Author: Alexander Boot

On 3 January the newly elected Democratic majority in the US House of Representatives will come into force.

Is there a constitutional crisis looming on 4 January? Or a couple of weeks thereafter at the latest?

I hope not. An America in crisis spells an America enfeebled and consequently a NATO weakened.

And NATO is the sole guarantor of our liberties, threatened by variously evil empires. That’s how it has been since 1949, and that’s how it’ll remain – or nothing will remain at all.

The classicists among you will notice that I’m paraphrasing the stout aphorism of the great Jesuit Matteo Ricci (d. 1610): “Simus, ut sumus, aut non simus” (“We shall remain as we are or we shall not remain at all”).

Fr Ricci displayed prophetic prescience in anticipating the role NATO plays in European security – and also the idiocy of a pan-European army as a possible alternative.

Lacking Fr Ricci’s foresight and remembering Cassandra’s fate, I refuse to make any predictions. Guesses, however, are a different matter, provided they’re reasonably educated.

First the indisputable facts, all relating to the Mueller investigation.

Four of Trump’s most senior associates have pleaded guilty to assorted crimes, most of them related to illegal dealings with Putin’s Russia.

Threatened with long prison stints, they’ve all cut deals with the prosecution. That means they’ve been baring their souls to Mueller for several months.

However, none of their revelations have so far been made public. Why has Mueller been so reticent?

Granted, he’s institutionally obligated to submit his findings to the Attorney General, not to The New York Times. But come on now, we’re all grown-ups here. We live at a time of inexplicable leaks, with the press getting a whiff of explosive information through unauthorised channels.

Mueller has a large staff, covering many tiers in the ‘G’ structure of federal employment. Since possible findings may include some with the megaton yield of Watergate proportions, newspapers would pay sticker price for any sensational leak. Millions, if need be.

Anyone who insists that not a single person working for Mueller could be seduced by an offer of secure retirement presumes way too much on human goodness. So why has the Mueller investigation gone mute?

Of course one possibility is that it has uncovered nothing worth leaking. But that’s unlikely.

Men like Manafort and Flynn were privy to every secret of the Trump campaign, including its dealings with Putin. Actually, these two in particular were the principal intermediaries in such dealings.

Now it’s not only unlikely but impossible that systematic contacts between a man not overburdened with scruples and a regime closely resembling an extended Mafia family escaped a touch of dirt somewhere along the line.

It might have been a bit of fiscal mud sticking to the shoe sole or a dumper truck tipping its load of collusion manure all over the man, but there was some dirt – guaranteed.

You know it, I know it – above all, Trump knows it. For ever since allegations of collusion with the Putin gang surfaced, Trump has been acting as a man with something to hide.

He tried to make Attorney General Jeff Sessions shut the Mueller investigation down. When Sessions refused, he got into the president’s bad books. Tellingly, he was then sacked the day after the Democrats won their majority in the House.

Clearly Trump senses a dog fight ahead, and he wants a pit bull in his corner, not a poodle. Sessions was only a minor annoyance when the Republicans controlled both Houses. Once they lost the lower one, he became an unaffordable liability.

Trump has the power to fire Mueller without any help from Justice, but he may remember what happened to Nixon after he sacked Special Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox.

“Impeach the Cox sacker”, screamed NY bumper stickers, much to my mirth (and pride at being able to understand such puns just off the proverbial boat). Less than a year later Nixon was gone.

So far Trump has had to content himself with firing Sessions, just as earlier he got rid of FBI Director James Comey, who instigated the Mueller inquiry.

Matthew Whitaker, Sessions’s replacement, has publicly denounced the Mueller investigation, which makes him a perfect choice for the time when the Trump administration goes to the mattresses.

Thus, when Mueller submits his findings to the new AG, the latter will have the constitutional power to redact them, or even suppress them altogether. However, with the Democrats holding a House majority and presiding over all the key committees, they too have the power to fight back.

For example, they may call for a public inquiry and, if they wish, subpoena the entire population of Washington, DC, including the president himself.

A man with nothing to hide would welcome such an investigation because his name would be scrubbed a pristine white as a result. However, when a man uses every means at his disposal to shut the investigation down, his conscience can’t be impeccably spotless.

Yet the question remains: why have we not heard anything from Mueller since the potential jailbirds began singing under oath? Here we have to rely on conjecture.

I dread the possibility that Mueller and whoever is behind his investigation are sitting on explosive findings in anticipation of the Democrats taking control of the House. They may want to drop their bomb only when they know they won’t miss.

The Democrats take over on 3 January. Unless I miss my guess, the next day Mueller will submit his report to the Attorney General, who won’t release it to the public if there’s anything incriminating there.

A public inquiry will follow, and within a few weeks America may find herself embroiled in Watergate Mark II. I dread this possibility, and not just because this would make NATO vulnerable.

For, much as I find Trump personally hideous, most of his policies reflect a statesman’s mind and courage. A US president doesn’t have to be erudite, well-mannered, well-dressed and intellectual. He has to be effective, and Trump certainly is that.

He has already shown that, on balance, he’s a good president, certainly better than any of his post-Watergate predecessors, with the possible exception of Reagan. In time he may become a great president, which would benefit us all.

However, if his romance with Putin ever went beyond foreplay, none of that matters. Impeachment would be too mild a punishment. Flailing alive would be more fitting, although I don’t think US jurisprudence provides for this option.

Let’s wait and see – with our hands over our hearts, as if trying to contain the frenetic beats. I do hope America will remain at peace two months from now.

Bring something virtuous instead, if you want to get on the right side of the government and do your bit for the NHS.

Stock up on alfalfa, some nuts, perhaps a little tofu – all those things that are are both more and less than food.

Less, because anyone who prefers that stuff to a rare sirloin or full English hates food – and also God who provided it. More, because by going veggie, one sends a message of virtue urbi et orbi.

Alas, we’re all sinners and there’s a price attached to sin. It used to be believed that payment will be exacted in the afterlife, but that’s oh so yesterday.

If you sin against ‘our planet’, your body and consequently the NHS, the state will step in and make you pay instantly. Cash on the nail, son, without trouble like.

That’s why the government will almost certainly follow Oxford scientists’ recommendation that a 79 per cent tax be imposed on bacon, ham and sausages, and a 14 per cent one on raw meat.

Our governing spivs can be trusted to accept as gospel any pseudo-academic prescriptions that involve raising taxes. If tomorrow a Cambridge don recommends taxing dog owners or golfers, be sure that recommendation will be followed with alacrity.

With the fraudulent precision so characteristic of today’s academics the Oxonians promise that such a measure would prevent 6,000 deaths annually by dragging us towards healthier gastronomy.

They’re missing a trick there. Take it from an old advertising hack, chaps, never give round numbers if you want to be believed. Thus 6,054 would have sounded more credible than 6,000.

Equally suspect is their assertion that squeezing us with even more taxes would save the NHS £730 million by reducing the need for care. Again, take my advice, lads: either say ‘£729 million’ or, if you insist on round numbers, say ‘just under a billion’.

Lead researcher Dr Marco Springmann explains that: “The consumption of red and processed meat… is having significant impacts not only on personal health, but also on healthcare systems, which are taxpayer-funded.

“We are not saying do not have any meat, just pay a fair price for it that reflects the cost to your health and the pressure on the NHS.”

I suspect it would be easier for Dr Springmann to lose the redundant last letter in his surname than to abandon his canine devotion to the good of the state. But I admire his omniscience in knowing what is and what isn’t a fair price for a BLT sarnie.

Alas, in the fine, if recent, tradition of our academe he seems to be incapable of making a sound argument focusing on the crux of the matter, rather than on peripheral issues. It’s not about us deciding to eat more or less meat; it’s about the state making that decision for us.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a close friend, who at that time, some 30 years ago, was an NHS doctor. Having just moved to England from the US, I was appalled to see that not wearing a seat belt was punishable by law.

Such negligence, I said, could potentially harm the driver but no one else. And the government’s function is to protect us from others, not from ourselves.

Yes, said my friend, but if you get injured as a result of not wearing a seat belt, treating you would cost the NHS a lot of money, which makes it the government’s business.

That, I replied, is the strongest argument against the NHS, proving my point that a government that does a lot for you will end up doing a lot more to you.

Nationalised medicine enables the state to dictate what and when we should eat, how many hours or with whom we should sleep, how much exercise we should have and so forth. Yet I’d rather risk health problems than see my liberty curtailed wantonly.

To his credit, my friend has since mitigated his adulation of the NHS, but at that time he almost snapped my head off.

The NHS, you see, isn’t just a (grossly inefficient) system of financing healthcare. It has become a cult, a National Holy Service, and things like infidelity, apostasy and heresy are unthinkable.

Not being an expert, I’m not prepared to argue the health aspects of eating red meat. On general principle, I’m sure that eating too much of anything is bad for you, and meat is no exception – just as I’m certain that moderate consumption of any food God gave us in his munificence can’t harm anyone.

However, if those learned Oxonians want to elucidate the medical aspects of food, by all means they should. That’s what they get paid for.

But when they recommend punitive action, coinciding with the state’s urge to put its foot as far down as it’ll go while extorting even more money from us, they step way outside their brief.

I can only repeat what I said to my friend 30 years ago: it’s not the state’s remit to save us from ourselves. It is, however, its remit to save us from domestic criminals and foreign enemies.

For example, the state should pursue to the ends of the earth the vegan scum who issued death threats to that Devon turkey farmer – and send them down for many years, with nothing but meat on their prison diets.

Neither would it go amiss to treat knife wielders as vicious criminals to be locked up for life, rather than misguided youngsters in need of mollycoddling care. And yes, perhaps catching and convicting some burglars would be helpful too.

Once the state has taken care of its prime responsibilities, by all means let’s talk about Sunday roasts and bacon rolls – provided that chitchat doesn’t turn out to be yet another pretext to extort more of our money.

We’re sensible people, and we’ll listen to sound advice. But that’s all it should be, advice. Not a diktat, not a robbery attempt, not a way of reminding us who’s boss.

As to Dr Springmann and his fellow cardsharps, perhaps they should retrain as butcher’s assistants. They’d be able to do something useful for a change.

Macron’s ratings are heading down towards room temperature (Celsius), which exerts an unbearable pressure on his already overburdened mind.

And it’s worse than just the opinion polls. The French tend to express their disapproval of the government not only by talking to pollsters but also by burning cars, building barricades and tossing bricks through elegant shop windows.

Now, since Manny has announced his intention to raise petrol taxes even higher, the rioting season is about to start, and Manny is going off the rails.

Symptoms of an incipient mental disorder were particularly evident the other day, when Manny explained to the seething French that what they need in their lives isn’t affordable petrol but a united European army.

The need for it, according to Manny, is urgent – how else can we “protect ourselves against Russia, China and even the United States of America”? He didn’t mention Britain explicitly, but I’m sure in his febrile mind it’s but a subset of a vast, hostile entity called les anglo-saxons.

These are the countries Manny sees as immediate geopolitical threats to Europe, the kind of threats that only a pan-European army, presumably led by Angie as Generalissimo and Manny as Chief of the General Staff, can preempt or, barring that, repel.

Or perhaps I’ve got the pecking order wrong. After all, Manny sees himself as a present-day Charlemagne, the natural leader of a united Europe. Since after we leave the EU France will be the only nuclear power in the good part of Europe, perhaps it should be Manny taking charge.

I’m sure some modern answer to David and Delacroix has already been commissioned to paint Manny, sabre in hand, astride a white steed. May I suggest Toujours de l’audace! as the title of the painting?

Conceivably one can see how Russia can be cast in the role of potential aggressor, what with the increasingly bellicose noises emanating from the Kremlin. So, should the Russian army sweep across the plains of central Europe, Manny will be the first to man the Maginot Line, whatever is left of it after Germany’s previous attempt to unite Europe.

However, it’s not immediately clear why a pan-European army is required to counter the China threat – which isn’t to say that no threat exists. However, in any foreseeable future, China’s threat to France is economic, not military.

After all, the distance between the two countries is a densely populated 5,000 miles, which is a long hike even for a well-trained army, especially since it might have to fight its way through a few other countries en route.

Of course, China may opt for a massive ICBM strike instead, but then it’ll be down to France alone to retaliate, with other EU members watching from the sidelines. The Bulgarian, Romanian or even German contingents will realise that their small arms are useless against nuclear blasts.

Discounting therefore China as an immediate military threat, we move on to the looming menace of les anglo-saxons, with les yanquis leading the way and les rosbifs bringing up the rear.

As these abominable characters demonstrated on 6, June, 1944, they have the knowhow to get a vast force across La Manche and wipe the floor with Germany, united with France at the time and, come to think of it, at present as well.

One can see Manny’s point: France wouldn’t be able to resist such an invasion on her own, what with US and British armour rolling through the Channel Tunnel, oblivious of the beefed-up customs checks.

Hence the need for all continental countries to hang together, hoping les anglo-saxons don’t join forces with Russia, which will then stab France in the back – the way those ghastly Italians did in 1940.

If this is the way Manny’s geopolitical cookie crumbles, call for the men in white coats. An early diagnosis and immediate treatment just may take care of the problem before things like frontal lobotomy become necessary.

I think his foster mother Brigitte will be remiss in her duty of care if she ignores the emerging clinical picture. Act now, Bridge, before it’s too late.

Manny should read his briefings to learn that a united army able to stop Russia in her tracks already exists. It’s called NATO, which admittedly depends on les yanquis to remain a formidable force.

If Manny were medicated to get rid of his delirium about the impending US threat, he’d realise that simply matching the EU defence budgets with American (in GDP percentage terms) will provide all the military protection Europe will ever need.

And if he wants to fight les yanquis and the Chinese on the economic battleground, he should make France friendlier to business, both domestic and international.

Cutting taxes (including those on petrol) would be a good start, followed by stepping on the unions and a vast reduction in red tape (the amount of it in France looks insane even to les rosbifs, themselves no slouches when it comes to bureaucracy).

However, even suggesting this sort of thing to Manny is impossible. That’s like asking a madman who insists that he’s Napoleon to change his tack and declare himself Charlemagne instead.

For Manny is what psychiatrists call a monomaniac. He doesn’t really care about improving the business climate in France, any more than is absolutely necessary for his re-election.

Nor does he have sleepless nights about the 82^nd Airborne securing a bridgehead in Normandy. Manny’s fixation is on one subject only: a single European state, ideally with him at the helm.

Merging the armed forces of all EU members would take a huge stride towards that goal, for a country whose army isn’t under its own command is no longer a sovereign country.

Hence all the gallimaufry that comes out of Manny’s mouth, about the danger of the US joining forces with China to crush France in a pincer manoeuvre, with Russia chipping in from the north.

Manny had a rare flash of lucidity in the same speech, when he spoke about the threat of fascism in Europe.

Indeed, the National Front, or whatever it calls itself now, already outpolls Manny’s own party in France, while populist, in fact crypto-fascist, parties are making inroads in Germany, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Italy and elsewhere.

Yet Manny’s brittle mental health prevents him from realising that this worrying development is a direct reaction to what Euromaniacs like him are doing to Europe: stamping national identities into the dirt and replacing them with bondage to the throng of corrupt and unaccountable bureaucrats.

I must put a quiet word in Brigitte’s shell-like, to the effect that there’s plenty of work still to be done on Manny – provided his treatment works.

On his visit to Ghana, Prince Charles felt called upon to refer to the horrors of slavery as “the most painful chapter of Ghana’s relations with the nations of Europe, including the United Kingdom.”

“The appalling atrocity of the slave trade, and the unimaginable suffering it caused,” added HRH, “left an indelible stain on the history of our world.”

This suggests, and not for the first time, that HRH himself is a slave – to the liberal twaddle that passes for consensus in the more fashionable postcodes of London.

Yes, slavery is an awful institution that harms slaves and masters alike. If the former suffer physical pain, the latter are damaged morally and, in the long run, economically.

After all, free men work better than slaves. The desire to improve one’s lot is a greater inducement to productive labour than an overseer’s bullwhip.

Having said all that, Prince Charles’s pronouncement brands him as a slave as surely as the iron in the hands of the Virginian planter used to do.

It’s true that Britain, along with the US, Spain, Portugal, France and Holland played a shameful role in the slave trade. But their role was that of buyers.

The sellers were Africans themselves. In fact, 90 per cent of those suffering bondage in Europe and America were originally enslaved and sold to white traders by Africans themselves.

Especially active there were the slave-trading kingdoms of central and western Africa – of which the briskest trade was done by the Akan of the kingdom of Asante.

That place is no longer a kingdom, nor indeed a colony. It’s an independent republic called… Ghana.

That made it an unfortunate venue in which to preach the evils of slavery. But then of course HRH wasn’t referring to the role played by the proto-Ghanaians in enslaving masses of their own tribesmen.

He was generously assigning all of the blame to his own tribesmen, the British. The White Man’s Burden has become the White Man’s Burden of mandatory guilt.

This is a gross distortion of historical facts, an attempt to bend history to ideology, which is always pernicious.

Of course slavery is shameful, and only savage brutes refuse to acknowledge this. But that’s precisely why this issue is so easy to exploit for political (or politically correct) purposes.

The American Civil War is a prime example of such dishonesty. For abolition was only the pretext for the hostilities.

True enough, the eleven Southern states seceded largely because the federal government had put obstacles in the way of spreading slavery into the newly acquired territories.

However, Lincoln and his colleagues explicitly stated on numerous occasions that they had no quarrel with slavery in the original Southern states.

Their bellicose reaction to the secession was caused not by slavery but by their in-built imperative to retain and expand the power of the central state to ride roughshod over local government. “If that would preserve the Union, I’d agree not to liberate a single slave,” Lincoln once said.

Note also that his Gettysburg Address includes not a single anti-slavery word – and in fact Lincoln dreaded the possibility that he himself might be portrayed as an abolitionist.

The potential of slavery to be inscribed on the banners of unrelated politics is lamentable, but it adds nothing to the intrinsic value of this abominable institution. So yes, slavery did leave a stain.

But an indelible one? That’s an unfortunate choice of adjective by the future head of the Church of England (provided HRH will accept that role on his accession, which in view of some of his past pronouncements isn’t a foregone conclusion).

Surely a Christian must believe that honest repentance can redeem sins. And Britain has done more than just repent.

Having become in 1807 the first country to ban the slave trade, Britain sent the Royal Navy to blockade the coast of Africa and intercept slaving ships. That effectively put an end to it by delayed action, although US slavers were allowed to run the blockade for a while (the first intimation of the special relationship?).

A Christian, which one has to believe HRH is, must also be aware of the redemptive potential of sacrificing one’s life. After all, such an act founded the faith he’ll be institutionally bound to defend.

Now thousands of British sailors died enforcing the blockade and engaging slaving convoys. Surely their blood washed off some of the ‘indelible’ stain?

The stains of past sins only become indelible when they are neither repented nor redeemed. HRH would have done much better commenting on the marks left by inhumanity on more modern countries: Germany and Russia, especially the latter.

Germany did make an honest effort to repent and atone for the diabolical horrors of the Third Reich, although her subsequent attempt to create a Fourth have undone some of the good work.

But Russia has made no such effort, quite the opposite. Her present government is actively exonerating and glorifying those who enslaved the whole country and murdered 60 million of the slaves.

That’s hardly surprising, considering that 80 per cent of Russia’s high officials come from a KGB background and still proudly pledge allegiance to history’s most murderous organisation (“There’s no such thing as ex-KGB,” said Col. Putin. “This is for life.”)

Now that stain is truly indelible, and it’s spreading wider. The stain of slavery, however, has been erased by Britain – in every sense other than the PC one.

One can’t say the same with equal certainty about most of the erstwhile slave kingdoms of Africa, including Ghana, whose citizens aren’t invariably treated as free men and women.

Do let’s encourage them to redeem their sins too, while casting aside the leg irons of intellectual slavery. I do hope HRH frees himself from it before his accession – while praying for this event to be delayed for a very long time.

Taharka Ekundayo, ne Anthony Lennon, has lit up a path to self-advancement that I’m prepared to follow even at my advanced age.

Taharka (Tony for short?) is a white actor and theatrical art director who some years ago decided he was black at heart.

That didn’t mean he considered himself irredeemably wicked. His self-discovery wasn’t moral but racial: he self-identified as a black man even though there wasn’t a single drop of tar in his family barrel.

“I was at a stage in my life where to address myself as Anthony Lennon did not fulfil me; it didn’t seem to allow me to express myself as I saw fit,” explained Taharka-Tony. “I prefer to call myself an African born again.”

The cynic in me would point out that Taharka-Tony’s ability to express himself after his rebirth was boosted no end by a £100,000 Arts Council grant for ‘theatre practitioners of colour’, for which he qualified on the strength of his newly discovered identity.

But then the unabashed believer in free choice takes over, silencing my internal cynic and shaming him into a humiliating retreat.

The implications are theological, more specifically Christian. For free choice springs from free will, God’s greatest gift to us.

Originally the concept only meant the ability to make a free choice between good and evil. But the human race evolves, thanks to Darwin.

Therefore over time our God-given free will has acquired new dimensions, such as political and economic.

Politically we can make a free choice among politicians we don’t know from Adam (an appropriate Biblical reference, if I say so myself). The choice may not always be informed, but it’s always free.

Hence we rejoice at the sight of the nonentities we’ve freely chosen to govern us, leading us on the road to liberty and prosperity for all, amen. Or else on the road leading to the outskirts of the German empire, which is fine too – we’ve freely chosen our representatives who’re now free to do as they see fit.

Some of us may notice that exercising this particular freedom unfailingly elevates to government those unfit to govern, but that’s not the point, is it? The point is that we’re free to choose, with thanks to Milton Friedman, who put this phrase in the title of his book.

Prof. Friedman applied the phrase to economics, specifically consumer power. For it’s our freedom to choose synthetic over natural fibres and frozen pizzas over fresh fish that drives economic competition – which isn’t only a good thing, but, according to Prof. Friedman, the only thing that matters.

Now progress is nothing if not expansive. New concepts gather strength in one area, and then effortlessly segue into others.

As a life-long progressivist myself, I’m ecstatic that, for example, the notion of evolutionary natural selection has left its original confines of biology to blaze new trails in social, political, economic and cultural life.

In one era, out the other, I say. Anything new is by definition better than anything old, just as anything big is better than anything small (although I’ve spent a lifetime trying to disabuse women of this notion).

Thus I’m happy that the goodness of free choice is now available in the areas that have hitherto suffered from reactionary determinism. Such as sex – pardon me, gender.

The chromosomal determinism of ‘XX, you’re a woman; XY, you’re a man’ used to block the concept of free choice from entering this domain. Well, no longer.

If we’re free to choose our socks or underwear, why can’t we choose – freely! – our sex? Never mind the chromosomes, feel the free choice. We are what we say we are, and that’s all there is to it.

In the past, exercising our free will in this area involved complex surgical procedures. But then more progress kicked in, and this is no longer necessary.

A man can keep his bits and still declare he now identifies as a woman, which is tantamount to kicking in doors to women’s lavatories and showers. (Not yet invariably though, as I found out trying to gain access to the women’s showers at my tennis club, by claiming that I identified as a woman for the next 20 minutes.)

A physician reader of mine was recently asked to treat a female patient who had presented with prostate cancer, which by the sound of him he found ludicrous. Oh well, I can’t choose my readers, and some are obviously less committed to the notion of free choice than I am.

Long live women with prostates and men with cervixes, provided they chose their new identities freely. Penis envy? Not to worry: just have one sewn on, and Freud can go suck his cigar.

Now Taharka-Tony reminds us that free choice can be extended to race as easily as to sex. Moreover the choice can be not only free but also profitable, provided you play your cards right, meaning fraudulently.

So, with thanks to Taharka-Tony, I hereby declare that I’ve discovered my true Chinese identity. I’ve seen the right, as we say in China.

You may expose your reactionary nature by objecting that I don’t look Chinese. But Taharka-Tony doesn’t look black either, yet he collected the Arts Council shilling faster than you can say “I’s socioeconomically disadvantaged”.

From now on, I wish to be known as Boot Alexander, not Alexander Boot (in China we put the surname first, as in Mao Zedong, not Zedong Mao).

I’ll be using the masculine and feminine personal pronouns interchangeably (as in “my wife is overusing his credit card”), with the added benefit of stressing the fluidity of sex identity.

I’ll dispense with the plural endings (as in “we’re governed by many spiv”). And I’ll replace the whitey system of English tenses with the Chinese way of putting everything in the present, as in “before he become black, Taharka-Tony is white”.

And if you find anything wrong with any of this, I’ll report you to the Commission for Racial Equality.

Does anybody have their email address? And give me the one for the Arts Council while you’re at it. It’s time to cash in my Chinese chips.

Last night London sounded like Beirut, c. 1980. Mercifully, it was fireworks rather than mortars, but the nervous souls among us jumped up all the same each time a bomb-like device went off.

The staccato cannonade had a crescendo built in, and tonight it’ll reach a thunderous finale (Penelope, where the hell are those earplugs you got me last year?). Technically the big bang should come tomorrow night, but weekends are more conducive to festivities.

“Always remember the fifth of November”, goes the popular ditty, and obedient Londoners always do. That’s why every year on this day, give or take a couple, fireworks light up the night sky, turning light sleepers like me into swearing insomniacs.

Bonfire Night is a big event, celebrating the failure of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, when the professional soldier and converted Catholic Guy Fawkes placed 36 barrels of gunpowder under the Houses of Parliament.

The aim was to blow up King James I, along with the House of Lords, to trigger a popular revolt and restore Catholic monarchs to the throne. The plot failed, and England remained staunchly Protestant, which ineluctably led to her becoming staunchly atheist.

This observation is inspired not by any personal convictions but simply by observation: the Reformation demonstrably acted as the anteroom to atheism.

Invited by Descartes (himself a semi-lapsed Catholic) to doubt everything, by Luther to become their own priests and by Calvin to disdain all spiritual authority, people were cast adrift in the raging sea of their own devices.

The reefs of atheism beckoned invitingly, and people happily sailed towards them. A Richard Dawkins – throngs of Richard Dawkinses – became inevitable, new prophets of the new materialistic gods always athirst.

These are the most obvious thoughts that Guy Fawkes night bangs into my mind. There are also less obvious ones, those having to with politics, not religion.

My contention is that violence is the only way to supplant any modern democratic state.

I’m not talking here about people voting to replace, say, Socialists Lite, aka Tories, with Socialists Full Strength, aka Labour. What I have in mind is rather changing significantly the existing constitutional arrangement if it doesn’t work well.

This brings us to ‘consent of the governed’, the defining feature of the modern state in the eyes of its founders. As do so many liberal notions, this one derives from Hobbes and mostly Locke, the inspiration behind both American and French revolutions, and therefore modern politics.

An idealised picture Locke must have had in mind was that of ‘the people’ coming together at some instant in the past to decide on accepting or rejecting the post-Christian idea of secular government unaccountable to any absolute moral authority.

Upon mature deliberation they chose to give their consent to the liberal, secular state. No doubt a show of hands must have been involved, all perfectly equitable and democratic.

This idea is doubtless attractive and it would become even more so if any evidence could be found to suggest that this meeting of minds ever took place. Alas, no such evidence exists.

In fact, no modern attempt to replace a traditional monarchy with a ‘liberal’ republic, be that the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, the American and French ones of the eighteenth, or the Russian ones of the twentieth, involved campaigning for the ‘people’s’ consent or asking them what they wanted.

What they all did involve was unbridled violence unleashed in ‘the people’s’ name by a small cadre of subversives and their variously named revolutionary committees.

Since neither Locke nor his followers could pinpoint the granting of ‘consent’ to any specific historical event, they had to talk about some nebulous ‘compact’ or ‘social contract’, to use the phrase first popularised by Democritus and later by Hobbes and especially Rousseau.

However, according to the legal principle going back to the Old Testament, for any contract to be valid it has to be adjudicated by an authority holding sway over both parties, one whose judgment they accept as binding. In any reasonable sense such an authority has to be institutionally superior to the two parties.

The only authority that can be deemed superior to both the state and the individual is God. Hence frequent, if insincere, appeals to the deity in various founding documents of the early liberal states.

However, one would look in vain for any scriptural references either to ‘government by consent’ or to ‘social contract’. Nowhere does it say that a third of the electorate, a proportion deemed adequate in most modern democracies including Britain, can cast their vote in a way that will give them absolute sovereignty over the remaining two-thirds.

An important aspect of ‘consent’, as understood by Lockeans everywhere, is that it’s irrevocable: once given, or presumed to have been given, it can’t be reclaimed by any peaceful means.

Yet in no conceivable way could it be true that a third or even a fourth of the population voting in a government has given consent on behalf of the rest of the people as well. This is patently ludicrous, as is the whole idea of consent, which in reality is neither sought by politicians nor given by voters.

Any real agreement includes terms under which it may be terminated. In the absence of a higher adjudicating authority, no ‘social contract’ can have such a clause.

Therefore violence is the only recourse either party has, meaning that in a modern state a revolution is not so much an aberration as a logical extension of the ‘social contract’, the only way for the people to withdraw their ‘consent’.

I don’t know whether Hobbes and Locke realised that their theories implicitly issued a carte blanche to revolutionary conspiracies. But Guy Fawkes illustrated – and presaged – their theories perfectly.

So perhaps some of the fireworks should be set off to commemorate his valuable contribution to political science – rather than to celebrate the failure of his attempt to put it into practice.

Was he aware of his pioneering effort? Who knows. A penny for your thoughts, Guy.

First a disclaimer: I love women’s naked bodies. Some of the happiest moments of my life have been spent in their presence, and I cherish every one, especially those I can remember.

Moreover, at the risk of enraging my more devout friends, I even enjoy female nudity vicariously, by looking without touching.

Photographs of naked women don’t upset me, quite the opposite. And I even like explicit sex scenes in films, provided they’re gratuitous and pursue no artistic ends whatsoever.

Having thus established my dissipated, tasteless and probably misogynistic credentials in three paragraphs of self-lacerating disclaimers, I now feel it’s safe to say what it is I dislike, nay despise.

That’s nudity practised for a cause and thus pretending to be something it isn’t (virtue), while concealing what it actually is: exhibitionism covering itself with an ideological fig leaf.

What the cause is doesn’t really matter: no good one can be promoted by parading female flesh in the buff. And even if the cause starts out as good, it’ll be compromised by the striptease.

Actually, the original Calendar Girls dropped their kit in 1999 allegedly to support a worthy cause, Leukaemia Research. Yet, even though a film was made about them, with Helen Mirren starring, they only succeeded in trivialising that deadly disease.

Miss Mirren, incidentally, has struggled to keep her clothes on throughout her distinguished career. Even now, in her dotage, she likes to parade her superannuated flesh at every opportunity, making one suspect that such exposure is an aim in itself.

Anyway, the idea caught on, and exhibitionism for commercial or ideological causes became a standard technique. Actually, Pirelli tyres have always been promoted that way, which is tasteless but otherwise unobjectionable.

Famous actresses stripping for the anti-fur campaign, on the other hand, was not only tasteless but also actively revolting.

Various naked celebrities would drag their fur coats behind them, each leaving trails of blood. “I’d rather go naked than wear fur,” was the line.

Ladies, this side of puerile, onanistic fantasies, there’s usually something worn between one’s skin and an overcoat. Hence the choice didn’t have to be as stark as that (pun intended). It’s possible to shed a fur coat and still sport, say, a jumper and a skirt for decorum’s sake.

Yet the ‘celebs’ jumped at the chance to parade what the Americans call T & A. Exhibitionism is as much of a compulsion as drug addiction.

And speaking of Americans, the latest actress to let it all hang out for an ideology is Jennifer Lopez.

Now Miss Lopez has devoted her whole life to keeping herself in shape, and it shows. Even at 49 she’s still a knockout, and her body is well worth admiring even fully clothed (especially in profile), never mind nude.

Her mind, unfortunately, is something else again, which she proved by shedding her clothes to strike a blow for women’s rights.

“It has taken time,” explained Miss Lopez in fluent Hollywood, “but I think we’re in a very powerful moment where women are going, ‘Wait a minute. We’re not afraid to say what we deserve.’”

And what would it be, dear, that you deserve to say? That you can bare your jutting attraction in a show of pathological exhibitionism? But we already knew that, thank you. Nothing new there.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the greatest barrier in the way of women’s emancipation from their servitude men’s insistence of seeing them as merely sex objects? Those ghastly creatures’ refusal to see a subtle mind and a great soul hiding behind well-rounded secondary sex characteristics?

So explain to me how an actress baring all in provocative poses upholds women’s rights. I’d suggest she’s striking a blow against them, not for them.

Perhaps I’m being too harsh. It’s possible that Miss Lopez has set a pattern that could be profitably followed by prominent politicians, such as Mrs May.

She has already danced her way to the podium at the latest party conference – why not do pole dancing next time, to make a case for soft Brexit?

Yes, I know Mrs May isn’t exactly Miss Lopez, but then neither were those original Calendar Girls. Exhibitionism is an inner imperative that doesn’t have to depend on outward beauty.

And Frau Merkel is definitely missing a trick, which in her case is inexplicable. Naked photos of her as a young girl are widely circulated, so why not travel the trodden path?

As a former adman, I can even suggest a concept. She could run the ‘then and now’ photos side by side, with the headline saying: “I’ve matured over the years. So has the EU”.

On second thoughts, scratch that. Bad idea, sending a wrong message: the EU must portray itself as full of energy and youthful thrust.

The striptease would work better for Brigitte, Macron’s foster mother. The headline could say: “Manny loves me for what I am. Why can’t you love him for what he is?”

Please stop me before my imagination runs away with me. But the harrowing thought is that nothing I or any other perverse individual can think up is a match for reality.

Modernity makes satire redundant; today’s Swifts and Fieldings would be writing ads for toothpaste, or perhaps financial newsletters.

If you disagree, tell me if you would have been impressed by any satirist back, say, in the 1990s cracking a joke about a man who used to be a woman marrying a woman who used to be a man, and then getting pregnant because her reproductive organs weren’t removed when her brand-new penis was sewn on?

Of course not. You would have laughed at the man, not his joke. Now you can weep when reading such stories in medical journals.

Note that I said 1990s, not 1920s. Just one generation, and satirists already have nowhere to go. Perhaps now they’re unemployed, they could spend more time admiring Miss Lopez’s body, and never mind women’s rights.

A German joke is no laughing matter, quipped a wit once. Yet today no joke is – and some may be sacking or even criminal offences.

William Sitwell, the editor of the Waitrose Food magazine, found himself on the receiving end of this observation, when he was summarily sacked after responding to an e-mail pitch from a vegan hack.

Selene Nelson, food and travel writer of the vegan persuasion, pitched a series of articles on “healthy, eco-friendly meals”, as a result of which the “popularity of the movement is likely to continue to skyrocket”.

Movement, no less. Vegans are present-days suffragists, Luddites or Chartists. They aren’t just isolated oddballs here and there. They’re a political force, albeit still an aspiring one.

Mr Sitwell admirably replied in 10 minutes, which promptness is extremely rare among editors (spoken from personal experience). Moreover, his reply was humorous, which is rarer still:

“Thanks for this. How about a series on killing vegans, one by one? Ways to trap them? How to interrogate them properly? Expose their hypocrisy? Force-feed them meat?”

Personally, I would have suggested making them eat one another, but then I have no job from which I could be fired. Mr Sitwell did – and was.

Now neither Mr Sitwell’s joke nor especially my embellishment of it is particularly funny. That’s why I wouldn’t make it in a public medium, but then neither did Mr Sitwell.

His unfunny joke was made in a private missive, recipient’s eyes only. Since it had dire consequences, the self-righteous snitch must have forwarded the e-mail to Mr Sitwell’s employers and demanded action.

The demanded action was taken because today’s publishers are gun-shy. They know that a publication can suffer severe damage as a result of a PCC complaint or especially legal action.

The mere threat of any such thing is sufficient for them to get rid of the putative offender – whatever the face value of the problem (again spoken from personal experience: my offence was against homosexuals, not vegans, but both groups are equally hypersensitive).

In this case the Press Complaints Commission wouldn’t have been interested because the offending remark wasn’t published. I doubt a lawsuit would have been a real danger either, for the same reason.

What the publishers were afraid of must have been the possibility of a hysterical smear campaign, possibly accompanied by riotous rallies outside their offices. Being totally devoid of a sense of humour is an essential qualification for New Age activists.

Now vegetarians and especially vegans, unless they have medical reasons for their dietary quirk, suffer from a hysterical neurosis typically exacerbated by pernicious ideology.

Not being a professional neurologist or psychiatrist, I don’t know if their condition is treatable. However, I do know that most of them would refuse to submit to treatment, and that’s where the ideology comes in.

In their eyes they’re paragons of virtue, courageous, self-sacrificial fighters for the liberation of animalkind. Since as a rule they’re atheists (I’m strictly talking about Westerners here), they are prone to anthropomorphising livestock.

They may know that a legal difference exists between killing a person and slaughtering a cow, but in their eyes there’s no moral one. Both are animals created by Darwin in a flash of inspiration.

The neurotic hysteria part of it is indeed no laughing matter: we shouldn’t have fun at the expense of physical or mental deformity. But the ideological part is fair game, for the sanctimonious self-righteousness of those people isn’t a medical condition but a conscious choice.

Well, they’ve chosen wrong, and that’s a good reason to have a good laugh at their expense. But when they elevate their hysterical adulation of animals to a secular religion of sorts, an awful, hare-brained surrogate of real faith, they’re no longer just mildly amusing.

Like exponents of any other cult, they treat normal people not as the holders of a different view but as heretics and infidels. Hence no holds are barred, not even murder, as those fire-bombing anti-fur fanatics have demonstrated.

And their response to jokes at their expense isn’t a million miles away from the Muslims’ reaction to what they perceive as an affront to their particular cult. People may forgive those who poke fun at their thoughts, but not those who mock their faith.

Exponents of veggie cults become aggressively dangerous in that they try to shoehorn toxic alien additives into our civilisation, putting it at great peril – especially when they join forces with other New Age loudmouths, your tree-huggers, global-warmists, ideologised LGTB perverts, anti-nuke zealots and the like.

Therefore we, Western holdouts, are duty-bound to fight back with every weapon at our disposal, and savage satire has to come out of the quiver first. I myself lampoon those people every chance I get, and I support everyone who does the same – and admire everyone who suffers for doing so.

Such as William Sitwell, who showed that modern martyrdom doesn’t have to be sanguinary. The bastards can get us in all sorts of ways.

The fact that this question can be asked suggests some lack of certainty. No such problem with deciding what it doesn’t stand for: conservatism.

Conservatism is the only political and moral philosophy rooted in the founding Judaeo-Christian tenets of our civilisation. This applies not just, these days not so much, to the religion itself, but even to every seemingly secular principle the religion spawned.

That determines what conservatives wish to conserve: the core principles of Christendom, as refracted through the complex facets of contemporaneous society.

Therefore political conservatives (and conservative parties) must find a way of adapting those principles to the rough-and-tumble of quotidian life, making sure the latter doesn’t deviate too far from the former – and the former don’t compromise the latter.

The defining political feature of any country is the relationship between the state and the individual. The more power the central state possesses, the less conservative it is.

The key organisational principle of Christendom is that of subsidiarity, devolving power to the lowest sensible level. That’s why, before Jesus Christ became a superstar, no central Western government had even approached the power of today’s prime ministers or presidents.

Since everyone was believed to be individually responsible for his own salvation, it was assumed that everyone could also be responsible for taking care of the infinitely easier task of running his own life.

Kings thus held much more sway over the loftiest courtiers than over the lowliest peasants. The people just went on with their lives, which were steered with loose reins by local squires, magistrates and priests – not by the almighty central state.

This reversed the arrangement that had existed in the Hellenic world, where the polis was everything and the individual next to nothing. Personal sovereignty was a concept alien to the Greeks and Romans alike: people had any value only as citizens, not as individuals.

And citizens were happy to be subjugated to the polis, accepting that their own petty concerns were trivial compared to the communal good – as defined by the polis.

In an eerie sort of way today’s democratic politics resembles Hellenic antiquity, minus the philosophical depth and cultural refinement. This mock-classical heritage is reflected in the budget unveiled by the government yesterday.

Even before the 2008 crisis, sensible people knew that an economic disaster loomed at the end of a profligate spend-and-borrow policy. The way most Western states run their economies resembles a pyramid scheme, or cheque kiting if you’d rather.

Cheque kiting means writing a cheque for an amount greater than the account balance and then covering the deficit with a cheque drawn on another account at another bank where the funds are also insufficient.

If the kiter presciently opens multiple accounts in banks all over country, he can pursue the scam quite profitably – until one day the penny drops, as it were. Usually that happens when he gets too greedy to stop in time, an oversight he’ll then have plenty of time to contemplate in prison.

In that spirit, the chancellor has announced the winding down of austerity, which never was wound up in the first place. The Exchequer, he proudly declared, will loosen its purse strings to the tune of an extra £103 billion – this just days after the PM bemoaned the inordinately high cost of serving the national debt.

The government has been reticent about the source of the extra funds, but I can tell you where they’ll come from: printing and borrowing, the governmental version of cheque kiting.

Sooner or later the fraudulent cheques will be called to account, and the scam will come to a shattering end. But as long as this doesn’t happen before the next general election, it’s not this government’s problem, is it?

Their problem is to secure victory when the time comes, and damn all else. But why does this irresponsible, nay suicidal, spending spree improve their electoral chances? Why isn’t everyone screaming bloody murder?

Alas, our comprehensively uneducated public doesn’t realise that there’s a cheque-kiting scam under way. And even if they did, they wouldn’t care.

For they’ve been indoctrinated to think about such matters in the same slipshod way, and this applies to how they handle their own finances too. Maxing out a full pack of credit cards and mortgaging themselves to the hilt are the cornerstones of today’s private fiscal policies – mirroring the public equivalent.

Neither the government nor the voters give a moment’s thought to what will happen if, say, interest rates get to the level of 30 years ago, around 15 per cent? Doesn’t bear thinking about, that.

But this is only the most visible, and I daresay less significant, pitfall of promiscuous spending. For the state doesn’t shower prospective voters with money just to win their support. It does so to increase its own power.

Our state is paternalistic, meaning it performs towards us the same function as a father performs for his children. People welcome this care, forgetting that a father has practically an unlimited power over his brood.

He provides for the child’s food, shelter, education and medical care – but in return he acquires the right to tell junior that it’s time for bed or that there won’t be any pudding if he doesn’t eat his greens.

Extrapolating to politics, the more a state does for people, the more it’ll do to them. In the process, a provider state will draw more and more power to the centre, and away from the periphery.

Whether the state will worship Marx, as ours will under PM Corbyn, or pays lip service to Christianity, as ours does under the vicar’s daughter, is immaterial. It’s a distinction of style, rather than a difference of substance.

Some states achieve this end mainly by violence and diktat; others, such as ours, go easy on violence, heavier on diktat and heavier still on paternalistic hand-outs.

But they all pursue the same self-serving aims. Therefore, even though there might be some genuine conservatives in our Conservative government (which I doubt), the government itself has nothing to do with true conservatism. ‘Conservative’ is a misnomer.

The only good thing I can say about this lot is that, while defying the timeless principles of conservatism, they uphold what I call the ABC of today’s politics: Anyone But Corbyn.

Yes, that lot will be infinitely worse. But I can say one thing for them: at least they don’t call themselves conservative.

Many people, especially those who never wanted to leave the EU in the first place, claim that no one realised at the time of the referendum what Brexit meant.

Things have since proved so complicated, and the economic consequences of Brexit appear so nightmarish, that we need at least one more referendum.

If at first they didn’t succeed, they want to try and try again – until they get a result they can get their heads around, meaning the one they want. Everything else is just too incomprehensible for words.

The only thing those people with learning difficulties do know for sure is that post-Brexit we’ll all starve and freeze in the dark. It’ll be worse than the Black Death, what with fruit and veg becoming so unaffordable that a pandemic of scurvy will empty out the British Isles.

So, for the benefit of those slow learners, I’ll be happy to simplify matters by reducing them to a very clear proposition.

The EU is a political project whose aim is to create a single pan-European state dominated by Germany, with France bringing up the rear. As things stand now, Angie Merkel will be empress in all but name.

That’s why only one question needs answering:

Do we wish Britain to be a sovereign state headed by Her Majesty and governed by Parliament or, alternatively, to become a dominion of the German empire?

That’s all. Everything else is either immaterial or derivative.

Think of it as boarding a 16:43 for Birmingham. As you contemplate the journey, the only relevant question to ask is whether the train will get you there in time for, say, a 19:30 concert at the Symphony Hall.

Once that question has been answered in the affirmative, then and only then may you also wonder about the chances of bumping into someone you know at Euston Station or meeting the love of your life on the train (provided your wife isn’t any the wiser).

But first things first, right?

The very last thing we should do is mire the problem in the swamp of extraneous considerations, such as Brexit’s economic consequences. The issue is all about politics. So let’s sort out the politics first and worry about everything else later.

All right so far? Splendid. Now we’ve taken care of the central issue, let’s talk about peripheral ones – such as indeed the economy.

Actually, this isn’t a bad time to talk about it because our Europhile chancellor is about to uncork a ruinously promiscuous budget – and, which is even worse and certainly more perfidious – link it to Brexit.

Mr Hammond intends to spend even more billions we haven’t got and put an end to austerity – but only if Parliament agrees to the kind of Brexit that isn’t really Brexit.

I’ve said it a thousand times if I’ve said it once that those chaps ought to look up ‘austerity’ in the dictionary. They’ll find it means spending less than one earns – not overspending at a stratospheric rather than cosmic rate, which is what austerity seems to mean to our governing spivs.

Their type of austerity has brought bailiffs to many a door, and the IMF to many a country. This is one example of what I call ‘glossocracy’: controlling the people by controlling their language.

But what will happen if Britain takes French leave from the EU’s good offices? Something so awful that it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Britain – brace yourself and make sure you’re sitting, or better still, lying down – will have to lower taxes, reduce red tape and free up trade to attract foreign investment. In other words, our economy will emulate Singapore’s by becoming friendly to international commerce.

Again let me boil this down to a very simple proposition even slow learners can understand.

If we comply with the wishes of the British people (more of whom voted for Brexit than have ever voted for anything else), the government will go against its instincts and make our economy sound – just like Singapore’s. In other words, prosperity is a sort of punishment imposed on the people if they misbehave.

On the other hand, ruining the economy with unsustainable spending and borrowing, accompanied by devastating taxation and strangulating red tape, is the prize we win for abandoning, or at least compromising, our sovereignty.

The threat of prosperity has thrown Corbyn and other subversives into a hysterical fit. Becoming like Singapore, they wail frothing at the mouth, will destroy our manufacturing and make us all poor.

Now Britain’s GDP per capita was just under 40,000 USD in 2017, whereas Singapore’s was just over 55,000. Become like Singapore? Any sane person will scream “Yes, please!”

But not our governing spivs and especially not their disloyal opposition. Surely even problem pupils must see that the economic ‘punishment’ they see in their mind’s eye will bring not only more service business to Britain, but also a great deal of manufacturing?

In any case, British manufacturing has been in the doldrums for several decades now.

Nevertheless the country has managed to keep the wolf from the door, doing much better now than it did when the unions suffocated Britain with billowing black smoke and Jeremy Corbyn screamed “Down with capitalism!!!” at street corners rather than in Parliament.

Now I have no conduit through which I can reach idiots, subversives or subversive idiots. But if you do, please convey these simple messages to them for me. Who knows, perhaps a few of them will understand.

And as to the Fourth Reich, aka the EU, well, you know what I think.