Author: Alexander Boot

 Russia faces a ban from the Rio Olympics for running a state-sponsored doping programme. Blood samples, 1,417 of them, destroyed, officials bribed, the unbribable ones threatened along with their families – naughtiness all around.

The scandal gathering momentum now has been brewing for a year, and it was a year ago that I wrote about it. Looking at that article now, I realise that every word still applies – so here it is, almost every word of it:

There I was, thinking that nothing the Russians do can possibly surprise me. How wrong I was, and I thank Putin’s sports establishment for reminding me of the dangers of complacency.

In this instance what surprised me wasn’t so much the revelation that Russian athletes cheat, but the scale of this activity – quantity rather than quality.

The fact itself is yesterday’s news, or even the day before yesterday’s. For example, one remembers the glory days of the Soviet Union and its satellites, when a dozen top women athletes turned out to be something else.

Oh they were athletes all right, but they weren’t quite, well, women. Some were hermaphrodites, some practically men, and none really qualified for the women’s events they had been dominating.

When chromosome testing was first introduced at international events in 1966, many ‘female’ athletes from communist countries (the Soviets Tamara and Irina Press, Tatiana Shchelkanova, Klavdia Boyarskikh, the Rumanian Iolanda Balàzs, the Pole Ewa Klobukowska and many others) announced their retirement.

It wasn’t just sex, or rather trans-sex, games. Soviet fencers were caught rigging their foils to set off the touché lamp when no contact was made. Doping was rife. Soviet judges routinely cheated in gymnastics, figure skating and diving competitions.

The wartime slogan ‘Everything for victory!’ was smoothly shifted into the sports arena, and nothing was off limits.

For example, when Soviet sports scientists established that a woman’s body is at its physical peak shortly after terminated pregnancy, this opened all sorts of exciting opportunities.

Shortly before the 1968 Olympics the gymnast Natalia Kuchinskaya was impregnated by her coach and made to abort the baby, specifically to enhance her performance. She repaid the loving attentions of the Soviet state by winning four gold medals.

I must compliment Putin for his honesty. Speaking at last May’s military parade in Red Square, he proudly declared that “Continuity of generations is our chief asset.” It most certainly is.

Not to let the national leader down, the Russian sports establishment dutifully retained and built on the Soviet version of sportsmanship.

A well-researched German documentary has just alleged that as many as 99% of Russian athletes are guilty of doping. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) possibly, and the Russian Athletics Federation (RAF) definitely, have been accused of being in cahoots with the scheme.

The (extremely) latent Russian patriot in me desperately wants to believe that the country’s sports officials acted purely for the glory of the motherland, with no pecuniary interest involved.

Alas, that’s not exactly the case. For example, Liliya Shobukhova, winner of the 2010 London Marathon, admits paying the RAF €450,000 to cover up a positive drug test.

The Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko denies the allegations, but then he would. Such slander, he said, is yet another attempt on the part of the West to besmirch Russia’s pristine honour. Recorded testimony of both athletes and former anti-doping officials counts for nothing, as far as Mr Mutko is concerned. It’s all beseless.

Perhaps. Allegations of wrongdoing, baseless or otherwise, are a standard weapon of Cold War, something that’s unfolding in front of our eyes.

It’s just that some allegations are more, and some are less, credible than others. For example, few would take on faith an allegation that 99% of, say, British athletes are doped up to their eyeballs every time they compete. Yet the same allegation about Russia, given both her history and current evidence, rings true.

The Russian sports establishment is run by the same amalgam of the KGB/FSB and organised crime that runs the whole country. Expecting probity, sportsmanship and fair play from that lot is like expecting statesmanship from Dave Cameron.

I’d go as far as to suggest that even in the absence of state sponsorship, Russian and Eastern European athletes would be doing the same things, if possibly on a smaller scale. Thus most doping bans in professional tennis have been imposed on Eastern European players – even though they are relatively independent from their federations.

Westerners simply don’t comprehend the full scale of moral degradation suffered by a nation under communist rule. Four generations of Russians and two of Eastern Europeans were brainwashed to believe that morality is coextensive with the good of the state.

Even assuming against all evidence that things then changed drastically, it’ll take at least as many generations – and I’m being uncharacteristically generous – for these countries to recover from the trauma.

They haven’t yet, not by a long chalk. This should (but won’t) give our own rulers some second thoughts about all those Eastern Europeans, millions of them, settling in Britain.

One hears many good-natured people saying that, when all is said and done, those people are products of Christian civilisation. Hence we shouldn’t be unduly concerned about being inundated with them.

Wrong, my friends. These people come from a civilisation so corrupted by communism that lawlessness has penetrated their DNA.

There are exceptions of course; there always are. But as the Russian version of sportsmanship shows, these exceptions are the kind that prove the rule.

 

 

 

Israelis claim they don’t think about terrorism and, if so, my hat’s off to them. If I lived there, I’d be quaking in my boots.

Yes, I know one should never project one’s own feelings onto other people, especially those living in extreme circumstances. And I do understand that danger activates protective mechanisms that drip antidotes into the bloodstream.

For example, when I lived in the Soviet Union, I feared arrest for various anti-Soviet activities. But that was a background fear that didn’t really affect my day-to-day life.

The fear was there somewhere, beneath the surface, and it only came up when, say, someone I knew was arrested or imprisoned. But, in the vegetarian early 1970s, such events were relatively rare.

How would I have felt had they happened every day? I probably wouldn’t have displayed the casual, nonchalant courage of today’s Israelis.

For in Israel acts of individual terrorism do happen on most days, with a collective disaster always lurking around the corner. Both the everyday occurrences and the potential for disaster spring from the same source, one that both Dubya and our own Dave have described as a ‘religion of peace’.

Israel is the bulwark of our civilisation faced with the threat of an impassioned Islam. She struggles not only for her own survival, but also for ours, and it’s lamentable that so many in the West fail to realise this.

It’s as if war has been declared, and only one side has shown up. We sit in the relative security of our island, listening to assorted Corbyn clones pontificating on the Palestinians’ plight. That’s what drives Muslims to violence, they claim.

This doesn’t quite explain why most armed conflicts all over the world, from Africa to Timor, from India to Indonesia, from Chechnya to Azerbaijan, have in the post-war years involved Muslims, with nary an Israeli in sight.

Israel may be the focus of Muslim violence but she isn’t its cause. She just happens to be in the forefront and hence in the line of daily fire.

Daily has a slight connotation of once daily, but outbursts of Muslim brutality often come in twos or threes. Yesterday was typical in that respect.  

First a Palestinian terrorist rammed his car into a group of hitchhikers, injuring four people including a pregnant woman. Then a Palestinian lass stabbed a security guard, a knife being a natural fashion accessory to accompany a hijab.

Both terrorists were shot on the spot, the man fatally, the woman not quite. So far I haven’t read any articles in our press castigating Israelis for wantonly taking the lives of two peaceful Muslims (I haven’t seen today’s Guardian yet).

However, whenever Israel protects herself with a larger-scale action, there’s wailing and gnashing of teeth all over our newspapers and airwaves.

Our flaming conscience can just about handle, at times, acts of individual self-defence, with only a few people threatened at a time. When the whole nation strikes out to thwart extinction, we throw our hands up in horror.

Look, another bombing raid – how dreadful. Look, another foray into Palestinian territory – how brutal. Look, another peaceful terrorist base razed – how uncivilised.

This gets me back to the beginning, my hopeless attempt to picture myself living in Israel. My imagination has proved insufficiently acute, but perhaps you can do better.

So picture a normal day in Tel Aviv or somewhere near the West Bank or anywhere in Israel. You wake up to reports of multiple rockets fired at your country’s villages by exponents of the religion of peace.

None of them hit your house; you heave a sigh of relief. You go out into the street, not consciously thinking about danger, but inwardly tensing up nonetheless.

Will this black-clad woman plunge a knife into your belly? Will this car swerve into you deliberately? Will your bus be blown up by a bomb? Will your family be kidnapped while you’re out? Will a crazed mullah order a nuclear strike on your country?

Now multiply this day by 365, then by the number of years you’ve been around and imagine how you’d feel. Can you do that? Well, you’re a better man than I am.

 

 

 

 

That the Russian Orthodox Church is an extension of the government is a truth universally acknowledged, as Jane Austin would say.

Moreover, considering the CVs of all its top hierarchs, including Patriarch Kiril, one can pinpoint the exact slot into which the Church fits within the governmental structure: the KGB.

When this organisation still went by that testosteronal name, His Holiness (then head of the Church’s foreign affairs) had a codename ‘Agent Mikhailov’. This appears in numerous KGB reports, each invariably ending with a pat on Agent Mikhailov’s back: “the assignment was successfully completed.”

However, none of those assignments was as important as the Patriarch’s present mission. Agent Mikhailov’s assignment today is to link Christianity with today’s government, or, to personalise the task, Jesus Christ with Vlad Putin.

As a theologian, the patriarch is aware of certain differences between the two: Jesus was an hypostasis of God, but Vlad is at this stage only semi-divine, although he too is an hypostasis – of the KGB junta running the country.

But this problem isn’t insurmountable for someone who, in addition to the Orthodox catechism, is well-versed in Marxist dialectics.

As part of the job, Kiril must do a St Matthew and trace back Putin’s genealogy, a task simplified by the lamentable, yet indisputable, fact that Vlad was made, not begotten. Meaning, to translate from the ecclesiastical, that both his Mum and Dad were human beings, each complete with a birth certificate and CV.

Establishing Vlad’s spiritual lineage is trickier, and it’s Kiril’s expertise in doing so that makes him a model KGB prelate.

Here the desired parallel with Jesus begins to break down. God is eternal, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. Vlad can, at a stretch, claim the last three distinctions but not the first – he had a human Dad and he also had spiritual predecessors.

His Holiness’s KGB assignment was formulated in terse terms leaving no room for interpretation: Lenin begat Stalin, Stalin – skipping a few intermediate steps – begat Putin. For ever and ever, amen.

Therefore Stalin must be without sin, even as Putin is without sin. Whatever Kiril’s ostensible subject may be, that is the message of every sermon delivered by His Holiness ex cathedra or otherwise.

It’s in this context that the speech he made on 4 November must be understood. As you read the Patriarch’s ringing words, notice the distinctly Nazi vocabulary His Holiness chose:

“Today’s Russia would not exist without the heroism of the previous generations who in the 20s and 30s not only tilled the land, although that too was important, but were also creating industry, science, the country’s military might. [The virtue of a leader in charge at the time] cannot be doubted even if said leader committed evil acts. Where he showed will, strength, intellect, political resolve, we point out his indisputable successes…” And where he murdered tens of millions we rebuke him with filial deference.

Leni Riefenstahl, where are you when we need you? Can’t you just see it?

Black and white footage, with the set lit only by a torch held high above Vlad’s muscular torso. The title comes on: The Triumph of Will, Strength, Intellect and Political Resolve. Cut to a giant double portrait of Stalin and Putin projected onto a cloud. Background music segues from the Horst Wessel Lied to the Russian anthem.

Just imagining such a scene brings tears to my eyes, but not so much as to obscure the obvious: never in history has any church suffered as much as the Russian Orthodox Church suffered under Stalin and his precursor Lenin.

Millions of parishioners apart, at least 40,000 priests were shot in the first few post-revolutionary years, and in many instances ‘shot’ was a figure of speech. Priests of all ranks, from bishop down, were horrendously tortured, quartered, burned alive, crucified, castrated, turned into pillars of ice by having water poured over them in -40 weather, flayed alive – well, you get the picture.

In 1937-1938 alone, 80 per cent of the episcopate were culled, accompanied by the lesser ranks. Come the war, the Church, now slimmed down and house-trained, happily blessed Stalin, sanctifying him as the nation’s Saviour.

By establishing apostolic succession, the Patriarch made sure that some of that sainthood would rub off on Putin. This at a time when Russian churches bless icons of Stalin and put them up next to the Virgin and St Nicholas – and when school textbooks describe Stalin as an able administrator, occasionally strict but always fair.

Bugles are blowing and drums are rattling all over Russia, with Nazi-style vocabulary muscling in on the language of state propaganda, otherwise known as the Russian press.

Putin is doing his bit by striking the poses of antique semi-naked gods, displaying his prowess at martial arts, diving to great depths and otherwise auditioning for a role in a Leni Riefenstahl film.

The Patriarch appears in a supporting role, and, though his part is important, he won’t be allowed to upstage the leader. But to see a major Christian prelate acting as Dr Goebbels and even sounding like him is painful, wouldn’t you say?

 

 

I reached this unorthodox conclusion upon reading that the host of Pienaar’s Politics on Radio 5 commended James Cleverly, MP, for answering his questions honestly.

Honesty is of course a laudable quality — but it’s not a redeeming one. Much depends on what one is honest about.

For example, Jeremy Corbyn (the leader of the Labour Party, for my foreign readers) is widely praised for honestly holding views that, if acted on, would turn Britain into a Greece with bad climate.

Call me a moral relativist, but I’d rather our politicians advocated and executed good policies even if in their hearts of hearts they’d rather destroy Britain with a couple of well-aimed blows. I’d forgive them such hypocrisy.

As I would have forgiven Mr Cleverly for having uttered the usual dishonest platitudes instead of the honest replies he chose to give to the interviewer’s questions.

For example, he was forthcoming about having looked at hard porn on the Internet. Even allowing that such viewing practices resulted only from adolescent curiosity, one wishes he had kept such revelations to himself.

After all, MPs pass laws affecting our lives. In a sense, this is a paternalistic relationship: we are like children whose daily lives are in their parents’ hands. Of course we can vote politicians out, even as a child can run away from home.

But if we choose to stay put, we expect those in a position of authority to convey an image of strength and probity. No son would have much respect for a Dad who sobs every night after work and openly two-times Mum. Decorum matters.

So does taste. Mr Cleverly readily proffered the information that he would love to snog Home Secretary Theresa May and marry Yvette Cooper, the Labour MP, who happens already to be married to another hare-brained politician.

Whatever one thinks of Mrs May’s political performance, it’s hard for anyone with a modicum of taste to see her as a sex object. And even if one’s tastes do run towards middle-aged women with bad dress sense and an overbearing personality, it’s best to keep such preferences private.

This way one is entitled to ask whether Mr Cleverly fantasises about Mrs May or indeed Mrs Balls (the name by which Miss Cooper is known outside Parliament) when watching hard porn — and whether or not he smokes marijuana (which he also admitted to having done) while doing so.

An MP should not make public admissions that wouldn’t necessarily jar only if coming from a pop star, an actor or even some philosophers. They, unlike parliamentarians, represent no one but themselves.

If their listeners are appalled by their pronouncements, they can simply shun their work. Mr Cleverly’s constituents don’t have such an option, at least not until the next election. Neither do the rest of us, those on whose behalf he part-governs the country from the height of his mind, character and morality.

Though he harbours ambitions of becoming a Tory leader one day, one wonders how such an obvious lightweight could ever be elected to Parliament in the first place.

But then one remembers that the chap he defeated was caught sending naked pictures of himself to an undercover journalist. I couldn’t find out whether the targeted hack was male or female, but either way my opinion of politicians didn’t improve much. Nor has Mr Cleverly’s honesty done much to help.

Would it be preposterous to suggest that our modern democracy fails on the most significant desideratum of any political system: elevating to government those fit to govern?

What is so scary about our rulers isn’t their dishonesty, corruption and unbridled egoism but their total lack of any serious substance. One recalls with nostalgic longing such politicians of yesteryear as Messrs Talleyrand, Metternich and Disraeli.

None of them had an honest bone in his body, a skeletal deficiency for which they compensated by possessing statesmen’s mind and character. Our lot today is to applaud chaps who honestly say what they think, revealing how little they really do.

 

Autumn is called ‘fall’ in the US (as it used to be in England), which is a good word, evoking leaves gently flapping in the breeze – not airliners tumbling out of the sky.

Alas, that very fate befell the Russian Airbus A321 that crashed over Sinai, killing all 224 passengers and crew on board.

When such a tragedy happens, the natural question is why. Sometimes the answer is clear, as in the case of the Malaysian Boeing brought down by a Russian BUK missile over the Ukraine.

Since that incident implicated the government of a large country armed with nuclear weapons, it took a year-long investigation before fingers got to be pointed in earnest, but let’s face it: only fanatical champions of Col. Putin refused to see the obvious straight away.

The Sinai crash is still being investigated, and its cause is still unknown. But certain conclusions can already be drawn, certain options ruled out or in.

One of the former is the ISIS claim of responsibility, with pride and glee dripping from ever word. A display of such feelings over 224 innocent deaths says a lot about champions of the religion of peace, but that’s a separate subject. Yet ISIS still isn’t equipped with missiles boasting enough range to hit a plane flying at 31,000 feet, which is what they claimed.

Of course ISIS could have planted a bomb before the airliner took off from Cairo, and such a trick can’t be as hard to pull off there as at a Western airport: in a Muslim country there has to be more ambient sympathy to the ISIS cause among the staff.

The crash is consistent with this theory. The plane didn’t experience any engine failure, and the pilots didn’t send any distress signals. The analysis of the debris shows that the Airbus broke in half in the air, which of course could have been caused by an explosive device.

But there may be an explanation both more innocent and as criminal: an aircraft passed as flight-worthy really wasn’t.

Russian airlines lead the world by a wide margin in both the number of the deadliest crashes and their death toll. Even the state-owned Aeroflot has an appalling safety record, to say nothing of smaller cowboy airlines, such as the one that owned the A321.

If you believe Putin’s propagandists, the mysterious Russian soul is too preoccupied with matters of the spirit to pay sufficient attention to such mundane matters as air safety. Hence Russian pilots routinely shorten to zero the distance between bottle and throttle, and quite a few drunk fliers have been prevented from climbing into the cockpit at Western airports.

In one instance, a Russian pilot was actually arrested in Denmark. In another colourful tragedy, albeit one that happened quite a few years ago, a pilot gave his little son a ride in the cockpit. When the plane was over Siberia, he put the plane in autopilot and let the boy play with the controls while he himself answered a call of nature. The tot accidentally disengaged the autopilot, and the airliner plunged to its death.

Another frequent reason for crashes is the lackadaisical work ethic of ground crews, who also like the odd lemonade before dinner (or a gulp of antifreeze when lemonade isn’t available).

Though this plane was registered and serviced in Ireland, it was owned by an iffy Russian company Kogalymavia, and I can’t help thinking that Russian practices just might have rubbed off on the Irish – especially since the A321’s service record is consistent with the accident (if that’s what it was).

In 2001 the plane suffered a tailstrike, which technical term describes the tail end hitting the runway on landing or take-off. This usually happens when the pilot either pulls up or raises the nose too aggressively, which Russian pilots, with their daredevil nature preoccupied with metaphysical concerns, have been known to do.

Usually a tailstrike leads to no immediate danger, but the effect may be delayed. The subsequent repairs, if done in a slapdash manner, may cause a later structural failure of the airframe after repeated cycles of pressurisation and depressurisation at the weak point.

Such damage is historically hard to detect at certification checks, and many a Russian plane has come apart in the air due to structural defects or metal fatigue.

All this is of course speculation. But the possibilities aren’t limitless: planes don’t just happen to disintegrate in the air for no reason, giving the pilots not even a second to scream ‘Mayday!’.

Whether the crash was caused by a criminal act or criminal negligence, criminal remains the common denominator. The numerator is the 224 corpses. RIP. 

Over a lifetime I’ve assumed that women add up to roughly 50 per cent of our bedroom population. This has certainly been the case in my own sleeping quarters practically ever since I started wearing long trousers.

Tempora mutantur and all that, but simple arithmetic would suggest that, when males and females share such quarters even nowadays, they add 50 per cent each to the sum total. Even if they prefer solitary slumber, the proportion will still remain roughly the same, with a slight allowance for the greater number of women in the population.

Lest you might think I’m a stick-in-the-mud, I hasten to reassure you that I’m well aware of the growing tendency of men sleeping with men, and women with women. Here one’s calculations become more difficult, for one never knows whether such unisex bedrooms attract more male or female couples.

That is, such calculations used to be more difficult.

A government-backed report has proudly announced that female representation in bedrooms now “modestly exceeds” 25 per cent, which counterintuitive figure represents a vast improvement over a paltry 12.5 per cent in 2011.

I never realised things had changed that much. I’ve vaguely heard of the new-fangled practice of men marrying men, but reducing female representation in bedrooms to a risible 12.5 per cent strikes one as lamentable.

So much happier does one become on hearing that the proportion now stands at 25 per cent, which to one’s traditionally trained eye still looks low, but at least the vector seems to be pointing the right way.

It won’t be long before female representation in bedrooms will reach…. Oh my God, I’ve done it again.

My wife has just looked over my shoulder, called me a dyslexic twat, and pointed out that the report I’ve read talks about female representation not in bedrooms but in boardrooms – specifically those of FTSE 100 companies.

How silly of me, must talk to that nice girl at Specsavers. Oh well, this changes the story from slightly titillating to downright menacing.

Apparently the government mandates that, unlike our bedrooms that are still randomly split more or less 50-50, the chromosomal composition of our boardrooms is actually for the law to decide. Nothing is to be left to chance.

Even though FTSE 100 companies are supposed to be owned by their shareholders, who historically decide how and by whom the firms are run, it’s up to the government to rule who should be elevated to the board.

The only whiff of disagreement one observes in the rarefied HMG atmosphere seems to be whether the number of women sitting at the long oval table should be measured absolutely or proportionally. While acknowledging the dire and indisputable need for regulation, Lord Davies, Minister of State for Trade and God Knows What Else, favours the former.

However, His Lordship mournfully explains that ‘gender inequality’ (I had to look the term up, for at first I thought he was talking about grammatical categories) is far from being the sole problem. ‘Ethnic inequality’ is a parallel and equally pressing concern.

“In order to combat both issues,” says The Times, “he urged graduates not to work for companies which were not diverse.”

This strikes me as slightly wishy-washy. The government should never leave such vital matters to be decided by personal choice. Urging isn’t good enough – ordering works so much better. Where does Lord Davies think we live, a free country?

Here’s my modest proposal. At a cost to be calculated but not to exceed £10 billion, police details must be placed at the entrance to all companies (not just the FTSE 100 ones) where diversity isn’t up to desired levels.

All young persons walking in should be subjected to a quick police interview, according to this sample questionnaire:

“Where do you think you’re going, sunshine?” [If the answer indicates that the entrant is a job seeker, proceed to the next statement.]

“Keep walking, mate [or, if female, ‘love’], and if you ever show your face here again, I’ll do you.” [Should the interviewee  enquire where he/she should seek employment then, proceed to the next statement.]

“Not my department, mate/love. Call Lord Davies’s office, they’ll sort you out.”

I feel confident that, should this proposal be taken up and acted upon, the current target of 33 per cent female representation by 2020 will be exceeded, as will be the target for a pleasing racial and ethnic mix.

Of course, to facilitate matters, it would help if the government were simply to nationalise all FTSE 100 companies and, ideally, all others as well. As the example of such economic powerhouses as the Soviet Union shows, this would not only simplify control but would also increase productivity and hence the living standards in the nation.

But I realise with quite some chagrin that this decisive step may be slightly premature. We’ll have to wait until Corbyn’s premiership for such benefits to be bestowed on the nation.

I wish I could offer not just sound advice but also tangible help. Alas, I no longer have any involvement with boardrooms.

I do, however, retain some control of my bedroom, and I hereby undertake to make sure its own ‘gender composition’ will stay at least 50 per cent female for the foreseeable future.

 

 

Pope Francis in the Vatican and Justin Webb in The Times have decried blanket hatred, the Pope towards Israel, the hack towards the US.

Without in any way wishing to imply parity between the two gentlemen, I can’t help noticing superficial parallels in their lines of thought, and also some fundamental divergences.

The Pope says “To attack Jews is anti-Semitism, but an outright attack on the State of Israel is also anti-Semitism… the state of Israel has every right to exist in safety and prosperity.”

No decent person would take issue with the second part of the statement, but some might disagree with the first. It’s possible, they’d say, to dislike Israel without being anti-Semitic.

It is indeed possible. However, purely empirical observation suggests that those who are most vociferous in their disapproval of Israel also happen to be at least latently anti-Semitic.

It doesn’t have to be that way, but it just is. In a way this is understandable.

After the Holocaust, hating Jews betokens such putrid nastiness that all but outright fanatics refrain from public manifestations of anti-Semitism. Yet camouflaging them as, say, anti-Zionism begins to flirt with social acceptability, though care must be taken not to sound too virulent.

One can get away with saying “I detest the theocratic aspects of Israeli statehood” without sounding as anti-Semitic as one really is. However, saying “I could kill every Zionist with my own hands” just may put one beyond the pale, as it were.

His Holiness, to his credit, left room for disapproval of some aspects of Israeli politics without being anti-Semitic. However, and again the Pope mentioned this, disagreeing with political measures without which Israel would be obliterated is crossing the line.

To his even greater credit, he made an honest attempt to build bridges and not to rely on time to heal all wounds. Some wounds require immediate medical help, and His Holiness has tried to provide it.

He is used to expressing himself in clipped, evangelical messages, communicating the truth but not necessarily trying to explain it, leaving exegesis to assorted commentators.

For hacks like Justine Webb that’s not good enough. He has to look for deep psychological explanations to utterances that by themselves manifestly lack depth.

This starts with the title of his article: Those Who Hate the US Actually Hate Themselves. The statement struck me as not just controversial but daft. Nonetheless I read on to get to the kernel of the argument.

This is the gist of it: we all have an American inside us, trying to get out. Hence whenever we find anything wrong with the US it’s the American part of ourselves that we actually abhor.

This took me out of my depth, for I invariably look askance, or more typically out of the window, at statements of such psychological profundity.

I found myself lost even farther at sea when Mr Webb explained that politics lies underneath it all, with “the right distrusting [America’s] happy-go-lucky approach to society building, the left hating the way that society operates.”

This was a loose paraphrase of a loose statement by the French pseudo-philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, who also said that “Anti-Americanism comes from the fascist tendency in French thought.”

Displaying enviable erudition, Mr Webb counters that not all anti-Americanism is political. This deplorable tendency actually predates America as a political entity. “Throughout the 18^th century serious people had been sent to America and reported back that the place was a dump.”

Here lies the difference between my two protagonists.

The Pope felt duty-bound to comment on a real, soul-destroying problem of long standing and wide, almost universal reach.

The hack concocted a problem where no problem really exists. Of course some people hate America, and of course left-wing fanatics hate her for being the epitome of capitalism, while right-wing fanatics hate her for insufficient racial and ethnic purity.

But, while there can be no legitimate reason for hating Jews or indeed the Jewish state, there may exist perfectly valid reasons for disliking America – or, to be more precise, Americanism.

Ignoring this possibility, Mr Webb chose as his hypothetical targets primitive ignoramuses who come up with spurious justifications for their anti-Americanism.

One wonders how he’d respond to serious criticism voiced by his intellectual equal or, God forbid, superior.

For example, a thinking Christian may point out the US is the first purely secular, in effect atheist, state in history. He may further state, quoting from Thomas Jefferson and other Founders, that the First Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees not so much freedom of religion as freedom from religion.

A political philosopher may expand on that theme by showing that the American Revolution was inspired by exactly the same ideas as the French one – and at a deeper level even the Russian one.

The US was – and remains – an Enlightenment construct, the first such state. America adumbrated our materialist, anomic, culturally and spiritually subversive modernity and remains its flag-bearer.

She is the living embodiment of the revolt against the religion, culture and civilisation of Christendom – this for all the fulsome protestations of piety one hears everywhere in America and even reads on her banknotes.

I’m not coming down on either side of the argument (I do in my books, which, in the spirit of self-serving American capitalism, I commend to your attention). It’s possible that serious counterarguments could be voiced by serious commentators, of whom Mr Webb clearly isn’t one.

His article is basically drivel, while the Pope’s statement, ostensibly made on a kindred theme, has much value. Far be it from me to suggest that it’s Christianity that lends verisimilitude to moral and intellectual attitudes.

However…

 

 

 

 

 

 

I often target The Times for my slings and arrows, lamenting that the formerly respectable paper has descended to the level of a tabloid both in physical size and intellectual content.

So much more pleasure it gives me now to say something laudatory about an article published in this receptacle for my bile: Matthew Syed’s piece It Is Roman Abramovich Who Shames Chelsea.

Mr Syed, who usually writes on sports, doesn’t talk about Chelsea’s catastrophic start to the season, its manager, players or tactics. Instead he fumes against “one of the great, unfolding scandals in English football. The money that has bankrolled Chelsea these past 12 years, which has brought many trophies while sanitising the image of one of the most dubious individuals ever associated with British sport, was corruptly amassed.”

‘Criminally’ would have been a more precise adverb, but let’s not quibble. At least Abramovich is no longer described as a ‘socialite’ or an ‘astute businessman’, rather than the gangster he really is.

As his barrister, Jonathan Sumption, QC, comments on the source of Abramovich’s wealth, “there was an agreement to support the president of Russia in return for privileged access to state-owned assets.”

Allow me to translate from the lawyerly: Abramovich and a handful of others were given a leasehold (never a freehold – that belongs to the KGB/FSB) over Russia’s vast natural resources. The quid pro quo was that they’d act as conduits for the money purloined by the KGB to flow into the laundries of assorted offshore havens.

Whenever Putin or one of his cronies needs a few billion for staging a sporting event, conducting a nice bombing raid, buying a 300-foot yacht or building another palace, Abramovich and a few others crack their chequebooks open with alacrity.

Abramovich, continues Mr Syed, “is a manipulative chancer whose money was gained through dubious means,” and he doesn’t know the half of it. Yes, Abramovich acquired most of his wealth through the rigged privatisation programme of the 1990s. But he already had to be wealthy and influential to be allowed to play the game of all those voucher schemes, collateral auctions and loans for shares.

Not to bother you with technical details, a group of young crooks (most of them drawn from the ranks of the Young Communist League nomenklatura) were given millions in public funds to ‘buy’ billions in public assets.

How Abramovich found himself in that privileged group is best described in Paul Klebnikov’s 2001 book Godfather of the Kremlin. Shortly after its publication the author, head of the Forbes Moscow bureau, suffered a rather extreme form of literary criticism.

He was riddled with bullets in the centre of Moscow. The hit (or ‘whack’ to use Putin’s favourite term) was done with two automatic weapons fired from a fast-moving car.

The authorities regretted that unfortunate event, which they attributed to the jealous rage of a wronged husband. Well, since there were two assault rifles involved, there must have been two wronged husbands, not one.

Mr Klebnikov must have been a real lothario, but his exploits in that area still don’t quite explain the mode of the assassination, which is quite rare in the annals of crimes passionnels.

Also, as any expert will tell you, it takes a high degree of murderous professionalism to hit someone by firing full auto from a moving vehicle in a crowded street – especially without sending bits and pieces of innocent pedestrians up in the air.

Klebnikov’s book accused Boris Berezovsky, the eponymous godfather, of all sorts of shenanigans, including the odd bit of murder. Abramovich was at the time Berezovsky’s partner, later to become his enemy.

Their feud was eventually resolved in a London court, and only one man, Abramovich, was left standing or indeed alive.

Mr Syed doesn’t go into such detail, but even what he does write makes his article the most honest and incisive piece of journalism I’ve ever read on this subject in the mainstream press.

Perhaps some of the accolades should go to the paper’s brave editor, and its legal department, which had the courage to allow this excellent article to run. Congratulations to all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the text of the talk I gave last week:

Oscar Wilde said that the best way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Unfortunately many Brits use this method for getting rid of the fascist temptation.

When they find something wrong with Her Majesty’s government, they turn their thoughts not to restoring history’s greatest constitution but to extolling the virtues of foreign politicians who detest our constitution – fascists of various red, black or brown hues.

Hence after the First World War many Britons became groupies to the murderous maniac Lenin, his worthy successor Stalin and his equally worthy disciple Hitler.

Lenin, in one of his few lucid moments, ungratefully called his Western supporters ‘useful idiots’. Mussolini and Hitler treated their fans with only marginally more respect.

Meanwhile the Bloomsbury set loved red fascism, and the Cliveden set the brown variety. George Bernard Shaw delivered a speech saying that he could die happy knowing that the future of the world was safe in Stalin’s hands.

Unity Mitford expressed her admiration for the brown cause by having group sex with SS officers.

Moura Budberg, Nick Clegg’s Russian great-aunt, used a similar method for converting British celebrities to the cause of the Soviet secret police she served.

Thousands of volunteers inspired by Bloomsbury propaganda went to give their lives for the noble cause of trying to turn Spain into Stalin’s colony complete with the GULAG.

A few years later British youngsters were joining the SS Britishches Freikorps – in smaller numbers, but then Hitler’s Germany was at war with their country.

This tradition of useful idiocy is alive and well. Today’s object of adulation is the regime that pulled together the red and brown strands, adding one of organised crime for good measure: the kleptofascist KGB junta fronted by Col. Putin.

Driven to despair by our own self-serving Quisling government, good conservative people are looking for angels where only demons can be found.

One hopes this is mostly caused by ignorance. If they really realised that Putin’s regime is indeed a KGB junta, indeed kleptofascist, and indeed mortally dangerous to the West, they’d recoil in horror.

Then again, I suspect that, just like the Bloomsbury lot, those who don’t know simply don’t want to know. For the facts are as much in the public domain now as they were then.

Every time I describe Putin’s regime as kleptofascist, some of my conservative readers target me for their slings and arrows.

Yet Putin’s regime is just that, kleptofascist, and to prove that I propose a short list of characteristics shared by all fascist regimes, different as they may be otherwise.

Let’s see how many of these boxes Putin ticks.

BOX 1: Populism combined with chauvinism.

All fascist regimes rally the masses by redirecting their national resentments into the conduit of jingoism.

It’s the regime’s task to correct an historical wrong and restore the nation to her past grandeur. For Hitler that was the Germanic conquest of the Roman Empire, for Mussolini the glory of ancient Rome.

Putin is doing exactly the same with Russia. He has described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century”, and vowed to right that wrong.

Using the most thunderous and nauseating propaganda this side of Stalin, Putin is rallying his largely impoverished population under the banners of Russia’s past redemptive glory, both under the tsars and the Bolsheviks.

BOX 2: Externalising evil.

Since Russia herself is a priori perfect, whatever privation people have ever suffered or are suffering has to be put down to the perfidy of outside enemies.

All fascist regimes, including Putin’s, cast the non-fascist West in that role, especially those ‘Anglo-Saxon’ vermin inhabiting Wall Street and the City of London.

In addition, each fascist regime has its own special enemies, such as Jews for Hitler or Ethiopians for Mussolini.

In Putin’s Russia these are ‘Ukrainians, ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and all those neighbours who cling to a modicum of independence.

BOX 3: Internalising the good of the nation within the person of the leader, whose approval must gravitate towards 100 per cent.

In Russia this idolisation of Putin is reaching Stalin’s proportions, though his public support is still somewhat short of the 105 per cent Stalin tended to score.

Putin’s Western groupies cite this adulation as proof of Putin’s virtue. Doesn’t public support justify any regime? Vox populi and all that.

Well, when public support gravitates towards 100%, the only thing it justifies is the certainty that the country has no free press.

BOX 4: State control of the media and their almost exclusive use for propaganda purposes.

Outbursts of public enthusiasm require a population house-trained to respond on cue. Hence the use of media for that purpose, accompanied, as it is un Russia, by the suppression of dissenting publications and broadcast channels.

And it’s not just the media. Putin recently told historians that their task is to defend “our views and interests”, for example in explaining the Nazi-Soviet pact.

Toxic falsifiers of history claim that it pushed the button for the Second World War. The two most satanic regimes in history formed an ad hoc alliance to divide Europe between them.

They then kicked off history’s most devastating war by assaulting Poland from two sides.

Yet, explained Putin, historians must teach that none of this is true.

The Pact proved Stalin’s peaceful intentions.

And as to Poland, she had only herself to blame. Didn’t she grab a chunk of Czechoslovakia in 1938, when the Germans moved in?

Those media outlets in Russia that don’t go along with Putin’s view of the world have been either shut down or brought under government control.

Even the pro-Western websites I regularly read here have been blocked inside Russia. And Russia is researching the feasibility of shutting down the Internet altogether.

BOX 5: The leader’s will replacing the rule of law.

This means, among other things, that the leader can choose how many or few people he wants to terrorise.

How many he does terrorise therefore reflects not the essence of his regime, but its current needs.

On Putin’s watch the number of people killed, roughed up or imprisoned for political reasons is in the thousands, not the tens of millions Russia lost under Lenin and Stalin.

But no safeguards exist to prevent Putin from unleashing mass terror should he so choose.

Law enforcement in Russia doesn’t enforce the law. It has been turned into a giant Mafia family, specialising in all the traditional Mafia pursuits, from extortion and protection rackets to robbery and contract killings.

Russians are scared of the police more than of criminals, because the police are the criminals.

Beatings and torture – sometimes to death, as in the Magnitsky case – are everyday occurrences in Russian police stations. Yet, on the rare occasions such crimes reach the courts, the sentences are either derisory punishment or acquittal.

BOX 6: Acquisitive aggression against neighbours. Fascist regimes see expansionism as self-vindication. They equate greatness with size, the bigger the better.

As a pretext for aggression they highlight their former ownership of an adjacent country or parts thereof, or else the plight of their ethnic brothers in that country, such as Hitler’s Polish and Czech Germans – or Putin’s Ukrainian Russians.

Hence the next flashpoint could come from Putin’s attack on Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, all with large Russian minorities.

Putin has personally started three aggressive wars: against Chechnya in 1999, Georgia in 2008 and the Ukraine in 2014. The Middle East could well be next in line.

The capital of Chechnya Grozny was bombed flat, even though its population was 80% Russian.

Georgia was baited into attacking her former province Abhazia, which Putin’s stooges used for shelling Georgian territory. That gave Putin the pretext he needed to bring Georgia back into the fold.

Then of course came the naked aggression in the Crimea and the Ukraine.

Meanwhile, bringing to mind the words ‘teapot’ and ‘kettle’, Putin’s media are describing the Ukraine’s government as fascist, out to exterminate the Russians, along with every other minority.

This even though the extreme-right parties only polled a mere 1.5% of the Ukraine’s electorate, as opposed to the 25% such parties routinely get in Russia herself.

And regular neo-Nazi marches carry their swastikas through Russian cities without being harassed in any way.

BOX 7: Creating or, if they already exist, supporting likeminded groups around the world.

The pattern is well established. The Bolsheviks bankrolled every communist party in the world, using them for espionage and subversion.

The Nazis did exactly the same by financing their own network, including such organisations as Friends of New Germany, the German American Bund and the British Fascist Union.

Following the example set by his role models, Putin is actively cultivating neo-fascist groups in Europe.

It recently came to light that the Russians are financing France’s National Front, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Hungary’s Jobbik, Italy’s Northern League, Austria’s Freedom Party.

When these facts became known, Marine Le Pen insisted that accepting Putin’s millions doesn’t mean following Putin’s policies.

Of course it doesn’t. Her party supports the rape of the Ukraine on merit, while Putin funds her for altruistic reasons alone.

BOX 8: Corporatist economy.

Unlike socialist or communist states to which they are closely related, fascist regimes typically eschew de jure nationalisation in favour of de facto control.

Rather than shooting owners, the regime turns them into managers beholden to the leader.

In Putin’s Russia it’s possible to amass a large fortune only by Putin’s permission, which is granted only to his henchmen.

What’s in Russia called ‘the vertical of power’ goes right through the economy, with the so-called oligarchs having only the leasehold on their wealth.

When they step out of line, their businesses are either destroyed or taken over by Putin’s cronies, while they themselves are killed or imprisoned or, if they’re lucky, allowed to flee abroad.

BOX 9: Allowing political opposition for window-dressing only.

Such conditions existed in Germany and Italy, and they are also observable in Putin’s Russia. The country’s parliament, the Duma, is filled with Putin’s cronies.

Political protests in Russia are actively discouraged. Those daring to protest are often prosecuted on trumped-up charges, roughed up or murdered.

Many politicians and over 100 journalists have been murdered during Putin’s tenure, all of them his opponents.

Most of those murders go unnoticed in the West, and only the more spectacular ones, such as those of Anna Politkovskaya and recently Boris Nemtsov, reach our papers.

The London murder of Alexander Litvinenko did make a bit of a splash, mainly because of the esoteric murder weapon, Polonium.

BOX 10: Militarisation. This can be used either for actual aggression or blackmail.

Russia is overhauling her armed forces to the tune of 290 billion pounds, with a particular accent being placed on strategic arms.

New weapon systems are being brought on stream at a rate far exceeding Nato’s. Among them are disguised armoured trains with nuclear missile launchers.

The overall strength of the Russian army is about a million, a quarter of them reservists, and growing fast. Last month they conscripted another 100,000 recruits.

Many training activities involve airborne troops, whose strength is being beefed up to 60,000, roughly four to five divisions. By contrast, the US has only one fully trained airborne division, 82^nd. (Some others are called airborne but do no jump training.)

Paratroops are offensive: they are too lightly equipped to be much use in defence.

Tanks are another clearly offensive weapon, and here the comparison between Russia and Europe is most instructive.

The three biggest Western European armies, French, German and British, have, respectively, 423, 408 and 407 tanks.

By contrast, Russia officially boasts 15,500 tanks in active service. But even that number is misleading.

Unlike Nato, the Russians don’t destroy decommissioned tanks. They mothball them in warehouses.

Should the need arise, those obsolete but perfectly usable machines can be taken out and thrown in.

That’s what happened in the Second World War, when the Germans wiped out the regular Soviet tank force in the first few days.

Much to their astonishment, new Soviet tank divisions appeared out of thin air, and the German intelligence couldn’t figure out their provenance.

How many of those mothballed tanks are there now? In the 1970-80s the Russians had 50,000 tanks, more than the rest of the world combined.

Many of those machines can probably still be thrown into battle should the need arise. And the Russians are giving every indication that the need may arise.

They are calling up reservists, constantly increasing both the duration and frequency of such call-ups.

They are conducting joint exercises with their puppet Belorussian army.

Other large-scale military exercises are being conducted in every border area from the Baltic to the Black Sea, from the Far East to Kaliningrad, formerly Konigsberg.

Putin is clearly creating two powerful salients, the southern one in the Crimea and the northern one in Kaliningrad, where short-range, radar-busting Iskander missiles are being deployed.

For the first time since Brezhnev, Russian strategic bombers are regularly buzzing the airspace of Nato members, while Russian fighters are tracking Nato planes.

Hardly a day goes by that Nato planes aren’t scrambled to intercept Russian bombers all over the world, including the California coast. In Syria Russian and American planes find themselves on a collision course every day, and Turkey’s airspace is being routinely violated by the Russians.

Russia lacks any obvious allies, which was proved when the UN General Assembly condemned the annexation of the Crimea by 100 to 11, with the rest abstaining.

Apart from the former Soviet republics located a few hours from Russia by tank, her 11 allies included Cuba, North Korea, Sudan and Zimbabwe.

Therefore Putin knows he has to be prepared to fight his corner all alone and he’s beefing up for it.

Putin’s Russia ticks all these boxes, which makes her undeniably fascist. Comparing Putin specifically to Hitler, however, one must out of fairness point out a significant difference, and this is why I describe Putin’s regime as not just fascist but kleptofascist.

Hitler’s regime wasn’t organically fused with gangster groupings – in fact both he and Mussolini suppressed organised crime.

Putin, on the other hand, has a long history of not only working hand in glove with gangsters but actually being one himself.

Just take a look at the dossier published by Marina Salye, who in 1992 headed the Petersburg Council commission investigating Putin’s business machinations when he was still a lowly deputy mayor.

Among other choice bits, the documents shows that Putin signed deals to export $100 million worth of raw materials in exchange for food. The raw materials dutifully left Russia. No food came back in return – this at a time of rationing in Petersburg.

It’s no wonder that under Putin, Russia’s economy is criminalised from top to bottom, and he himself is one of the world’s richest men, with the lowest estimate of his personal wealth standing at $40 billion.

Yet Putin is still claiming his share of fans in the West.

They read that Putin bans homosexual propaganda and nod their approval. But then neither Hitler nor, say, Osama bin Laden was known as a champion of homosexual marriage.

They read Putin’s criticism of Western decadence and agree enthusiastically. But then ISIS are saying exactly the same things about the West, most of them correct – so are we going to support them too?

They see footage of Putin and his cronies going to church, and don’t realise that these new-fangled believers often forget that Orthodox Christians cross themselves from right to left, not from left to right as they do in American films.

Putin’s fans insist that any frank assessment of Putin’s regime is a sign of Russophobia, even if it comes from independent rating agencies.

I looked at such ratings – only to find confirmation for the feeling deep-seated in the breast of most Russians and Peter Hitchens: the whole world is against Russia. All those rating agencies collude to cast Russia in a bad light.

Judge for yourself. In the rule-of-law category Russia came in at Number 92, out of 97 countries rated. That’s one rung below Belarus but – a glorious achievement! – one above Nicaragua.

In upholding fundamental rights, Russia’s rating was even higher: 82, one behind the Emirates, where you can go to jail for a little hanky-panky outside marriage. One is prepared to cheer, but then one’s ardour is doused by the cold water of some other ratings.

Russia ranks 148 out of 179 on freedom of the press. That rating places Putin’s Russia below Bangladesh, Cambodia and Burundi.

Russia haters refuse to look on the positive side: Putin’s bailiwick is still above, if not by much, Iraq and Gambia. If that’s not the crowning achievement of Putin’s reign, I don’t know what is.

Oh yes, I do. Russia, I’ll have you know, didn’t drop any lower than Number 127 on the corruption rating, where she finds herself in a nine-way tie with such bastions of legality as Pakistan and, again, Gambia.

And still some British conservatives cheer Putin on.

Those good people don’t realise what it means that the Russian government, from Putin down, is made up almost entirely of KGB officers.

In fact, the eminent Russian sociologist Olga Kryshtanovsky, who’s actually a Putin supporter, has analysed the CVs of the top 1,061 government officials in Russia. She found out that 80% of them are career KGB officers.

Some Westerners don’t seem to realise that party and KGB officials could under no circumstances rise to their positions without being profoundly evil men.

All communist countries had this in common, which incidentally raises interesting questions about Angela Merkel, who held a high-ranking position in the East German Young Communist League.

Hence Western triumphalism about the collapse of communism in Russia was misplaced. Communism didn’t collapse.

Following the First Law of Thermodynamics is was simply transformed into something else, evil by any other name.

After all, the precedent of Nuremberg trials established that membership in a criminal organisation, in that instance the SS, is itself a crime.

Yet the SS was responsible for at most 10 million murders. The KGB murdered 60 million Soviet citizens.

There’s another important difference between the SS and the KGB. The German government has repented Germany’s sins.

In Russia there was no repentance. On the contrary, Colonel Putin and his gang are openly proud of the Soviet Union and its criminal history.

“There’s no such thing as ex-KGB,” Putin once said. “This is for life.”

Had Western leaders and commentators had the benefit of the kind of experience I’m cursed with, they would be less prepared to disarm, with the British army, for example, being reduced to a size it hasn’t seen for two centuries.

And they certainly wouldn’t be singing hosannas to Putin, the strong leader of Peter Hitchens’s fancy.

The Russians, they say, live so much better under Putin. Yes, which is why the male life expectancy there is way below 60, why 20% of the population live below the poverty line which in Russia is a paltry $174 a month, why 25% of Russian households have no sewerage and 20% no plumbing.

And, as we have seen, every characteristic of a fascist state is clearly visible in Russia.

Unfortunately the West traditionally displays severe learning difficulties when it comes to lessons of history.

For example, the Second World War could have been easily prevented by a resolute early response to German aggression.

Instead the West vacillated. The mantra of appeasement and ‘peace in our lifetime’ was the order of the day.

We were forewarned, but we weren’t forearmed. A tragedy followed.

And today, forewarned means foredisarmed. I hope and pray that no catastrophe will ensue. I fear it might.

For the last several days I’ve had to have lunch in town, which – and I realise I’m not being original here – has involved communicating my order to a waitress. Each has been easy on the eye and eager to serve.

One slight problem though has diminished the pleasure I took in their company: they couldn’t often understand my order in every detail, nor provide lucid explanations whenever the menu wasn’t explicit enough.

I don’t know if it’s still legal to describe non-British EU ‘citizens’ as foreigners, but I’ll have to risk censure by telling you that’s what they were. That, by itself, doesn’t present a problem, especially to someone who himself wasn’t born where he lives.

However, surely it’s not unreasonable to expect that those serving the public ought to know enough English to communicate with the public they serve. Alas, even such an eminently reasonable expectation is routinely frustrated nowadays.

No real harm was done. I didn’t go hungry and, even though some condiments were put on the food rather than on the side as I had requested, I didn’t gag. Moreover, I had to tell myself not to be a grumpy old man and just go with the flow – the girls have to make a living, and a waitress doesn’t have to be an accomplished linguist to collect her tip.

However, the situation becomes more fraught when a linguistically challenged person, rather than serving hungry people in restaurants, treats ill people in hospitals.

As any doctor will tell you, talking to a patient is often as essential a diagnostic and therapeutic tool as any test. One word misunderstood by either party in such an interview can have dire, possibly lethal, consequences.

That’s why doctors must have perfect command of English, and one would think such a skill would be as important to a physician as the knowledge that we drive on the left would be to a bus driver.

Not so, according to Dr Tomaz Frylewicz.

The good doctor graced the NHS with his arrival from Krakow in 2006 and in the intervening nine years has failed an English test three times. Such ineptitude puts patients at risk, ruled a tribunal, which then suspended Dr Frylewicz until his English improves.

Looking at it from the doctor’s perspective, the tests have been coming thick and fast: three of them in the last year. That means Dr Frylewicz had been working in the NHS for eight years without ever being asked to sit such an exam.

Considering that his colleagues testified they were never sure he understood either them or, more critical, his patients, this strikes me as negligent.

In his defence Dr Frylewitcz explained that “this exam does not give the true knowledge of English.” Well, I don’t know how to explain this to you, doctor, so that you might understand, but an exam’s function is to test knowledge, not to give it. See the problem?

The reason the General Medical Council was so tardy in giving Dr Frylewicz linguistic skills by testing them is that – I’ll italicise this for your benefit – until last year testing doctors from within the EU had been against the law.

Allow me to rephrase. Until 2014 doctors were able to treat patients even when proper communication between the two parties was impossible. I’ll let you consider the deadly possibilities; my own imagination doesn’t go so far.

But wait a minute, perhaps an injustice has been done. Perhaps Dr Frylewicz’s English is perfectly adequate after all.

He certainly thinks so: “Every day to my home the Wall Street Journal comes.” Presumably he then the Wall Street Journal reads and it understands. But he really ought to have allowed a native speaker to make statements in his defence, for Dr Frylewicz digs the hole deeper with every word he utters.

Even assuming that he can follow stock market quotations with commendable fluency, this task taxes one’s proficiency in English much less than having to have detailed conversations with patients, whose own language may often break through the limits set by elementary textbooks.

For example, there are at least 50 major dialects spoken on the British Isles, and God only knows how many minor ones. Some of these dialects are difficult even for native speakers to understand, as anyone who has ever heard Sir Alex Ferguson speak will testify.

All such speech patterns are amply represented among NHS patients, and we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the problem. Even if a patient speaks textbook English (who does these days?), his speech may still be full of nuances that’ll go right by a foreigner – even one capable of reading that the FTSE 100 is two points down this morning.

Still Dr Frylewicz thinks he has been hard done by. He doesn’t like the new empowerment given to the GMC: “In my opinion it is a bad law, an anti-freedom law.”

I agree. Dr Frylewitcz’s freedom to cut off the wrong leg has been infringed – and a good job too. But then I understand what he means (I think). Any law contravening an EU law is by definition bad. Who does Britain think she is, regulating her own medical practice?

Frau Merkel is going to hear about this.