Author: Alexander Boot

Usually I vary my subjects day to day. But Hitchens’s piece on yet another Russian murder attempt in Britain is so nauseating that this article is a form of self-medication: it’s either comment or reach for a sick bag.

Hitchens used not to bother to conceal his almost homoerotic adulation of Putin. The general thrust was summed up in what he wrote a few years ago: “Mr Putin’s Russia [is] now astonishingly the most conservative, patriotic and Christian country left in Europe.”

‘Conservative’ covers a multitude of sins. Judging by the number of Stalin statues going up all over Russia, Putin is indeed conservative in his quest to conserve and promulgate evil.

But patriotic? Millions of Russians have fled their native land in the past decade, while Putin and his junta are robbing the country blind to stuff their own offshore accounts. If by patriotism Hitchens means the deafening din of jingoistic propaganda, he should say so.

And since when is patriotism ipso facto good? “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely,” wrote Edmund Burke. Loving an unlovely country gets us to Nazi Germany, which, to be logical, Hitchens has to admire for its undoubted patriotism.

Christian? The entire hierarchy of Russia’s state church is made up of career KGB/FSB agents led by Patriarch Kirill, aka ‘agent Mikhailov’, so identified in KGB archives. No wonder church attendance in Russia is even lower than in Britain, which is seldom accused of excessive piety.

However, Hitchens is a clever chap, after a fashion. At some point he realised that such effluvia made him sound not just biased, but simply deranged. He then changed his tack: he now first refers to Putin as a ‘sinister tyrant’ and only then defends his regime from its ghastly enemies, such as Britain.

In shilling for Putin’s kleptofascism, he now displays cunning worthy of his love object in the Kremlin. To wit:

“I was reluctant to believe without proof that this [attempted murder in Salisbury] was a Russian state operation. I still think some people have jumped too readily to conclusions without facts.”

Mea culpa. I, along with every sane person, did jump to that conclusion. It’s that pandemic Russophobia that Hitchens describes as “the current anti-Russian frenzy”. Coupled, of course, with the old cui bono principle, Putin’s track record, and the difficulty of buying nerve agents or radioactive isotopes at your friendly local chemist’s.

Hitchens’s standards of proof wherever Russian murders are concerned exceed beyond reasonable doubt. And whenever the proof meets such exacting requirements, he expertly casts doubt on it: “Despite the lack of conclusive proof, [my emphasis] I have to accept that the Russian state quite deliberately killed Alexander Litvinenko.”

“Have to” suggests reluctance. One can almost see Hitchens’s heart bleeding at this admission wrenched out of him by reams of evidence gathered by Sir Robert Owen’s inquiry (which incidentally Mrs May, then Home Secretary, tried to suppress).

So fine, Putin orders murders on our territory. Hitchens is man enough to admit this, however reluctantly.

But we aren’t squeaky clean either. After all, “We are not morally perfect ourselves, with our head-chopping aggressive Saudi friends, our bloodstained Iraq and Libyan adventures, and our targeted drone-strike killings of British citizens who joined IS.”

Moral equivalence run riot is the common stratagem of Putin’s useful idiots, and Hitchens is as usefully idiotic as they come. Since Britain herself falls short of his standards of moral perfection, we have no right to pass moral judgement on Russia.

We trade with the Saudis, so who are we to protest against Putin murdering British subjects on British territory? We embark on ill-advised “Iraq and Libyan adventures”, so we’re supposed to applaud Putin’s indiscriminate bombing of Syrian schools and hospitals. And if we target British jihadists in Syria and Iraq (I actually welcome this), then what’s wrong with Putin targeting British subjects in London or Salisbury?

Alas, there’s no direct recent parallel of us grabbing other countries’ land the way Putin has done in the Ukraine. But not to worry. At this point Hitchens abandons his moral relativism and insists that Putin’s cause is just in absolute terms.

He has written it a thousand times if he has written it once: “the 2014 outbreak was a putsch and its real target Russia.” Hitchens is aghast at the “putsch” that overthrew the “legal government” of Putin’s puppet Yanukovych and finally won the Ukraine’s independence.

Under Yanukovych the Ukraine was as independent from Russia as the equally legal government of Vichy France was from Germany. Hence the target of the popular uprising against Russian rule by proxy was indeed Russia – what else was it supposed to be, Portugal?

According to Hitchens, we have only ourselves to blame for Putin indulging in a spot of murder on our territory. “Before we embark on this, could someone explain why we actually want such a war?”

God help us, the man is mad. So Britain is waging war on Russia, not the other way around. Exactly how?

Are we conducting electronic warfare against Russia? No. Did we send troops or even armaments to the Ukraine, a country fighting for her freedom in the face of naked Russian aggression – the first time since 1945 that one European country stole the land of another? No.

We did join other civilised countries in imposing the mildest of sanctions following that beastliness, but the only intent was to discourage further Russian aggression in the region, this time possibly involving NATO members.

Have we been murdering people in Russia? No. Have we turned Moscow into a crime-ridden capital of the world’s money laundering, which is exactly what Putin’s thugs have done to London? No.

So what’s Hitchens’s problem? Oh yes, we have the audacity to spy on Russia.

“Spying is a hostile, dangerous and cruel activity which infuriates its targets, including us. Remember the 42-year prison sentence for George Blake…?”

It’s that moral equivalence again. Blake spied for the most cannibalistic regime in history. Skripal spied for, well, us – a flawed, enfeebled Britain that is nevertheless a constitutional monarchy ruled by law, where basic liberties are secure, a country that doesn’t pounce on her neighbours like a rabid dog (or like Putin, come to that).

As the old saying goes, one side’s traitors are the other side’s heroes. Yet Hitchens makes it sound as if traitors to Russia are in some convoluted way traitors to Britain as well. This is astonishing in a man who values patriotism so highly. One begins to wonder who’s the beneficiary of Hitchens’s patriotism.

“What the Skripal case tells us is that, long after the Cold War ended, we still choose to treat Russia as the sort of country where we should continue active, aggressive spying and efforts to bring down the government.”

I’m not aware of any efforts on the part of Britain to bring down Putin’s government, even though I think that would be a good idea. If Hitchens knows such facts, he should either share them or shut up.

As to spying, we’d be criminally negligent if we didn’t try to keep tabs on a country whose criminal leaders threaten to annihilate life on Earth – a country that’s hysterically hostile to Britain and the West in general.

Hitchens seems to think we should do nothing while the Russians murder people in Britain, for otherwise we are the aggressors. And anyway, we’re completely impotent:

“What will we do? Withdraw from the World Cup? Break off diplomatic relations? That will make them cringe, in the SVR’s Yasenevo headquarters in the birchwoods on the south-western edge of Moscow, won’t it?”

Note the expertise-signalling: Hitchens knows his Russia. No dummy, he. Why, he even knows there are birch trees in Yasnevo. Can’t pull a fast one on old Peter.

But if he really wants an answer to his question, I’m happy to oblige. The answer is, we should do both of the above – for starters. And then we should detoxify Britain by expelling all Putin’s cronies and confiscating (not just freezing) their purloined assets, including those houses in Belgravia and Knightsbridge.

At the same time we should arm ourselves to the teeth and drum up the support of all our allies in communicating a simple message to Putin: we have experience in standing up to evil regimes, and we’re ready to do it again.

Expressing a mild disapproval of multiple ‘whackings’ on our land is, according to Hitchens, tantamount to waging “a war our government chose to fight. What answer do we have to it that will not make it worse?”

Our government hasn’t yet chosen to resist the war Putin is waging on us – but I hope it will. And one good measure will be to make it clear to Hitchens that, if we’re indeed, as he claims, at war with Russia, his drivel is treasonous.

Vlad Putin has put fire into Russia’s belly with his star turn in a documentary entitled The World Order 2018. The film opened to great acclaim, both public and critical, the other day.

At some point, Vlad broached strategic issues from, as he hastened to add, a purely hypothetical perspective. Suppose for the sake of argument that a nuclear missile is heading for Russia. Well then, Vlad wouldn’t hesitate to order a global nuclear Armageddon – in the full knowledge that this is what he’d be doing.

“This would certainly be a global disaster for humanity, a calamity for the whole world,” commented Vlad dispassionately. “But, as a citizen of Russia and head of the Russian state, I have to ask myself: What good is the world without Russia in it?”

Interesting question, that, as far as hypothetical questions go. Replying in the same hypothetical spirit, I’d say that a world without Russia would still be able to muddle through somehow.

Moreover, had Russia not existed over the past century, the world would be distinctly better off. For one thing, tens of millions wouldn’t have been annihilated for the good of the state.

Without Russia’s help Hitler would have remained a marginal extremist unknown outside Bavaria. And he certainly wouldn’t have been able to start a world war without his Russian ally watching his back and supplying vast amounts of strategic materials.

Mao wouldn’t have come to power in China, nor Kim in Korea. The West wouldn’t have had to spend trillions protecting itself from the Russian threat. And even today the world would sleep a bit better knowing that no one is threatening to nuke it to kingdom come.

I know this might upset Vlad but, if he doesn’t like the answer, he shouldn’t have asked the question. And anyway, the view that Russia is a lot less indispensable to the world than he thinks isn’t new.

Writing a century before Rutherford split the atom, the first Russian philosopher Pyotr Chaadaev commented: “Alone in the world, we have not given anything to the world, nor have taken anything from it. We have not added a single thought to the wealth of human ideas, we have not in any way promoted the advance of human reason, and we have distorted everything this advance has given us.”

At that time no red button existed at the push of which Russia would have ceased to exist. But had the possibility occurred to Chaadayev, one gets the impression he would have felt that Russia’s absence from the world would be no great loss.

I’m only sorry that Vlad left many details out, opening the door to idle speculation. Usually he expresses himself more exhaustively. For example, when he says that traitors to Russia will “swallow poison”, no questions arise. And Vlad is always happy to stage a little demonstration for the benefit of slow learners.

But the Armageddon message raises a few questions. Vlad mentioned a single missile approaching Russia as a sufficient reason for destroying life on Earth. How will he be sure that the missile is nuclear? And in any case one missile, whatever its payload, wouldn’t destroy all of Russia, would it?

At most, it’ll take out a big city, which makes Vlad’s hypothetical response a bit of an overkill. And what if that missile was launched by accident, in a scenario similar to that shown in Dr Strangelove, the prequel to Vlad’s film? Still wipe out the world?

And shouldn’t there be some attempt to contact the responsible government? As that actress said to Harvey Weinstein, “Can we talk first?”

Then again, presumably the incoming missile would have been launched by one state, rogue or otherwise. Shouldn’t the retaliatory strike be directed at that state only, rather than the whole globe? Isn’t that pushing collective responsibility too far, even if the Russians do think that the whole world is united against them (for no conceivable reason of course)?

Too many loose ends, Vlad. But one can discern the central thought: if Russia goes, she’ll take the world with her. In this connection it’s interesting to juxtapose the statement by Vlad with an earlier one about Vlad.

A few years ago, Vyacheslav Volodin, the present Chairman of the Duma, explained that enemy action wasn’t the only threat to Russia’s continuing existence: “If there’s Putin, there’s Russia. If there’s no Putin, there’s no Russia.”

The logical inference from the juxtaposition of the two statements is irrefutable. If there’s no Putin, there’s no Russia; and if there’s no Russia, there’s no life on Earth.

Suddenly the situation is no longer hypothetical. It’s a loud and clear message to enemies internal and external that any attempt at a regime change in Russia would have calamitous consequences. Vlad would bang the door on the way out so hard that the whole house would collapse.

Hypothetical, yes, but there’s an element of bone-chilling reality to it. I for one am scared, and I don’t scare easily.

This sort of thing makes one reassess the ledger sheet of modernity, its credits and debits. Let’s chalk up in the credit column analgesics, painless dental work, longer life expectancy, my car – and anything else you care to mention.

But then let’s also inscribe in the debit column the technical possibility of an evil humanoid acting on an apocalyptic threat – or at least blackmailing the world with it. Which sign will the balance have, plus or minus? Will we be in the black, as in the heart of Putin’s Russia, or in the red, as in blood?

The next two questions are addressed to all those Putinistas on our hard Right, all those ‘useful idiots’ yearning for a strong leader like Putin. What kind of man can issue such a threat? And what kind of nation would bellow its delight at it?

Don’t bother to answer. I know what you’re going to say.

On this day every year I feel duty-bound to say a few words about International Women’s Day, a communist holiday nowadays astonishingly recognised in Britain.

This year is no exception, but when I sat down to write I realised that there was nothing I could add to what I wrote last year. Since paraphrasing just for the hell of it seems pointless, and repetition is said to be the mother of learning, I’m republishing my last year’s piece verbatim.

I’m man enough to admit that laziness and indisposition are also contributing factors in this self-plagiarism.

First we had Mothering Sunday, a religious holiday Western Christians celebrate on the fourth Sunday of Lent.

Then, under the influence of the US, Mothering Sunday was largely replaced by Mother’s Day, a secular holiday without any religious overtones whatsoever. That’s understandable: our delicate sensibilities can no longer accommodate any Christian festivals other than Christmas Shopping.

Now that secular but basically unobjectionable holiday has been supplemented by International Women’s Day (IWD), celebrated by all progressive mankind on 8 March. Our delicate sensibilities aren’t offended at all.

Actually, though the portion of mankind that celebrates 8 March calls itself progressive, it isn’t really entitled to this modifier – unless one accepts the propensity for murdering millions just for the hell of it as an essential aspect of progress.

For, not to cut too fine a point, 8 March is a communist event, declared a national holiday by the Bolsheviks in 1917, immediately after they seized power and started killing people with the gusto and on a scale never before seen in history. A few wires were expertly pulled after the war, and IWD also got enshrined in Soviet satellites.

The event actually originated in America, where the Socialist Party arbitrarily chose that date to express solidarity with the 1909 strike of female textile workers. Yet the holiday didn’t catch on in the States, doubtless because the Socialist Party never did.

Outside the Soviet bloc, 8 March went uncelebrated, unrecognised and, until recently, unknown. I remember back in 1974, when I worked at NASA, visiting Soviet astronauts made a big show of wishing female American employees a happy 8 March, eliciting only consternation and the stock Texan response of “Say what?”

The event was big in the Soviet Union, with millions of men giving millions of women bunches of mimosas, boxes of chocolates – and, more important, refraining from giving them a black eye, a practice rather more widespread in Russia than in the West.

But not on 8 March. That was the day when men scoured their conscience clean by being effusively lovey-dovey – so that they could resume abusing women the very next day, on 9 March. For Russia was then, and still remains, out of reach for the fashionable ideas about women’s equality or indeed humanity. As the Russian proverb goes, “A chicken is no bird, a wench is no person.”

Much as one may be derisory about feminism, it’s hard to justify the antediluvian abuse, often physical, that’s par for the course in Russia, especially outside central Moscow or Petersburg. Proponents of the plus ça change philosophy of history would be well-advised to read Dostoyevsky on this subject.

In A Writer’s Diary Dostoyevsky describes in terrifying detail the characteristic savagery of a peasant taking a belt or a stick to his trussed-up wife, lashing at her, ignoring her pleas for mercy until, pounded into a bloody pulp, she stops pleading or moving. However, according to the writer, this in no way contradicted the brute’s inner spirituality, so superior to Western materialistic legalism. Ideology does work in mysterious ways.

The Russian village still has the same roads (typically none) as at the time that was written, and it still has the same way of treating womenfolk – but not on 8 March. On that day the Soviets were house-trained to express their solidarity with the oppressed women of the world, or rather specifically of the capitalist world.

As a conservative, I have my cockles warmed by the traditionalist way in which the Russians lovingly maintain Soviet traditions, including the odd bit of murder by the state, albeit so far on a smaller scale. Why we have adopted some of the same traditions, at a time when communism has supposedly collapsed, is rather harder to explain.

But why stop here? Many Britons, especially those of the Labour persuasion, already celebrate May Day, with red flags flying to symbolise the workers’ blood spilled by the ghastly capitalists. May Day is celebrated in Russia, so what better reason do we need? None at all. But why not spread the festivities more widely?

The Russians also celebrate 7 November, on which day in 1917 the Bolsheviks introduced social justice expressed in mass murder and universal slavery. I say we’ve been ignoring this glorious event far too long. And neither do we celebrate Red Army Day on 23 February – another shameful omission.

But at least we seem to be warming up to 8 March, an important communist event. At least we’re moving in the right direction.

A reader of mine suggested that those who celebrate IWD should perform the ballistically and metaphysically improbable act of inserting the holiday into a certain receptacle originally designed for exit only. While I don’t express myself quite so robustly in this space, I second the motion.

Cherie (Mrs Tony) Blair once predictably expressed her support for IWD, ending her letter to The Times with “Count me in”. Well, count me out.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson is a rank blasphemer. Yesterday he offended Britain’s second religion (the NHS being the first).

Commenting on yet another Russian murder attempt in Britain, Boris alluded to the possibility of boycotting the football World Cup to be held in Russia this summer. “Thinking ahead to the World Cup,” he said, “it would be very difficult to imagine that UK representation at that event could go ahead in the normal way.”

He might as well have said that the NHS should be disbanded. Window panes all over Britain are still shaking from the ensuing thunder of protests. Typical among them was the tirade issued by Gary Neville, ex-footballer cum commentator and a knee-jerk leftie (footballers’ beliefs in anything outside football are knee-jerk by definition).

Speaking of our loquacious Foreign Secretary, Gary screamed on Twitter: “He’s a useless idiot! Why bring football into it?” If I were Gary, I wouldn’t throw the first ‘idiot’ – his own IQ drops to below room temperature whenever he ventures outside the subject of overlapping fullbacks.

Boris writhed under Gary’s attack, fortified as it was by a universal chorus of condemnation. He didn’t mean, God forbid, that our football team should boycott the World Cup, cried his spokesman. What do you think he is, a godless pervert?

Of course England footballers must go through the quadrennial ritual of losing in the last 16. All Boris meant was that there shouldn’t be a retinue of royals, FA officials and politicians trailing in the ball-kickers’ wake.

Since Prince William is president of the Football Association, his absence would really show Vlad what’s what. A commensurate response if I’ve ever seen one: they murder people on our soil; Will stays at home to entertain his pregnant wife. Vlad must be quaking in his jackboots.

Now Gary seems to think that football, and presumably sport in general, shouldn’t be brought into politics under any circumstances. I agree: there’s no need. For politics is already brought into football and sport in general.

Now here’s a question for the quiz night at your local. Which country has ever hosted both summer and winter Olympics in the same year?

This will catch out all but the most fanatical of trivia hounds. The answer is: Nazi Germany in 1936. First came the winter rehearsal at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which was followed by the grandiose spectacle at Berlin.

The latter was captured with technical mastery and moral decrepitude by Leni Riefenstahl in her film Olympia, starring the Führer grinning from ear to ear each time a German won a medal.

Each victory, clamoured Goebbels’s hacks, struck a blow for the superiority of Nazism and the Aryan race. All German winners responded by giving the Nazi salute on the podium, that went without saying.

But pornography watchers among you will also enjoy the footage of the England football team saluting Hitler in the same fashion. For purely protocol reasons they shouted neither “Heil Hitler!” nor “Sieg heil!”. But, had the protocol demanded it, they would have been in fine voice.

Football wasn’t brought into politics then, Gary. It was the other way around.

Following on that fine tradition, I wonder what will happen at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar? Will the England team drop on the ground and shout “Allahu akbar!” if the muezzin happens to sing during the opening ceremony?

Since 1936 politics has been inseparable from sport, especially but not exclusively in the more disgusting countries. Just as Hitler used the Olympics as propaganda for Nazism, so did the Soviets and their satellites use it as propaganda for communism.

Every gold medal won by a Soviet weightlifter on steroids or an East German woman swimmer turned into a man by drugs advanced the noble cause of transforming the whole world into a giant concentration camp. I still remember the nauseating din accompanying each such triumph in the Soviet press.

And I’ll never forget the bone-crushing abandon with which Czech hockey players defeated the much favoured Soviet team at the 1969 world championship, a year after Soviet tanks rode into Prague. Anybody who didn’t see it wasn’t just about ice hockey was indeed a ‘useless idiot’, to use Gary’s locution.

Nor is boycotting sport events for political reasons unheard of. One recalls the boycott by some Western nations (Britain went along only partially) of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, followed by the Soviets retaliating at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.

It was understood then, as it should be now, that politics and sport have become inseparable. It’s for political reasons that Putin’s junta has turned their international athletes into junkies, showing that the fine tradition of state-sponsored doping hasn’t gone the way of the Soviet Union (most other Soviet traditions are just as resilient, but this is by the bye).

The easiest way to deny tyrants the opportunity to use sport as propaganda of evil is not to put major sporting events into their countries in the first place. But, since both FIFA and IOC rival Putin’s junta in corruption, this option is unavailable.

Boycotting such events when the tyrants do something particularly revolting is more difficult. But it’s an excellent punitive measure to be held in reserve.

If the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was grounds for boycotting the 1980 Olympics, why doesn’t the Russian invasion of Georgia and the Ukraine call for boycotting this World Cup? And considering that Putin has turned Britain into a killing field, this time we should go the whole hog.

If evil acts aren’t punished so it hurts, there will be more evil acts. Surely even Gary Neville can get his head around this simple logic?

The world doesn’t revolve around football or, if it does, this is an abomination. The world does revolve (to a much greater extent at any rate) around discouraging and punishing political evil.

And yet so far not a single public figure has demanded a boycott of this World Cup. Not by Prince William but by the England team, including the overlapping fullbacks so dear to Gary’s heart.

Nor has any bank said it will impound Russian assets and refuse to accept more. God forbid the monthly influx of over a billion in purloined and laundered cash will slow down.

That leaves only one question unanswered. Whom will Vlad ‘whack’ next? In Britain, publicly, proudly – and to the accompaniment of trumped-up rage only surviving until the next news cycle.

P.S. Turns out Skripal’s wife and son didn’t die in car accidents, as was previously reported. The former died of cancer; the latter of liver failure; and Skripal’s brother also died recently. Natural causes of course, but all surviving family members would be well-advised to watch out.

In a court of law the evidence against my friend Vlad would be regarded as strictly circumstantial. Innocent until proven guilty and all that.

But between us boys we know that Vlad murdered (well, tried to) Sergei Skripal as surely as we would had he been caught running away from the scene, toxic aerosol in hand.

Vlad’s outlook on life was formed in street gangs and later refined in the KGB. In that street gang with megalomania, officers are taught that, if coincidences number more than two, they aren’t coincidences. And in Skripal’s case, coincidences abound.

Col. Skripal, GRU, was in 2006 caught spying for MI6. He was sentenced to 13 years in a hard labour camp, the slow version of capital punishment. Four years later he and a few others were exchanged for a gaggle of Vlad’s spies led by the femme fatale (that’s the French for whore) Anna Chapman.

Skripal was first flown for a debrief in the US, but then settled in Wiltshire. That’s when coincidences began to pile up.

First Skripal’s son was killed in a car accident. Then, last year, the same fate befell his wife. And now he and his daughter are fighting for their lives, having been poisoned with an unknown substance in a Salisbury shopping mall. A few months before that, Skripal had reported threats to his life.

I don’t know what the odds are in favour of one family suffering all these misfortunes within five years, but they can’t be very high. If you disagree, start buying lottery tickets – you’re bound to win millions quickly.

However, I stand corrected. A highly credible, nay unimpeachable, Russian source indignantly denies any FSB role in the attempted murder.

“The English suffer from phobias. Whatever happens to Russians, they immediately look for a Russian connection… It shouldn’t be excluded that the media are trying to fan around this incident yet another scandal involving Russian special services.”

This highly credible, nay unimpeachable, source is Duma deputy Alexei Lugovoi who in 2006 poisoned in London another Russian, Alexander Litvinenko, with polonium-210. Lugovoi’s guilt wasn’t established in a court of law because Vlad refused to extradite him for questioning. However, the evidence against Lugovoi is enough to convict 10 murderers, which of course doesn’t mean that his current protestations lose any of their credibility.

Vlad learned how to deal with enemies in his two schools of life: street gangs and the KGB. Accordingly in his inaugural address he promised to hunt terrorists down wherever they may be. “If they hide in the bog, we’ll whack’em in the shithouse,” explained Vlad in the only idiom that comes naturally to him.

(One would think that a chap possessing two post-graduate degrees would be able to express himself somewhat less trenchantly, but don’t be misled by diplomas. Just the other day, the daughter of the Chancellor of Petersburg’s Mining University described how her father wrote, cut and pasted Putin’s doctoral dissertation. Since then the academic has become a billionaire, which, considering his salary, testifies to extreme frugality coupled with a successful investment strategy.)

Enlarging on that presidential promise, Vlad later said: “Traitors always end in a bad way. Usually from a drinking habit, or from drugs, right in the street.” Or else from the world’s first act of nuclear terrorism, one should add.

The substance used to whack Col. Skripal is unknown, and consequently so is any possible antidote. In Litivinenko’s case, polonium-210 was detected by sheer luck, and, one suspects, that elusive commodity will be required here as well.

It’s known that FSB laboratories have been working hard on developing undetectable toxins and methods of their delivery. This effort goes back to the first days of the Bolshevik power.

One of the first acts of that young, idealistic republic was to establish two laboratories within the CheKa structure: one specialising in counterfeiting, the other in poisons. The latter is still in business and by all accounts doing famously, and it would take unlikely credulity to suppose that the former isn’t.

Hence from 1917 onwards Russia’s presence in the world has been toxic in both the narrow and broad senses of the word. It has to be said that Russia had never been a particularly nice country – it’s not for nothing that back in the nineteenth century she was called ‘the gendarme of Europe’ and ‘the prison of nations’.

But neither was she a downright criminal state. That metamorphosis was perpetrated by the Bolsheviks, aggravated by the Soviets and is now being further advanced by Putin’s kleptofascist junta – to the applause of ‘populists’ everywhere.

Trained in both street and state crime, Vlad will always push as far as he can get away with. He’ll steal Russia’s natural resources, other countries’ territory, doctoral dissertations and anything else within reach.

And he’ll do murder at home and abroad – provided he goes unpunished. This presumably is what makes him the strong leader some of our pundits who’ll remain nameless, such as Peter Hitchens, wish we had.

A statesman’s strength would indeed be welcome, but not the strength of a mafia godfather. If our leaders were strong, they’d immediately freeze all Russian assets in Britain, expel their holders and sever diplomatic relations with Vlad’s bailiwick.

Instead they’ll mumble casuistic half-truths about insufficient proof and, at best, slap Vlad on the wrist with a few more or less painless sanctions. To someone of his pedigree this is tantamount to an open-ended licence to kill on British soil.

And this used to be such a decent place…

“Trade wars are good and easy to win”, declares Donald Trump. He should heed the lesson taught by that famous actor and, evidently, closet economist Patrick Swayze.

In his film Roadhouse, where he plays a two-fisted bouncer, his character is asked if he has ever won a fight. “No one ever wins a fight,” replies the bouncer cum philosopher cum closet economist.

Replace ‘fight’ with ‘trade war’, and the statement is unassailable. Yet Trump assails it in word, and possibly soon in deed.

If he doesn’t hold Swayze’s economic nous in high regard, perhaps he should listen to the founders of modern economics Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Say what you will about them, but they did understand economics rather well.

Thus for example 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 bought there as cheap as that of foreign industry, the regulation is evidently useless. If it cannot, it must generally be hurtful.”

Ricardo went further, arguing in favour of even unilateral free trade. If a foreign country wants to punish its population by making our exports more expensive, let it. That’s no reason for us to retaliate by punishing our people as well.

The logic here is simple, and remains so until modern economists move in with their incessant effort of self-perpetuation. The economy is too simple for today’s economists to understand.

Using all sorts of graphs, charts, computer models and, their favourite word, paradigms, they’ll unfailingly complicate the bleeding obvious, typically pushing the economy towards ruin. If we listen to them, before long we’ll march to the soup kitchens, singing “Brother, can you paradigm”. (If you understand the pun, don’t admit it – you’ll date yourself.)

In this case, by slapping tariffs on imports in an attempt to protect domestic industry (which is recommended by many ‘liberal’ economists), the country will make imported goods more expensive for the consumer.

The consumer will thus have less money to buy other domestic goods, those that don’t have to rely on protectionism to compete. Funds will thereby be channelled away from the most, and into the least, productive areas. The jobs saved in the flagging industries will be lost in the successful ones, and they’ll soon stop being successful.

If, for example, Trump goes ahead with his plan to impose a 20 per cent tariff on imported steel, the price of goods made of this metal will go up (manufacturers tend to pass cost increases on to consumers). This will affect construction, motor trade, domestic goods and many other sectors.

Consumers will have to pinch in other areas, such as high-tech in which America excels, if with a little help from her Asian friends. The knock-on effect will kick in, and those dominoes will fall one by one – to the detriment of the whole economy.

Hence trade wars are neither good nor easy to win. What Trump should have said is that, if one side practises protectionism, a trade war is inevitable.

There’s no rational reason for it to be so, but people aren’t always, and never merely, rational. If attacked, and protectionist tariffs are doubtless offensive, human nature calls for retaliation in kind – whatever sage things Ricardo had to say on the subject.

Then there are also practical considerations. For in today’s world economics is inseparable from politics. That’s why political economy is a more valid academic subject than economics on its own.

A country is bound to respond to aggression, in this case economic, as a way of deterring further aggression, which may also manifest itself in other areas. That’s why protectionism seldom goes unpunished, whatever the purely economic reasons in favour of turning the other cheek.

Here we approach an important difference between the USA and the EU. The former, while seeking global political aims, still has to make good on the founding promise of happiness, which the Founders understood in economic terms.

The EU, on the other hand, is a predominantly political contrivance using economics as a smokescreen to hide each new step to its ultimate goal: the creation of a single European state. Hence it doesn’t mind having its member states suffer economic hardship as long as they march in step towards the bright future.

The EU doesn’t care whether or not its members, especially the marginal ones, are prosperous. It just wants to pretend it’s doing everything possible to make sure they are. That’s why the EU was conceived as a protectionist bloc: its subjects are told protectionism keeps their jobs safe so loudly that they don’t realise the actual damage they suffer because of it.

Trump, being a populist, has to make a good show of make-believe as well. He campaigned on the promise of protecting jobs in the Rust Belt, and the easiest way to do that is imposing tariffs on imports. On the other hand, he can’t allow all other economic indicators to dip too sharply, as the EU can.

This explains why the US retaliates against EU protectionism, but also why the tariffs it imposes tend to be lower than the EU’s tariffs on American products. For example, the EU slaps a 10 per cent tariff on American cars, while the US imposes only a 2.5 per cent one on European ones.

Trump’s threat of hiking the tariffs may come either from a perceived political need or, more likely, from ignorance, which is demonstrated by his statement about trade wars being good and easy to win. It’s no wonder Mrs May is running scared: at Brexit time Britain can ill-afford a trade war with America.

One way to avoid it would be to leave the EU immediately, without any shilly-shallying transitions. If Britain then removes tariffs from American goods, Trump would have to be especially bloody-minded to keep his own in place.

But in the end, both sides in a trade war end up losing. No one ever wins such a fight – the late Patrick Swayze was right about that.

The title sounds like an oxymoron, but, as I once tried to explain to a group of young economic libertarians, it isn’t necessarily.

As one of them put it, “I thought when you free up the markets everything else will follow automatically.” In response I warned against the dangers of totalitarian economism, a term that often crops up in this space.

It’s possible, I argued, for reasonably free markets to coexist with tyranny. Economic freedom may be essential, but it’s certainly not sufficient. The youngsters looked at me with utter consternation.

In fact, looking at the entire complexity of life mainly from the standpoint of economics is a common element on which socialists and libertarians overlap.

Nationalise the means of production, claim the socialists, and everything else will follow. Socialism good, capitalism bad.

Privatise the means of production, object the libertarians, and everything else will follow. Capitalism good, socialism bad.

Like Orwell’s animals, both species reduce everything to a single issue. They just can’t agree on the number of legs.

Alas, libertarian fallacies are so deeply engrained that I don’t think I convinced my audience (I would have suffered a similar failure with socialists, but I never argue with them: they’re a lost cause.)

So much more thankful I am to my new friend Xi Jinping, who has kindly provided some empirical evidence for my argument. President Xi (funny he should use the newly fashionable impersonal pronoun for his surname) has submitted to whatever China’s legislative body is called a proposal that no limitation on the president’s terms in office should henceforth exist.

Since every proposal coming from Xi is automatically rubberstamped, that effectively makes him president for life, barring a successful coup. Such an arrangement is hard to reconcile with democracy or indeed liberty (I don’t use these words interchangeably).

And true enough, China’s government is an out and out tyranny, complete with severe limitations on civil liberties, unlawful prosecutions and whatnot. The cult of Xi’s personality is also growing apace.

Thus at the Nineteenth Congress of China’s Communist Party, held in October 2017, the Party Charter was augmented to include ‘thoughts of Xi Jinping’. Until then that honour had been bestowed only on Mao and Deng Xiaoping, so Xi is in good company.

However, China’s economy is reasonably free and getting freer. Plus there’s a sizeable middle class that too is growing.

The current development in China is closely paralleled in Russia, where the sham of democratic elections can’t conceal that Putin enjoys a similar job for life, again barring a coup or a popular uprising.

The two countries have much in common, and in fact Putin’s pet concept of Eurasia has since 2014 taken a marked turn towards Asia. I’m not sure if a meaningful alliance between the two powers is possible, given their widely divergent interests, and I rather hope it isn’t.

However, there’s more in common between the two presidents for life, and indeed their two countries, than either of them has with the West. Incidentally, both countries invest vast amounts in R&D, Russia mostly in weaponry, China across the board.

China contributes 20 per cent to the world’s R&D expenditure, making her second only to the US, and not by a wide margin. That sort of thing would be impossible without a great deal of economic freedom, which is so dear to my libertarian friends. And yet China is a tyranny.

Libertarians ought to realise that Homo economicus isn’t among the species of life’s fauna. Neither production nor consumption nor economic behaviour in general defines man and therefore society.

Man and therefore society can easily accommodate both political tyranny and economic liberty. It’s just that some tyrannies are too ossified to introduce a measure of elasticity, and some aren’t.

Mao’s tyranny had no room for private enterprise; Xi’s tyranny does. Thus Xi can control the populace without having to murder millions, and Mao couldn’t. But controlling the populace is the shared goal – only the methods are different.

Similarly, by transferring power from the ossified party to a more flexible blend of KGB and organised crime, Putin’s government can limit itself to murdering hundreds, thousands at most, rather than tens of millions. But there are no moral or, if you will, existential barriers that would prevent Putin from upping those numbers exponentially should the need arise – and that’s the case with Xi as well.

One can understand how most people are attracted to simplistic theories providing a total explanation of life. They don’t realise that the very fact such theories provide a total explanation of life means they’re false, for life is irreducible to simplistic formulas.

This goes for Marxism, socialism in general, Darwinism, Freudianism – and also for libertarianism. Propagation of such fallacies obviates the need to study widely and think deeply, thereby reducing man’s chances for grasping the truth and gaining freedom.

For, as we know, “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Conversely, missing out on the truth means a life of intellectual servitude – with physical servitude lurking just round the corner.

While I was otherwise engaged for a few days, my friend Vlad Putin went to town.

Delivering the Russian answer to the US State of the Union Address, Vlad implicitly established the priorities of his perpetual government. Poverty, pensions and healthcare received 10 minutes in toto.

That shows keen awareness of reality. Had Vlad lingered on those boring subjects, he would have had to comment on the 10 per cent of Russians who, by the government’s own figures, live below the poverty line.

Since in Vlad’s realm that line is drawn at about £200 a month, this means they starve – as do most pensioners. As to healthcare, the less said about it, the better. Russian hospitals act mainly as anterooms to the cemeteries.

Vlad’s friends, all coincidentally billionaires, wouldn’t be caught dead (pun intended) in Russian hospitals. Whenever something’s wrong, they hop on the plane to one of the enemy countries, which is to say the West.

Of course the situation with the rubrics that rated 10 minutes of Vlad’s time could be improved had Russia kept the two trillion dollars currently sitting in the enemies’ banks, half of it in those belonging to the US, Enemy Number One.

But that money belongs to Vlad and his friends, family, bodyguards, cooks and judo partners. Repatriating and, God forbid, spending it on those undernourished crumblies, would mean disrespect for sacrosanct private property, and that just wouldn’t do, would it? So it’s best to keep shtum about it.

Skipping over the unpleasant stuff, Vlad gave his compatriots the good news. Thanks to the new generation of weapons, he declared triumphantly, Russia could put an end to life on earth, and certainly the part of life that unfolds within the confines of the US and other mortal enemies.

Vlad illustrated his point with a few animated cartoons, and let me tell you: Bambi or Snow White they weren’t. The cartoons showed Vlad’s unstoppable missiles doing graceful pirouettes around America’s pathetic defences before reducing US cities to the nuclear ash so beloved of Vlad’s propagandists. The cartoons were actually produced in 2012, but such masterpieces live for ever.

This evoked my fond childhood memories of Khrushchev informing the Americans that Soviet scientists had developed a nuclear device that could blow all of the US in one whack.

Nikita was exaggerating: no such device existed then, nor exists now. That was bluster used for blackmail purposes and above all to push Russia’s claim to be treated as a superpower.

The trick worked, encouraging imitation. You’ve refused to speak to us, thundered Vlad, but you’ll speak to us now. So we will, as one would try to engage in conversation a madman brandishing a razor and threatening to slash our eyes.

To what extent Vlad’s razor is real, as opposed to coming from Props Central, is immaterial. For example, many experts think that the nuclear-powered missile Vlad boasted of is a figment of his imagination. It does have some nostalgic value in that Khrushchev was scaring the West with something like that back in 1959.

What’s undeniable is that Russia is putting all her resources in the military basket, an ability she has demonstrated many times before. That’s why it’s dangerously ignorant to claim that the country is so poor that it’ll never be able to match up to America’s military muscle.

Russia was poorer by orders of magnitude in the 1930s, when millions of people were starving to death, more millions were being exterminated and many more dying in Arctic labour camps.

Food rations barely kept the rest of the population alive and working three shifts in munitions plants until they keeled over their lathes. And yet, having started the decade without any discernible industry, the Russians ended it with the largest and best-equipped army in the world. In some weapon categories, such as tanks, the Red Army outnumbered the rest of the world combined.

The USSR wasn’t exactly prosperous in the two decades I remember personally, the 50s and 60s. Bread and potatoes weren’t just the staples but the sum total of most people’s diets; most families (such as mine) inhabited one room in a communal flat.

And yet the Soviets stayed neck and neck with the Americans in the arms race. True, they couldn’t sustain it in perpetuity, but Vlad may have a shorter timeframe in mind.

One way or another, Russia is capable of straining every sinew in pursuit of strategic military objectives. If that entails having a life expectancy 15-20 years lower than in the West, then so be it. Nobody cares about that.

But what does Vlad care about? What in his mind justifies such a gigantic effort?

Vlad’s propaganda screams as loudly as Khrushchev’s did about the West encircling Russia and only waiting for a propitious moment to strike. That many Russians swallow that bilge is understandable: like most people, they rely on TV to form their view of life.

Yet amazingly a couple of months ago I heard a British professor lecturing in all seriousness on the validity of such fears. He stopped just short of saying that NATO plans a first strike on Russia, but he did say that the Russians’ fears are justified.

Now in a sane world such fears would only be justified if an unprovoked NATO attack were a possibility, however remote. But it isn’t: no US president will push the red button with blithe disregard for the likely retaliation.

Vlad knows that. So why the muscle-flexing posturing, in line with Vlad’s much photographed bare torso?

It could be merely an attempt to blackmail the West into some concessions, such as the lifting of sanctions. But it could also be something more sinister than that.

Every state has to have a claim to its legitimacy, such as a time-honoured constitution or, say, divine right. The legitimacy of every Russian government has always been based on the promise of growing strength and imperial expansion. In Soviet times, those who were sceptical about that promise were subjected to no-holds-barred violence on a scale never before seen in history.

Putin’s state is history’s unique blend of secret police and organised crime, which at this point still uses violence selectively – it hasn’t yet got to a point where it has to murder millions in order to survive.

So much more does it depend on the traditional promise being accepted: take imperial sabre-rattling out, and Vlad’s junta must either go out of business or start culling Russians on a Stalin scale.

This explains why Vlad incongruously extolls both tsarist Russia and the regime that destroyed it. He accepts neither in its entirety; what appeals to him is the element on which they overlap: a show of imperial force. Without this he knows he not only won’t stay in power, but may not even be allowed to live to enjoy his purloined billions.

Hence his increasingly aggressive policy aimed at restoring the tsarist-Stalinist empire. Vlad’s forays into Chechnya, Georgia and the Ukraine have received but a mild slap on the wrist – the West was sufficiently scared of the razor Vlad was brandishing already.

That he now deems it necessary to wave more diabolical weapons may suggest that he plans actions that the West might otherwise punish more decisively. This can only be something Khrushchev didn’t dare launch: an attack on Russia’s neighbours that happen to be NATO members.

If so, the West must scrape together as much resolve as possible. We must take seriously not the metaphorical madman, but the razor in his hand – and be prepared to respond in kind.

Reading the review of a TV programme about botched plastic surgery, one paragraph caught my eye:

“An elegant American pianist described how she had arrived for auditions, and the ‘fat’ on her upper arms had grossed out her producers.” She got a plastic operation, but: “It went wrong, and she has difficulty playing the piano.”

Just a few words, but they tell the whole story of a cultural catastrophe. For playing classical music is an art distinctly different from pole dancing, nude or semi-nude modelling, striptease and porn films.

One can see how having a tasty body would be a job requirement for a woman trying to excel in those genres. There’s every inducement for those young ladies to submit to the scalpel in the hope of removing, reducing or rearranging any obstacles in the way of a successful career.

But a classical musician purveys an aural rather than visual art representing both the highest achievement of our culture and its most eloquent expression. Therefore its practitioners need a set of skills that require both more and less than what pole dancers need.

That a musician must have virtuoso technique goes without saying, and most professionals possess that. But that’s only a start. A performer must also have the sensitivity, intellect, emotional makeup and near-osmotic intuition to grasp and then communicate the sublime insights of some of history’s greatest men.

Performers boasting this combination of qualities are now practically nonexistent. But that’s no problem because also practically nonexistent are audiences that can appreciate musical performances on such terms.

That knocks out one leg of the tripod propping up a performance: the symbiosis of composer, performer and listener. With that leg gone, the structure collapses – but concert halls still need to be filled, with a new type of audience listening to a new type of musician.

The task of putting bums on seats has proved easy, what with the path to commercial success already signposted by popular arts, including those I’ve mentioned above and especially pop music.

Impresarios, concert organisers and record producers used to sell their wares on the basis of their charges’ musicianship. They knew that the greater the musician, the more he’ll be appreciated and the higher will be the commercial return.

However, since these days the public en masse can’t tell a proper musician from, say, Lang Lang, high talent no longer guarantees high profits.

Quite the opposite: a real musician works hard and he demands that his listeners do the same. And for the listeners to work hard, they should know how – they should have acquired the necessary tools. That takes a serious effort over a lifetime.

In addition to attending hundreds (thousands?) of concerts and listening to (tens of?) thousands of recordings, a real listener prepares himself by learning about the culture that produced the masterpieces, reading up on musical theory to acquire at least a general notion of structure and harmony, honing his aesthetic perception by studying other arts, learning the history of music, analysing the aesthetic, philosophical and religious aspects of the composers’ inspiration.

When such a listener finds himself in a concert hall, he’s not there to be entertained. He’s there to concentrate on every note almost as much as the performer does.

After the last note has sounded, the listener is left drained, engrossed in thought, repeating in his mind every poignant phrase. Some of those phrases stay with him for ever. The high pleasure of this experience requires a high effort – but then so does anything else worth having.

Today’s typical audiences are unwilling to make this effort, and they’ll shun a performance that demands it. They attend concerts to be entertained, and it’s to that need that concert organisers appeal. And, since to the average listener all performances sound the same, provided the musician can play all the right notes in the right sequence and at the required speed, other aspects come to the fore.

Performers are promoted all the way to stardom by extra-musical characteristics, physical appearance prime among them. Specifically female musicians are selected on the standards not fundamentally different from those applied to pole dancers. They should have sexy flesh and reveal as much of it as possible without being charged with public indecency.

Just look up on YouTube performances by, say, Yuja Wang, Khatia Buniatishvili, Joanna MacGregor, Nicola Bendetti, Alison Balsom (nicknamed ‘crumpet with a trumpet’, her promos more often suggest ‘a strumpet with a trumpet’ instead) et al.

You won’t hear any musical revelations, but you’ll see much bare flesh. While appreciating the differences between such playing and pole dancing, one can still feel that similarities are becoming more prominent.

Reviewers realise this better than anyone else, hence the content of their articles. Thus for instance runs a recent review of a piano recital at Queen Elizabeth Hall, one of London’s top venues:

“She is the most photogenic of players: young, pretty, bare-footed; and, with her long dark hair and exquisite strapless dress of dazzling white, not only seemed to imply that sexuality itself can make you a profound musician, but was a perfect visual complement to the sleek monochrome of a concert grand…”

I feel sorry for the “elegant American pianist”, who mutilated herself trying to satisfy today’s exacting requirements. Of course the simpler and less taxing solution to the problem of imperfect upper arms would have been to cover them with a proper concert dress. But that would have left the public feeling cheated.

One can’t help recalling some sublime women musicians of the past, such as Myra Hess, Maria Yudina, Clara Haskil, Marcelle Meyer, Marguerite Long. None of them would have won a Miss Hull beauty pageant. And what do you know, the public didn’t care.

P.S. On an unrelated subject, women’s curling strikes me as one of the few Winter Olympic sports that have a clear practical application. It develops a knack for a woman to get down on her hands and knees and scrub the floor. For that reason, and I won’t even mention other possible uses of this talent, curling ought to be boycotted by all those who, like me, resent such a utilitarian view of womankind.

One would expect that Justin Welby, oil trader retrained as the Archbishop of Canterbury, would have a firm grasp of both the sacred and secular realms.

In fact, he struggles to come to terms with either.

The transition from the cutthroat end of private enterprise to Christian ministry must have been too abrupt for his mind to handle. Especially since his mind was already compromised by its leftward slant.

The Archbishop is concerned about the “schism” caused by the deadly combination of Brexit and austerity. That fire-spewing juggernaut is “crushing the weak, the sick and many others”.

As a stickler for rhetorical precision, I’m always worried about open-ended propositions. What kind of “many others”? How many of them? Is their number coextensive with the subscription rolls of The Guardian? The public deserves to know.

Wearing his businessman’s hat, His Grace ought to have checked his numbers. He would have realised that ‘austerity’, as used by Guardian subscribers and the key figures in the Labour party, doesn’t really convey its dictionary definition.

What they mean isn’t penny-pinching austerity, but a slower growth of economically suicidal profligacy. Public spending is still redlining, but not quite so fast.

Putting this in familiar terms, just imagine, Your Grace, that the price of crude grows at $10 a barrel every year until one year it only grows by $8. It has still grown, hasn’t it? Good. Glad we’ve sorted this out.

Now the need for ‘austerity’ arose mainly because aforementioned profligacy brought the country to the brink of disaster. The snowball was rolling to the precipice and, though it couldn’t be stopped, it had to be slowed down.

Of course, the Left know only one cure for any disaster caused by socialist policies: more socialist policies. Hence their assault on ‘austerity’, with the Archbishop in the vanguard.

Wearing his clerical mitre, he should really focus on teaching his flock to concentrate on hard work, thrift and self-reliance – and that goes for the government too. Ministering to the poor is an essential part of the priestly remit, but that doesn’t mean shilling for policies proven to make more people poor.

As to Brexit, His Grace feels that it closely parallels the Second World War, supposedly with hundreds of thousands of Britons killed during Germany’s previous attempt to unite Europe.

One has to assume that the post-Brexit London the Archbishop sees in his mind’s eye will be reduced to smoking ruins, with hungry people digging the charred corpses of their loved ones out of the rubble.

Why, one London building has already suffered such a gruesome fate, and His Grace blames, both explicitly and implicitly, the Grenfell Tower fire on ‘austerity’ combined with Brexit.

The link to Brexit is just cloud cuckoo land, but even the role ‘austerity’ played isn’t immediately clear either. After all, the tower was financed by the public purse – they didn’t call it a council estate for nothing.

So blame the local council by all means, or perhaps the construction company presumably called Jerry Builders. Or even, at a lucid moment, the residents who might have been a bit lax in their fire safety. But what does HMG’s economic policy have to do with anything?

And particularly what does Brexit have to do with that towering inferno? Oh yes: “Brexit has divided the country – and now we need a new narrative… There is a danger that there is a schism in our society into which the most vulnerable are falling.” People can fall into a chasm, not schism, but let’s not quibble.

One can justifiably say that any election, and certainly any referendum, divides the country between those who vote one way and those who vote the other. This normal division has been blown up into a ‘schism’ by the Archbishop’s co-ideologues who despise the will of the people but worship the will of Brussels.

As to the implicit prognosis of the dire effect Brexit will have on ‘the most vulnerable’, here the Archbishop swaps his clerical mitre for his businessman’s hat – with results that bode badly for his mental health.

First, we don’t know what the effect will be on the most or least vulnerable. Let’s wait and see, shall we? And do let’s put a sock into the mouths of naysayers and try to make sure the country, including everyone with varying degrees of vulnerability, thrives after Brexit.

Second and most important, we’re still at least two years away from the actual exit. If Welby’s co-ideologues have their way, we may never get out. One way or another, what on earth, or for matter in heaven, does it have to do with the Grenfell Tower and the current plight of the “the weak, the sick and many others”?

But then Welby, in common with all Remainers, blames Brexit for everything. Perhaps I should become a Remainer too, so that I’ll be able to blame my forthcoming hip operation on that God-awful referendum.

The good Archbishop preaches that “we must be a warm, welcoming nation”, presumably to mitigate the effects of austerity and Brexit:

“Welcoming strangers to our own country and integrating them into our own culture is important. We must be generous and allow ourselves to change with the newcomers and create a deeper, richer way of life.”

Methinks, this is spitting on the graves of those Grenfell Tower victims. After all, had we had less immigration, they’d still be very much alive in their own countries.

But that little logical problem aside, I’m all for welcoming and integrating strangers. But let’s be more specific. How many should we welcome, and how do we integrate them?

Welby’s statement sounds like an open invitation irrespective of numbers. Now, it’s a safe assumption that at least a third of the world’s seven billion inhabitants would rather live in Britain than in their native lands. How many should we welcome? All of them?

May we please be allowed at least to limit the influx of those who stubbornly refuse to be integrated into “our own culture”? And are we sure that “changing with the newcomers” will actually “create a deeper, richer way of life”? Is our life being deepened and enriched by the presence of, say, 200,000 Somalis?

Possibly. But if so, a demonstration is in order, for without it such statements run the risk of sounding like typically asinine bien pensant waffle – the kind of stuff we expect from Blair or Clegg, not from prelates.

His Disgrace shouldn’t overload his brain with such matters – unless he plans to empty out even more Anglican churches. If times are as hard as he claims, then so much more do the people need the solace and eternal hope that only Christianity can provide.

The spectacle of an Archbishop of Canterbury mouthing faddish secular nonsense won’t bring them to the pews. It’ll bring them to cynicism at best, despair at worst.