Author: Alexander Boot

Such is the assessment of Gen. Sir Nick Carter, the Chief of the General Staff. And he doesn’t rate our chances.

I’ve been saying similar things for years. That only goes to show how obvious they are: if a rank amateur like me can spot both the strategic menace and our inability to nullify it, then surely anyone can.

Well, not quite. While few will argue against the second proposition, that Britain is so weak militarily as to be practically disarmed, many are the ‘useful idiots’ who insist on Putin’s good intentions and generally spotless character.

They’ll probably be saying the same things if a Russian airborne division established a beachhead in Kent. You see, they’ll be saying, what our provocations have forced this good, Christian, anti-homosexual, patriotic, strong leader to do.

It’s anyone’s guess whether they’d change their tune if Russian tanks advanced on London. But I prefer to talk facts, not conjecture.

I shan’t repeat Sir Nick’s assessment of the relative military potential of Russia and Britain, or for that matter Europe. Those interested in the technical details can find them in today’s papers.

Suffice it to say that we’re decisively outgunned in every category – and the disparity is widening due to our successive governments’ criminal policy of denuding our military to pre-Napoleonic levels.

Then again, the only thing that matters to our spivocrats is self-perpetuation, which means garnering enough votes to win the next election. Pumping money into defence of the realm won’t achieve this purpose, while bloating welfare and NHS budgets to suicidal levels may.

Hence our spivocrats will throw trillions down the black hole of social spending and foreign aid, while only building, as a sop to the hawks, a couple of aircraft carriers with no aircrafts to carry.

But let’s concentrate on the nature of Putin’s Russia, along with her intentions. These are crucial because HMG’s entire defence policy is based on the assumptions peddled by Putin’s propagandists and their eager recipients in the West.

(Incidentally, if downloading child porn is a criminal offence because this encourages uploading it, then surely downloading RT should be as well. A few perverts aren’t going to cause nearly as much damage, after all.)

Alas, even reasonably unbiased Britons don’t understand the profoundly evil nature of Putin’s kleptofascist regime. We’ve lost the capacity to identify evil – or indeed to acknowledge it exists, this side of the Muslim world.

Those Britons don’t know much about evil regimes, and understand even less. Hence Lenin’s and Stalin’s nightmare had millions of supporters, especially within the fashionably lefty lumpen intelligentsia.

Hitler too had his supporters, drawn mainly from the classes above the intelligentsia. And the likes of Lloyd George and G. B. Shaw successfully spanned the two groups by favouring both red and brown Satanists.

Typologically, British fans of Putin resemble the group that supported Hitler, although their accents aren’t usually as upmarket. They certainly cite similar reasons: our government is weak and vacillating (true), their idol is strong (equally true), he’s patriotic (true about Hitler, less true about Putin), he’s the only hope of the world (false in both cases).

And even those who generously acknowledge that murdering or imprisoning dissidents, suppressing free press, turning the whole country and much of the world into an organised crime mob, attacking neighbours and grabbing pieces of their territory aren’t nice things to do still find excuses for the KGB colonel.

It’s all our fault, they say. We’ve provoked Putin by supporting the Ukraine’s independence and expanding NATO to include the Baltics.

This only goes to show that their moral compass must sit next to a powerful magnet. Chaps, the Russians deliberately starved millions of Ukrainians to death, forcing parents to eat their children. And in the next decade they murdered or deported about a quarter of the Baltics’ population.

In both places, guerrilla warfare against the Russians went on throughout the 1950s, with young people heroically going to their deaths to resist their murderers, torturers and suppressors of their national culture.

When their descendants finally managed to gain their independence, surely it’s the moral duty of the West to offer every possible support and protection? Even at a cost to itself?

However, Putin’s fans profess thinking in realpolitik, not moral, categories. But they wouldn’t know either morality or realpolitik if it bit them on the, well, nose. Because of that cognitive disorder they don’t realise that this is one of those rare instances when morality and realpolitik coincide.

They think Russia’s massive military build-up (see today’s papers) is just for show. They think that Putin’s hysterically bellicose propaganda identifying the West as both the enemy and the target is just a political stratagem designed to win the next election.

This only shows their pro-Putin bias married to cataclysmic ignorance of history, Russia, propaganda, military build-ups and just about everything else involved in the problem at hand.

Correcting such all-embracing ignorance in a short piece is an impossible task, but I can still outline some stab points. The most important one is that runaway militarisation coupled with total – not to say totalitarian – war propaganda acquires an inner logic all its own.

At some point militarisation becomes mobilisation and, as the German strategist Helmut von Moltke postulated, mobilisation is war. Once that juggernaut gathers speed, it soon reaches a point of no return.

I’d argue – and so evidently would Sir Nick – that Russia’s militarisation has already reached that point. So has her propaganda.

Bugles haven’t tooted and drums haven’t rattled so loudly in Russia since the 1930s, when Stalin was turning the populace into unthinking murderous automata ready to roll over Europe. I certainly never saw anything on the same scale during my 25 years in Russia (ending in 1973).

This sort of thing has the same effect as mobilisation. When the state’s whole raison d’être is rattling its sabre, at some point that sabre has to see the light of day. Otherwise the state will lose its legitimacy, a loss that its leader will be unlikely to survive physically.

Parallels with 1914 are being drawn all over the place, but the most critical one escapes most commentators’ attention. None of the future combatants wanted war then; they all hoped to achieve their ends by peaceful means. To that end, they all militarised, made bellicose noises and flexed their muscles.

They thus breathed life into the genie of war and consequently lost control over it. The genie came out of the bottle and wouldn’t be put back.

Putin runs a country where at least half of the population (and I’m being generous) live in appalling poverty, many of them actually starving. At the same time the country is facing a demographic catastrophe, with its population declining as a result of low birth rates, third-world life expectancy, practically non-existing medical care, undernourishment – and mass emigration.

Against that background, Putin and his junta are stealing the country blind, transferring trillions into various offshore havens. Putin has turned his whole entourage into billionaires, from his family and friends to his bodyguard and cook.

There’s a constant rumble of tectonic discontent in Russia, and an eruption can only be prevented by offering a metaphysical compensation for all the physical deprivations. Putin remembers Herzen’s maxim: the strongest chains tethering the people are forged out of victorious swords – or, to start with, out of the promise to unsheathe those swords.

But the deprivations are real, made even more so by the fact that Russians are allowed to travel to the West and compare. Since, in the good tradition of both the tsars and the Bolsheviks, the government is above reproach, that state of affairs has to be blamed on someone.

When Hitler took over a destitute, humiliated Germany, he identified the culprits rather narrowly: the Jews. So far this traditional enemy of everything that fascists of every hue see as good hasn’t been mentioned in Russia, at least not publicly by its government.

For the time being Putin has set his sights wider: the West. And he has made a solemn promise, sometimes in so many words, sometimes tacitly, that the West will pay for its perfidy.

Hence the whole logic of Russia’s kleptofascist regime demands war. Promises are supposed to be kept, and those who break them will be held accountable.

For all intents and purposes, Russia’s KGB government, backed by her KGB church, has already declared a crusade on the West. Sir Nick seems to realise this, and he’s aghast that the government doesn’t seem to.

In fact, the war is already in full swing, but only one side is fighting it – so far mostly with electronic and information weapons. Sir Nick knows that in modern warfare these are as deadly as tanks and missiles. So he screams, but, though his isn’t exactly the lone voice crying in the wilderness, it’s certainly not part of the mighty choir we need.

I do disagree with Sir Nick on one point. We aren’t facing the greatest threat since the Cold War. It’s the greatest since 1939 – and the only way to confront it is with a resolute show of strength.

With our government, I’m not holding my breath.

The last time puritanism flared up in England, a king was decapitated. I do hope no such fate awaits Her Majesty, for puritanism is on the rise again.

This time, however, it springs not from a dour misreading of Christianity, but from replacing it with a kind of pagan moralising underpinned by ersatz virtue.

It’s in that spirit that Chris Tarrant got shopped.

The TV presenter had four drinks at a village pub just over a mile from his Berkshire house. He then drove home and relaxed. He shouldn’t have.

For one of his fellow drinkers had shopped him to the cops, which is par for today’s course. The same people who, as children, knew not to grass up a classmate, now sanctimoniously denounce anyone who contravenes the new pseudo-morality, be that by having a tipple or patting a girl’s behind.

The cops banged on Tarrant’s door 13 minutes after he got home and found him to have 50 microgrammes of alcohol per 100 millilitres of breath. Since the legal limit is 35 microgrammes,  Tarrant was done – for having roughly one drink too many to satisfy the exacting legal requirements.

When he was tried at Reading Magistrates Court, both his prosecutor and judge were Muslims, or at least had Muslim names, Hasrat Ali and Shomon Khan respectively.

I’m not suggesting any bias on their part, but, had Mr Tarrant been tried by a jury, gentlemen with those names wouldn’t have been on it. Having Muslims try a drink-driving case is like having RSPCA members pronounce on cruelty towards animals.

It’s hardly surprising that His Honour ruled that the “relatively low reading” couldn’t possibly “reduce the seriousness of the offence”. He then banned Mr Tarrant for a year and fined him £6,000.

The law was thus served – and justice abused.

Most people would disagree with me, but I have a problem with prosecuting drink-driving in general, provided the imbiber drives normally. If he veers all over the place or, God forbid, runs someone over, then by all means throw the book at him. But if his driving isn’t affected, arresting him for having three glasses of wine instead of the allowable two smacks of preventive arrest.

I’ve heard arguments that a chap who has drunk half a bottle of wine is statistically more likely to have an accident. That may be.

But since when do we arrest people on statistical probability? For example, statistics show that a black man is more likely than a white one to commit a crime. Does this mean we should arrest all black men just in case?

However, even assuming that a law against drink-driving has some merit, surely it must be applied sensibly. For example, there’s less excuse for DUI in London, where one can just get into a taxi, than in the country, where no other transportation is available.

The issue is dear to my heart because I spend almost half my time in rural France, where we often go to friends’ houses for dinner. The party usually lasts some four hours, over which time I’d typically have a couple of glasses of bubbly before dinner and perhaps a bottle of wine with it.

After that I drive home, on the roads that are empty even in daytime, never mind after midnight. Since I metabolise alcohol efficiently, I’m probably within the UK limit, but conceivably outside the French one, which is a third lower. So what should we do, walk 15 miles home? Or not drink at a French dinner party? (The former is more plausible.)

Fair enough, if I had a bottle of whisky rather than wine, I shouldn’t be driving, as, to my eternal shame, I used to do in my youth. (I still warmly remember that Texas cop who stopped me, demanded that I get out of the car, realised that I couldn’t and still let me off, saying to my wife: “Lady, either you drive or I take him to jail.”)

I wouldn’t do that now, having acquired some common sense and civic responsibility. But any experienced driver is capable of driving home safely after a few glasses of wine – especially on empty country roads.

The argument that one’s reflexes are dulled by alcohol doesn’t quite wash either. A friend of mine has a 93-year-old father who can still legally drive from Paris to our neck of Burgundian woods. I bet my house against your pint that I have sharper reflexes after a bottle of wine than he has stone sober.

So, if the speed of reflexes is an issue, which of us should be arrested? And if the authorities are so concerned about reaction time, why not measure that instead of the blood alcohol content?

Getting back to Mr Tarrant’s case, preventing an accident was clearly not on the policemen’s mind. After all, he was already home safely. So why go after him with so much determination?

Then there’s the size of the fine. I Googled drink-driving penalties on the government website, and it mentions a fine of up to £2,500. How come Mr Tarrant was fined £6,000?

Oh well, you see, he’s a wealthy man, and our judges are soldiers in the frontline of class war. A smaller fine, they probably think, wouldn’t hurt enough to constitute a punishment or deterrent.

Fine, I accept that logic, but only if we extend it to other types of punishment as well. For example, a thug who has been in and out of pokey since he was 12 wouldn’t suffer imprisonment as much as a tweedy middle-class chap. So, should they both commit the same crime, say running someone over when drunk, shall we give a much stiffer sentence to the thug?

If drink-driving is indeed a genuine problem, rather than merely another opportunity for the bossy state to put its foot down, then there’s a better way of solving it. Paradoxically, it should be decriminalised.

However, drinking should be treated as an aggravating circumstance in any other infraction, from bad driving to causing a fatal accident. The latter should be treated as manslaughter calling for a life sentence with no tariff. And even simply hurting another driver should draw a custodial sentence.

This would prevent drink-caused accidents more effectively than the possibility of a ban and a fine. But that’s not what the state is after, is it? (See Orwell’s 1984 for details.)

Mrs May’s de facto deputy David Lidington (hereinafter referred to as Dave Mark II) has done nothing to improve my judgement of our politicians’ intellectual and moral integrity.

It’s possible, he said, that in the next 10 to 20 years the EU will be so different that we’ll happily come back into the fold (that is, provided we actually do leave, was the unspoken refrain).

Across the Channel, Manny squeezed that time frame to “a few years”. After that time has elapsed, explained Brigitte’s foster son, the UK could “find its place” in a “reformed and simplified EU”.

Now Manny, being the EU’s flesh of the flesh, can’t be expected to say anything different. But it’s appalling to see a senior British minister display so much ignorance about the organisation to which he fervently believes Britain should belong (Dave Mark II is a fanatical Remainer).

The two forecasts are identical in everything other than the time element. Dave Mark II thinks it’s impossible to predict what the EU would be like “in 10 or 20 years’ time”.

Clearly, his assumptions are that 1) the EU is bound to change drastically and 2) the change can only be for the better (this suggests something that Dave Mark II couldn’t possibly have meant, that the EU is so wretched that it has no way to go but up) and 3) the British will miss the EU so much that they’ll be delighted to crawl back on their hands and knees.

Manny agrees with it all, but he’s more specific: the EU will be reformed towards greater simplicity. Of course, all God’s children like things simple, but Manny was very economical with details. Simplified how?

Now arguing with the French on this subject is like trying to argue with an ayatollah that there is a God other than Allah, and Mohammed isn’t his prophet. Or to convince a senior Western politician that ‘Allahu akbar!’ isn’t the Arabic for ‘has nothing to do with Islam’.

But, in theory at least, Dave Mark II ought to know something about the organisation for which he has found so much love in his heart. Some knowledge of general political history wouldn’t go amiss either.

First, giant ideological contrivances created by a few fanatics to achieve a specific purpose are too rigid to reform. They either do what they set out to do and then have a free run for a few centuries or else collapse. Examples for either possibility are both too numerous and too obvious to mention here.

The EU was concocted for one purpose only: to create a single European state under the aegis of Germany, with France bringing up the rear. C’est tout, as Manny would say.

If that wicked contrivance can achieve that objective in its present form, it’ll probably hang on for quite a while – until it implodes in the blood splatters of an all-out civil war. If it doesn’t achieve its purpose, it’ll disintegrate – probably again with some bloodshed, but less than in the first option.

The objective of a single superstate is as immutable as an ayatollah’s belief that all infidels should be either killed or enslaved in a global caliphate. Hence no serious EU reform is on the cards – all that’s possible are a few tactical tweaks here or there.

Hence, the only conceivable ‘simplification’ of that bureaucratic Leviathan is reduced membership. Some EU countries may be forced out by bankruptcy, some may get sick and tired of being bossed around by foreigners, some may have unsolvable internal turmoil.

In fact, such simplification is likely. One can easily imagine an EU shrunk to just Germany, France and possibly the Benelux countries. But I wouldn’t describe this development as reform. That’s like saying that D-Day reformed Nazi Germany.

Dave Mark II has to believe that, once Britain has been out in the cold for 10 to 20 (or just a few) years, she’ll be anxious to join the new European state, possible called Francmany or Germance. Somehow, that’s not a plausible prospect.

Conversely, the EU may keep its name and all its members (perhaps adding a few others, such as – Turkey? Saudi Arabia?) and stitch a new supranational state together out of those pieces. Would that make the British any more likely to want to rejoin?

You’ll remember that for two generations now our Europhile politicians have been lying through their teeth that the EU (or EEC) has no desire to create a single European state. It’s only after greater peace and prosperity.

That lie is the only reason the British voted to join the EEC in 1975, and without that lie the Brexit margin of victory would have been much wider, gravitating towards unanimity.

However, when the EU actually does become an unapologetic single state, be that of 30 members or three, that lie will no longer be possible. Now, unless a cataclysmic genetic catastrophe occurs, I can’t imagine too many Britons ever wanting to become a province of Germany de jure (de facto, we’re exactly that now).

So you see, Dave Mark II, predicting the future of the EU isn’t as hard as all that. All one has to do is read a book or two, think for a while and – most important – learn to respect one’s own country and its two-odd millennia of history.

It’s a fact provable both physiologically and empirically that ‘young people’ is an oxymoron.

The human brain isn’t even wired properly until age 25 or so. Add to this a comprehensively available education that doesn’t educate, and the path leading youngsters to full-fledged humanity is very thorny indeed.

If anyone still harbours reservations about this, a recent YouGov poll should dispel them. It asked American ‘millennials’ what kind of country they’d rather live in, capitalist, socialist, communist or fascist.

The findings go a long way towards proving the mental deficiency of youngsters: socialism outscored capitalism 44 per cent to 42, with the rest of the vote evenly divided between fascism and communism.

In other words, 58 per cent of young Americans choose various types and degrees of tyranny over freedom. These are the terms I prefer to the Marxist dichotomy of ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism’.

The very fact that the question was worded that way shows the triumph of Marxist terminology, made possible by a combination of what I call totalitarian economism and ignorance.

The antonym of socialism isn’t capitalism. It’s freedom – or liberty, to be more precise. Socialism, whether democratic, national or international, is defined not by the economy but by the primacy of the state over the individual. That’s its immobile hub, and everything else, including the economy, spins around it.

Hence socialism entails a drastic diminution of civil liberties and individual freedom – how drastic depends on the type of socialism and its success in putting its foot down. But doing so is its innate desideratum, which is why ‘democratic socialism’ is another oxymoron.

Marx defined society in strictly economic terms springing from private or public ownership of the means of production. Derivative from that was class war between the haves and have-nots in a capitalist country, where greedy fat cats own the means of production and the workers starve.

That gibberish was nonsensical even at the time it was put forth, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. Repeating it these days, which most people do, it’s frankly idiotic.

Marxism is based on a purely materialist view of man, which doesn’t make sense even in a purely secular society. Man, even post-Christian man, has aspirations produced not only by his stomach, but also by other parts of his body, such as head, heart and, well, the other one. Homo is indeed sapiens, not economicus.

Hence freedom – however defined – or lack thereof is a more telling feature of a country than who owns the factories. Whether or not a citizen can read whatever he wants, pray to God in any way he desires or say anything that comes to mind without fear of prosecution says more about society than the size of the public sector, although the two are usually linked.

To the American youngsters’ credit, their choices were motivated not so much by congenital stupidity or a lust for tyranny as by simple ignorance. When given the definitions of the four systems, they had problems identifying which was which.

Thus a third of them didn’t recognise capitalism from this definition: “Economic system based on free markets and the rule of law with legal protections for private ownership”. And two-thirds failed to spot socialism behind this description: “Economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and state control of the means of production as well as political theories and movements associated with them.”

Interestingly, most subjects felt well-disposed towards freedom of speech. However, they were so swamped by the totalitarian economism of the definitions on offer that they failed to grasp the inverse relationship between free speech and socialism.

Lest you might think I’m picking on Americans, I haven’t got the slightest doubt that a similar poll in any Western European country, including Britain, would yield similar or worse results.

What percentage of Oxford or Sorbonne students do you reckon would opt for socialism? My guess is five per cent on either side of 80, and I’m in a mellow mood.

Socialism will continue to triumph for as long as totalitarian economism does. For this philosophical aberration unites the seemingly incompatible political extremes.

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

This type of thinking is primitive; when applied to formulating policy, it’s dangerous. And it largely explains the gallimaufry of political thinking among young people. Yet some clarity of thought among them would be desirable because, by historical oversight, they’re allowed to vote.

That today’s young people aren’t taught the proper basics of politics, as related to philosophy, morality and civic virtue is fairly obvious – as is their inability to think such things through for themselves.

Hence, if I had to compile a similar questionnaire, I’d keep it simple. Instead of expecting the youths to find their way through the thicket of recondite and largely meaningless terminology, I’d ask just one question:

How much control over the individual should the state have, on the scale of 100 (total control) to 1 (only as much as is strictly necessary). This sounds simplistic, but then so are our youngsters’ minds. At least we’d get a reliable reading that way.

The young, said Trotsky, Corbyn’s role model, are the barometer of a nation. Alas, nobody notices that the barometer has fallen off the wall and shattered. Careful you don’t cut your feet on the shards of glass.

Manny Macron has offered to lend the Bayeux tapestry to Britain, which is widely regarded as an act of selfless generosity. Only dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries dare mention that it’s but a smokescreen enveloping Manny’s never-ceasing efforts to extort more money from us.

This time he wants an extra £45 million to beef up the border controls at Calais, thereby curtailing diversity that, according to Messrs Blair, Cameron, Corbyn et al, makes British culture so much richer.

Leaving aside any questions about the invaluable cultural contribution bestowed upon us by, say, the 100,000 Somali migrants currently resident in Britain, one may still wonder why we should pay for security measures on the other side of the Channel. We take care of our end, the French take care of theirs, wasn’t that the deal?

We do stand to benefit from tighter border controls there, but then a shop owner also gains something by paying protection money to the mob. Should we also pay for France’s police? After all, some British tourists may be assaulted in Paris (predictably, by the same people whom the extra security is supposed to keep out).

On the other hand, perhaps we don’t stand to gain so much by agreeing to succumb to Manny’s blackmail. For, in parallel with demanding money to stem the flow of moustachioed migrant children, he also insists that we accept more of those overgrown babies.

Logically speaking, the two demands seem to cancel each other out, but Manny functions according to the superior Gallic logic, possibly Cartesian in origin. The core premise is that, if A equals B and B equals C, then let’s stick it to les anglo-saxons.

Anyway, the offered loan of the tapestry may solve this matter, though not necessarily in the way Manny and his foster mother Brigitte envisage. (I assume, perhaps unfairly, that she put him up to this.)

But first a personal note, if I may. My wife and I have been going to France regularly for some 20 years now. In all this time, Penelope has been bugging me, in that understated English way of hers, to go to Bayeux on the way to or from our house. I manfully resisted since that represented a rather long detour, and I’m the one who does all the driving.

However, no married man should be surprised that Penelope finally got her way, albeit after protracted resistance on my part. A fortnight ago, we did stop for a couple of days in Bayeux (a lovely town, by the way, with a glorious cathedral), which earned me some merit points.

Now what do you know, a few days after we come back it turns out the detour was unnecessary: the tapestry is coming to England, most probably London. If only I had held out for a fortnight longer… Oh well, the story of my life.

Yet I’m glad the tapestry will arrive because this may take care of Manny’s latest extortion attempt. We should give him his £45 million (hope you choke on it, Manny), but then just keep the bloody thing.

For the outlanders among you, the Bayeux tapestry is about 230 feet long. It’s made up of a sequence of some 50 scenes telling the story of the early stages of the Norman (emphatically not French) Conquest, culminating in the 1066 Battle of Hastings.

Though made soon after the event, the tapestry isn’t the kind of history that’s written by the victors. It depicts the events strictly from the Anglo-Saxon perspective, which is no surprise considering it was designed, embroidered and constructed in England a few years after the events – only to be then taken to France.

There it was systematically cut up into pieces used for all sorts of nefarious purposes, until some history buffs managed to locate all the fragments and stitch them together in the early eighteenth century.

Therefore, my campaign to keep the tapestry dovetails neatly into another campaign, one involving the Elgin marbles. That one is fronted by the intellectual and cultural giant George Clooney, whose overachieving wife had to explain to him that the marbles involved were sculptures and not playthings.

I’d suggest that my case is stronger, which isn’t saying much because the Clooneys have no case at all.

For Lord Elgin, then ambassador to Greece, legitimately bought the marbles from the Ottoman Turks who occupied the country at the time. The Turks, who clearly didn’t regard those masterpieces with the same reverence as Lord Elgin, were burning them to obtain lime for construction purposes.

On balance, Greece’s claim to the Elgin marbles is much weaker than ours. And, considering the tapestry’s English origin and subject, our claim to it is at least as strong as France’s – especially since this illustration to English history was vandalised there for so long.

Admittedly, reclaiming the Bayeux tapestry from its current residence would take a mini D-Day, which isn’t an operation HMG would ever be prepared to undertake. But mercifully there’s no need.

When Manny brings the tapestry over in his camion de livraison, we should simply take it and tell him to kiss it good-bye. “So here’s your £45 million, Manny,” we should say. “An exchange is no robbery, mate.”

Financially, the investment will be quickly amortised if we keep the tapestry in a stand-alone museum and charge the same exorbitant admission fees that the French do in Bayeux. And morally, our cause is just.

“All the lonely people, where do they all come from?” asked the Beatles.

Don’t have a clue, is my answer. All sorts of things can cause loneliness: one’s own hermetic tendencies or rotten disposition, the olfactory aspect of personal hygiene, rowdy drunkenness, excessive fastidiousness in choosing friends, outliving one’s friends and family.

But not to worry: we’ll soon find out exactly where all the lonely people come from. More important, they won’t be lonely any longer – the state will take care of that. “For far too many people, loneliness is the sad reality of modern life,” commiserated our PM Tessa. “I want to confront this challenge for our society.”

And confront it she has. Tessa has just appointed Tracy Crouch as First Minister for Loneliness. So worry naught, all you lonely people. Tracy and Tessa will look after you.

The urgent need to create yet another ministerial post arose when it was discovered that nine million Britons live in isolation. That, you must agree, is a serious problem, and who better than Tracy and Tessa to solve it?

As a lifelong believer in an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent government, the bigger and more central the better, I’m sure that the public purse can solve any private problem.

However, here’s the rub: numerically, loneliness isn’t the greatest problem in Britain.

The American comedian George Carlin once quipped: “You know how stupid the average person is? Well, I’ve got news for you: half the people are even more stupid than that.”

Though offered in jest, this points at another blight affecting Britain: statistically speaking, the number of idiots must greatly exceed nine million.

If you seek empirical proof, just look at the number of Corbyn supporters; people who believe that after Brexit we won’t have French wine; those who think wind farms can provide all the energy we need; champions of global warming; chaps who feel that allowing two men to marry strengthens the institution of marriage; those who agree with Richard Dawkins that evolution explains everything.

So yes, a first minister for loneliness (is there also a second one?) is a jolly good idea. But let’s sort out our priorities. If there are more idiots than loners, we need to appoint a First Minister for Idiocy before we do anything else.

And while we’re at it, there are many other snags in the human condition that the state is uniquely qualified to eliminate. For example, my wife often burns my breakfast toast – and I bet millions of other Britons suffer from the same ordeal.

Hence Tessa must urgently appoint a First Minister for Burnt Toast to alleviate the suffering of all those men on whose behalf I’m speaking herein.

Neither should we forget millions of people traumatised by having to queue up for anything. My heart bleeds for them: the appointment of First Minister for Queues is urgently needed.

Also, if you have any compassion in your heart, think of the plight of redheaded and corpulent people (routinely dismissed as, respectively, ‘ginger tossers’ and ‘fat bastards’), Welshmen (‘sheep shaggers’) and people ridiculed for preaching the impending environmental catastrophe caused by aerosol sprays (‘tree huggers’).

They’re all crying out for a new ministry dedicated to lifting their gloom. I’m not sure about the relative numbers involved, but it’s nothing that a multi-billion research programme can’t find out. A few more billion – and hey presto, sorted. Jean-Jacques is your uncle, Tessa is your aunt.

All this sounds crazy, I know. But it’s not I who’s crazy, but the world where people have been brainwashed to believe that any problem can be solved if the government can throw a few billion at it.

This goes against reams of evidence showing that large-scale state interference doesn’t solve problems. It either makes them worse or creates new ones.

A war on poverty makes more people poor; an attempt to redistribute wealth destroys it; an overhaul of education promotes ignorance; a war to end all wars leads to more and bloodier wars. At the end of all that bungling nothing beckons but an even greater expansion of the state, a further reduction of liberty.

For make no mistake about it: the more the state does (or rather claims to do) for you, the more it’ll do to you. Every ministry, apart from the four or five essential ones, isn’t there to cure social ills. It’s there to increase state power at your expense.

Yet loneliness can be a serious problem. So, abandoning my prior facetiousness, I’d like to offer a serious solution – with no new sinecure anywhere in sight.

If you’re lonely, start going to church every Sunday. Introduce yourself to the priest or vicar, buy him a cup of tea or a pint (the latter would be the preference of most vicars I know). Tell him you’re lonely, see what he says and does.

He’ll probably tell you that, metaphysically, you’re never lonely when you’re with God. And in purely practical terms, he’ll introduce you to other parishioners with whom you can go out for a cuppa or a pint after the service. Before long you’ll have as many friends as you can handle.

So there’s the problem of loneliness, solved. Solving the problem of rampant statism is more difficult and, in today’s world, probably impossible.

Back in 2014, three German Muslims got drunk and threw firebombs into the Wuppertal synagogue. Mercifully, no one was hurt.

The synagogue is rather old, but its building isn’t. The original quarters were burned rather more successfully during the 1938 Kristallnacht.

Both acts of arson suggest that the arsonists had some misgivings about the Jews. The first lot were quite open about this motivation, knowing that the state welcomed it. The trial or two that ensued were perfunctory, and the firebugs got off with only a word of nudge-nudge, wink-wink reproach.

Now, because the current German state hasn’t yet got around to the same delights of Judophobia, the Muslim chaps pleaded innocence of anti-Semitism. They simply sought “to draw attention to the Gaza conflict” with Israel.

One has to say that firebombing German synagogues is both a criminal and illogical way of taking issue with Israel’s policy. After all, most people inside weren’t Israelis but Germans who happened to worship the first part of the Bible more than the second.

Of course back in 1938 that would have been regarded as a distinction without a difference. It didn’t matter how, if at all, German Jews worshipped God. What mattered was that they were Jews. Killing them was laudable because it advanced a noble political cause.

Times have changed altogether though, haven’t they? Well, yes, they have changed. But not altogether.

For last Friday, the regional court affirmed the original court ruling that the firebombing wasn’t anti-Semitic at all. It was a valid form of political protest.

Even taking anti-Semitism out of it, one finds it hard to accept Molotov cocktails as a valid form of political self-expression in a country where legal means exist. A long custodial sentence is the only punishment that fits the crime, with the proverbial key thrown away. Isn’t it?

Evidently not, for the arsonists only got suspended sentences. Their political, as opposed to racial, motivation was seen as a mitigating circumstance.

There’s nothing new about this sort of lenience, and I’m proud to know that Russia pioneered it back in 1877, when the socialist terrorist Vera Zasulich shot and wounded the Governor General of Petersburg Fyodor Trepov.

However, the jury trial, a short-lived novelty in Russia, acquitted Zasulich on the same grounds as those on which the Muslim arsonists were spared jail. Her brutality was political and therefore justifiable, if unfortunate.

Since then, similar suicidal idiocy has taken root even in civilised countries, both in Europe and North America. Any strong political feelings are ipso facto seen as extenuation if not exculpation, regardless of the cause.

But when I read about the German trial, I was aghast and bitterly disappointed. What do you mean Mrs Merkel’s Palestinian guests were drunk at the time?

I thought pious Muslims, those ready to die for their faith, didn’t drink – because Mohammed didn’t drink and he was perfection personified.

It was in a state of perfect sobriety that he had 800 Jews slaughtered by way of saying hello to Medina after his move from Mecca – and yet today his followers get drunk before trying the same sort of thing, if on a smaller scale.

Does this mean the arsonists aren’t real Muslims, and Islam is indeed a religion of peace, as so many of our leaders have proclaimed? This would be a spurious conclusion to draw. The true one is that Islam is neither a religion of peace nor, for most of its followers, at least in Europe, a religion at all.

It’s a licence to kill (mostly Jews and other infidels) and to enslave (mostly women). In common with other violent doctrines, such as communism, fascism and Nazism, the function of Islam is to turn mass murderers into freedom fighters in the eyes of our ‘liberals’.

Yet the only purpose of mass murder is to murder masses – and killing Jews is the only purpose of killing Jews. Everything else is just an attempt at vindication, be it in courts or at fashionable leftie parties hosted by senior Labour figures.

It must have escaped the German judges’ attention that the number of anti-Semitic incidents in European countries is directly proportional to the number of Muslims there. Such incidents may involve murder, assault, desecration of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues – whatever it is, the more Muslims, the more such outrages.

Now we’re talking mathematical relationships, the likelihood of a Muslim committing such crimes is directly proportional to the extent to which he self-identifies as a Muslim. If, say, a British Muslim sees himself as a Muslim first and British a distant second, he’s more likely to firebomb a synagogue than someone who’s British first and foremost.

The task of mullahs and Muslim activists is to draw as many men as possible from the second group into the first. And – back to mathematics again – their success is directly proportional to what they’re allowed to get away with.

Our governments, utterly corrupted by the bien pensant ‘liberalism’ they themselves have fostered, let them and their acolytes get away with anything, including – as in this arson case – attempted murder.

As a direct result, Jews are emigrating en masse from precisely the countries with large Muslim minorities, such as France. In other countries they are warned to take precautions by, for example, not wearing skullcaps in public.

The mathematics I mentioned earlier strongly suggest that the only way to reduce Muslim violence (and not just against Jews) is to reduce the number of Muslims – and also of the venues, such as mosques and Islamic centres, in which they receive their absolution, aka the licence to kill.

I’m not saying anything new here – everybody knows this. Yet few are those who can say it openly – and even fewer the governments capable of doing anything about it.

So yes, Mrs Merkel, zeitgeist says those arsonists aren’t anti-Semites. Were the SA?

Seeing the multitudes, Vlad went up into Moscow: and when he was set, his Ministers and the multitudes came upon him: And Vlad opened his mouth and taught them, saying…

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, that communist ideology is evil, but I say unto you: “Communist ideology, it’s really much akin to Christianity: liberty, equality, fraternity – all this is based on Holy Scripture, it’s all there.”

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, that Lenin hated Christianity, but I say unto you: “Look, Lenin was put into the Mausoleum. How’s that any different from the relics of Orthodox saints or simply other Christians? When I’m told that no, there’s no such tradition in Christianity – what does it mean, no? Go to Mount Athos, have a look, they have holy relics there, and we too have our holy relics here.”

I’m sorry about prefacing Vlad’s gibberish with phrases from Matthew, but that’s really the spirit in which it was meant. Vlad delivered his lines with nothing short of gospel gravitas.

The Ministers and the multitudes were represented by editors of top Russian publications, who came together at the Mount, or rather the offices of Komsomolskaya Pravda, a paper so proud of its Soviet heritage that it has kept its name, Komsomol Truth.

Now, Putin’s ‘conservative’ British fans, otherwise known as ‘useful idiots’, regard Vlad as the last stronghold of Christianity, mainly because he ‘supports the Orthodox church’ and doesn’t support homosexual marriage.

As to the latter merit, it’s commendable but rather insufficient. After all, ISIS aren’t great fans of the new Western institution either, but few will insist that this redeems their other sins.

As to Vlad’s take on Christianity, he that hath ears to hear, let him hear the two passages quoted above. Such an aural effort should suffice to put paid to the frankly idiotic and refreshingly ignorant view of Vlad as the latter-day Fidei Defensor.

However, here are a few comments for those of them who are hard of hearing and plagued with learning difficulties – and of course also for normal people who suffer from none of those disabilities and therefore understand what Putin is about.

First, “liberty, equality, fraternity” has nothing whatsoever to do with Scripture. It was a Masonic slogan adopted by the French Revolution, the first massive violent revolt against Christianity. Anyone who has the remotest idea of Christianity would instantly know how un-, or rather anti-Christian that slogan is.

Jesus repeatedly disavowed any association with any revolutionary or liberation movement, to wit: “My kingdom is not of this world”, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” and so forth. He was talking about gaining spiritual freedom through the truth – hardly a demand for political liberty.

Second, equality and fraternity, as used in the secular French slogan, don’t appear – nor could have ever appeared – in Scripture. We’re all brothers because we have the same divine Father, and we’re equal only before Him – not because some blood-thirsty chaps murder all aristocrats.

Third, Vlad’s statement is both ignorant and blasphemous. However, compared to the second statement quoted above, the one equating Lenin with Christian saints, it’s an exemplar of piety and erudition.

Christian saints were different people living in different places and at different times. However, they all had at least one thing in common: they were Christians. I hate to break the news to Vlad, but that’s not quite the same as being anti-Christian.

Lenin, whose relics are as saintly as, say, St Sebastian’s, hated Christianity with every fibre of what passed for his soul. Is Vlad aware of this? He has to be – he did go to a Soviet school after all. Why, he even went to university, where he had to take a course in ‘scientific atheism’, as did we all.

One could quote any number of statements to that effect from a whole library of Lenin’s works. For example, he wrote to Gorky in 1913:

“Any god is necrophilia… any religious idea, any idea of any god, even only flirting with god is unimaginable filth, which is tolerated and even well received particularly by the democratic bourgeoisie – and precisely because of that it’s the most dangerous filth, the most disgusting, the most revolting contagion. A million sins, failings, violent acts, physical infections… are much less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual, clad in luxurious vestments idea of god.”

Lenin’s visceral hatred of Christ and his church couldn’t co-exist with the sight of church valuables, all those icons in enamel frames studded with jewels, heavy gold crosses, precious books in jewelled covers, silver vessels.

Those had to be plundered, along with all other riches amassed throughout Russian history. However, for the first couple of years the saint-to-be had to wait: when the peasants were still too strong to resist, there could be undesirable consequences.

Finally the time came in 1922, during the first murderous famine caused by the Bolsheviks. Lenin wrote a secret circular, saying church valuables could now be plundered, what with the peasants “swelling from starvation… reduced to cannibalism” and therefore too weak to resist.

But it was not all about money. Lenin continued that: “…removal of valuables… must be carried out with merciless resolve and in the shortest possible time. The more representatives of the reactionary bourgeoisie and clergy we shall manage to shoot in the process, the better. It is now that we must teach that scum a lesson so that they will not even dare think of any kind of resistance for several decades.”

That task was accomplished. During Lenin’s tenure (November, 1917 – April, 1924), 200,000 church people, 40,000 of them priests, were slaughtered. As to the number of lay parishioners, massacred out of hand, say by spraying a procession with machine gun bullets, their deaths were too numerous to count.

Lenin was turned into a relic immediately after his death, when, before the current Red Square ziggurat was built, his mummy was placed into a temporary wooden structure. Alas, the builders carelessly punctured the sewer underneath, flooding the sacred remains and giving Patriarch Tikhon, then under house arrest, an opening for a witticism: “The incense fits the relics.”

The Orthodox church was stamped into a puddle of blood under Lenin. However, it came back under Stalin, when the Germans were overrunning Russia in 1941.

With 4,000,000 soldiers taken prisoner in the first three months of the war, many of them without any resistance, Stalin realised that the people wouldn’t fight under the banners of their communist murderers and slave masters.

The Russians had become immune to Marxism, communism and all other Bolshevik poisons. As a matter of fact, Stalin himself had had enough of them, which had been evident for several years before the war. Mussolini observed perceptively that, under Stalin, “communism became a Slavic version of fascism”.

Yet an idea for which people would fight was urgently needed – and it was at that time that the church came back, albeit in a different incarnation.

Ever since Peter I the Orthodox church had been an extension of the state. Peter abolished the patriarchate and had the church run by a lay Synod.

Stalin embellished that arrangement by placing the church under the aegis of the secret police. Coming in from the cold was not only the church, but all other demonstrably un-Bolshevik, nationalist ideas: Mother Russia, Third Rome, Holy Russia – all packaged with the idea of imperial expansion.

When Vlad took over, he looked at that state of affairs and saw it was good. He too needed to rally the populace, and Marxist ideas could no longer work even as window dressing.

The traditional Russian imperial idea based on the delusion of the country’s holy mission was the only available option, the only way in which the criminal KGB colonel could legitimise the rule of his kleptofascist junta.

The church had been house-trained long ago, to the point that all the post-war patriarchs were career KGB agents. Not only the present patriarch Gundiaev (aka Kirill, aka ‘agent Mikhailov’), but also the other two candidates for his post at election time are KGB men, every bit as servile and corrupt as all other members of the ruling KGB elite.

They serve Putin with the same ardour as they served Stalin. It was thanks to their support that the murderous, thoroughly corrupt KGB colonel has acquired the status of the last Christian standing.

Vlad knows that, without mouthing imperial slogans, he’d never stay in power, which is to say alive. That’s why he’s busily reviving every scrap of Russia’s expansionist history – regardless of who was at the helm.

He’ll take something from Ivan the Terrible, something from Peter I, something from Nicholas I, something from Lenin – and a lot from Stalin, whose statues are going up all over Russia.

Now, I’m well aware that I can’t make our ‘useful idiots’ change their minds – if it were possible, they wouldn’t be idiots. But I can feel pity for them: it must be hard going through life spouting ignorant, ideologically inspired shibboleths.

… Emperor Hirohito, who was cordially received at the Palace in 1971. He was the wartime leader of Japan, when tens of thousands of British soldiers lost their lives, many of them in concentration camps (see the film The Bridge Over the River Kwai). Under Hirohito’s leadership, Japan matched the Nazis in genocidal atrocities – including anti-Semitic ones in Indonesia.

… Mobutu, in 1975. The dictator of Zaire successfully combined murderous totalitarian oppression with embezzlement.

The $15 billion sum he misappropriated may be smaller than Putin’s achievements by an order of magnitude, but we must make allowances for inflation and also for the Congo having considerably less riches to purloin.

… Nicolae Ceaușescu, in 1978. He was dictator of Rumania, then the most Stalinist country in the Eastern bloc, which is saying a lot. Ceaușescu was a mass murderer, who routinely ordered his troops to fire at protesters.

… Hajji Suharto, in 1979. The military dictator of Indonesia suppressed a communist uprising in 1965-1966, which was a good thing. By some estimates, about a million people died, which sounds excessive but, if they were indeed communists, forgivable. Alas, many of them were only guilty of being ethnic Chinese, the most successful and therefore hated group in Indonesia.

… Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1989. Before the former KGB chief Andropov elevated Gorbachev to the Politburo, he had run the Stavropol province, one of the most corrupt in the USSR. Even against that background, he was nicknamed Mickey Envelope (Mishka konvert) in reference to his preferred way of doing business.

When moving into the Kremlin, Gorbachev continued Andropov’s programme of sham liberalisation, designed to save bolshevism by making it appear acceptable to the West. When that began to unravel, he ordered his troops to fire at demonstrators in Lithuania and Georgia. Before that, he had mendaciously denied the Chernobyl disaster, which was indirectly responsible for thousands of unsuspecting Soviets dying.

… Boris Yeltsyn, in 1992. He too had run a major province, that of Sverdlovsk, before moving to Moscow. Yeltsyn ran Sverdlovsk in a sort of duopoly with the KGB, whose concentration camps provided much of the region’s labour.

That kind of recruitment policy got some Nazis hanged at Nuremberg, but Yeltsyn thrived. While in Moscow, he ordered tanks to fire at the building of the Russian parliament, which was a rather radical version of Colonel Pride’s approach to parliamentarism.

In parallel with moving from Sverdlovsk to Moscow, Yeltsyn made a seamless transition from dipsomania to alcoholism and was never again seen sober. During his prolonged absences, the country was run by Gen. Korzhakov, Yeltsyn’s former bodyguard, ably assisted by the new breed of gangsters, mainly Berezovsky and Abramovich. They in fact chose Putin as Yeltsyn’s successor, a choice Berezovsky later got to rue.

When meeting Her Majesty, Yektsyn tried to paw her, with the Queen setting a good example for today’s indignant soft-porn stars by thwarting his attentions without making a big fuss.

… Robert Mugabe, in 1994. Zimbabwe’s Marxist dictator presumably rated the honour by such achievements as crimes against humanity, racism (of the forgivable, indeed commendable, anti-white variety) and championship-calibre corruption.

… Bashar al-Assad, in 2002. His qualifications for the royal honour are too current to require a comment. The only good thing one can say about him is that ISIS is even worse.

… Vladimir Putin, in 2003. Though the unrepentant, indeed proud, KGB colonel hadn’t yet got around to having his critics ‘whacked’ with radioactive isotopes in the middle of London, he had already covered himself head to toe with domestically harvested blood.

To ease his way to absolute power, he had several blocks of flats blown up, with the blame placed on Chechnya. The second Chechen war followed, easily as genocidal as the first.

At the time of his visit to Buck House, Vlad was already on his way to becoming the most successfully corrupt leader in history. Under his strong leadership, so admired in some British quarters, Russia has not only maintained but infinitely strengthened her leadership position in global money laundering.

… Xi Jinping, 2015. The communist dictator of China is a proud heir to the regime that slaughtered some 60 million and later gave the world Tiananmen Square.

Compared to these gentlemen, President Trump positively looks like a liberal trying to get in touch with his feminine side. Moreover, unlike them he represents Britain’s most important ally.

Historically the UK-USA relationship has only been ‘special’ in the warped minds of British propagandists. Ever since the beginning of the twentieth century, when America began to supplant the British Empire, the relationship has been rather one-sided. FDR, for one, transparently detested the British Empire almost as much as Nazi Germany.

Still, when American interests happened to coincide with ours, the US has been an important ally, and, in peacetime, seldom as important as now – for reasons too widely discussed at the moment to call for my penny’s worth.

And yet Mrs May’s government has allowed subversive socialists like Corbyn and Sadiq Khan to rouse enough rabble to make Trump’s visit untenable. If any justification for the modifier ‘subversive’ is still needed, this repulsive action provides it more than amply.

Personally, Trump isn’t my favourite cup of Bourbon, what with his vulgarity, narcissism and manifest absence of any discernible cultural attainment or dress sense. But his policies have by and large been the best of all other presidents’ I remember, with the possible exception of Reagan’s.

Yet our rabble-rousers object not so much to Trump’s personality or his policies as to his palpable contempt for all their sacred cows – both physical and semiotic. At the moment, for example, they’re up in arms over his describing some downmarket countries as ‘shitholes’.

Now, I don’t think leaders of civilised countries should resort to such uncivilised vocabulary, but implicitly the lefties deny countries that merit this designation exist. Having come from one myself, I can assure them that the description is apt and accurate – including in the most literal of senses.

Preventing our greatest ally from visiting Her Majesty (whom by all accounts Trump admires) shames not only the immediate culprits, but also our limp-wristed government, unable to act in Britain’s interests no matter what. Above all, it shames Britain herself, a country that allows such nonentities to ascend to government.

I hope that Trump will be able to rise above this slight, but I fear that, narcissist that he is, he won’t.

If two parties can’t agree on terminology, they can’t agree on anything. This basic rule is vindicated every time I talk to my French friends about politics or law.

Take the rule of law, for example. I’ve never been comfortable with that notion, if ‘law’ is left unmodified by ‘just’. Yet with the unqualified way the term is commonly used, one may get the impression it’s synonymous with virtue.

However, the two most diabolical regimes in history, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, both had laws galore.

Nazi Germany, for example, enforced Nuremberg Laws, prohibiting on pain of death marriages between gentiles and Jews. Those laws ruled all right, but they had nothing to do with justice.

And the USSR Criminal Code contained Article 70, under which lending a friend a mimeographed copy of, say, a Solzhenitsyn book carried a penalty of up to seven years of hard labour.

All such laws are described as ‘positive’, which means they’re vectored from the state downwards, and their justice is wholly dependent on the moral and intellectual integrity of those at the top.

This brings us back to Roman law, a subject I touched upon yesterday. That positive law arrived in France with the Renaissance and gradually assumed the exclusive role it still plays today, having been refined – or rather exacerbated – by the Napoleonic Code.

That represented a drastic departure from the legal concept prevalent during the millennium of the Middle Ages. The French and proto-French didn’t then widely use the word ‘law’ in the secular context. The word they preferred instead was ‘custom’.

Now the rule of custom takes us away from positive law and gets us close to common law, as practised in the Anglophone countries under the influence of their erstwhile English metropolis.

Unlike positive law, the English Common Law is vectored upwards. Rather than relying on the wisdom and virtue of lawyers and lawgivers, it rules by paying heed to millions of legal precedents accumulated over centuries.

In essence, this means that at the core of English jurisprudence lies the Judaeo-Christian doctrine of original sin. The underlying assumption is that, because man is fallen, he’s fallible, and therefore his judgement isn’t always safe.

Starting from this premise, the English Common Law tries to protect individuals from arbitrary rulings by judges and magistrates. One could argue that, by doing so, it also reduces the epiphanic effect that a brilliant legal mind could have on proceedings.

In fact, my French friends, some of them lawyers, often make that argument, if not in so many words. To them, the compromise implied in the English Common Law is unacceptable. To someone who regards prudence in such matters as a greater virtue than brilliance, it’s not only advisable but uniquely advisable.

Implied in Roman law is what we today call statism, the primacy of the state over the individual. Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis was an imperial code designed to strengthen, or rather revive, the central power of Rome.

Though produced in Christian times, the code has distinctly pagan antecedents going back to Hellenic times. In those days, to simplify ever so slightly, the polis meant just about everything and the individual just about nothing.

Public interests trumped private ones, and an individual’s worth was judged in terms of his usefulness to the polis. Laws were designed on that understanding, including laws that turned women into strictly their husbands’ chattels.

In the same spirit, the Greco-Roman civilisation accepted slavery as natural, and that institution shouldn’t be confused with medieval serfdom. A serf was a man; a slave was a possession, not drastically different from livestock.

Christianity changed all that by teaching the inherent value of man, thereby altering his idea of himself – and consequently of the desired interaction between himself and the state. The spiritual revolution that caused the change was by far the most sweeping in history – and in that sense the Renaissance was counterrevolution.

It revived Greco-Roman antiquity with all it entailed, including the inherently centralising Roman law. (Slavery, steadily disappearing throughout the Middle Ages, also made a comeback, culminating in the nineteenth century.) That’s why to the French ear the word étatisme has no negative connotations that its English equivalent has for us.

The French are conditioned by their history to accept the dominant role of central authority. In fact, one could say that, rather than being progressive, modernity is regressive, leapfrogging Christendom in a backward jump to land smack in the middle of pagan antiquity.

Nowadays this affects us as much as the French, but at least in England some rearguard conservative action is possible. In France it isn’t, which is why conservatism in our sense of the word doesn’t exist there.

One can’t argue persuasively that relying on the state’s good offices is a factor of political stability. If England has had roughly the same constitution since the 1688 Dutch occupation, otherwise known as the Glorious Revolution, France has had 17 different constitutions since 1789.

And the number of different laws spawned by those constitutions is uncountable. What is patently obvious is that this system doesn’t foster a visceral, intuitive respect for the law – of the kind the English used to have predominantly and still have residually.

That’s why in England rioting still isn’t accepted as a valid way of settling political disputes – and that’s also why so many Englishmen are intuitively suspicious of the big national state.

That suspicion logically carries over to the rejection of the even bigger supranational state, the EU. By voting for Brexit in unprecedented numbers, the British communicated their misgivings about a political contrivance based on voluntarism and no precedent whatsoever.

This viscerally conservative feeling animates the British opposition to the EU. In France, however, those on the Right, like my French friends, adore the EU, and the opposition to it comes mostly from the anarchic Left.

The French and the English have much common ground in matters cultural, but not political. That’s why we naturally belong together at a dinner table but not within the same state – and both my French friends and I realise this.

Alas, our powers that be don’t.