemen chopped their historic enemies into mincemeat.

Clearly, the Red Army was too blunt a weapon for what was developing into a delicate task. More perfidious subtlety was required if what Sidney ‘the Ace of Spies’ Reilly called a “hideous cancer” was to spread. And perfidious subtlety was something only the Cheka had.

The first few years of the Bolshevik era saw the formulation of two policies which, mutatis mutandis, Russia has been following ever since: Military Communism and New Economic Policy (NEP).

The purpose of the former was to rape first the country and then the world into submission. The chief objectives of the latter were to mitigate the effects of the former, backpedal a bit, let some steam off, and set up the next round by presenting to the world a picture of ‘change’, ‘liberalisation’, Stalin’s ‘perestroika’ (let’s give that term its true provenance), Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, Gorbachev’s ‘glasnost’ and so forth.

Sudden shifts in Russian policy can never surprise anyone familiar with this alternating pattern: the bloodthirsty collectivisation followed by Stalin’s caution against “vertigo from success”; post-war purges followed by ‘the Thaw’, which was bound to adumbrate Brezhnev’s reaction, which in turn set the stage for the on-going NEP-like binge. 

But it’s not enough to execute this policy of two steps forward, one step backwards domestically. The West’s support, or at least acquiescence, is a sine qua non. That means disinformation and strategic deception don’t just lie at the heart of Russia’s policy. They are Russia’s policy – and that’s what really makes the Cheka “the essence of Bolshevism”, in Lenin’s phrase.

This organisation has demonstrated its ability to string the West along. Its strategic debut in the early 20s was an auspicious event: Operation Trust. It was designed to neutralise the White emigration that remained a formidable force, especially with Western support.

The OGPU, as it was then, created a bogus anti-Bolshevik network inside Russia and dropped a few telling hints in the West that the ‘hideous cancer’ was about to go into remission – given inactivity on the West’s part and a little help with financing and technology.

The West swallowed the bait and was immobilised at a time when the ghouls were at their most vulnerable. OGPU ‘ops’ were being financed by their targets and, as an additional benefit, the Trust lured some prominent émigré leaders, Reilly among them, into Russia, where they were murdered.

The history of the Cheka is one continuous string of such successes. An extremely abbreviated list would include:

The post-war peace movement, as a result of which Western atomic scientists, such as Oppenheimer, Szilard, Fermi, Pontecorvo and Bohr, felt called upon to share their secrets with the Russians.

The bogus anti-communist guerrilla movements in the Baltics in the late 40s-early 50s, which pre-empted any real resistance.

The detente and SALT of the 70s, during which the Soviets embarked on an unprecedented military build-up.

The ‘Prague Spring’, a perestroika rehearsal possibly designed to test the West’s reaction.

The Polish Solidarity movement, infiltrated by the KGB from the start.

And even to a large extent the dissident movement of the 60s and 70s which too was infiltrated by the KGB, and many of whose leaders are now known to have been KGB plants. 

Secret police was the cutting edge of the Party, but the two were often at odds. The Party was committed to its ideological rigidity; its head was in the Marxist clouds. The Chekists, on the other hand, had their feet on the ground. They were pragmatists and as such always championed more flexible means to achieve the same end.   

The Cheka’s most outstanding figure was Lavrentiy Beria who in effect led that organisation from 1938 to 1953. In that capacity he displayed requisite monstrosity, but also certain administrative abilities. Beria ran not only the secret police and intelligence, but also the vast GULAG empire, where emaciated inmates supplied the country with vital commodities, from gold to uranium.

During the war, GULAG’s economic value increased no end, and so did Beria’s power. In addition, he was put in charge of the atomic project and brought it to a successful conclusion in 1949.  

After Stalin’s death, which Beria welcomed and, according to circumstantial evidence, might have accelerated, he proposed to his Politburo colleagues a glasnost and perestroika programme that anticipated the ‘op’ of the late 1980s in such details as the introduction of private enterprise, abolition of collective farms, withdrawal from Germany, a greater accent on the production of consumer goods, etc.

The objective was all-familiar: presenting a human face to the West, luring it into disarmament, blackmailing it into a massive transfer of funds and technology, finlandising first Europe and then the rest of the world.

While the rigid Party apparatchiks welcomed those objectives, the means made their heads spin, and Beria was knocked off in gangland style. But, as Bolshevik obituaries used to say, “Our comrade is dead, but his cause lives on.”

Beria’s people were purged from the organisation (just as Beria purged Yezhov’s people in 1938), but his plan survived. It was passed like a relay baton to subsequent KGB leaders, from Shelepin to Semichastnyi to Andropov.

When the latter became Secretary General in 1982, the secret police finally got to run the country unimpeded and put Beria’s designs into effect. A few years later the Russian language contributed the words ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ to the OED. It’s useful to remember that the principal players of that game, Gorbachev and Yeltsyn, were closer to the KGB than most of their Party colleagues.

Gorbachev owed his ascent to Andropov who plucked him out of the wilderness of the Stavropol region, where Gorbachev was Party secretary. He moved to Moscow and jumped several steps up to a position in the Politburo. Andropov, the custodian of Beria’s plan, was dying and he needed a safe pair of hands to succeed him.

Before moving to Moscow, Yeltsyn had run the Sverdlovsk region, the site of numerous defence installations, including nuclear bomb factories. These were under the auspices of the KGB, whose massive presence made Yeltsyn’s leadership strictly nominal.

It was these two men who succeeded in realising Beria’s plan in broad strokes, if not in every detail. At some point their control might have slipped, and they allowed the Soviet Union to fall apart. But Beria’s overall design remained intact.

When Russian émigré writers tried to explain what was going on, their words fell on deaf ears. Western useful idiots sat behind the first line of defence: “What you are saying is groundless nonsense”.

When, in the spirit of glasnost, the Russian government itself released some of the relevant facts, the useful idiots fell back to the second line: “Yes, you were right in factual details, but there’s no sinister subtext there. Beria and his disciples Andropov, Gorbachev and Yeltsyn simply realised that the people wanted change.”

That version is now coming across in everything useful idiots are writing, including the book on Beria by the American writer Amy Knight. She actually argued that Beria (who, unlike Himmler, tortured and murdered his victims personally) cared for the people’s well-being. That shows a lapse not only in historical knowledge but also in understanding human nature.

What we are witnessing at the moment is the downswing of the Beria rollercoaster. The KGB/FSB fronted by Putin is trying to regain control partly relinquished by Gorbachev and Yeltsyn, and they are doing it by the same hybrid methods as those the Cheka devised a century ago.

This will doubtless be followed by an upswing. The war will stop, new people will take over, and a new round of perestroika will kick in – to the hosannas chanted by useful idiots unaware that they are being duped yet again. Another rude awakening will then come with a bang, for that cancer never stops metastasising.

Westerners find it hard to fathom a behavioural stereotype that’s dramatically different from their own. They think that if their leaders are benign ignoramuses whose idea of a long-term objective is a minuscule growth in GDP, then Russian chieftains must be like that too.

Well-meaning philistines are incapable of understanding unalloyed evil, which is why they’ll never understand modern Russia until it’s too late – just as they never understood Nazi Germany until it was too late.

“It’s the economy, stupid”, was how Clinton’s strategist James Carville defined the key message of any electoral victory.

He therefore thought that people voted not so much their hearts and minds as their wallets. This is an utterly cynical view of the American electorate and, like most other cynical views of humanity, it’s by and large correct.

Moreover, this concept easily crosses the Atlantic and goes to work in England’s green and pleasant land. A strategy based on the economy wins almost every time, but ‘almost’ is the operative word. This time around, the Tories floated their economic record before voters and were shot down in flames, giving Labour a landslide hardly ever seen in Western politics.

Such a crushing defeat means a change in leadership, and contestants are off the starting blocks. At present, Shadow Security Minister Tom Tugendhat is the favourite, and he rejects Carville’s prescription.

Mr Tugendhat is a general good egg boasting perfect Tory credentials. He grew up in Westminster, where his father was a High Court judge. St Paul’s School for boys, Cambridge, Master’s in Islamic Studies, journalism, military service in Iraq and Afghanistan (terminal rank major), MP for Tonbridge, good age (51).

He is seen as someone in the centre of the Tory Party, meaning that under Mrs Thatcher he would have been seen as loony Left. But Mrs Thatcher hasn’t been around for a while, and things have changed. Let’s accept that and hear what Mr Tugendhat has on his mind.

It’s not filthy lucre that matters, he says, or rather implies, but principles. And here is the good news: while Labour are “squabbling” already, the Tories stand united on their core tenets.

To be fair to Labour – and I never thought these words would cross my lips – they have 411 seats in the Commons, to the Tories’ 121. Numerically speaking, it’s much harder to establish a common ground among 411 MPs than among 121.

Still, such base calculations aside, every Tory heart should rejoice. All God’s children love principles, and having a parliamentary party boasting such cohesion and uniformity is a good start on the road to regaining power.

Or rather would be, if Mr Tugendhat was speaking English. But he was speaking political, and in that language seemingly the same words mean something else. In this case, the word ‘principles’ as Mr Tugendhat uses it isn’t just different from its dictionary definition but the opposite of it.

Now in opposition, the Tories will concentrate on regaining trust with voters, not on policy debates, says Mr Tugendhat. Out of interest, how can such trust be regained if not by offering promising, realistic policies that would appeal to the electorate?

You see, in the language of politics, ‘sound principles’ stand for sound bites. Never mind policies, never mind issues – just tell voters anything that caresses their ears. That’s how you win their trust.

Mr Tugendhat helpfully listed the issues that are off limits for discussion:

“The ECHR. Gender. Tax rates. Defence spending. Net zero. These are things that aren’t up for debate in this leadership election. Why not? Because politics is about principles and all Conservatives are guided by our basic principles here.”

If we stubbornly insist on words meaning what they are supposed to mean, one is expected to applaud Tory unity on all such issues. What’s there to argue about if they all agree?

Yet I for one would like to see what it is that the rump Tory Party agrees on. Let’s look at the list cited and slide our finger all the way down.

The ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) is one of the key documents of the European Union, of which we are no longer a member. More Britons voted to leave that organisation than have ever voted for anything else.

Mr Tugendhat, however, voted Remain, and so did most of the high-ranking Tories, who thereby parted ways not only with over half of all Britons but, more ominous, the majority of their party’s rank-and-file. This, along with his dual British-French citizenship, probably means he has a warm spot for all European institutions, including the ECHR.

He now says that, if the ECHR stopped serving British interests, he’d be prepared to leave it. That commitment isn’t especially binding because it presupposes that, under normal circumstances, the ECHR is a good thing to keep.

It’s not and never has been. To begin with, Britain’s historical record on human rights stacks up favourably against every major member of the EU, emphatically including Germany and France. Hence we need neither lessons nor diktats from them on this subject. And nor do we need the ECHR.

It lists free movement of people as an essential human right, which is fine in theory. But in practice it makes controlling national borders much harder, and that’s one issue on which the Tories have lost voters’ trust, leaving us at the mercy of Labour’s open-door policy.

Ditching the ECHR should be one principle the Tories qua Tories should agree on – it should be obvious to anyone other than a rank Remainer that the ECHR can serve British interests neither in theory nor in practice. Instead, Mr Tugendhat joins the chorus of wishy-washy waffle we are used to hearing from politicians.

Next on his list is “gender”, and I assume he isn’t talking about grammatical categories. If he means transsexuality, then I’d like to know what it is that the Tories agree on.

The only proper Tory position is that transsexuals should enjoy all the same Englishmen’s rights, as they used to be called, as everyone else.

But they should have no rights specifically reserved for them: not to puberty blockers, not to surgery at public expense, not to their own pronouns, not to be legally or institutionally recognised as belonging to any other than their chromosomal sex. If the Tories agree on this, fine. But if they don’t, some debate would come in handy, if only for the public to know where they stand.

“Tax rates” is next. Under the Tories, the tax burden on the populace was the greatest ever suffered in peacetime. If Mr Tugendhat wishes to imply that the Tories are now uniformly committed to lowering it, he should say so outright. Otherwise, voters may think he means more of the same.

Then comes “defence spending”, and here Mr Tugendhat commendably campaigns for raising it to 3 per cent of GDP. However, having been in government for 14 years, the Tories had ample opportunity to do so. Instead, they chose to degrade defence of the realm to a risible level. Have they now seen the error of their ways? Do they all now agree with Mr Tugendhat? Somehow I don’t think so.

And finally, “net zero”. There’s nothing I’ve ever heard from any Tory frontbencher about this economic suicide that might suggest they regard it as such. On the contrary, every pronouncement makes it clear they agree with this basic policy and only wish it were pursued fervently, rather than fanatically.

In fact, this commitment to net zero reflects an explosive combination of scientific ignorance and ideological zealotry. Is that what the Tories are united on? Or do they merely hope we’ll agree to cut our collective economic throat inch by inch, rather than with one quick slash?

There’s something to discuss there, but not as far as Mr Tugendhat is concerned. This and all other vital issues “aren’t up for debate”. Nor is the issue of the Tories’ electoral chances for the next generation.

After all, of the potential leaders, Tugendhat really does seem the best. The parliamentary Tory Party is indeed united – in its mediocrity, absence of any principles (much less conservative ones), amoral powerlust. United they fall, and we are stuck with Labour.

Can we please have some “squabbling”?  

The political season is upon us, and though politics can’t be the entirety of one’s current interests, it can certainly inspire ratiocination. And that dangerous pastime can take one in all sorts of directions.

When I was reading up on J.D. Vance the other day, I noticed that he had been raised an evangelical Christian but converted to Catholicism at an emblematic age of 33.

For me, that’s a sign that he had outgrown his insalubrious background and achieved intellectual and cultural maturity. As a man now in full command of his faculties, he must have realised that Catholicism is the only Western confession that’s the true heir to the early Church.

St John Henry Newman reached the same conclusion and made the same journey, although his starting point was High Anglicanism, the most Catholic of the Protestant denominations. “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant,” he wrote.

People who are deep in history tend to be highly educated, and Anglophones boasting such credentials, especially if they also happen to be writers, tend to turn to Catholicism tropistically.

The list of such converts is long: Dryden, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh, Kirk, Muggeridge, Spark, Clair Booth Luce, Fr. Richard Neuhaus and so on. At the same time, I can’t think offhand of a single writer or thinker who made the journey in the opposite direction.

One is tempted to define a Catholic as a thinking Christian, but that would be unfair to many serious Protestant thinkers. On the other hand, defining a Christian strikes me as easy, but even such a seemingly simple task defeated one writer I’ve mentioned, Malcolm Muggeridge.

In his moving book Jesus Rediscovered, he described Leo Tolstoy as “not only one of the greatest writers of all time, but also one of the greatest Christians of all time”. That one sentence inspired me to write my own book, God and Man According to Tolstoy, arguing that Tolstoy wasn’t a Christian at all (nor much of a thinker), never mind one of the greatest ever.

Tolstoy rejected Christian doctrine wholesale, starting with the divinity of Christ and Virgin Birth. Mary simply got pregnant by someone the usual way, and Joseph kindly agreed to marry her and accept her illegitimate child as his own.

Tolstoy rudely mocked every sacrament and described the Holy Trinity as incomprehensible and nonsensical. Jesus, whom Muggeridge rediscovered, was to Tolstoy simply a good man, and he regarded worshipping him as blasphemous. Nonetheless, he considered himself not only a Christian, but the only true one left in the world.

In that spirit, Tolstoy set out to write what he called “the gospel of Christ the Materialist”. He merged the four gospels together, excised all the miracles and everything supernatural, and gave a general impression that God was just like Tolstoy, if a bit older.

A similar project had been undertaken a century before Tolstoy by Thomas Jefferson. He too practised a selective approach to Christianity: some of it was acceptable to him, some wasn’t. So he clipped the acceptable passages out of the Bible and pasted them into a notebook, thus creating his own Scripture. One can argue that possibly all Protestants go through the same exercise in their minds, if not literally.

St Augustine warned against such voluntaristic arrogance half a millennium earlier: “If you believe what you like in the gospel and reject what you do not like, it is not the gospel you believe in but yourself.”

In other words, the Scripture must be accepted in its entirety. But does the Scripture include the entirety of Christianity? Evangelical Protestants, from Zwingli to Vance in his youth, believe so. Sola scriptura is one of the founding tenets of Protestantism.

But which scriptura? St John, who first quotes Jesus as saying “I and the Father are one”, but then quotes “My Father is greater than I”? St Luke’s Annunciation to Mary or St Matthew’s Annunciation to Joseph? St Mark who wrote about James and John approaching Jesus with a request or St Matthew who states it was their mother who was the supplicant? Mark and Luke who talk about demons being cast out of a man, or Matthew who says there were two men? St Luke who has shepherds visiting the manger at the Nativity or St Matthew who says it was the kings who followed that star?

The four gospels are four polyphonic themes, similar but not identical, that are then woven into a glorious whole with the rest of the New Testament. But who can be that weaver? Just about anybody, if we agree with Tolstoy, Jefferson, Martin ‘Every Man Is His Own Priest’ Luther, and all evangelical Protestants.

In the end, we’ll end up with many different Christianities, and true enough: in addition to the main Protestant denominations, there exist, at the latest count, 35,496 independent or non-denominational churches, all of them Protestant.

At some point, one becomes justified to ask the question in the title above. Does Christianity even exist as a single religion? Not according to Hilaire Belloc, who wrote in his book The Great Heresies that:

“There is no such thing as a religion called ‘Christianity’ – there never has been such a religion. There is and always has been the Church, and various heresies proceeding from a rejection of some of the Church’s doctrines by men who still desire to retain the rest of her teaching and morals.”

That’s a cogent, if somewhat radical, expression of the Catholic view and a profound rejection of Protestantism as one of the eponymous great heresies. By equating Christianity with Church doctrine, Belloc was arguing that only the Church preserves the Revelation in its entirety, without fracturing it into pieces appealing to various sects.

J.D. Vance talks about a mystical experience that drew him to Catholicism, which makes him one of many communicants who were thus inspired to travel to Rome, whither, as we know, all roads lead. But it’s possible to pave one such road with nothing but rational thought.

Other Western confessions simply don’t make sense, historical, philosophical, cultural or any other. I’d add social and political to this list, for the seditious Reformation was really the anteroom of agnosticism, which the subsequent Enlightenment converted into mass atheism.

That was an attempt to harness man’s sinful nature and lead mankind to virtue by DIY means, secular and political. The attempt failed, which John Adams either diagnosed or prophesied as early as in 1798:

“We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”

Amen.

In case your command of American slang is less than perfect, a twofer is someone who ticks two boxes on the list of woke credentials. A threefer is someone who ticks three such boxes, and so on, although not quite ad infinitum.

Thus Kamala Harris is a twofer, or even a twoandahalfer. She is a woman – tick. She is also racial minority – tick. And then perhaps another half-tick because, in addition to being half-black, she’s also half-Indian. That’s two racial minorities for the price of one, can’t beat that.

Now she has the Democratic nomination more or less sewn up, barring a likely dip in the polls, all those ticked boxes are supposed to establish – dare I say circumscribe – her presidential credentials.

Having twice indulged their appetite for diversity candidates, American voters may not be quite sated yet. After all, by being black, Obama ticked only one such box.

By the way, both Jim Crow segregationists and woke ‘liberals’ have an identical racial criterium: a drop of tar, all black. Hence Barack and Kamala are universally accepted as black even though their mothers were, respectively, white and Indian. That’s as if mothers – women! – didn’t count, which strikes me as rank misogyny. Tell me where to report such reprobates.

Some naysayers still insist that, in the absence of any other discernible qualifications, being a twofer may still not be sufficient to take Kamala to the White House. Now, if she were a threefer… Wait a minute.

True, Kamala is neither a cripple nor a lesbian nor a trans, but presidential candidates never walk, or for that matter run, alone. They have a VP candidate in tow as part of the ticket. And if Kamala herself can’t be a threefer, her ticket certainly can be.

The choice of her running mate therefore makes itself: Pete Buttigieg, the openly homosexual Transport Secretary. And as an extra benefit, he’s a white Midwesterner, thereby adding both chromatic and geographic balance to the ticket. Sorted, as they say on our side of the Atlantic. Hail, President Harris.

This reminds me that there’s no such thing as corrupt politicians, not in democracies at any rate. There are only corrupt, or rather corrupted, electorates. Yes, what I’ve written so far today is a mocking spoof. But you can only mock something that exists, and what exists is Kamala Harris who may well become the next president of the United States.

This at a time when the West is in what Americans call clear and present danger. Russia, inflamed by Nazi propaganda, is waging brutal war against the West’s eastern flank. In that undertaking she’s supported surreptitiously yet unequivocally by China.

Also, according to recent intelligence reports, China is about to invade Taiwan, thereby disrupting the supply of silicon chips to the West and holding its economies to ransom. And at this critical time, political analysts are discussing the woke boxes Kamala ticks or doesn’t.  

It takes a thoroughly corrupted electorate to vote for Kamala strictly on the basis of such extraneous qualifications. And if any other basis exists, I’m at a loss to see what that might be.

I’m not an enthusiastic admirer of Trump, but he is beginning to look better by the minute. Say what you will about him – and I’ve said plenty – at least he doesn’t play the ticket-balancing game.

Trump chose as his running mate a likeminded man he thinks will be a good vice president and potentially president. J.D. Vance is an eminently capable chap who doesn’t balance Trump’s ticket in any way: he is white, conservative (as the term is understood in the US), populist – and he doesn’t come from any swing state.

My opposition to Trump is largely a matter of style and rhetoric but, compared to Harris, he comes across as a present-day Demosthenes.

For example, here’s how Kamala communicated the idea that the present must be viewed in a historical context: “I think it’s very important… for us at every moment in time and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualise it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future.”

Or this is how she expressed her resolute support for Roe vs Wade: “I think that, to be very honest with you, I do believe that we should have rightly believed, but we certainly believe that certain issues are just settled. Certain issues are just settled.”

I read up on such verbal problems when working on my book about Tolstoy’s philosophy and religion. One chapter was devoted to the writer’s mental health, as analysed and recorded by psychiatrists.

They reached the conclusion that Tolstoy suffered from epilepsy, one of whose symptoms is perseveration, a tendency to repeat the same words and phrases within the same sentence. This may be a symptom not only of epilepsy but also of some other organic disorder or brain injury. And Kamala does perseveration with the best of them.

Joe Biden’s tenure has brought the issue of mental health into focus, but now the focus can be profitably shifted to Kamala, who doesn’t seem to be quite compos mentis either.

Just look at this passage where she explains Artificial Intelligence to the uninitiated: “It’s about machine learning, and so, the machine is taught – and part of the issue here is what information is going into the machine that will then determine – and we can predict then, if we think about what information is going in, what then will be produced.”

I’d be curious to hear what a psychiatrist would have to say if exposed to that text without attribution. He’d probably notice perseveration and might conceivably even diagnose mental retardation – that gibberish sounds as if it was delivered by someone half a century younger than Kamala.

If her oratory is laughable, her record is well-nigh non-existent. Politically, she won the 2017 Senate election in California, where having a pulse is the only requirement for a Democratic candidate to win. When she ran solo as a presidential candidate in 2020, Harris was blown off in the early primaries. Even impeccably Democratic commentators openly mocked her tendency to talk drivel and laugh uncontrollably at the most inappropriate moments.

(An interesting aside: in America political candidates run; in Britain they stand. Can one extrapolate that the American national character is more dynamic?)

Kamala then provided that vital balance to Joe Biden’s ticket and became his VP. Now, it’s commonly believed that US Vice Presidents’ responsibilities are seldom more onerous than those of a doorstop. There is some truth to that belief, but it’s not the whole truth.

Sometimes presidents assign specific tasks to their VPs, which was the case with Kamala. She was given the immigration brief, specifically that of controlling the eternally porous southern border to stem the influx of illegal migrants.

On her watch, at least seven, and by some estimates as many as ten, million illegals crossed the border with Mexico. The situation that had always been dire became catastrophic. But not as far as Kamala is concerned.

Proud of her accomplishments, she said: “We have a secure border in that that is a priority for any nation including ours in our administration.” Mrs Cicero strikes again but, rhetoric apart, if Kamala thinks the Mexican border is secure, there are some properties I’d like to sell her west of Malibu in her native California.

How this nonentity can be considered as a possible candidate for presidency is beyond me. Yet the problem isn’t just with Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party or the thoroughly corrupted US electorate that can be swayed by woke credentials even in the absence of any other.

For similar outrages are happening all over the West, with manifestly unfit candidates rising to power on the basis of irrelevant criteria. My view is that we are reaping the crop planted by the Enlightenment, but this is something to ponder not in an article but in a book (such as any of mine, apart from the aforementioned one on Tolstoy).

“Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy,” said Margaret Thatcher.

That was a memorable aphorism, and it was almost right. Yet, like all such adages, it needs unpacking, which is what I’ll try to do.

Thatcher meant specifically the Enlightenment afflatus that inspired the American Revolution and its founding documents. And it’s true that, while European polities developed organically over centuries, the American state was created in one fell swoop as a political embodiment of Enlightenment philosophy, or rather ideology.

However, this doesn’t mean that European history was free of philosophical inputs. Any state probably, and any Western state certainly, is a physical expression of a metaphysical fact. It’s just that the metaphysical core of Europe took more time to develop – after all, as an older civilisation Europe did have more time at its disposal.

America’s Founders, on the other hand, were men in a hurry: their task was to form not just a new state but a new nation, and to do so quickly. And a nation has to have not only genetics but also metaphysics at its foundation, for without that symbiosis of body and soul it would remain stillborn.

That’s where the Founders ran into a problem. After all, their country was first settled by religious dissenters who had to believe God was on their side because no one else was.

The new continent greeted them with the fangs and claws of wild animals, and the tomahawks and scalping knives of irate natives. The new settlers had to find inexhaustible resources of strength, and they found them in a sense of their messianic mission.

As early as 1630 their leader, the Puritan lawyer John Winthrop, delivered an oration in which he alluded to Matthew 5: 14 by describing the new community as a “city upon a hill”. That was the beginning of American exceptionalism: the neonatal nation saw itself as a messiah destined to lead the world to goodness – after all, Winthrop and his friends knew the rest of that proselytising verse: “Ye are the light of this world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.”

Such was the country’s metaphysical heritage, and the Founders had to take it into account. Yet their Enlightenment provenance left no room for divinity. Most of them were deists at best, if not agnostics or downright atheists (to me, the differences there are anyway slight).

Hence they faced the task of wrapping their secular project in religious verbiage. Having started with the message of a nation worshipping God and doing his work on earth, they gradually replaced it with the idea of a nation worshipping itself – while paying lip service to God.

In 1809 Jefferson tried to express the principle of America as a beacon without relying on biblical references: “Trusted with the destinies of this solitary republic of the world, the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government, from hence it is to be lighted up in other regions of the earth, if other regions of the earth shall ever become susceptible of its benign influence.”

Tastes differ but facts shouldn’t: America wasn’t “the only monument… and the sole depository… of freedom and self-government”. England, to name one other country, had form in those areas too. But then the puffery of political pietism knows no bounds.

Subsequent American politicians have had to find a workable blend between their secular desiderata and requisite quasi-religious cant. Even today every political speech in America has to have divine references, if only “God save America” at the end.

In his acceptance speech the other day, Trump – who has never been accused of excessive piety – acknowledged that tradition by saying: “I stand before you only by the grace of almighty God.” Though rather tame by the standards of American politics, that statement tugged on the heart strings of the nation. The country stood ready to believe that Trump had been saved by divine interference rather than by Crooks’s poor marksmanship.

At least Trump didn’t ascribe divine powers to his country, as did, for example, Thomas Paine in his revolutionary gospel Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand…”

Later the lexicon of American exceptionalism was expanded by the journalist John L. O’Sullivan who in 1840 coined the term ‘manifest destiny’. Said destiny was according to him divine: it was incumbent upon America “to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man”.

At about the same time, John Quincy Adams averred that America’s founding document was a simulacrum of Genesis: “Fellow citizens, the ark of your covenant is the Declaration of Independence.”

Such sentiments had to find an artistic expression, not just the verbal kind. That’s why sacral visual imagery abounds in American politics, as do mock-religious shrines to past leaders.

George Washington in particular is worshipped in a religious manner as the ‘Great Father of the Country’. The interior of the Capitol dome in D.C. displays a fresco entitled The Apotheosis of Washington, where the sainted Father is surrounded by Baroque angels and also representations of other Founders in contact with various pagan deities, such as Neptune, Vulcan and Minerva.

In the same vein, the Lincoln Memorial is designed as a Greek temple and is actually identified as such in marble: “In this temple, as in the hearts of the people, for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”

The Jefferson Memorial, not far away, is also a replica of a pagan shrine, with various quasi-religious references inscribed. Cited, for example, is a quotation from Jefferson’s letter to Washington preaching that: “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? … Commerce between master and slave is despotism”.

It’s useful to remember that these ringing words were uttered by a man who had his chattel slaves flogged to mincemeat for trying to escape. Jefferson also openly despised every Christian dogma and sacrament.

The statement would therefore be either hypocritical or even cynical if we were to forget that by then ‘God’ had become the shorthand for ‘America’. Thus the sacred shrines in Washington’s Tidal Basin attract millions of secular pilgrims every year, those eager to worship at the altar of American exceptionalism.

Margaret Thatcher was right: Europe will never be like America. Europe has abandoned her religious heritage; America has converted hers into pagan self-worship.

It’s hard to say which is worse. But it’s easier to understand why British conservatives wince every time an American politician waxes quasi-devout to an audience happy to put their hands on their hearts.

Yet by now that reaction is more aesthetic than philosophical. Which, of course, makes it much stronger: taste runs deeper than any philosophy. One thing for sure: contrary to Churchill’s quip, it’s not just the common language that divides the two nations.

There’s no such thing as a good ideology, as far as I’m concerned. All ideologies are wrong practically by definition.

They are all political constructs built out of such materials as rancour, powerlust, sentimentality, envy and other deadly sins – never out of high intelligence, common sense and morality as laid down in Exodus and Matthew.

Ideologies are secular religions that, on false pretences, demand the kind of obedience and worship that real religions command as of right. This creates an incongruity that offends any developed aesthetic sense. All ideologies are in bad taste, which is even worse than being downright subversive.

That’s true even when they are preached and practised by good people full of good intentions. For example, I know and like quite a few people who support Trump. However, whenever they talk or write about their hero, I wince as if touching a slug by accident.

They all have good reasons for supporting Trump, and they can discuss them quite rationally and persuasively. Alas, one can detect another layer either above or beneath their reason, that of ideological, messianic devotion. They worship Trump as if he were Moses guided by God to lead them into the promised land of right-wing rectitude.

Hence they treat any criticism of Trump not as disagreement but as heresy or even apostasy. Trump, like Caesar’s wife, is above suspicion. He is the messiah embodying God’s will, someone who can only be worshipped, not decorticated.

Whenever any politician – and I do mean any, throughout history – is talked about in those terms, I smell a rat, the kind that died in one’s basement at the beginning of a hot summer. An ideology raised to the level of cult is at play there, and that cancels out in my eyes any sound policies Trump has in mind – and many of them are indeed sound.

Let’s not lose track of the historical fact that Moses wasn’t a candidate for the presidency of Judaea, nor was Jesus an MP for Galilee South. Both of them signposted their territory way above politics, and any politician claiming or receiving similar devotion is a trespasser. This, no matter how attractive his policies or sterling his record.

Now we are on the subject of Moses and his people, the Jews suffered a tragedy in the 20^th century for which one struggles to find any close parallels in history. About half of the world’s Jews were murdered by satanic ghouls in the name of a satanic ideology.

It’s testimony to the fortitude of the Jewish people that they have risen Phoenix-like yet again, having recovered from the worst wounds few nations have ever suffered. Yet wounds leave scars. These may become paler and less achy with time, but they never disappear.

In this case, the scars are mental. Just imagine 35 million Britons murdered within a few years (the same proportion as the Jews murdered by Hitler and his henchmen), and you’ll know that such scars demand treatment, for otherwise the wounds will fester for ever.

The Nazis, those from Germany and occupied countries, especially but not exclusively in Eastern Europe, defined Jews by their ethnicity. A Christian or an atheist Jew was still a Jew to them, and as such slated for extermination as a member of the lowliest race.

Such a descending scale of racial ranking was a purely ideological construct, abhorrent not only to Jews and other putative Untermenschen, but also to Christians and any decent people whose moral compass hadn’t gone haywire.

Unfortunately, Jews and other decent people reacted to that ideological savagery with an ideology of their own. Their ideology isn’t savage and, in fact, it’s perfectly understandable. Yet it’s an ideology nonetheless, and therefore impervious to facts, common sense and in fact to the evidence before our very eyes.

The essence of that ideology is that Jewishness has no ethnic or racial component whatsoever. The logic is, as I said, understandable, but it’s still shabby.

Since Hitler treated Jewishness as ethnicity or race, and Hitler was a murderous monster, Western Jews and, in due course, Westerners in general decreed that thenceforth any such characteristics no longer applied. A Jew is a synonym of a Judaist. If he isn’t a Judaist, he isn’t a Jew. And anyone who insists on an ethnic component to Jewishness is a Nazi sympathiser.

This gets me back to the title above. If we follow this logic to its natural conclusion, then an atheist Jew, or one espousing any other religion, is a contradiction in terms. Yet anyone with eyes to see knows that’s not so. One doesn’t have to be a Nazi to observe that, say, the late Dr Ruth Westheimer looked Jewish and, say, the late Grace Kelly didn’t.

Yet it’s meaningless to say that Joe Biden looks Catholic or Donald Trump Presbyterian. Religion lives in the mind and soul only and doesn’t produce any physical characteristics.

If, however, many members of a large group do share such characteristics, they have some genetic commonality. This observation doesn’t exonerate Hitler or other anti-Semites, whose name is legion, and a rapidly growing one at the moment. It’s just a statement of fact free of any ideological overtones.

Israel is a religious state in ways that in the West are things of the past (one is tempted to say unfortunately). Hence it has a state religion, and more power to it. But, unlike the state religion of England, Israel’s is interlaid with ideological strands, and this is evident in its Law of Return.

According to it, any Jew living in any part of the world is automatically entitled to settle in Israel and receive Israeli citizenship. This noble law was a direct response to the Holocaust. Jews of the world had to be told that they could always find a safe haven in Israel, no matter how persecuted they were in their native lands.

All that remained was defining a Jew, and that’s where ideology crept in. The Law of Return applies to any person who has a Jewish mother, and also to the children and grandchildren of Jews, as well as their spouses and the spouses of their children and grandchildren.

Any atheists within that group are welcome, which suggests that the criterion at work there is purely ethnic. However, the Law doesn’t cover any Jew who espouses any religion other than Judaism. This is illogical on many levels.

Historically, the Nazis treated Jewish Christians the way they treated all Jews – with murderous hatred. Today’s anti-Semites also ignore religious nuances (as the Russians say, it’s not your passport but your mug that gets punched), meaning that, push come to shove, Jewish Christians would be as much in need of a refuge as Jewish atheists.

Moreover, the former are religiously, philosophically and typologically closer to Judaists than atheists are – after all, the Old Testament is part of the Christian canon. An atheist Jew isn’t an oxymoron, but then neither is a Christian Jew.

This is what happens when ideology barges in: logic goes right out of the window, as does factual evidence. When queried on this subject, Israelis simply walk away from an obvious infidel.

By the same token, Trump’s right-wing admirers refuse to discuss some demonstrably left-wing policies he favours, such as protectionism. Ideology has a way of cauterising one’s brain, at least the part of it where capacity for dispassionate analysis resides.

So no, an atheist Jew isn’t an oxymoron. But a good ideology is.

When Argentina players were celebrating their victory in Copa America the other day, they sang a chant going back to their 2022 victory over France.

Considering that France is in Europe and hence took no part in Copa America, I don’t understand why the Argentines chose to revive that song. But I do understand perfectly the indignation expressed in no uncertain terms by the French Football Federation (FFF).

In fact, when I glanced at the lead paragraph in the article about that outrage I too was incandescent, as a part-time resident of France. Apparently, the chant claimed that all French players were from Angola.

“How dare they!” I said out loud within Penelope’s earshot. Everybody knows Angola used to be a Portuguese possession, not French. Don’t they teach geography in Argentina? They should have sung that all French players came from Senegal or Côte d’Ivoire, then everyone would be happy…

It fell upon Penelope to do her wifely duty and get me on the straight and narrow. Read the whole article, she said. Then you’ll know why everybody’s up in arms.

So fine, I read the whole article, or rather the first half of it, and as a result my anger subsided somewhat but didn’t disappear altogether. Here are the offensive lyrics:

“Listen, spread the word, they play in France, but they are all from Angola, they are going to run well, they like to sleep with trans people, their mum is Nigerian, their dad is Cameroonian, but on the passport it says: French.”

Fine, Cameroon indeed used to be a French colony, I’ll grant them that. But Nigeria was British, so what on earth does it have to do with anything? Those ball-kickers are still geographical ignoramuses, and the FFF has every right to be aghast.

To their credit, Argentina footballers redeemed themselves in my eyes by praising the athleticism of their French colleagues (“they are going to run well”) and their broadminded approach to the most burning issue in today’s global affairs (“they like to sleep with trans people”). Anticipating that the FFF would excuse the geographical faux pas, balanced as it was with unreserved accolades, I then read its statement in full:

“Faced with the seriousness of these shocking remarks, contrary to the values of sport and human rights, the President of the FFF decided to directly challenge his Argentinian counterpart and FIFA, and to file a legal complaint for insulting remarks of a racist and discriminatory nature.”

Excuse me? Racist? Discriminatory? Legal complaint? I had to go back to the chant’s lyrics to see if they contained any derogatory remarks about other races – and found none. If we abandon geographical hair-splitting, the chant simply stated a fact in lexically neutral terms.

Looking at France’s 26-player squad at Euro 2024, anyone can see that all but four of its players are of African origin. That makes most of them, if not quite all, as the chant claims. But hey, what’s a little poetic licence among friends?

And how is the contention that France players like to sleep with trans people discriminatory? If the claim were that they hate to get their jollies with transsexuals, now that would be clear-cut discrimination.

According to the prevalent ethos, transsexuality is perfectly normal, and in fact commendable. Thus denying people sexual favours just because they used to be another (not the other!) sex would be discrimination at its most blatant. Granting such favours, on the other hand, means striking a blow for diversity, equity and inclusivity. The FFF should have congratulated Enzo Fernandez and other Argentina players on being so free of bias.

Enzo drew most fire in England because he plays for Chelsea FC. It has to be said that protecting the delicate sensibilities of the French has seldom figured high on the British list of priorities. But we can rise above parochial concerns when an accusation of racism wafts through the air.

The outcry was thunderous, especially since Fernandez isn’t the only Argentine player in the Premier League or even at Chelsea. Some of his teammates unfriended and unfollowed him on social media. Others complained to the FA (this stands for the Football Association, not its do-nothing approach to its job).

The FA and Chelsea FC have had to launch a forensic investigation, which one wouldn’t think should require the detective skills of a Sherlock Holmes. In fact, the purpose of this effort isn’t to establish guilt or innocence – anyone accused of racism is guilty as charged – but to decide on the commensurate punishment.

So far the talk is of a lengthy ban, 12 games or more, not a criminal prosecution. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the Met got interested too. After all, since London is famously crime-free, our police can concentrate on things that really matter.

Actually, South American players have some previous in this area. Two years ago, Edison Cavani of Uruguay and Manchester United was banned for three games. When a Uruguayan friend had congratulated him on his performance, Cavani wrote back, saying “Gracias negrito”, which means “Thank you, my dear friend” in Uruguayan slang.

However, the FA gentlemen didn’t care about the niceties of Uruguayan usage. They cared about the pejorative meaning a partial homophone of ‘negrito’ can have in English. This isn’t just a matter of semantics, but also of phonetics.

Words like ‘niggardly’ have been known to get officials in trouble, and I wouldn’t be surprised if barmen serving Negronis had their collars felt. This gives a palpable meaning to the expression ‘I don’t like the sound of that’.

If a perplexed Cavani was banned for using a normal term of endearment, Enzo could well be drummed out of English footie for good. Since he is aware of that possibility, he hastily produced a profuse written apology. One can admire his eloquence in English, for just a couple of months ago he could barely manage “My name is Enzo” in that language:

“I stand against discrimination in all forms and apologise for getting caught up in the euphoria of our Copa America celebrations. That video, that moment, those words, do not reflect my beliefs or my character. I am truly sorry.”

I’ll let you in on a secret. Nobody is genuinely offended by that unfortunate chant: not the FA, not Chelsea FC, not Fernandez’s teammates – not even the French who do tend to offend easily. However, the governing woke ideology mandates that they all register their indignation, the more hysterically the better.

English football chants in general aren’t known for heightened sensitivity to voguish taboos, including racial ones.

Thus Liverpool supporters are treated to “Your mum’s your dad, and your dad’s your mum, you’re inbred and you’re benefit scum.”

Tottenham Hotspur, based in a largely Jewish neighbourhood, is regaled with the chant of “Yid army!” and “Where’s your foreskin gone?// where’s your foreskin gone?// where’s your foreskin gone?”

The Spurs Korean striker Son plays to the accompaniment of: “He’ll run and he’ll score, he’ll eat your Labrador.”

And then there’s the ubiquitous chant of “There ain’t no black in the Union Jack!” at all football venues.

Sexual allusions are also rife, such as: “[Player’s name] is queer, he takes it up the rear.” (This, irrespective of the player’s sexuality.)

Such is the culture of English football, and the background against which Fernandez’s transgression should be judged. Footie in England is a working class game, mostly played by athletes who grew up in degrading poverty. Many of them come from racial ghettos in Britain and elsewhere.

Holding them and their fans down to the standards that woke ‘liberal’ intelligentsia wishes to impose on society the better to destroy it is criminal. People like Enzo are more sinned against than sinning.

Imperfect people can’t produce a perfect world, which doesn’t prevent them from hoping. And when hopes get frustrated, people refuse to blame their own failings.

Proceeding from the presumption of their own infallibility, they have to ascribe all sorts of problems to some dark and unidentified forces conspiring against everything that’s good in the world.

In the distant past, the culprits nominated for the role of conspirators were all supernatural: demons, witches, the devil himself. The demons were exorcised, the witches were burned at the stake, the devil was told in no uncertain terms to go back where he had come from. Yet nothing worked: life went on and problems multiplied.

Since then mankind has moved onto a less mystical ground, and human candidates have assumed the role of conspirators in the public mind. Jews and Freemasons, the Bilderbergers and the Club of Rome, vaccinators and cryptocurrency mongers, the Deep State and the New World Order, the World Economic Forum and Skull & Bones all figure prominently among the likely conspiracies planning either to destroy or to dominate the world.

This leaves me frustrated at never having been asked to join. Every time a prominent individual is described as a member of one such group, I have to ask that popular rhetorical question: “And what am I, chopped liver?”

This levity shouldn’t suggest that I don’t believe any conspiracies have ever existed. They have, and communism springs to mind as an obvious example as a vast plot to take over the world. Yet, while specific actions planned by the communists were usually kept secret, their goals weren’t.

In fact, anyone scanning the works of communist chieftains will notice their commendable frankness: they never bothered to conceal their plan to foment a world revolution, which is to say a violent global conquest. It’s not for nothing that the Soviet state emblem featured the hammer and sickle superimposed on the whole globe.

However, that real conspiracy hasn’t satisfied the public’s hunger for mythical ones, those concocted so deeply underground that no evidence of their existence has ever been uncovered. Blaming the Soviets or the Chinese was too humdrum. On the other hand, blaming the Judaeo-Masons or the Illuminati tickled imagination into onanistic satisfaction.

Moving on from big to small, every attempt to assassinate a public figure has been blamed on a conspiracy even in the presence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And fair enough, some were indeed fiendish plots hatched by villainous groups.

Many other assassination attempts, however, weren’t. They usually resulted from a confluence of two factors: existence of a deranged individual with a firearm and a monumental lapse of vigilance on the part of the security detail. A cock-up in other words, and this version of history appeals to me more than any conspiracy theory.

With that in mind, let’s put conspiracy theories aside for the moment, whip out our Occam’s razor and try to cut the most direct path to the attempt on Trump’s life.

The first precondition was in place: Thomas Crooks with his AR-15 rifle. The lad is generally described as a deranged loner, and perhaps he was just that. Spy services have been known to recruit such people “in the dark”, to do their dirty work often even without knowing the employer’s true nationality.

The possibility of such a false-flag recruitment shouldn’t be discounted altogether. But first we must consider a simpler and likelier explanation: Crooks was an impressionable youngster who was misinformed.

Since before his teens he had been exposed to grownups highly placed in government and media telling him that Trump threatened to destroy American democracy and introduce a fascist dictatorship. Now, if you were certain that some individual harboured such dastardly designs, and that you could save your country with a well-placed shot, wouldn’t you at least consider it?

By the same token, as C.S. Lewis once explained, medieval people had no doubt that every natural disaster and pestilence was a result of witchcraft. Hence they burned witches as a way of saving the crops and livestock that fed their families. That was a failure of education, not morality: most people would kill to save their families from certain death.  

The same thought process might have led Crooks to believe he was a hero, dying so his country would live. He might have been led to this conclusion by wily conspirators, but it’s not beyond the realm of psychological probability that he reached it all by himself.

But why was he allowed to get those shots off in the first place? Again, one hears all sorts of theories involving plots hatched by Iran in cahoots with the Democratic Party. In the absence of concrete evidence, these proceed from the old cui bono principle.

If anyone wishes to investigate the crime on that basis, good luck to him. The number of groups wishing to see Trump dead runs into dozens, and the number of such individuals into millions. Hence I have to be sceptical about any such forensic investigation ever reaching an end other than a dead one.

The cock-up explanation lacks the cachet of an involved conspiracy theory, but it offers the advantage of simplicity and greater probability. The cock-up in question is produced by the pandemic of moral and intellectual corruption infesting every public institution in the West.

The source of that corruption might have been partly conspiratorial at the very beginning, a century or so ago. But by now it’s so all-encompassing that it has infected great swathes of Western public opinion. I’d describe that source as the primacy of ideology over reason and morality, or else as the triumph of virtual over actual reality.

Various ideologies have always made inroads on decent life, but society used to be robust enough not to cede its core even when accepting minor compromises at the periphery.

That strength has now been lost, and the West is reeling from the blows delivered by one cock-up after another. People like me, those who used to live under the sway of pernicious ideologies, shudder with recognition.

We’ve seen it before: important public jobs from government ministers all the way down to lowly cops filled not with the best candidates but those who pass the test of ideological purity. In Russia, one got ahead by mouthing Party drivel with eye-popping conviction and also by having simon-pure ancestry (no relations abroad, no capitalists, no Jews or other undesirable ethnics, ideally several generations of manual workers).

That eventually led to the whole country becoming one giant cock-up at every level, a megalomaniac exercise in ideology-induced incompetence and corruption. And now the West is going the same way and for the same reason, if led by an ostensibly different ideology.

It would be counterintuitive to expect the US Secret Service to remain an oasis of sanity keeping ideology off-limits. So, if such is your wont, you are welcome to ascribe the ease with which Crooks climbed that roof and started firing to a conspiracy. I ascribe it to an ideological cock-up.

First question: how come no agents were placed on the roof offering a perfect firing position just 150 yards from the target, practically point-blank for the AR-15? Kimberly Cheatle, head of the US Secret Service, explains that oversight was deliberate.

“That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point,” making it dangerous for Secret Service agents to climb there, she says. British readers will instantly identify this reply as pervasive obsession with ‘elf and safety. People must be protected from every manner of danger – and their managers from every manner of lawsuit.

Now, Secret Service officers are expected to take a bullet aimed at their charges. Compared to that, climbing onto a sloped roof seems to be a doddle, and in fact the roof from which Secret Service snipers fired at Crooks was just as sloped.

Cheatle’s reply is thus nonsensical, or would be had it come from reason. But it came, in fact, from the visceral reaction of an apparatchik loyal to the dominant ideology, not to her job.

‘Health and safety’ is only a minor part of that ideology. Much more important is DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), an eerie reminder of the Soviet accent on ideological purity. Cheatle wouldn’t be in her job if she weren’t a DEI martinet.

Thus, she said that by 2030 she wanted at least 30 per cent of all agents to be women: “We need to attract diverse candidates and ensure that we are developing and giving opportunities to everyone in our workforce, particularly women.”

It has to be obvious to any sensible person that women have certain physical disadvantages that may curb their performance on the muscle end of law enforcement. It’s possible that some women may overcome such innate weaknesses and become, say, great Secret Service officers. Yet putting a percentage target on such overachievers suggests that women would be recruited simply on the basis of their sex.

In fact, when Cheatle took over and spelled out her life’s philosophy, many officers quit, leaving the service grossly understaffed. But Trump’s security detail did include three women, whose response strongly suggests they were DEI hires.

All three were short and overweight (chivalry prevents me from saying ‘fat’). After the shots were fired, they had no idea what to do. They were running around in circles, pointing their guns at all and sundry. One fumbled with her holster, unable to put the weapon back in. Another, about a foot shorter than Trump, embraced him and put her head under his armpit, leaving his head exposed.

Meanwhile, a male officer tall enough to shield Trump from another possible bullet was behind him, which showed a remarkable lack of coordination. Even worse was the lack of coordination between the Secret Service and local police, drawn in to secure the wider perimeter.

The whole thing was a cock-up, and the ideological explanation of it strikes me as more plausible than the conspiratorial one. One way or another, I fear we’ll never know the truth, which doesn’t prevent me from hoping we shall.

Donald Trump’s choice of running mate has won a ringing endorsement – not only from the Republican Convention but also from Putin’s propagandists.

“Reasonable people could come to power in the States,” commented Alexander Dugin, the ideologue of Russian Nazism. Translated from the Russian Nazi, ‘reasonable’ means ‘willing to deliver the Ukraine to Putin’.

But fair enough, J.D. Vance is indeed an intelligent and capable man. And he is misguided the way only an intelligent and capable man can be.

Vance’s intelligence was honed by his career as venture capitalist, just as Trump’s was by his lifetime in property development. It’s understandable that both men have to see the world at least partly through the prism of their experience.

Alas, that prism tends to distort the real picture. That’s why Trump seems to think that any foreign threat can be nullified by ‘making a deal’, a phrase I think should be banned from political discourse.

Property developers think deals; political leaders think alliances, blocs, partnerships, treaties, power relationships. Property developers make deals on the basis of short-term profit. Once the project has been completed and all the cheques have cleared, the deal is done – on to the next one. Political leaders, by contrast, must think on a loftier timeline: decades, possibly even centuries.

Property developers and their clients engage in a bit of give and take to strike a mutually beneficial deal defined in monetary terms. The only moral requirement is to stay a hair’s breadth inside the law. Political leadership relates to that activity the way philosophy and morality relate to double-entry accounting.

Everything that can be said about property development also goes for venture capitalism. This isn’t to say that men trained in such professions can’t rise to statesmanship and strategic thought. They can, but such an ascent requires a qualitative upward shift, making which is never easy, and it becomes harder with age.

Vance is young enough to make it, but the starting point should be a realisation that so far his thinking on foreign policy has been at best shallow. He doesn’t seem to understand the tectonic shifts in world order currently under way.

Vance doesn’t see Putin’s Russia as “an existential threat to Europe”. Speaking about the biggest European war since 1945, he said: “I got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” And in any case, Trump will “bring this thing to a rapid close so America can focus on the real issue, which is China. That’s the biggest threat to our country and we are completely distracted from it.”

Trump doubtless shares this point of view, yet even he doesn’t pronounce on “this thing” so forthrightly. Moreover, when Trump suggested he’d stop the war in 24 hours, he didn’t go into much detail. Cutting aid to the Ukraine is what he probably had in mind, but Vance has already acted in that spirit in the Senate, by manfully trying to block the aid package for the Ukraine.

He couched that effort in pragmatic-sounding but in fact spurious terms: “We lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war. By committing to a defensive strategy, Ukraine can preserve its precious military manpower, stop the bleeding and provide time for negotiations to commence.”

‘Defensive strategy’ and ‘negotiations’ are in this context synonymous with surrender. As to America’s inability to make enough weapons, that claim is simply false. The US was able to act as ‘the arsenal of democracy’ (also of Stalin’s totalitarianism, it has to be said) under the much greater demands of a world war. That enabled her to emerge as a great power and undisputed leader of the free world.

In this case, America wouldn’t even have to manufacture all the arsenal that could win the war for the Ukraine. Much of it already sits in warehouses ready to be decommissioned and replaced with the next generation of weapons. Yet what has become obsolete for the US army could be life’s blood for the Ukraine.

For example, the USAF is now flying 5^th generation fighter planes, which will be replaced with 6^th generation by 2030. However, a few hundred 4^th generation F-16s could throw a security blanket over Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. Such planes wouldn’t have to be manufactured: they are already parked in hangars, and there’s some life left in them yet.

In common with his boss, Vance is suspicious of America’s Atlanticism. He sees NATO as “a tax on America”, which no doubt plays well in the swing states. Yet this is sheer demagoguery because the ‘tax’ comes with a hefty refund.

This isn’t to argue that Europe shouldn’t spend more on defence – its approach to such matters has been criminally irresponsible for decades. If Trump only threatens to withdraw from NATO to make Europe loosen its purse strings, I hope this works. Yet it’s hard to overestimate the economic benefits America derives from being the dominant Western power.

Without going into too much detail, the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement established the dollar as the world’s reference currency, which was consistent with America’s newly acquired global status. Should America relinquish that status, just think what would happen if her staggering $35 trillion debt were denominated in some other currency, such as the yuan. The ensuing catastrophe is hard to imagine.

Also in common with Trump, Vance feels that America’s vital interests lie in the Pacific, not the Atlantic. Yet he is wrong to discount the “existential threat” of Russia while emphasising that presented by China. Both threats exist, and in fact they are one and the same.

The two evil powers work in concert to destroy the post-1945 world order, as underwritten and enforced by NATO. China is the senior partner in that relationship, the feudal to Russia’s vassal. Xi is using Putin the way the Golden Horde used Russian princes who did much of its fighting, mostly against other Russian princes.

China herself stays on the side lines, openly encouraging and secretly supplying Russia’s war effort, while buying up Russian hydrocarbons at dumping prices. Meanwhile, China’s own designs on Taiwan have never gone beyond hysterical threats, and it’s far from clear that Xi is planning an invasion.

His vassal Putin, on the other hand, is already attacking Western interests on the battlefield. Hence Vance’s belief that America needs to keep her weapons for a potential war with China is misguided. And if he doesn’t realise that the Ukraine is defending our vital interests, he hasn’t delved into this issue as deeply as it requires.

In any case, his main problem with China has to do with matters economic rather than martial. According to him, too much production is outsourced to China, which makes American workers suffer. His – and Trump’s – solution is to impose stiff tariffs on Chinese imports, stiffer than the 10 per cent Trump put into effect during his first term. In fact, Trump is threatening to slap protectionist tariffs on all imports, not just Chinese ones.

This is bad economics, which has been known since at least the 18^th century. Thus Adam Smith: “To give the monopoly of the home-market to the produce of domestic industry… must, in almost all cases, be either a useless or a hurtful regulation. If the produce of domestic can be brought there as cheap as that of foreign industry, the regulation is evidently useless. If it cannot, it must generally be hurtful.”

Protectionism “must generally be hurtful” because it raises the price of goods produced by uncompetitive domestic industries, thereby diverting funds from the competitive ones – and hurting consumers in the process. Limiting or even eliminating trade with hostile powers is a different proposition, but that’s achieved with sanctions and boycotts, not tariffs. All such measures spring from political necessity, not economics.

I recall seeing bumper stickers in America, saying: “Buy a foreign car, put 10 Americans out of work”. One would expect the once and future leaders of the free world to think of the economy on a higher level than the owner of a pickup truck with deer antlers attached to its roof.

At my advanced age, I know better than to take politicians at their word. It’s possible that Trump and Vance won’t act on their statements, coming up instead with a sage policy designed to contain and roll back evil powers. But something tells me they are likely to practise what they preach, which would be bad news for all of us.

I think the Donald will miss a trick if he doesn’t start his speech at the Republican Convention by saying: “Friends, Americans, countrymen, lend me an ear”.

On the one hand, this will demonstrate his knowledge of English classics, an erudition he has so far securely kept under wraps. On the other hand, it’ll show he’s a man who can afford treating English classics cavalierly, which only highly educated people can get away with – and only in the company of other highly educated people. And then, of course, taking his near brush with death so lightly will reinforce his image as a man of courage.

Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to offer unsolicited advice to any politician. Hence I’m sure Trump won’t make light of that tragic episode. Then again, he doesn’t have much in the way of a sense of humour, at least none that’s instantly discernible.

American politicians in general tend to come across as sombre people who don’t find the world a laughing matter. They are inclined to take the world, and especially themselves in it, seriously. Sure enough, they all have a repertoire of stock jokes they deliver at the beginning of their speeches, but then they tend to wipe the smile off their faces and start waxing serious or rather solemn.

When they do crack a humorous aside, it often comes across as rather inappropriate and heavy-handed. Thus J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, attempted humour by identifying Britain as the first Islamist nuclear power. “I was just beating up on the UK,” he explained when asked what he meant. That’s a time-honoured kind of fencing, but perhaps it would be better if practised with a rapier, rather than a cudgel. Anyway, what happened to making France the butt of American jokes? She too is a nuclear power, and she has more Muslims than Britain does.

Ronald Reagan stood apart from most American politicians, what with his ready chuckles and “oh shucks” asides. His famous joke about his age during a debate with Walter Mondale (“I’m not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience”) was probably pre-prepared, but I remember his amusing lines delivered off the cuff at talk shows even before he was elected president.

But Reagan was rather an exception – just compare his reaction to being shot with Trump’s. Reagan’s response was a charming quip delivered with a smile; Trump’s, a gesture of belligerent defiance made with a scowl.

In general, it’s hard to imagine an American politician like Boris Johnson, a P.G. Wodehouse Englishman pretending to be a P.G. Wodehouse Englishman, full of one-liners, wisecracks and anecdotes, all introduced with “I say…”. The desired impression to convey thereby is that there is a man of substance lurking behind the light-hearted exterior.

A closer examination of Mr Johnson’s political career, however, reveals no such man ready to spring to action from the depth of his real character. The flimsy outer shell is all there is.

By the accounts of people who know him personally, Johnson is a joy to have around at a dinner party. But when it comes to leading the Tory Party, one would rather have a man short on sense of humour but long on character. And even public figures who have a knack for keeping us in stitches with witty epigrams and clever asides should limit that ability to a bare minimum.

People like humorous men, but they follow serious ones – even in Britain and certainly in America. That point was made by the advertising guru David Ogilvy, a Scotsman who spent most of his career in the US. “People don’t buy from clowns,” he wrote. True. But they used to buy from salesmen who charmed them with inoffensive humour.

When advertising was at its best, in the second half of the 20^th century, it was full of humour both in Britain and the US, but more so in Britain. It wasn’t wit of the calibre of Oscar Wilde and P.G. Wodehouse or, for that matter, Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. But then neither was it usually the hard sell preaching that a different brand of toothpaste or deodorant could change a person’s life.

If we study the famous witty aphorisms by American and British politicians, we’ll find that most of them go back decades if not centuries. As time went by, politicians apparently began to lose their sense of humour, or perhaps politics no longer attracted people endowed with that talent.

Again, this tendency is more noticeable in the US than in Britain, though my experience of the two nations doesn’t suggest that Americans in general are any less humorous than Britons. The explanation, I think, has more to do with class than with nationality.

Until relatively recently, it was the British upper classes that staffed most political institutions, including government. And not taking themselves seriously, or at least not showing that they do, is a hallmark of British aristocracy and the upper reaches of the middle class. Actually, that attractive feature cuts across the whole British social ladder, but skipping a few steps in the very middle, those occupied by unsmiling nouveaux riches bourgeoisie.

And yes, I agree that my blackish jokes at the beginning of this article aren’t in the best of taste. But I can afford the luxury of questionable humour. After all, I’m not standing for any political office – and, between you and me, hold a rather dim view of those who do.