Author: Alexander Boot

In the late 80s, when writing ads for The Sunday Times and other Murdoch papers, I had the pleasure of meeting the great man himself.

 An election was approaching, and someone asked Murdoch if he’d fire any employee voting Labour. “No,” he replied, “but I’d pay for his psychiatric examination.”

 “A man after my own heart,” I thought, thus proving that I hadn’t yet lost all my silly illusions.

 A few years later Murdoch threw the entire resources of his media empire behind New Labour in general and Tony Blair in particular, thus inaugurating the worst government in British history.

 Not only did Murdoch act as kingmaker, but in a way he himself became a co-ruler. For Blair’s government was the first one with no substance whatsoever, at least none that had anything to do with the good of the country.

 Blair’s sole purpose was first to grab power and then to hold on to it for as long as possible, paving the way to future riches (his own, not the country’s). To serve this worthy goal, his brain, whatever little there was to begin with, had to be replaced with focus groups, telling him which way the wind of public opinion was blowing.

But the public, especially after a couple of comprehensively educated generations,  doesn’t form opinions all by itself – it’s more or less told what to think by the media.

 Hence the Blair-Murdoch duopoly, ascending to dictatorship or something near enough not to make a difference.

 It’s the free press that curbs the dictatorial instincts of any government, and all of them have those. When the press forms a pact with the government, this critical check is removed, and both the government and the press begin acting with unrestrained spivery.

 In the case of Blair’s government, this resulted in an orgy of constitutional vandalism ultimately aimed at perpetuating the power of the new elite.

 In the case of Murdoch’s News International, this resulted in an orgy of unethical and often criminal investigative techniques, and we’re all still suffering from the hangover. Like all true co-dictators, Murdoch’s underlings had delusions of impunity and acted accordingly.

 Tony and Rupert remained in close contact throughout Blair’s tenure, and the closeness wasn’t just professional but also personal. It was probably a marriage of convenience rather than love, but a close-knit one for as long as it lasted.

 And speaking of marriages of convenience, in 1999 Murdoch married Wendi Deng, a pretty girl 37 years his junior.

 By and large (and I realise there must be exceptions), when a pretty young woman marries a much older and richer man, he’d be deceiving himself if he believed she was solely driven by passion.

 This point was wittily driven home when Debbie McGee, the young wife of the wealthy magician Paul Daniels, appeared on The Mrs Merton Show. The first question the sly hostess famously asked was, “So, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”

Rupert Murdoch was a billionaire, not a millionaire, and the age difference between him and his wife was almost twice that between the Danielses. Considering that young Wendi had previous in marrying an older man and cuckolding him with someone closer to her own age, the newlywed Rupert shouldn’t have expected unwavering fidelity from his young bride.

Nor should he have expected loyalty from his friend Tony – the word just doesn’t appear in the modern political vocabulary. Still, when the news of the putative affair between the two was splashed all over gossip magazines last year, Murdoch claimed he was shocked.

Blair denies that he and Wendi were ever more than close friends ( I would too if I were married to a battleaxe like Cherie), but both he and his ex-friend Rupert know it’s the appearances that count.

And the appearances certainly suggested hanky-panky. The couple had been sneaking away together for secret weekends at Murdoch’s California ranch, his New York apartment, his London house, hotels and friends’ yachts.

The penny dropped when Wendi, obviously not on top of modern technology, hit a wrong button and sent to a wrong address an e-mail detailing one such weekend at Murdoch’s Carmel ranch.

Murdoch immediately flew to California to interrogate his staff, who were apparently uneasy about the whole thing. They divulged such details as Blair going into Wendi’s bedroom and shutting the door behind him, the couple hand-feeding each other at dinner and so forth.

The New York staff told similar stories, and eventually Murdoch uncovered his wife’s diary in which she praised Tony’s “good body”, his “really, really good legs” and even his “butt”, while admitting she had a “crush” on him.

The way Murdoch described the subsequent events, they had a certain staccato rhythm: “I was in Australia. When I got back, I naturally asked the staff, and it opened up. That’s the story. And then, you know, a week later I filed. As soon as I could find a lawyer.”

The couple divorced last November, much to the chagrin of their two children (Blair is godfather to the second one). A tawdry story, if hardly a unique one, but I’m sure it does have a moral there somewhere.

Murdoch clearly forgot the old saw about supping with the devil and bringing a long spoon, except that in his relationship with Blair he too was cast in a diabolical role. He got what he deserved.

 

 

 

 

 

Modern tyrannical regimes tend to proceed from an ideological premise, which makes them both stronger and weaker.

Stronger, because an ideology naturally lends itself to slogans behind which it’s easier to rally the masses. For example, Lenin’s slogan ‘rob the robbers’, usually mistranslated as ‘expropriate the expropriators’, instantly appeals to envy, described as a cardinal sin precisely because it’s so widespread.

Hoist it up the flagpole and it’ll work like a charm. And what could conservatives run up their mast in response? ‘Secure property is an essential cornerstone of a civilised settlement, while its absence paves the way to tyranny’? All true, but try to inscribe this on your banners and see how many will follow.

Yet an ideology also carries a germ of weakness. For, before it’s reduced to slogans, it has to be put down on paper as some kind of pseudo-philosophical doctrine, a sort of statement of intent.

That means a careful reader doesn’t have to be a Sherlock Holmes to figure out what a tyrant, current or potential, plans to do. And if the careful reader represents a side wishing to thwart the tyrant’s plans, he’ll have a head start.

That’s how it should work in theory. In practice, however, normal people usually find it hard to believe that there are others out there who aren’t at all like them.

Hence good Westerners often assume that, say, Russian politicians are like our own, rudderless ships drifting from one election to the next. If our politicians are incapable of strategic thought, then so are everyone else’s.

We know that our lot will say whatever is politically expedient at the moment, even if it’s at odds with what they said five minutes ago. So we tend to assume that, mutatis mutandis, evil tyrants are the same: they just say things without meaning them.

That’s why the good people both in Russia and in the West glanced at Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done and dismissed it as schizophrenic drivel. In fact it was the blueprint for a Bolshevik coup, which duly arrived 15 years later.

Three months before it arrived, Lenin published another pamphlet, The State and Revolution, in which he explained, none too cryptically, that mass murder was on the cards: “the State is a special organisation of force: it is an organisation of violence for the suppression of some class.” Actually, he meant ‘all classes’, but let’s not quibble about details.

Nobody took any notice, which shows that lack of focus while reading can be punished quite cruelly. Ignore evil at your peril.

The same thing happened with Hitler’s equally frank book Mein Kampf, published eight years before he came to power. The future führer honestly said what he was going to do – yet it all sounded so crazy no one took him at his word. The book was ignored because nobody read it properly.

Such pandemics of functional illiteracy haven’t gone out of fashion. Rewind back to 1992, a year after the Soviet Union ‘collapsed’.

That event caused such an outburst of triumphalism that the West, licking its chops in anticipation of getting fat on the ‘peace dividend’, simply refused to read accounts of what the perestroika chieftains were actually saying.

That’s a pity, for had Westerners been more attentive in 1992, they wouldn’t be surprised now, watching in stunned stupor Col. Putin’s aggressive drive to rebuild the Soviet Union in 2014.

Speaking at a 1992 OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe) conference, Russia’s Foreign Minister Alexei Kozyrev issued the following statement:

“I must introduce some corrections to the concept of Russia’s foreign policy… The space of the former Soviet Union cannot be viewed as a zone in which OSCE norms can be applied in their fullness. It is in effect a post-imperial space in which Russia will uphold her interests by all available means, including military and economic. We shall firmly insist that all former Soviet republics immediately enter a new federation or confederation, and there will be some tough discussion of this…”

The ‘tough discussion’ was longer in coming than Kozyrev suggested, but at least it’s now going full speed ahead, much to the surprise of Western officials with reading difficulties.

It’s useful to note that personalities don’t really come into this. In fact, Kozyrev eventually lost his job for being too soft on the West, to the point of having ‘surrendered’ to it. And at the time he issued this clarification of Russia’s long-term policy, Col. Putin held merely the second-highest job in Russia’s second-largest city.

“There are none so blind as those who will not see.” 

 

    

 

These days one is supposed to greet any freak show with an outburst of cloying sentimentality.

The sight of a double amputee racing around the track on two futuristic blades is expected to fill spectators with pride about the indomitable human spirit overcoming adversity.

And so it probably would, if the poor chap did it in private. Done on an internationally televised show, the performance evokes the county fairs of yesteryear, with bored yokels paying to see a bearded woman or a pregnant man.

One woman apparently charged admission for the pleasure of watching her standing knee-deep in faeces. One kind soul told to her to stop humiliating herself that way and find something better to do. “What,” replied the woman indignantly, “and quit show business?”

This story is probably apocryphal, but the sight of Pistorius bouncing on his blades is there for all to see on YouTube. In both instances, made-up and real, one wonders about the performer’s mental health.

One may also wonder about our times, when a quest for cheap notoriety overrides any notion of taste, decency and self-respect in the performer and viewer alike. But this is a separate subject.

More immediately, I’d suggest that any cripple eager to put himself on display in this tasteless fashion has to be insane. Perhaps not much, but noticeably.

This, one would think, could constitute a plausible defence strategy: diminished responsibility due to temporary insanity, or some such. It probably wouldn’t be sufficient to get the killer off, but it could be seen as an extenuating circumstance.

But Pistorius and his team wouldn’t take this line. Nor would any judge (no jury trial in South Africa) accept starring in Special Olympics as prima facie evidence of insanity. The modern ethos wouldn’t let him.

Instead Pistorius maintains this was all an unfortunate accident. “I am not pleading not guilty because the scene was contaminated,” he stated. “I am pleading not guilty because what I’m accused of didn’t happen.”

Didn’t he shoot and kill Reeva Steenkamp, guilty only of poor judgment in choosing her bed mates? Yes, he did. But he didn’t mean to: “I made a mistake. My mistake was that I took Reeva’s life.”

This courageous admission of mistakes is accompanied by an unseemly spectacle of Pistorius refusing to look at photographs of his butchered girlfriend, weeping, sobbing and in general putting on a show similar in terms of taste to his Olympic feats.

I’m not going to second-guess the judge or his verdict. Just consider Pistorius’s version of the events.

Awakened in the middle of the night by a noise coming from his bathroom, Pistorius reached across the bed to grab his pistol. Somehow he failed to notice that Reeva, supposed to be asleep next to him, wasn’t there.

He then hobbled into the bathroom, gun at the ready. On realising that there was someone in the lavatory cubicle, Pistorius instantly fired four times through the door. Three of the bullets hit and killed Reeva who, amazingly, was the person inside.

Now as someone who used to own similar (legal) guns, I can tell you the story smells to high heaven. No one keeping such sophisticated kit at home would fail to get some training with it.

This would go beyond learning how to slam a magazine in, pull the slider back, release the safety, aim and fire. It would even go further than going to the range regularly and practising one’s accuracy.

The most important part of the training is learning how to keep the gun at home, when to fire and – most important – when not to. The training doesn’t have to be formal: anyone going to the range and hanging out with fellow shooters would pick it up from ambient air.

For gun enthusiasts are a talkative bunch, and the experienced ones will always insist on imparting their knowledge to a novice. I used to be such a greenhorn, so I know this for a fact.

But perhaps Pistorius just bought the gun and forgot all about it, until he was reminded of it by the noise? Maybe he never went anywhere near a shooting range?

Alas, he did. Regularly. Here he is, in a YouTube video, blowing a watermelon to bits, then telling the cheering and laughing onlookers, “It’s a lot softer than brains but f*** it’s like a zombie stopper.”

It is indeed. A 9mm pistol sensibly loaded with hydroexpansion rounds does have a lot of stopping power.

Such rounds are sensible for the purpose of self-defence because one doesn’t want the kind of bullet that can go through the intruder – and then hit an innocent party who happens to be on the other side of the window (or a flimsy wall).

And no gun owner who knows such arcana, buys an expensive 9mm automatic, loads it with expertly chosen ammunition, then practises on a range in the company of fellow sophisticates, would under any circumstances blindly shoot away through the door of his lavatory cubicle without first ascertaining that the person inside is a criminal intruder capable of doing him harm.

Such a scenario isn’t just unlikely but impossible. There are only two plausible versions here.

One, Pistorius is mad. Two, he quarrelled with his girlfriend, she tried to get away from him by locking herself up in the lavatory, he followed her there and, in a fit of criminal rage, shot her four times through the door.

I hope the judge won’t be swayed by the spectacle put on by the defence, showing how vulnerable Mr Pistorius looks on his stumps, claiming he was traumatised by his deformity, understandably feeling oversensitive about protecting himself.

My heartstrings refuse to be tugged in such a manipulative manner. As far as I’m concerned, a man who parades his disability in public forfeits any claim to sympathy even under normal circumstances. And murder doesn’t qualify as such.          

The seasoned BBC veteran obviously feels that at this stage he has little to lose.

That’s the only possible explanation of why Michael Buerk broke ranks. Moreover, he practically broke the BBC Royal Charter by saying something that’s sensible and, much worse, at odds with his organisation’s deepest convictions.

This is a figure of speech: the BBC’s convictions aren’t really deep. They are a tasteless cocktail of silly, faddish shibboleths, of which feminism is so firmly entrenched that one questions it at one’s peril.

Yet that’s what Mr Buerk did, by saying that those who get their jobs solely because they look good shouldn’t complain about getting sacked when they no longer do.

By uttering this blasphemous statement, he struck at the very foundations of the feminist agenda. Its cornerstone is the belief that a woman should have it both ways.

First she’s entitled to fire every arrow in the traditional womanly quiver, densely packed with weapons of mass seduction. This would include wearing in business situations the kind of clothes that would have got a Victorian woman arrested, flirting and occasionally sleeping with powerful men, in general exploiting her sexuality to its limits.

I’ve know even brilliant women who sometimes did that sort of thing, mainly because in our sexualised, paedocratic culture they were expected to. Yet many women who exploit their looks to get ahead aren’t brilliant, though they’re clever enough to know how to capitalise on their more jutting assets.

The brilliant women, who may have given themselves a little extra boost on the way to the top, stay there in their mature age because they never really needed the boost in the first place. It was their way of cutting a few corners on the way to the destination they would eventually have reached anyway.

But when the other type’s assets stop jutting and begin sagging, they really have nothing else to fall back on – except of course the whole feminist ethos, these days propped up by all sorts of laws, domestic or more usually European.

Reaching in their quiver, now bereft of Eros’s arrows, they fumble for sharp verbal missiles, those labelled ‘ageism’, ‘misogyny’, ‘discrimination’, ‘rights’, ‘fairness’, ‘tribunal’ and ‘the European Court of Human Rights’. 

Sometimes these weapons misfire; more often they hit the mark. Political correctness is a bloodless form of fascism and, like any other fascism, it demands unquestioning obedience, with any revolt put down mercilessly.

One is amazed that Mr Buerk has been allowed to get away with similar remarks for quite some time now.

In 2005 he spoke out against the general feminisation of society, with “life being lived according to women’s rules”, masculine traits marginalised and men “becoming more like women”. (With the words ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ already being pushed out of legal documents and increasingly everyday speech by the androgynous ‘spouse’ or ‘partner’, how long before the very words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ become infra dig?)

Six years later Michael Buerk broadened his attack by aiming it against PC fascism in general, not just its feminist manifestation. Specifically he argued that “giving people jobs purely on the ground that we need another six Asians, or we need another six lesbians, or we need another six pensioners” is “almost worse” than age discrimination.

This sort of thing goes beyond the realm of the BBC or the entertainment industry in general. These days every aspiring political leader has to promise that the sex, age and demographic composition of his cabinet, parliamentary party or any institution he staffs will reflect the make-up of the nation at large.

Any sensible voter would much prefer being governed by people of intellectual and moral integrity, regardless of any other characteristics. But this same voter would know that such preferences can’t be voiced in polite society – by anyone who expects to remain its member.

We all breathe the same ambient air, and it has become poisonous. The antidotes are few and far between, but Michael Buerk has supplied one by appealing to the common sense that has become very uncommon indeed – and may soon become illegal.

One just hopes Mr Buerk won’t be flogged too painfully. Of course his approaching retirement age may do for him what a magazine stuffed into his trousers used to do for a naughty schoolboy about to be caned.

 

 

 

 

Will he? Won’t he? If he does, what will we…

The air is abuzz with speculations, all liberally laced with primal fear.

Will Putin do to the whole Ukraine what he has already done to the Crimea?

If so, will he stop there?

How forcefully should we oppose him? Surely not all the way to the brink of nuclear war?

Good questions. Wish I had good answers, but I’m all out. However, I can offer a few observations, for whatever they’re worth.

First, here’s an intercepted telephone conversation between two Russian ambassadors in Africa, Messrs Igor Chubarov and Sergei Bakharev. The audio has gone viral on Russian websites, and one of the ambassadors has since acknowledged its authenticity.

Speaking in the customary Putinesque idiom, Mr Chubarov boasted, “This is how I talk to EU ambassadors: ‘Lads, we’ve taken the Crimea but that’s early f****** days yet. Next we’ll take your f****** Catalonia, Venice, Scotland and Alaska. That’s when we’ll take a breather.”

The other heir to the Russian diplomatic tradition of Dolgorukov, Razumovsky and Golitsyn added his own penny’s worth: “Latvia, Estonia and other f****** Europeans, kick’em up the a*** all the way to where they belong.”

This private chat shouldn’t be taken for a coherent enunciation of Russia’s foreign policy. It is, however, symptomatic of the deafening din of imperial chauvinism that, expertly fanned by Putin, is drowning all other sounds in the country.

Parallels with Nazi Germany have been overused over the last month or so, but that doesn’t make them spurious. Then the air thundered with Sieg Heil! Hoch! and Heil Hitler! The air of today’s Russia echoes with the sort of stuff exemplified by the refined exchange between the Russian Metternichs.

The public enthusiasm wasn’t faked then and it isn’t now. There’s no need: the masses are lemmings who’ll follow anyone over the precipice, provided he screams loudly and with psychopathic self-confidence. Muffling all other voices also helps, and KGB Col. Putin is a well-trained past master.

Once we’ve taken a plunge into the murky waters of historical parallels, we might as well dive deeper. In 1938 pro-Hitler thugs, ably assisted by Nazi spies and agent-provocateurs, rioted in Czech streets. When the police timidly tried to quiet them down, Dr Goebbels screamed all over the world that the German minority was being oppressed, and it was Germany’s duty to march in and save it.

Exactly the same sort of thing is happening in the Ukraine, today’s equivalent of Czechoslovakia, and Russia, today’s answer to Nazi Germany (so far in this respect only, but give Putin time).

Over the last few days gangs of pro-Putin thugs have staged provocative pogroms in the Ukrainian cities cursed with large Russian minorities: Donetsk, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Luhansk.

The thugs were flying the flags of the Ukrainian Communist Party, the Soviet Union and Russia. The slogan they were yelling makes historical parallels even harder to resist: “One people! One history! One future!” Is that the Russian for Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer? Same rhythm, same tripartite composition – more important, the same moral impetus.

The hire-a-mob mostly wielded primordial weapons: sticks, stones, bricks, knives and, above all, the fascist ideology. But the Ukraine’s Security Service also reports having confiscated the sort of gear one can’t buy in a corner shop: bombs, 300 machineguns, RPGs, pistols, hand grenades.

Other than taking some of their toys away, the police passively watched as the thugs occupied administrative buildings and decorated them with their favourite flags. A few of the buildings have since been reclaimed, even though they remain engulfed by a sea of frenzied human refuse.

According to some reports, ex-president Yanukovych has returned to the Ukraine, to supervise the pro-Russian riots and beg his good friend Vladimir for help. You know, the sort of help Hitler so generously gave to the Sudeten Germans.

This is where the comparisons must stop. For we don’t know yet whether the parallel lines will follow Euclid by remaining separate or Lobachevsky by converging. Will he or won’t he?

If he doesn’t, he’s not yet a Hitler circa 1938, though he may well be a Hitler circa, say, 1936. Though we’ll do well to remember that it wasn’t just chronologically that 1938 followed 1936, let’s stick to what we know for sure, shall we?

Fanning the toxic fumes of imperial chauvinism to a point where they poison the whole country (90 percent of Russians side with Putin) is a complex business. Tyrannical leaders seldom undertake such projects just for the fun of it, and Putin is like any other tyrant in this respect.

When deafening domestic propaganda is accompanied by provoking and organising riots in foreign cities, the task becomes even more daunting. If Putin has taken it on, it’s not just for the sake of winning the next election – he’s not a Western politician after all.

There’s no doubt whatsoever that Putin’s plan is to recreate the Soviet Union or a close simile thereof, thus going down in history as the Man Who Made Russia Great Again. Gaining control of the Ukraine has to be an essential part of this plan, and this is what’s currently under way.

I don’t know whether Putin will offer fraternal help (the Russian for tanks) to the oppressed Russian minority immediately, in the near future or some time down the road. A lot will depend on the West’s resolve to stop him in his tracks.

The West’s craven response so far must have emboldened Putin no end. He feels he can be reasonably sure that today’s West will echo the 1939 Left Bank intellectuals with their shrugs of “Mourir pour Danzig?”.

Today’s Westerners are no more prepared to die for Kiev than their grandfathers were to do so for Danzig. Yet in due course the choice was taken away from the granddads. Will it be taken away from the grandsons?

I don’t know. But, having grown up fighting Russian bullies, I do know they tend to recoil when hit on the nose before they’ve gone too far.

Yet it takes courage to throw that first punch, and this quality is in short supply in today’s West. So far.

For those unfamiliar with American folklore, the title is an oblique reference to popular beer commercials whose slogan was ‘And now it’s Miller time’.

Extrapolating ever so slightly, it’s Miller time in British politics, a time when a trendy, empty-headed leftie like the eponymous Maria can sit on the Tory front bench as Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.

Moreover, it’s a time when such a post, indeed such a department, should be seen as necessary – in a country that first showed the world how to organise government and now seems hell-bent on showing how not to.

A simple observation will demonstrate that the moment a state decides to govern culture through a specially designated ministry, the national culture takes a precipitous dip.

This is partly a case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc, for the existence of such a post betokens a tyranny, democratic or otherwise, and no form of tyranny is conducive to cultural expression. But in this instance the chicken and the egg exist in a symbiotic relationship.

For example, when the post was instituted in the nascent Soviet Union, Russian culture was in the midst of the so-called Silver Age, glittering with such names as Pasternak, Blok, Soloviov, Florensky, Levitan, Kandinsky, Prokofiev, Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, Bunin.

Enter the 1917 revolution, and with it the People’s Commissar for Education and Culture Anatoly Lunacharsky. What happened next… well, you know what happened next.

The Nazi revolution also introduced a similar post in 1933, appointing Joseph Goebbels to the task of overseeing culture, mainly seen as an extension of his principal function of Hitler’s chief propagandist.

Germany at the time, and for the previous 250 years, was synonymous with Western music to an extent to which no other country could ever be described as synonymous with any other art.

And what was Germany’s most salient contribution to the world’s musical culture after the appointment? The Horst-Wessel-Lied. Boy, did he ever. A bit of a come-down after Schubert’s and Mahler’s lieder, to say nothing of Bach’s cantatas, wouldn’t you say?

Somehow all those Debussys, Ravels, Célines and Prousts had managed to deliver a reasonable output in France long before 1959, when André Malraux rode his white steed into a newly created post of culture minister. Alas, one struggles to point out the country’s blinding cultural highlights in the subsequent period. Perhaps Messiaen; c’est tout.

Our own culture department is, along with the Maastricht Treaty, John Major’s gift to the nation. Alas, in both instances this is a gift that keeps on giving – cultural subversion in one case, political debauchment in the other.

From 2012 the post of Culture Secretary has been graced by Mrs/Ms Miller and, if she has done anything at all to promote cultural excellence, it has escaped me. Let’s just say that the fruits by which one is supposed to know them are clearly tasteless and arguably poisonous.

Mrs/Ms Miller first caught my attention during last year’s Wimbledon, when she attacked the BBC for its bias. No, not its leftwing bias, which is clearly at odds with the BBC Charter, and shame on you for having thought that. After all, Mrs/Ms Miller is a modern Tory politician.

No, what caused her ire was a few unchivalrous remarks sports presenter John Inverdale saw fit to make about Wimbledon singles champion Marion Bartoli. Clearly this was a cosmic problem requiring cabinet-level involvement.

Immediately afterwards, Mrs/Ms Miller announced she would boycott that year’s British Open which is to golf what Wimbledon is to tennis. Why? Because it was going to be held at Scotland’s Muirfield club that doesn’t admit women.

That club is, of course, a private institution and therefore has as much right not to admit anyone as a member as you have not to invite anyone as a guest. But Mrs/Ms Miller had to justify her existence somehow, as if presiding over the barbarian onslaught on what used to be a great culture wasn’t enough.

Now that she has been caught with her hand in the expenses till, everyone and his brother is clamouring for her dismissal. My point is that she shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

We’ve lost the ability to see the woods of fundamental corruption for the trees of the most trivial kind. Don’t get me wrong: we don’t want expense-cooking cheats as our governors.

But, given the choice, I’d prefer to see fiscal dishonesty rather than a fundamental political, moral and philosophical corruption going by the name of modern British government.

One of its telltale signs is the very existence of Mrs/Ms Miller’s department – and another one is someone like her engaged in any politics above the level of a local PTA.

So yes, by all means it’s Miller-out time. And is it too much to hope that the ensuing vacancy will never be filled?

When it comes to Fraser Nelson’s Telegraph piece on this subject, possibly all three.

Making historical allusions without knowing much history suggests ignorance laced with arrogance.

Not being able to draw logical conclusions from observation hints at a lowish IQ.

And refusing to see the obvious betokens a clean break with reality, which is a reliable symptom of schizophrenia.

But judge for yourself. Mr Nelson’s Panglossian argument is that the Muslims are perfectly integrated in Britain, which contrasts her favourably with other European countries where the Islamic communities remain alienated from the ambient culture.

No doubt the Muslims running retail outlets in the better London boroughs indeed appear to be perfectly integrated. But contrary to Mr Nelson’s perception there’s a bit of Britain south of the Thames, east of the Tower and north of the A40.

If he seriously thinks that the Islamic communities in, say, Leicester, Birmingham, Leeds or Bradford are more English than, say, the banlieues of France are French, he either hasn’t seen those places or is blind.

It’s there that the denizens insist on Sharia superseding the law of the land. It’s there that forced marriages are practised, along with such other rather un-British things as ritual murders, beatings and, within mostly the Somali community, female genital mutilation.

And it’s there that thousands danced in the streets celebrating the World Trade Centre atrocity and then the 7 July massacres in London.

True enough, there are more cars burnt every year in St Denis than in Streatham, and during the riot seasons even Muslims born in France scream ‘Nique la France!’ (f*** France). But I haven’t heard of too many French Muslims blowing up buses full of their countrymen – as British-born Muslims have been known to do.

Drawing Winston Churchill in as support is simply disingenuous. Does Mr Nelson really think that quoting Churchill’s 1897 remark “Their religion – fanatic though they are – is only respected when it incites to bloodshed and murder” supports Nelson’s assertion that Churchill’s “criticism of the Afghan tribesmen was that their behaviour was un-Islamic”?

This is cloud cuckoo land, especially in the context of Churchill’s other comments on Islam, such as “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytising faith” or “The religion of Islam above all others was founded upon the sword… Moreover it provides incentives to slaughter, and in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men – filled with a wild and merciless fanaticism”.

Equally silly is referring to the Victorian ministers’ boast that Queen Victoria, with her millions of Islamic subjects, was “running the greatest Muslim power on earth”.

Surely any sane person with or perhaps even without secondary education ought to know that Victorian England wasn’t a Muslim power. It was a Christian power with Muslim colonies.

By the same token, the Queen’s empire included millions of animist subjects. Did that make Britain an animist power?

And how does Mr Nelson think Queen Victoria and her ministers would have felt about thousands of minarets disfiguring the skylines of British cities? Especially had they known that most mosques lent their premises to virulent anti-British propaganda and incitement to terrorism? I bet with a lot less equanimity than the ministers of our own dear Queen.

Quoting isolated instances of British Muslims protecting Jews in, say, Bradford is equally – insane, idiotic, disingenuous? Choose your own adjective.

Some Russian peasants took in half-dead GULAG escapees. Some Germans harboured Jews. However most Russian peasants turned the emaciated skeletons in for a pat on the back and a couple of herrings. And most Germans either collaborated with the SS or at least were enthusiastic about its nightmarish deeds.

Individuals, regardless of their religion, have a free choice between good and evil, and some will choose good. However, large groups of people are judged collectively, and the judgment has to depend on the predominant tendency.

From sociology on to theology: “Anyone serious about either religion will know that they both worship the same God…”

If Mr Nelson were serious about either religion, he’d know that they are chalk and cheese. Of course they all worship the same God: ultimately there’s no other God to worship, at least not for an exponent of an Abrahamic creed.

But this is neither here nor there. For we aren’t talking about the fine points of doctrine. We’re talking about a Muslim community integrating into an historically Christian society – which has been proven time and again to be impossible.

Actually, this incompatibility can indeed be traced back to the divergent doctrines. Christianity would be impossible without freedom of choice, and therefore of thought; Islam would be impossible with it.

In this life such freedom may eventually lead to atheistic secularism, as it has done in the West. But it also ineluctably produces a quest for pluralism and tolerance, while its absence produces the diktat to kill infidels and apostates.

Not all Christians are loving and tolerant, and not all Muslims are murderous fanatics. But the overall tendencies are unmistakeable, which is why the two religions – or rather the civilisations they produced – have been at daggers drawn for 1,400 years.

The formerly Christian West has sheathed the dagger a long time ago; the Muslim East hasn’t and never will. Witness the horrendous persecution of Christians throughout today’s Islamic world, complete with churches burnt and parishioners murdered.

Muslims living in Britain aren’t yet in a position to persecute Christians en masse. But there’s little doubt where their sympathies lie, which makes Mr Nelson sound utterly ridiculous when claiming that “The integration of Muslims can now be seen as one of the great success stories of modern Britain.”

The only way for Muslims to integrate is to lapse as Muslims, or at least not to follow their religion too closely. Muslims qua Muslims are, and will forever remain, an alien – and typically hostile – element within any Western society.

Not to see this is a sign of either ignorance or blindness. And to insist that Muslim integration is ‘one of the great success stories of modern Britain’ is wishful thinking bordering on insanity.

Only last week Dave claimed that his subversive campaign for homomarriage was his proudest achievement.

Now he has confused his supporters by shifting his object of pride on to foreign aid. Or rather on having kept his promise (and the UN target) to blow 0.7 percent of our GDP on fattening the Swiss bank accounts of assorted tyrants.

By contrast, the United States spends 0.19 percent of its GDP on foreign aid, France 0.45 per cent and Italy just 0.13 per cent.

But Dave promised he would hit 0.7 percent, and who says he doesn’t keep his promises?

“I am proud,” he declared, “of the fact that we have taken 0.7 of this year’s GDP and given it to the poorest countries in the world.” Or, to be exact, to the richest people in the poorest countries. But hey, let’s not get hung up on details.

For once Dave is being too modest. For not only did he hit the desired target but he actually overshot it by £320 million. Altogether he spent £11.4 billion of our money – a massive increase of 30.5 percent on the year before.

That’s more than a third the size of our defence budget, which has been cut not just to the bone but to the bone marrow. But do let’s keep things in perspective.

We need to spend money on the armed forces in order to protect the realm. Dave needs to spend money on foreign aid in order to protect his job. In his mind there’s only one choice. Yet the choice is wrong even on its own puny terms.

But then we already know that Dave isn’t very good even at his chosen vocation: getting votes by hook or, in his case, by crook.

Not only did he fail to secure an outright victory against comfortably the worst government in British history, but he has since demonstrated an unrivalled ability to repel the core Tory support even further.

His previous object of pride, homomarriage, was a brilliant demonstration of that ability, with Dave effectively doing the job of Nigel Farage’s campaign manager by shifting a quarter of potential Tory voters UKIP’s way.

This current squandering of public finances will run the other abomination pretty close, and Nigel must be rubbing his hands with glee. Here’s Dave, shooting himself in the other foot, the shot many traditional Tories will take for the starter pistol in their race towards UKIP.

But forget electoral politics. This side of the Notting Hill set, the main problem with foreign aid is neither economic nor political. It’s moral.

Foreign aid is external welfare, and it has the same corrupting effect as the internal kind. In both instances, I’m not talking about helping those who genuinely can’t help themselves.

Internally this category includes the old and the sick for whom welfare is the only way to keep body and soul together. Externally the category comprises countries victimised by some sort of catastrophic force majeure: famine, earthquake, tsunami, drought.

Developed countries don’t need outside help to handle such disasters. Others often do, and refusing help may lead to starvation and deadly epidemics. Even worse, such heartlessness would betoken a deficit of charity – the ultimate slap in God’s face.

When such help is offered, it should arrive in the form of food, clothes and medicines whose distribution must remain in the donor’s hands. Otherwise, the only people helped will be the tyrants running those countries.

For example, when a massive famine broke out in Russia’s Volga region in 1921 (that sort of thing always happens immediately after all revolutions aimed at universal brotherhood), Western countries rushed in to offer help. The most prominent was Hoover’s American Relief Administration, which did manage to feed 10 million people by insisting on controlling distribution.

Other donors weren’t as streetwise, and the Bolsheviks recycled much of the aid back to the West, only for it to return in the shape of hard currency. As a result, six million died, showing the way for future tyrants: guns aren’t the only weapons they can use for crowd control.

An infinitesimal portion of our £11.4 billion was spent to relieve natural disasters. The rest was squandered by our spivocrats to present an image of compassion to their fellow spivs (or their intellectually challenged victims), both at home and abroad. Some of the money went to countries rich enough to produce nuclear weapons and launch space satellites.

It’s characteristic that, while preaching and even occasionally practising austerity, our mock-Tory government has actually increased the budgets of two giant socialist projects, foreign aid and the NHS.

The former is occasionally criticised; the latter is off limits, enjoying the kind of immunity these days not even afforded to God. Both have little to do with their ostensible purpose, other than jeopardising it.

Our nation’s physical health would be better served by a mainly private system augmented by charitable funds. Other nations’ economic health would be more robust if we removed any barriers to free trade.

But that’s not the point, is it? The point is for Dave to come across as sharing and caring. Never mind the statesmanship, feel the image.

Well, certainly not every day. Yet now doctors are saying that five a day, which was the previous recommendation, isn’t enough. That’s bizarre.

Even at a hormonally active age I had better things to do than to go at it like a hyperactive bunny rabbit all day long. Like reading, writing and mercifully very little arithmetic. Occasionally even going to work.

And I’d maintain that any reasonable, non-priapistic appetite ought to be slaked by one or two a day, with perhaps the odd peak activity when on a business trip.

It’s a sign of our licentious modernity that satyriasis and nymphomania should be pasted all over the papers under the guise of medical advice… Oops!

Never mind. My wife has just looked over my shoulder, as she so annoyingly tends to do, and said I ought to read the articles, not just scan the headlines.

What the articles are about, and anyone but a blithering idiot would realise this, is eating seven portions of fruit and vegetables a day – not the smut I, according to her, have on my mind. And isn’t it about time I started acting my age.

Well, I’ve now read the articles and I’m about to start acting my age. Part of this paradigm shift is insisting that my uninformed take on the headlines was less nonsensical than the articles themselves, or in fact the University College study on which they were reporting.

A portion of vegetables is defined as 80g. Seven times that makes 560g (I did do some arithmetic as a youngster). That’s a pound and a quarter to those fossils who are, like me, stuck in the Stone Age.

Call me a health Luddite, but this sounds like an awful lot. Let’s see.

A bacon sarnie for breakfast could perhaps accommodate a slice of tomato. Call it 20g.

A slice of pizza for lunch, with, say, a lettuce leaf and some other salady things on the side. Perhaps 40g in toto. Where are we so far? 60g? Now wine is made of fruit, does it count? Apparently not.

That leaves 500g, well over a pound to be gobbled up at dinner. That’s a lot of broccoli, too much actually, especially if you dress it with a little butter. Eating on that scale is how one gets fat, and surely obesity can’t be good for one’s health.

And wine still doesn’t count. Neither does that grappa in which one occasionally indulges after a slice of Black Forest.

All things considered, this seven-a-day business is clearly a non-starter for any self-respecting gentleman – or even a self-professed lady like my wife.

But hold on for a moment. The author of the study, Dr Ouinlola Oyebode (just think how far you’d go in life if you had a name like this), thinks what I’m saying is nonsense.

“The clear message here,” he says, God bless him, “is that the more fruit and vegetables you eat, the less likely you are to die at any age.” Logically, if one is unlikely to die at any age, one is likely never to die.

Now we’re talking. Dr Oyebode doesn’t need God to bless him. Since only the deity can confidently promise immortality, he himself is God.

Stuff yourself with the green stuff at every meal and, whatever age you are, you’re unlikely to die. The logical inference is that, if you were a vegan and wholly reliant on veg for your sustenance, you could give Methuselah a good run for his money.

Yet the same book in which Methuselah is one of the dramatis personae only promises three score and ten. Fine, thanks to clean water and antibiotics, perhaps now the book could upgrade to three score and twenty-five. Add another year or two for good (and utterly boring) behaviour and, give or take a year, you arrive at the universal life expectancy in the civilised world.

Perhaps in a generation or two this will grow to 90, even 100. But that’s it: the likelihood of death for all of us is, in round numbers, 100 percent. A time comes when we are absolutely, unequivocally guaranteed to die no matter what we have for breakfast.

Even God Almighty stops short of promising immortality in this life, at least not until he comes again with glory and all that. Nor does he talk about eating fruit and veg in that context, though he does offer some rather imperative dietary advice in the first part of his revelation.

Yet following the commandments of that book isn’t whither we look for immortality these days. Booklets on diet and exercise are a much more popular option in our pagan, solipsistic age.

Death is now seen as not so much tragic as unfair. Death breaks modernity’s chief promise of a long, possibly indefinitely long, life.

Never mind what kind of life, never mind how meaningless and spiritually impoverished. We want to live! Physically! Parrots can last for centuries, so how come we can’t? Death is no longer a transition to a new life. It’s a promise broken.

So by all means, eat your seven a day if that’s what turns you on. But if you expect never to die as a result, you’re in for a letdown. 

Nigel Farage has attracted spirited criticism for two separate sets of remarks based on the situation in the Ukraine. Some of the criticism was deserved. But not all of it.

It’s understandable that one political operator may admire another one’s technical command of his craft, without necessarily endorsing the ends to which such mastery is applied. This is what the UKIP leader probably meant when saying that Putin is the politician he most admires.

In a similar vein, a writer may admire another writer’s skill while despising his message. A pianist may praise another pianist’s fleet fingers without being enthusiastic about his interpretations. While fining a dangerous driver, a traffic cop may praise his car.

To be fair, Mr Farage explicitly disavowed both Putin’s personality and his policies, and he’s clearly not in favour of imprisoning journalists, although, if he read The Times regularly, he might rethink this position.

I’d also be tempted to add that Col. Putin not only imprisons his opponents, journalists or otherwise, but also occasionally has them bumped off without wasting taxpayers’ money on the pointless casuistry of legal proceedings.

But Mr Farage may not be aware of such details and, if he were, I’m sure he wouldn’t endorse them. Still, public figures must refrain from giving any encouragement to tyrants, and there’s no doubt that Col. Putin is one such.

This goes for politicians of the past as well. Does Mr Farage admire Lenin for coming out of obscurity to take over Russia? Stalin, for his devious skill in outflanking his fellow butchers Trotsky and Bukharin? Hitler, for twisting Hindenburg’s arm to appoint him Chancellor? Mussolini, for doing something similar to King Victor Emmanuel? Mao, for ousting Kuomingdan?

I bet he doesn’t. So it’s best not to shoot from the lip, especially when one is in one’s cups. The absence of such self-restraint smacks of irresponsibility, and this isn’t a quality we like to see in our politicians – even (especially?) in those with whom we agree on many issues.

Farage’s other related remarks, those on the EU having Ukrainian blood on its hands, deserve to be taken more seriously, if not altogether approvingly.

Again, I don’t know how familiar he is with modern history, but the West does have an unenviable record of first encouraging popular uprisings in oppressed countries and then getting cold feet at the last moment – only to see the uprising drowned in blood.

In 1956, through the good offices of the CIA-controlled station Radio Free Europe, the West, spearheaded by the USA, all but called young Hungarian patriots to arms.

They promptly rose, only to find out in short order that the support they were promised didn’t extend beyond hollow speeches. Soviet tanks rolled in, crushing the uprising under their tracks. Thousands died, another 45 years of slavery ensued.

In 1961 the CIA went further than mere encouragement. The Agency funded, trained and armed Brigade 2506, a group of patriotic Cuban paramilitaries yearning to reclaim their country from Castro’s bloodthirsty dictatorship.

On 16 April the 1,500-strong brigade landed at Playa Girón in the Bay of Pigs. Their chances of success were good: the patriots could rely on both public support and, more immediately important, the air support promised by President Kennedy.

Its primary role was to cut off the causeway through which Castro’s Soviet-made tanks could arrive at the beach. Yet at the last moment Kennedy chickened out, as Americans would say. The promised air support didn’t materialise, the causeway wasn’t bombed, the tanks arrived and the brigade was butchered.

In the first instance, the CIA didn’t hang any Hungarian students off Budapest lamp posts. In the second, it didn’t massacre Brigade 2506. Yet from any moral standpoint it can’t be absolved of guilt. In that sense, one would be justified to say that the USA had some blood on its hands.

But most of it was on the hands of the actual perpetrators, those who pulled the triggers, drove the tanks, soaped the ropes, tortured and killed. Above all, covered by blood from head to toe were the evil regimes against which the people rose with self-sacrificial heroism.

It’s tempting to think that such moral distinctions are too fine for all practical purposes. But moral law, like any other, accepts gradations of guilt. Thus, in the examples I cited, it would be wrong to hold the USA solely or even mainly responsible for the massacres. Yet equally wrong would be to absolve it of guilt altogether.

This preamble should explain why Nigel Farage was right in saying that the EU has blood on its hands, meaning the blood of those, mercifully few, Ukrainians so far killed over the last month. But such remarks are spurious unless they are counterbalanced by the sort of nuanced analysis I attempted above.

Yes, the EU was wrong to encourage open resistance against the rule of Putin’s puppets – unless it was prepared to offer tangible support in case of an utterly predictable backlash. No, the EU isn’t the main culprit here. This honour belongs to Putin and his cronies, both inside and outside Russia.

Professing admiration, however qualified, for Col. Putin is ill-suited to the role of such a counterbalance. In general, it’s best to refrain from controversial statements on subjects about which one knows little.

Then again, unlike the three mainstream parties UKIP has a serious argument to make. And any argument is by definition polemical: one argues not only in favour of some proposition but also against another.

Polemical fervour has been known to encourage ill-considered off-the-wall remarks, but serious politicians tend to avoid those. By failing to do so Nigel Farage did his party no favours. Moreover, he may have reinforced its undesirable image of a single-issue campaigner.

This isn’t to say he has no point at all in some of his remarks: the EU can indeed be held partially responsible for the bloodshed. Most of those who attacked Farage probably refuse to admit it.