Author: Alexander Boot

Piece of cake, you’ll say if you live in any large city, especially London. You just walk out into the street in the city centre, and there they are. Whole bevies of them.

Tactile delights may be out of your reach in most instances. But there’s no shortage of visual ones. Aesthetics trumps carnality everywhere.

But notice I said ‘any large city’. I could have said ‘anywhere’ but didn’t, advisedly. For I spend almost half my time in the north-western corner of Burgundy. Between Sancerre and Chablis, to put it into your frame of reference.

Yet there’s no wine industry where we are. Nor, actually, much of any other. Welfare is the biggest industry, with timber perhaps a distant second. Since we don’t get many tourists, there aren’t many service jobs either.

This means youngsters with anything on the ball leave the moment they’re old enough and sometimes before that. The clever boys go where jobs are, and so do the pretty girls. The girls also go where eligible men are, which is usually the same places that have jobs.

The locals who stay do nothing much but drink and sleep with their next of kin, which activity is called le cinéma des pauvres in these parts. That, I’m sure, is a most enjoyable cinematic genre, but it tends to be rather detrimental to the gene pool.

Hence at 5’7” I tower over most local men, and the women tend to be broader than they’re tall. In both sexes the hairline is almost contiguous with the eyebrows, and the chins with the sternums. Both sexes are badly shaven.

This explains my sense of acute visual deprivation whenever I’m here, sometimes three months at a time. There are gorgeous birds everywhere, but strictly of the avian variety.

After a week so, I in my desperation try to espy any good-looking person, regardless of sex. But casting the net wider doesn’t produce a greater catch. The locals are all lovely, courteous people, but they don’t add much to the serene beauty of the undulating landscape.

Our closest big city is Auxerre, and it’s big only by French standards, 30,000 souls or thereabouts. Still, since it’s one of Burgundy’s five regional centres and one of the most beautiful cities this size I’ve seen anywhere, one would expect the situation to improve there.

It doesn’t, not enough to make a difference. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a beautiful girl there, and even pretty ones are a rarity.

Now I know why. They’re all, dozens of them, nurses at the Auxerre Hospital, and they probably stay there all the time.

I found myself in a position to make this observation some four days ago, as a result of suffering a TIA, which the French perversely call AIT. They do have this tendency to get things the wrong way around: NATO is OTAN to them, fancy that.

Anyway, whether you call it Transient Ischemic Attack or Attaque Ischémique Transitoire, it amounts to the next best thing before stroke. Hence, for once, my wife overcame my staunch resistance and dragged me 30 miles to Auxerre.

Penelope probably wouldn’t have managed the feat had she not drawn reinforcements in the person of our charming doctor friend. She magically diagnosed the condition over the phone and explained that I’d be a con if I didn’t go to les urgences immediately. (If you don’t know what con means, I’ll let you guess.)

So I did, partly out of curiosity. This would give me the opportunity, I thought, to compare French healthcare with ours, of which I have rich experience at both the public and private ends.

The Auxerre Hospital is public, but in everything that matters it’s much closer to our private hospitals than to the NHS. Within 10 minutes of arriving at les urgences, I was seen by several nurses, each fit to feature in G&Q magazine.

Another five minutes later I was on a scanner, with several more beauties in attendance. They all called me Monsieur Boot, whereas NHS staff always refer to me as Alex or, if they’re feeling especially diffident, Alexander. I only become Mr Boot in private hospitals, or, as I once found out at High Wycombe, when moved to the private wing of the same hospital.

Half an hour later, I was on a gurney in the corridor, talking to three other gorgeous nurses and a stern-looking doctor. They were ganging up on me, trying to explain why not staying in for a few days would put my life in imminent jeopardy.

After some vigorous resistance I agreed: they were giving me both the chance to go on living and a reason to do so.

Over the next few days I gathered even more basis for comparison. The only aspect of healthcare in which Auxerre Hospital approaches the NHS is the food. Surprisingly for France it was inedible, and I gratefully lost five pounds while there.

But all rooms on my floor were private or semi-private. Some of the semi-private ones, including mine, housed men, some women, but never the two together.

I once spent several nights in an NHS hospital, when the NHS almost succeeded in killing me. I had been delivered there by an ambulance after an attack of gall stones.

When brought up to the ward, I saw something I’d never seen even in Russia, never mind the US: men and women were all jammed together in an open plan room. Those weren’t the circumstances under which I normally like to share a bedroom with a woman.

As to my problem, it wasn’t diagnosed, nor the pain relieved, in the three days I spent there. Eventually I fled for my life, and I don’t mean this figuratively.

The next day a private consultant diagnosed the condition before I finished the first sentence. When they operated on me, they found that gangrene had already set in. Another day at the Chelsea & Westminster, and you wouldn’t be reading my scurrilous prose now.

Nothing like that could ever have happened at Auxerre. If anything, I got as much attention as I needed and more than I could cope with, both from the excellent doctors and the efficient nurses. The latter numbered at least 20 on my floor, with their appearance only covering the range from pretty to beautiful.

So here’s my advice. If you find yourself in this neck of the woods and don’t see any good-looking women around, visit the hospital. You never know your luck.

Every time I promise myself to ignore Hitchens’s sycophantic effluvia about Putin’s Russia (“the most conservative, patriotic and Christian country left in Europe”), he writes something that can’t be ignored.

This time his very first sentence says everything one needs to know about this hack: “How all the Russophobes hurried to believe in the faked death of the Russian Arkady Babchenko in Kiev last week.”

I don’t know if Hitchens deliberately uses every venomous shibboleth spun out by Putin’s Goebbelses, or it’s simply a coincidence, puny minds thinking alike.

But tarring everyone who opposes Putin with the brush of Russophobia is exactly what they all do. If you hate Putin’s kleptofascist regime, you hate Russia because Putin is Russia. Without Putin, there’s no Russia, according to Vyacheslav Volodin, Chairman of the Duma.

And without Russia, enlarged Putin in his usual deadpan manner, there won’t be a world left. In other words, should Putin feel threatened, he won’t hesitate to unleash a nuclear Armageddon.

According to Hitchens and other Putin shills both in and out of Russia, hatred of Russia is the only possible motive for detesting this evil regime. Hence all those hundreds of thousands of Russians who protest by walking into skull-splitting police truncheons, do so because they hate Russia.

Those dozens of courageous journalists who write anti-Putin articles knowing that every word could be their death warrant do so out of irresistible Russophobia. They need Hitchens to teach them Russian patriotism.

“It’s easy to accuse the Kremlin of directly killing people because they are nasty, dishonest, violent and secretive, which they are,” continues Hitchens. Really? And there I was, thinking Putin’s Russia is “the most conservative, patriotic and Christian country left in Europe.”

That’s his standard ruse, designed to ward off accusations of sycophancy, or worse. Having made this sop towards Russophobes like me, Hitchens feels free to shill for Putin in earnest:

“But [Russophobes’] gullibility was turned up to maximum as soon as they heard of Mr Babchenko’s supposed death, a ludicrous fake involving bags of pig’s blood, and the coldly cruel deception of Mrs Babchenko…”

The other day I wrote that every supporter of Putin’s regime is an accomplice to its crimes. But few are more insistently complicit than Hitchens. And few can match his moral callousness and cynical disregard of truth.

How would Hitchens feel if informed by the police that a $40,000 contract has been taken out on him? Try to imagine his reaction, though this would stretch your imagination to breaking point: no one would value Hitchens’s life as highly.

Moreover, he’s the small fry at the top of the list including 30 really big-time marks. And the only way to save himself and others is to take part in a sting operation, which, looking down from his dizzying moral ascendancy, Hitchens dares to call “a ludicrous fake”.

Would Hitchens heroically decline such an offer and proudly go to his death, closely followed by the deaths of many others? If you believe that, there’s a bridge over the Thames I’d like to sell you.

Here’s how movingly Babchenko himself describes his ordeal, in the stream of consciousness style he sometimes uses:

“You come home from the morgue, the stench of blood and formaldehyde can be smelled a mile away, not having slept for 24 hours, having lived through your own murder, having walked about for a month with a target on your forehead, waiting for that shot, a month lived with the realisation that your death is paid for – your death is paid for. This thought is piercing – you hug your wife who’s no longer even hysterical, the hysterical phase ended several days ago, and what’s left now is total, absolute emptiness, deathly senselessness, everything has been squeezed out… you don’t know how long you’ll live, for how long you’ll be followed by bodyguards, you don’t know when you’ll simply be able to live with open curtains and your daughter will be able to play with other children… and those c**** write about this without having a f****** clue about the hell I’ve been through, and may God spare them knowing or living through this, so go on writing, while I’ve just come back from such darkness, climbed out of such abyss…”

That’s Russophobia, as far as Hitchens is concerned. Then comes the didactic bit, from a man Babchenko would describe as a c*** who pretends to know all about Russia, but really knows f***-all (I myself would never use such language):

“Don’t rush to conclusions too easily about this part of the world. The Wild East is a murky place, with more than one villain in it. It’s as likely that such murders (when genuine) are the work of gangsters not under direct government control.”

One has to admire craft, however it’s applied. The parenthetical phrase is a subtle hint at the likelihood that most (all?) political murders may not be genuine.

They have been staged for the benefit of gullible Russophobes, and trust Hitchens to see through the ploy. Verily I say unto you, Hitchens must possess Christ-like resurrecting powers.

Any day now we’ll see walking through the door Anna Politkovskaya, Galina Starovoitova, Boris Nemtsov, Natalia Estremirova, Sergei Magintsky, Alexander Litvinenko, Paul Khlebnikov, Atyom Borovik, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Anastasia Baburova and hundreds of other victims of Putin. Any day now we’ll see the passengers and crew of Flight MH17 smiling from our TV screens.

When it comes to political assassinations, there is indeed only one villain in Russia: her criminal ruling elite, which is an organic fusion of the secret police and organised crime.

The cocktail has been blended so thoroughly that even people who know Russia infinitely better than Hitchens (such as myself, false modesty aside) find it impossible to see where one ingredient ends and the other begins.

No Western government has the same concentration of billionaires as Putin’s clique, led by the good colonel himself, reputedly the world’s richest man. How do you suppose they came by their billions? Saving up by taking bag lunches?

The demarcation line between Putin’s government and gangsters exists only in what passes for Hitchens’s mind. Even JFK’s administration tried to use the Mafia for wet jobs. In Putin’s Russia the gangsters are the administration, and the administration are the gangsters.

Hitchens insists that those blaming this group for political murders have no proof. True enough, the murderers don’t carry in their pockets a licence to kill so-and-so signed by Putin personally. Actually, it wouldn’t matter if they did: they’re practically never caught.

But it takes either a madman or a Putin propagandist (paid or voluntary, makes no difference) not to see the common element over which all Putin’s victims overlap: they detest what he has done to Russia.

Hitchens’ standards of proof loosen up remarkably when it comes to shilling for Putin: “I’d guess [my emphasis] such gangsters probably killed the brave reporter Pavel Sheremet, whose car was blown up… in Kiev in July 2016 shortly after he’d criticised pro-Western Ukrainian militia leaders and their links with organised crime.”

Right. It was the dastardly Ukies what done it, having taken time out from firing missiles at Malaysian airliners. The same Ukrainian villains who had usurped power that rightfully belongs to Putin and his stooges. (That’s how Hitchens routinely interprets the popular uprising in the Ukraine.)

One can only wonder on what basis Hitchen guesses that, considering that, unlike Putin’s kleptofascist gang, Ukrainian leaders have never been suspected of political murder before or since – and Sheremet had had to flee Russia one step ahead of Putin’s goons.

(Babchenko’s reaction at the time was different. Addressing Putin’s gang, he asked in his article: “What did you kill Pasha Sheremet for, degenerates?”)

Yet Putin would be to blame for such murders even if a few of them were indeed committed by individuals driven by personal urges.

For over the last two decades, Putin’s totalitarian propaganda has systematically created an atmosphere of military hysteria and psychotic hatred. Falling victim are millions of zombified Russians, who have been brainwashed to regard every pro-West opponent of Putin as at best their personal enemy and at worst a target.

Or certainly a Russophobe, the term favoured by the most strident propagandists. Such as Hitchens.

To the horror of my conservative friends (which is to say all my friends), I must admit I don’t like Donald Trump.

I find him brash, vulgar, egotistical, uncultivated, impulsive, uncultured, sartorially challenged and surprisingly ignorant for someone who went to all the top schools.

That, however, is neither here nor there because I do like most of his policies. While he wouldn’t be my choice of a dinner guest, he would be my choice of US president, especially considering the options available.

There’s no contradiction there whatsoever. Take the reverse of all the adjectives mentioned above, and I doubt you’d find a single politician in history to whom they’d apply.

For all those reverse qualities would probably prevent a man from seeking political office, and they’d certainly prevent him from gaining one. For such reverse qualities preclude powerlust, which is an absolute sine qua non for an aspiring politician.

So fine, I dislike Trump personally, but I like most of his policies. Most, however, doesn’t mean all, and those I don’t like spring from Trump’s hare-brained take on America First.

This slogan was inscribed on the banners of isolationists in the run-up to the Second World War. Much as I hate to say this, those good people were wrong and the awful FDR was right – on his own terms.

His own terms were set by the entire US policy of several preceding decades. That policy was aimed at achieving global domination, and it was not the isolationists but FDR who was in touch with it.

From the standpoint of that aspiration, Roosevelt was a spectacular success. He managed to push the Lend-Lease programme through Congress, using a spurious, demagogic simile of a ‘garden hose’.

If your neighbour’s house is on fire, wouldn’t you lend him your garden hose? he orated. You would, if not out of altruism then for fear that the fire could spread to your own house.

The Lend-Lease was tantamount to America entering the war six months before Pearl Harbour. After Pearl Harbour, largely provoked by Roosevelt’s policies in the Pacific, the US entered the war formally and started to churn out mountains of armaments both for export and for her own use.

As a result, the US emerged from the war richer than she had been at entry. While the other parties had bled white, the US achieved her imperial goal at a cost of merely 300,000 or so casualties. The British Empire had been killed; the US empire was born; FDR was vindicated.

The world began to be globalised, with the US successfully fighting off one challenge after another to her position at the top of the hill.

Now Trump is viscerally isolationist, but he’s also an American imperialist. Alas, he doesn’t seem to realise that the two desiderata are at odds.

As an isolationist, he has misgivings about Nato, to the point of even threatening to pull out if the other members don’t pay their fair share of military costs.

I agree unequivocally that Europe shouldn’t rely on America for her defence. Defence of the realm from every threat, foreign or domestic, is after all the most, not to say only, legitimate function of the state.

To fulfil this mandate, European countries should at least double their defence budgets. Otherwise they’ll be in default of their duties.

Yet few modern wars have ever been fought, and none won, by one country on her own. Some kind of alliance has always been formed, and I dare say Nato has proved its value more than other military alliances I can think of.

It’s thanks to Nato – and emphatically not to the EU, as particularly inane Eurocrats claim – that Russophones like me are still in the minority among British subjects.

That Europe contributes to Nato three times less than the US in terms of GDP per capita is unfair and, more important, potentially dangerous. But playing the world’s leader is a role that requires expenses, which all previous empires, including our own, can confirm.

Roosevelt realised that, but Trump doesn’t. Hence he must decide whether he wants America to stand on her own two legs or continue in her role of the world’s leader. He can’t have both, not in today’s world.

Trump’s isolationist instincts also push him towards protectionism. Now if his stance on Nato may be debatable to some extent, his slapping tariffs on steel and aluminium imports is downright ignorant – as is the promise Trump made to Macron, that he would not rest until the last Mercedes had disappeared from the streets of New York.

If you don’t want Mercs, Donald, make sure American cars can be made better and cheaper. That’s the only sensible way.

Here too Trump should take his cue (in terms of how not to run an economy) from FDR, specifically the way he tried to fight the Depression.

The depression only began to bite after Roosevelt’s protectionist measures went into effect. And that makes sense.

As von Mises, Hayek and every Chicago economist worth his salt have shown, the success of a reasonably free economy is determined by the consumer, which is to say by a strong, voracious demand.

And what boosts the demand is free competition among suppliers, regardless of which country they come from. In such conditions they are forced to offer better products, lower prices and more efficient services.

It’s demand that decides the issue. You can only help the economy by helping the consumers, says the conventional wisdom. You can’t do so by hurting them.

This can only mean that protectionism can’t help the economy. It almost certainly will cause untold damage, by mollycoddling domestic production behind a protective wall of near-monopoly. That anyone should deem this necessary can only mean that domestic production was ineffective to begin with.

Yet when its incompetence is artificially protected, it’ll have little incentive to get its act together. Quality will go down, prices will head in the opposite direction, funds will be channelled into the least – and away from the most – productive areas, and consumers will bear the consequences.

There is now, or was at the time of the Great Depression, nothing new about any of this. Bright economists from Smith, Turgot and Ricardo onwards had known it and written about it.

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

Slapping, as Trump has done, protectionist tariffs of 25 per cent on steel and 10 per cent on aluminium means that everything made out of those metals will cost US consumers more.

This may protect jobs in the industries that produce steel and aluminium, but many more jobs will be lost in other sectors, whose products consumers may no longer be able to afford. And that’s before the countries on the receiving end begin to retaliate, making US exporters less competitive in global markets.

‘Liberal’ is a dirty modifier when attached to almost everything, but liberalised trade is one exception. It’s a factor of prosperity, and it’s regrettable that Trump is ready to sacrifice it for the narrow political goal of confirming his populist credentials.

When Britain’s most senior family judge welcomes the collapse of the ‘nuclear’ family (which is to say the family), you know it’s the end of the world.

It’s beyond belief that a man as manifestly unfit, morally and intellectually, to head the High Court’s Family Division as Sir James Munby got the job.

In his recent speech Sir James made the most subversive attack on the very notion of the family ever launched by a public official, this side of Lenin at any rate.

He began in a way that raised expectations. Finally someone in charge of family law realised the social, demographic, economic and moral catastrophe that had befallen the family. Sir James Munby-Punby certainly got his facts right:

“People live together as couples, married or not, and with partners who may not always be of the other sex. Children live in households where their parents may be married or unmarried.

“They may be brought up by a single parent, by two parents or even by three parents. Their parents may or may not be their natural parents.

“They may be children of parents with very different religious, ethnic or national backgrounds. They may be the children of polygamous marriages.”

He left out babies conceived and gestated in a test tube, but otherwise the dystopically nightmarish picture is complete. We’re witnessing the collapse of society’s cornerstone and therefore of society itself.

After all, it would be tedious to cite the masses of statistical data directly linking the offspring of such families to high levels of crime, joblessness, alcoholism, drug use and just about every type of sociopathy known to man.

Surely Sir James has all such data at his fingertips, and thank God here’s a man in a position to do something about it.

The reality, summed up Sir James, is that many Britons “live in families more or less removed from what, until comparatively recently, would have been recognised as the typical nuclear family.”

And then came a thunderous fist banging on the table, with the listeners made to jump up and hold their breath. This was followed by a rise of 20 decibels in Sir James’s voice and a mighty roar: “THIS HAS GOT TO STOP!!!” Right? Alas, no.

No fist banged down; no roar came. What came was a Munby-Punby squeak: “This, I stress, is not merely the reality; it is, I believe, a reality which we should welcome and applaud.”

Since one can’t think of anything more diabolical than the situation Sir James described in such loving detail, the inference has to be that any reality, especially a new one, must be welcomed and applauded.

This is in line with the current thinking on just about every issue of import. One hears such progressivist twaddle everywhere, from Parliament to the Cabinet to a run-of-the-mill dinner party. “Things change,” mouth nincompoops who think they are actually saying something.

The implication is that every change and every new reality resulting therefrom is for the better, and hence none should be decried or resisted. This sort of thing confirms the Darwinist fallacy of man descending from lower organisms.

For such inane thinking wouldn’t be out of place in a conversation between two amoebas. Their presumed descendants couldn’t have evolved all that much, since they can neither acknowledge the facts nor draw proper conclusions.

If all change were for the better, today’s philosophy dons would be an improvement on Aristotle or at least Collingwood, the Beatles on Bach or at least Handel, Damien Hirst on Vermeer or at least Chardin.

More to the point, Tony-Dave-Theresa would be an improvement on Burke, Wellington or Churchill. Even more to the point, a pygmy like Sir James would tower over giants like Lord Chief Justice Holt (d. 1710), King’s Serjeant Davy (d. 1780) or Lord Chief Justice Mansfield (d. 1793).

Those great lawyers made a vital contribution to the abolition of slavery, and all three cited a ruling from a 1569 case, that “England is too pure an air for a slave to breathe in.” Lord Holt also stated unequivocally that “as soon as a negro comes to England he is free; one may be a villein in England, but not a slave”.

I can just hear what Munby-Punby would have said in similar circumstances: “The reality is that many English families own slaves, which, I stress, is not merely the reality; it is, I believe, a reality which we should welcome and applaud.”

Slavery was reprehensible because it struck at the foundations of our society: treating men as livestock makes mockery of the very essence of humanity as established in the founding documents and events of our civilisation.

The disintegration of the family is just as, if not even more, reprehensible. For the family isn’t just a building block of society – it’s also the model on which many traditional institutions were built. Welcoming and applauding its demise is either cosmically stupid or deliberately subversive.

I don’t know which of those possibilities apply to Sir James, some combination of the two most likely. What I do know is that the very fact that he occupies such a position says a lot not just about him but also about every one of us.

It hurts me to say so, but on the subject of rape Germaine Greer has a point. Too much of one, actually.

The point is that rape has become politicised to a hysterical level.

Women are brainwashed into claiming it’s the worst thing that can happen to them, leaving them psychologically traumatised for the rest of their lives.

I’ve ridiculed this idea many times, giving long lists of things that any sane person would think considerably worse than rape. How about being killed? Left brain-damaged after a beating? Losing an eye or two? Having every bone broken?

Anyone blessed with a modicum of imagination can extend this list until there’s no paper left in the house. Miss Greer certainly can, and on this issue at least we agree.

“We are told it’s one of the most violent crimes in the world. Bullshit,” she says (make allowances for her Aussie origin). After all, the majority of “rapes don’t involve any injury whatsoever”.

The first statement is correct, the second one betrays what in less progressive times used to be called ‘woman’s logic’.

For a violent rape may cause no physical damage, for example if the rapist holds a knife to his victim’s throat during the act, threatening to kill her and her children if she doesn’t comply. But this sounds fairly violent to me, injury or no injury.

Most rape isn’t rape, continues Miss Greer, dumping a truckload of rubbish on a kernel of truth: “Most rape is just lazy, just careless, just insensitive. Every time a man rolls over on his exhausted wife and insists on enjoying his conjugal right, he is raping her. It will never end up in a court of law.”

As to the last sentence, it’s factually incorrect. If Miss Greer read the papers, she’d know that a whole new legal category of marital rape has been brought into existence. Many a man has been convicted for helping himself to a bit of how’s your father without first obtaining explicit (written?) consent from his wife.

Such sex is indeed lazy, careless and insensitive, and men who practise it have no manners whatsoever. Yet it shouldn’t be criminalised in any sane society, which ours no longer is.

However, Miss Greer doesn’t even notice that what she says is self-refuting. For she equates marital sex without permission with common or garden rape, where a stranger jumps out of the bushes in the said common or garden and forces himself on a woman.

In other words, she implicitly supports the very attitude of which she accuses our courts and society in general. Moreover, she hints at the extreme feminist position that even consensual nuptial sex is rape.

Discrimination of any kind is a dirty word these days, but no judgement, intellectual, moral or aesthetic, is possible without it.

By equating bad sex with rape, Miss Greer effectively endorses treating the former as the latter in the courts. Judges oblige, and insensitive husbands often end up sharing a prison cell with violent degenerates.

Discrimination relies on establishing narrow, concrete categories. But Miss Greer’s categories are wide enough to let an articulated lorry through.

Rape to her is “sex where there is no communication, no tenderness, no mention of love.” On that criterion, I’d guess 90 per cent of all men married for longer than a few years should be banged in pokey.

Miss Greer disagrees. According to her, no rapist should receive a custodial sentence. Some 200 hours of community service should suffice, especially if no injury was involved.

Now that idea is provocative, which is fine: if an idea doesn’t provoke, it’s not an idea but a truism.

The trouble is that Miss Greer’s idea isn’t just provocative, but deliberately provocative: something uttered for shock value only. This always means the idea has no other value at all.

In the next breath she suggests that rape be reclassified as GBH, which would result in a lighter sentence. When it’s her word against his, and the potential punishment is seven years, says Miss Greer, no jury will convict.

This again doesn’t add up. First, if it’s just her word against his, no jury should convict anyway, although many do. Second, the maximum sentence for GBH is life, and the normal sentencing is in the three to 16 years range. So how will such reclassification produce a lighter sentence? And anyway, should we go no higher than 200 hours of community service?

Miss Greer’s mind may be smallish, but her ability to self-promote through iconoclasm is gigantic. She has devoted her whole life to blowing up every traditional (and the only true) view of women, men and family – and it has paid.

The nuclear, which to say normal, family is to her the worst possible environment for women to raise their children.

I haven’t investigated her position on this subject deeply enough to find out what the best environment would be. A single slut on social raising several children by different fathers in a space filled with crushed beer cans and crumbled cigarette packets?

To be truly free, women, according to Miss Greer, should abandon monogamy and put themselves about like uncaged animals. Hence perhaps the hypothetical woman of my morbid imagination above is really Miss Greer’s paragon of female liberation.

Bralessness is another essential component. On this subject, she loses me altogether, even though I was rather lost already.

“Bras are a ludicrous invention,” she once said, “but if you make bralessness a rule, you’re just subjecting yourself to yet another repression.”

So wearing a bra is as repressive as not wearing one. What’s a well-endowed girl to do if she doesn’t want to play footie with her endowments? How does double mastectomy as a blow for liberation strike Miss Greer?

She is right to point out that the concept of rape has been so widened that perfectly innocent men have been convicted for, say, not stopping in the middle of a consensual act just because the woman felt like stopping. Or else a woman having sex with two men and then deciding she doesn’t fancy one of them after all. (References to specific cases available on request.)

However, when throwing her stones, she doesn’t realise she herself lives in a glass house. For she should look no further than herself and mindless fanatics like her in search of those who have ripped to shreds the fabric of our society.

It doesn’t occur to her that, if she or anyone else is incapable of uttering two words on this subject without one word contradicting the other, then perhaps the premise is false.

Fair enough, our society, cast adrift from its roots, is ready to respond to any twaddle with Hitlerjugend-type alacrity. But Miss Greer has added quite a few lashes of her own to the whipping up of destructive hysteria.

Now she looks at her creation and realises she doesn’t quite like it. She is the female Herostratus disillusioned with arson, or rather some of its consequences. Yes, she became famous, job done. But perhaps Ephesus doesn’t look quite right without that temple.

The murder of Arkady Babchenko produced thousands of angry articles, including my own, around the world.

That the murder was staged as part of a police sting operation has also produced thousands of angry responses, this time with both Babchenko and the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) on the receiving end.

The accusations are varied. Those by Reporters Without Borders represent almost the whole gamut, proving that this august organisation ought to be renamed Reporters Without Minds.

The first arrow was fired at the SBU: “it is pathetic and regrettable that the Ukrainian police have played with the truth, whatever their motive… for the stunt”.

This suggests that any police force running a sting operation somehow transgresses against morality – even if crimes are prevented and lives are saved as a result. This is simply nonsense.

Ever since the fictional Sherlock Holmes staged his own death to nail a sniper who had been stalking him, there have been thousands of real cases where a death was faked.

For example, in 1976, the Texan billionaire Cullen Davis was found not guilty of attempted murder.

Rather than heaving a sigh of relief, the vindictive billionaire compiled a list of everyone involved in the trial, starting with the judge, and hired a hitman to sort them out. He hadn’t done his due diligence properly, for the hitman was an FBI plant, part of an elaborate operation.

Pictures of the supposedly dead judge smeared with ketchup were taken. The ‘assassin’ showed them to Davis as proof of a job well-done (“I got the judge for you, okay?”) and collected his payment. As the envelope was changing hands, Davis was arrested.

Whatever next? Are we going to accuse the war allies of perfidy for landing in Normandy, having first deceived the Nazis into believing the landing would happen in Pas-de-Calais? You have to admit that the allies ‘played with the truth’ more deviously than even the SBU.

What else? Oh yes, Reporters Without Minds strongly hint that this operation somehow exonerates Putin of all his crimes, past and future. This sting, they explain, “would not help the cause of press freedom. All it takes is one case like this to cast doubt on all the other political assassinations.”

Presumably, the cause of press freedom would have been helped only by Babchenko’s real death. Rather than cooperating with the SBU, he should have painted a target on his back and gone to his death with the same heroic resignation as Reporters Without Minds doubtless would display under similar circumstances.

And how much doubt will be cast on other political assassinations? In the real world, as opposed to the virtual one inhabited by Putin’s revolting sycophants?

Must we now doubt that Anna Politkovskaya was killed for real? Boris Nemtsov? Natalia Estremirova? Sergei Magintsky? Alexander Litvinenko? Paul Khlebnikov? Atyom Borovik, Yuri Shchekochikhin? Anastasia Baburova? Pavel Sheremet, Babchenko’s friend and another journalist taking refuge in Kiev, murdered by a car bomb in 2016? Is Flight MH17 still doing its rounds?

Or do the Mindless Reporters deny that Putin’s regime is capable of murder, including political assassination, in or out of Russia? If so, this gives a whole new meaning to the word no-brainer.

Why do they and other critics full of moral indignation think Babchenko agreed to expose his wife, children, elderly mother and numerous friends to the shock of his death? Is he a callous, heartless cynic with no regard for the misery of others?

Hardly. This is a man who adopted five girls, saving them from the horror of Russian orphanages, where malnourished children are dying in droves. Rather than as a heartless cynic, he is known to his friends as a noble, kind, generous man.

So why did he do it? At his posthumous press conference, Babchenko said he had no other option, and I believe that’s what he thought.

Here are the facts, as we know them. Babchenko had been receiving death threats for years, some coming from Putin’s insiders, such as Marina Yudenich. In spite of that, he courageously continued to publish articles scathing of the criminal regime under which he had to live.

Babchenko only fled Russia when he found out that he was about to be arrested and tried, which in Putin’s Russia means imprisoned – political defendants are always convicted, with the verdicts predetermined in the Kremlin. Chances are, he wouldn’t have survived incarceration (remember Sergei Magnitsky?).

Then, about a month ago, the SBU told Babchenko that a $40,000 contract had been taken out for his assassination. And not only his: apparently, Babchenko headed a list of 30 Russian émigrés slated to be ‘whacked’ (several had already been killed). The SBU then devised the sting and asked Babchenko to play along.

He agreed, and as a result Putin’s hitman has been arrested. He is being interrogated even as we speak, and it’s conceivable that he’ll blow the whole conspiracy sky high.

But even if he doesn’t, saving Babchenko’s life is good enough by itself, especially if there was indeed no other option of protecting him.

Not being as familiar as Babchenko’s critics evidently are with the intricacies of police procedure, I can’t judge whether or not other options existed. In America and Britain, for example, people can get police protection involving a change of address, identity and sometimes even appearance.

But the Ukraine is neither America nor Britain. The country is crawling with Putin’s spies, and collaborators, always willing to lend a helping hand. They definitely number in hundreds of thousands, possibly millions. Given such demographics, going to ground is more difficult there than in America or Europe.

One way or another, the operation has shown that Putin can’t have his own way in the Ukraine. It has saved dozens of lives possibly and Babchenko’s definitely.

Rather than being criticised, the SBU and Babchenko ought to be congratulated on a brilliant operation, yet again exposing the enormity of Putin’s fascist regime to everyone – except those who won’t see.

 

 

One of the best Russian journalists, Arkady Babchenko, has been murdered in Kiev today. He was shot three times in the back.

Babchenko was only 41, and for the last 18 of those years he wrote brilliant, witty articles about the fascist junta ruling Russia.

Before then he had served in the army, fighting in two Chechen wars. Babchenko’s war dispatches earned him wide renown not only in Russia, but also abroad.

He was one of the most brilliant critics of Putin among journalists, but not the only victim. Until today, 43 Russian journalists had been murdered on Putin’s watch. Now there are 44, and counting.

At first they tried to get him not with a bullet but with an equally lethal court verdict. But Babchenko found out that a ‘legal’ case was being prepared against him and fled Russia in 2017 – especially since the ‘legal’ proceedings were accompanied by a torrent of death threats.

He and his family were penniless for a while, and his articles always ended with pleas for help accompanied by his account number. I curse myself for not having offered any, not out of stinginess, but out of laziness and hatred for any financial transactions involving bank transfers. A lame excuse, I know.

Eventually Babchenko settled in Kiev, where he got a fair amount of remunerative work in television and print. When he died, he was no longer destitute.

The Ukrainian police are looking for the murderer, but he was only the finger on the trigger. Whoever he is, and the police have several clues, the real murderer sits in the Kremlin.

The actual hitman is only his accomplice, one of many. For Russia is ruled by a gang of criminals, and you can find an accessory to this murder by picking at random any member of the ruling elite.

And not only them. The hands of every supporter of Putin’s kleptofascist regime are dripping Babchenko’s blood on the floor. It’s their faces that are reflected in the surface of the congealing red puddle.

Many of those faces belong to British and other Western ‘useful idiots’ to Putin. What are they feeling now? Pride in their ‘strong leader’? Joy that yet another enemy of their beloved monster has been eliminated? I know it isn’t shame; ideological fanatics are incapable of feeling that emotion.

I could name some of them, but won’t: I’ve done so often enough. Anyway, they know who they are. And I know what they are: evil. For supporters of an evil, murderous regime are themselves evil and murderous – just as everyone involved in a crime, however tangentially, is a criminal treated as such in the courts.

In the good tradition of British civility, one is supposed to eschew strong words and give even such scum the benefit of the doubt. They aren’t evil, but misguided. They aren’t scum, but ignoramuses. They aren’t accomplices to multiple crimes, but idealists.

Well, the time for civility has passed. It has been ticking away with each subsequent crime and now it has run out. They no longer deserve to be called even useful idiots. No one is so idiotic as to be so useful to fascists for so long.

Thus let’s call them what they really are: evil, murderous scum. And let’s not look for mitigating circumstances, claiming they are good family men, Christians, honest and intelligent in every other respect, nice dinner companions or whatever.

Someone involved in murders, directly or indirectly, is himself a murderer. All else is but background noise. It may sometimes be quite interesting, but it’s always completely irrelevant.

Just think: any evil dictator is balanced on the very tip of a pyramidal structure. Immediately below him are members of his regime; below them are their moneybags and other active supporters.

As we go down the pyramid, each lower tier gets wider until we reach the lowest and the widest one: the body of advocates, admirers and fans. Remove this tier, and the whole structure collapses.

They live among us, we chat with them, run into them at parties – we shake their hands. Having done so, let’s scrub and scour our own hands clean, hoping to get all the blood off. Now including Arkady Babchenko’s blood.

RIP. Or, as the Russians say, may earth be his down.

Not so long ago abortion came up at a party, and I mentioned that I’m opposed to it.

That offhand remark caused not so much indignation as consternation.

“I’ve never met anyone who feels this way,” gasped an impressionable girl attending one of our better universities.

“Why on earth would you oppose it?” asked her much older boyfriend (aka lucky bastard), who isn’t much given to moral reflection. “And don’t give me that bullshit about the sanctity of human life.”

The way he put it suggested he was familiar with that argument, but dismissed it as being utterly ridiculous. That says something about him, but much more about the state of our civilisation.

For if the very idea of human life being inviolable is ridiculous, then our – by which I mean Western – civilisation is no more. What passes for Western civilisation now is an awful impostor, a murderer who has moved into his victim’s house and claimed it for his own.

That initial exchange showed that my interlocutor and I didn’t just have different views on this matter. We inhabited different civilisations, different moral, spiritual and intellectual universes.

Hence any further discussion was pointless, but it continued anyway. My opponent, passionately supported by his barely post-pubescent girlfriend, recited the usual litany based on the old device of reductio ad absurdum.

What if a girl gets pregnant after being gang-raped by vicious degenerates? Seduced/raped by her father/uncle/brother or all of them together? Would I still object to abortion then? Now that you mention it, yes, I replied.

But please don’t make it sound as if the best part of the 200,000 annual abortions in Britain result from rape, incestuous or otherwise. Most of them are caused by the mother (or also father, if known) not wishing to cramp her ‘lifestyle’.

So what, objected my opponent. It’s the mother’s body, and she can do whatever she pleases with it.

This is another illustration to the statement I made earlier. For opposition to abortion, or to any gratuitous taking of human life, is but one aspect of the civilisation first murdered and then looted posthumously.

Another aspect is intellectual. People used to know what constituted a valid argument and what didn’t. Sequential logic was its legitimate tool. An example wasn’t. And polemic was a game that had certain rules, to be followed by both parties.

That doesn’t mean that, at a time when the sanctity of human life wasn’t yet seen as ridiculous, everyone made nothing but sound arguments. Like any game, a polemic could be played well or badly; it could be won or lost. However, both winner and loser played by the same rules.

Any violation of such rules constituted a rhetorical fallacy, akin to one contestant in a fencing competition tossing his rapier aside and grabbing an axe instead.

My brave opponent didn’t even realise he was committing a gross rhetorical fallacy. The Romans called it petitio principii, we call it begging the question (which expression, incidentally, is routinely misused by modern barbarians to mean ‘raising the question’).

Petitio principii is using the desired outcome of an argument as its premise. In this case, the whole argument boils down to deciding whether a foetus is indeed part of the mother’s body, like her appendix, or a sovereign human being, like her child.

If it’s the former, then yes, she can abort it: not many people raise moral objections to appendectomy. If it’s the latter, then she’s committing infanticide, and many people still illogically object to that.

Yet my interlocutor, along with the civilisation he inhabits, is ignorant of such basics. He didn’t realise that what he was saying amounted to the statement even he would recognise as false: because a foetus is only a part of a woman’s body, it is only a part of a woman’s body.

But a foetus is wholly dependent on his mother, is another ‘argument’.

Quite. And a baby three months old isn’t? He’ll survive famously even if left to his own devices? No? Then what’s the moral (or come to that logical) difference between killing a child three months before delivery (the legal cut-off point for abortion in England) and three months after? None is immediately obvious. So this argument doesn’t work, does it?

And why have a legal cut-off point at all? Does a foetus become a sovereign human being at six months plus one day, while remaining an equivalent of the appendix at a mere six months? Having a legal limit is tantamount to a tacit acknowledgement that even before delivery a foetus is a human being endowed with the right to life.

He’s obviously not yet a person in the full sense of the word. But, at the risk of taking modern barbarians further out of their depths, one might invoke Aristotle’s (and then Aquinas’s) teaching on the subject of potentiality and actuality.

A foetus isn’t a person actually, but he is potentially. In this he differs from any animal, vegetable or mineral – or for that matter from the appendix. An appendix may become inflamed and life-threatening, but it’ll always remain an appendix. A foetus, on the other hand, may become Aristotle or Aquinas and will definitely become a person.

Conception thus doesn’t produce a person, but it does produce a human life that will eventually become a person. And human life must be assumed to start at conception because no other point can be determined with reliable accuracy. Hence abortion at any point of gestation is tantamount to the gratuitous taking of human life.

In the old civilisation now dead, abortion wasn’t subject to such discussions. It was axiomatic that human life was sacred and that was all there was to it. Why waste intellectual energy on trying to prove a self-evident point?

No reason at all. However, all the axiomatic presuppositions of Western civilisation died along with it. Yet that’s not all that died. Also biting the dust was the ability to think rigorously.

That ability was an offshoot of the same civilisation that produced the notion of sacred human life. The West has no alternative to the culture produced by that civilisation, nor to the religion and morality on which it was based. Neither do we have an alternative to its thought. Our choice is between its thought and none.

None is modernity’s evident choice. That’s why it’s pointless arguing the issue of abortion with modern barbarians. They’ll dismiss the Christian argument contemptuously, and they’ll be unable to follow the purely secular argument of the kind I proposed above.

The only thing that surprises me is that the Irish held out for so long. They were clinging to the coattails of the corpse being lowered into its grave – and now they’ve let go.

Two thirds of their population voted for abortion on demand. Had the Irish waited another few years, the vote would have been closer to 100 per cent. As it would be in England.

Journalists often deceive themselves when claiming they learned a lot about a country after visiting it for a few days.

They don’t look for knowledge. If they did, it would take much longer to acquire. What they look for is the confirmation of their pre-existing bias, and in this mission they usually succeed.

My flying visit to Riga had no autodidactic purpose: I was simply curious to see how the place had changed in the 45 years that I hadn’t seen it. That curiosity was satisfied: it had changed a lot – and not at all.

But then I fell into the journalist’s trap, thinking I had learned everything there was to know about the place. However, clutching the edge of sanity with my white fingertips, I stopped myself just in time from claiming to have learned everything.

But I did learn something, which achievement was facilitated by a long life sporadically linked to Latvia. After all, for my first 25 years I lived in the USSR, of which Latvia was then a part. And for the past 14 years Latvia has belonged to the EU and Nato, to which Britain also belongs – to the former, one hopes, not for long.

Hence it was important to see whether Latvia had changed enough to be an integral part of the West, to whose defence the West is committed according to Article 5 of the Nato treaty. Or had it remained Soviet at heart?

My impression is that the changes have been numerous but mostly superficial.

There are many mock-Western restaurants, whose waiters stop just short of asking you to taste your water before pouring it. The Gothic and Art Nouveau buildings have received a lick of paint. Tourists swarm everywhere, stolid Germans and drunken, tattooed Englishmen, typically of the kind who pronounce their favourite word to rhyme more with ‘book’ than with ‘buck’.

Yet, as the French say, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Hard though the Latvians tried to erase the civilisational stigmata of their Soviet past, they still have a long way to go. And even the external scars are still there for all to see.

This, although the Rigans have tried to get rid of them. Statues of communists starting with Lenin have been removed, streets have been renamed, the university is no longer named after the leading Bolshevik Pyotr Stuchka (ne Pēteris Stučka).

Yet passing by a theatre I caught sight of the memorial plaque informing those wishing to know that “the great proletarian writer Maxim Gorky, the founder of Soviet literature” assisted the production of his plays on that very stage.

If in 1991 they managed to pull down the 30-foot statue of Lenin disfiguring the city centre in my youth, how hard would it have been to remove a small plaque commemorating his acolyte? Not very, is the answer to that. But they haven’t.

And then there’s another 30-foot statue, honouring the Latvian Riflemen. (That’s what Latyshskie strelki means in English, not the more romantic but ignorant ‘Latvian Sharpshooters’ favoured by Anne Applebaum.)

Solzhenitsyn called them ‘the midwives of the Bolshevik revolution’. And, leaving obstetrics aside, they certainly did play a key role in protecting Lenin’s cannibalistic regime.

The Latvian Riflemen units were formed in 1915 out of the socialist volunteers who had fought against the tsarist troops during the 1905 revolutions. When the Bolsheviks usurped power in 1917, the Latvian Riflemen formed the most professional core of the ragtag bands going by the name of the Red Army.

They defended not only Lenin’s revolution but also Lenin’s person, serving as his bodyguards. And Col. Jucums Vacietis of the Latvian Riflemen became the first Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, working hand in glove with Trotsky (for which cooperation Stalin had him shot in 1938).

I don’t get the logic of it. Why remove the statue of Lenin but keep in place one of his dogs of war? When queried, the Latvians say that some of the Riflemen were actually on the White side.

Quite. And some Waffen SS officers tried to save Jews. Should we then erect a monument to the Waffen SS? Also, considering that the monument in question was erected in 1970, you get no prizes for guessing whether it commemorated Red or White soldiers.

Then there’s the unmistakable style of the granite statue, which can be best described as fascist brutalism. Back in the Soviet Union (or for that matter in Nazi Germany) this aesthetic perversion was highly productive in art, and not only depicting military personages.

Riga proves this versatility. Take one of those granite Riflemen off their pedestal, dress him in mufti, put him in an armchair, and what do you get? A monument to Jānis Rainis, Latvian national, not to say nationalist, poet adorning one of Riga’s central parks.

One doesn’t have to be an art expert to see what kind of ideology produced the two statues. And a bit of expertise would even reveal that they are the work of the same hack. I didn’t know his name, but Google helpfully provided it: Dzintars Driba.

Another telling detail: all street signs are exclusively in Lettish, which language is totally incomprehensible to anyone not born in Riga – and even quite a few of those who were.

Yes, Lettish is the state language of Latvia, but then French is the state language of France – and yet announcements on the Paris Metro are both in French and English. This, though even linguistically challenged visitors can figure out what, say, Place de la Concorde means. Not so with, say, Marijas iela.

This is of course a spurious comparison, for in France this is purely a linguistic matter. In Latvia, it’s a political one. For when Latvia split away from the USSR, speaking Lettish became one of the requirements of citizenship.

One nation, one language sounds like a good idea, and I wish we had that in London, where one has to be a veritable polyglot to negotiate one’s way through many a service outlet. But Riga is no more London than it is Paris.

In both Russian and Soviet empires it was steadily Russified. Russians now make up a third of the country’s population, and half of Riga’s. And half of them never bothered to learn Lettish, which now makes them disfranchised, in Latvia at any rate.

They are welcome to vote in Russian elections, and many do – for Putin. In fact, Putin’s share of the vote among that group is even higher than in Russia proper: close to 85 per cent.

Those Russophone Latvians never learned Lettish for the same reason many Raj administrators never learned Hindu: they assumed that, if the colonials had anything important to say, they’d say it in English.

Now those Russian Latvians feel like the English who never left, say, post-colonial Kenya: as barely tolerated aliens.

They have my sympathy, for Putin doesn’t want them either, not really. He just wants to use the supposed plight of the Russian diaspora as a pretext for re-occupation, the way Hitler used the Sudeten and Polish Germans.

This brings us to the only genuine interest I have in Latvia. It’s that Article 5 again.

Latvia was welcomed into both Nato and the EU in 2004, which was either a noble gesture or an irresponsible one. It was noble if the West was truly committed to protecting Latvia from Russian aggression. It was irresponsible if that commitment was at best tepid.

Putin recently had an instructive conversation with Grigory Yavlinsky, the leader of one of those window-dressing opposition parties. “Do you realise,” asked Yavlinsky, “that your policies are pushing the world to the brink of war?” “I do,” replied Vlad. “And we’ll win it.”

Since the West isn’t going to attack Russia, such a hypothetical war could only start if Putin attacked the West. And the likeliest target would be the tripwire Baltic countries.

Would the wire be tripped if Russian tanks swept into Latvia? Would Nato honour Article 5 and go to war? Are we prepared to die for Riga any more than we were prepared to die for Danzig in 1939?

I don’t know – and neither does Putin, which is why he hasn’t yet given the marching orders. But I suspect, and so probably does he, that Nato would do nothing beyond perhaps filing official protests and imposing more sanctions.

If our suspicion is correct, then inviting the Baltics to join Nato was criminally irresponsible, for it exposes the three countries to the same brutality they suffered at the hands of the Soviets in the ‘40s, when a fifth of their population was exterminated. If our suspicion is wrong, then the whole world is in danger.

Yet there’s no doubt that Nato would respond with everything it has if Putin attacked, say, Denmark. Why not Latvia then? Aren’t we supposed to defend our own?

Because, and it pains me to say so, Denmark is indisputably our own and Latvia isn’t. Nato leaders won’t say this out loud, but they all realise it. So does Putin. So, after my trip, do  I.

Anyone still thinking the EU is anything but an awful, unworkable contrivance should visit Riga.

Whose deranged mind decided it’s possible to a create a single federation out of 28 (30? 40?) European countries? Having spent four days in Riga, I can testify that this mind wasn’t only deranged but also evil.

It’s possible to create a federation out of different countries – provided they have something in common, a little area where they overlap.

What I mean by an area isn’t shared geography, even though that helps. However, much more important are shared culture, history, behavioural modes, social responses, aesthetics – all those things that add up to civilisation.

Hence some bright European sparks must have got together and decided that, say, Greece and Holland have enough in common to blend naturally into a single country.

I suppose an experienced sophist could argue the toss, referring, for example, to Greek philosophy and its input into our religion and culture. And indeed a peripatetic Westerner visiting Athens might be impressed by treading the ground trodden 2,500 years ago by peripatetic philosophers.

But then he’d look for more up to date evidence of kinship, only to find none. Greece and Holland, though both technically speaking European, haven’t much more in common than either has with Mongolia.

They may be forced under the same umbrella, but neither will be home and dry together. There’s no umbrella big enough to cover both.

If you agree, then let me tell you: Athens is more of a European capital than Riga is. Yes, Greece has had a chequered history, punctuated by foreign occupation, most recently by Nazi Germany.

But, even though Nazi Germany took over Greece’s land, it never took over Greece’s soul. I’m sure that no foreigner visiting Greece in 1972, 27 years after the liberation, would have said that the country still remained Nazi.

Well, this visitor, here in Riga 27 years after the country left the Soviet Union and 14 after it joined the European one, can argue that the country remains Soviet to its core.

It’s not the Latvians’ fault. Communism corrupts nations so absolutely that its effects will linger for at least as long as communism lasted – and I’m being generous. Twice as long would be closer to the mark, and that’s provided the country makes an honest effort to cleanse itself.

The first thing one notices about Riga is how dingy it is, and I don’t mean its physical plant. Quite the opposite: the medieval Old Town is lovely, the city centre boasts more Art Nouveau buildings than any other city in the world, and the parks separating the two are beautifully landscaped and maintained.

True, Riga’s Gothic churches aren’t a patch on those in France, but then whose are? And Riga’s Art Nouveau architecture isn’t exactly Gaudi, but then whose is?

Yet one central park stopped me dead with the notice above. My first impression was that it was some kind of inside joke. Surely children don’t drive?

Oh yes they do. And I don’t even mean grown-ups driving like irresponsible children, zipping through the streets at 70 mph in their clapped out jalopies with mufflers shot or non-existent – there are plenty of those in Riga. No, it’s tots, some as young as three, actually driving their electric go-karts through the park.

I pointed them out to my wife, and her reaction was that the cars were paddled. Yet she realised they weren’t when one three-year-old hit a kerb and then reversed out with the élan of a get-away driver. Obviously Latvian standards of ‘elf and safety aren’t quite like ours.

Riga isn’t exactly dingy in any physical sense, even though veering off the beaten track of Gothic and Art Nouveau areas landed me smack in the middle of the Soviet suburbs of my Moscow childhood.

Still, Riga’s dinginess isn’t in the buildings. It’s in the people.

They don’t look, act, walk or deport themselves like Europeans. Language apart, they are indistinguishable from the inhabitants of the bad outskirts of Moscow.

Speaking statistically, in terms of GDP per capita, Latvia is better off than most Eastern European countries and certainly than Russia. Yet in the four days we didn’t see a single well-dressed person, male or female.

I mean M&S or Gap well-dressed, not Bond Street or Savile Row. Yet Riga has many of the boutiques one finds in those streets. Who shops there? Certainly not the equivalents of the Russian Mafiosi – those chaps shop in London and Paris. And evidently no one else.

Then there are the 20-stone, misshapen women, some of them still young, one sees everywhere. I’m sure they don’t add up to half the female population, but one could be forgiven for getting that impression. There are plenty of obese women in any European city, but nowhere do they dominate the human landscape to the same degree.

The number of falling-over drunks is also far greater than in any European capital I’ve seen, although some places in England may compete with Riga in that respect. But drunks are different there: they’re simply barbarians who can’t think of any other way of having fun. But have fun they do, if you can call it that.

In Riga people clearly drink the way the Russians do: not to have fun but to forget, ideally to die. One can almost see the abyss of despair into which they’re falling with every gulp. Many drinkers are down-and-outs on their last legs.

“There’s nothing else for them to do,” explained a woman we chatted up. “There are no decent jobs for them to find, so those who have anything on the ball just up and leave. Those who stay drink.” She herself prefers New Zealand as her holiday destination, to get as far as geographically possible from her native city.

There are boozers and off-licences at every corner in Riga, sometimes more than one per corner. Yet I’ve found only two bookshops in the whole city, each the size of a typical newsagent in London.

I’m sure there must be more, but it’s hard to walk through the centre of, say, Paris for five minutes without catching sight of a sizeable bookshop. The Rigans’ interests must lie elsewhere.

Even the way they try to be Western is touchingly childish. We stopped at a rather chi-chi restaurant for a late-night snack. All we wanted was their celebrated tuna tartare and a glass of wine.

The celebrated tuna tartare turned out to be mostly avocado, while my request for two glasses of the house white raised the curtain for a major production. The wine waitress delivered a long soliloquy, talking about plonks in the terms normally reserved for women: “Lovely legs… full body… beautiful nose…”

I wanted to say, “For God’s sake, we aren’t ordering Meursault here. Just give us two glasses of plonk, will you?” Instead I said, “Pinot grigio is fine. And no, I don’t want to taste it first.”

The last time I visited Riga was in 1973. The place was then as unmistakeably Soviet as anywhere in Russia – and in many ways it still is. I don’t think it has much in common with Western Europe; in fact, Riga comes across as a little girl trying to walk in her mother’s shoes and looking silly for it – or, more menacingly, as a little boy trying to drive.

But then who says the EU has anything to do with Europe? Like any other socialist Leviathan it just wants to swallow as many countries as possible. Latvia fills the bill perfectly. So would Mongolia for that matter.