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During the dreary England-Andorra match yesterday, English football lovers were singing, to the tune of a popular song I’ve never heard, “Starmer is a c***, Starmer is a w*****!”

Since Sir Keir couldn’t be held personally responsible for England’s woeful performance on the pitch, one has to infer that the fans were venting their dissatisfaction with Labour’s woeful performance in government.

One has to praise the political acumen of our footie-loving masses, free as they seem to be from any partisan bias. Just a few months ago, the very same people were chanting “Tories out!” with the same gusto – and with the same justification.

Throughout the West, similar sentiments are echoed in reference to the mainstream parties taking turns in office. All of them fall short of people’s expectations; none of them seems fit to govern. Electorates are more and more willing to vote for someone different, which increasingly means anyone different.

This explains the rise of what is usually called populism, although the term is a misnomer. The trouble with mainstream parties isn’t that they aren’t populist, but that they are, albeit in less direct ways.

One of our greatest political minds, Edmund Burke, outlined what he saw as a proper democracy, but what was in fact a proper republic. He defined the role of parliamentarians as that of people’s representatives, not their delegates.

Elected officials, wrote Burke, should act according to people’s interests, not people’s wishes. When the two diverged, people’s wishes had to be ignored because they couldn’t always be careful what they wished for.

Burke, of course, lived in the second half of the 18^th century, and he fashioned his ideas out of the political fabric available to him. In those days, Britain and most other Western countries were governed by people trained for statesmanship from their cradle. They had a clear idea where the people’s interests lay and how best to serve them.

This doesn’t mean they were always right, far from it. In this world we aren’t blessed with perfection of any kind, only with some approximations thereof. And one doesn’t have to go beyond common sense to accept that intensive and extensive training helps in all sorts of fields of endeavour. And the more complex the field, the more it helps.

That situation has changed. Burke’s wise prescriptions have fallen by the wayside, as has the blueprint he drew for a constitutional (in Britain, monarchic) republic. Once modernity was ushered into history, different ideas took hold – this irrespective of the best-laid plans of the usherers.

In 1806, John Adams, America’s second president, wrote, “I once thought our Constitution was a quasi or mixed government, but they had made it… a democracy.” It didn’t take long, did it? What was in fact Burke’s notion of government was ousted so fast, in just one generation, that one has to think that a button had been pushed for a list of ineluctable begets.

The republican idea can’t coexist with the egalitarian Enlightenment ethos built around the unchallengeable advancement of the common man endowed with inalienable rights. These are bound to be understood sooner or later as the equal rights not just of human beings but also of political beings.

The egalitarian ethos clashes with the republican idea and, since numbers are on its side, wins. Defying Burke’s prescriptions, people’s representatives gradually become people’s delegates, catering to people’s wishes rather than serving their interests.

A new dominant political type evolves, the demagogue driven to assuage his powerlust by telling people not what they should know but what they want to hear. His own hold on power depends on how many people his empty phrases and promises can sway, or rather swindle because little he says bears any resemblance to reality.

Modern politicians’ power depends on how many deadly sins and their derivatives they expiate and glorify. Pride, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, sloth, wrath – take your pick, although you don’t have to. They can all work together as mechanisms sustaining political power.

In that sense, all modern Western politicians are populist. If they weren’t, they would be drummed out of politics. Yet the term is reserved for a particular sub-group within that group, one that steers clear of the mainstream.

The difference is purely tactical: mainstream politicians operate from the base of traditional, if debauched, institutions. ‘Populist’ politicians, on the other hand, go over the head of such institutions to sweettalk the masses without any institutional mediation.

Those politicians are usually described as populist right-wingers, but the adjective is more correct than the noun. Political terms and words in general these days mean whatever we want them to mean but, if we try to introduce some semantic rigour, such politicians aren’t right-wing.

From its inception in the days of the French Revolution, the term has been more or less synonymous with ‘conservatism’, an attempt to retain some core civilisational values in a rapidly evolving world. If we agree on this definition, then I struggle to name a single right-winger or conservative among today’s populist politicians.

This stands to reason for the populace they try to mollycoddle doesn’t want conservative civilisational values. Such values steer people away from the deadly sins they hold dear. They feel entitled to those sins and expect politicians to honour that sense of entitlement.

For example, if we accept Weber’s view of the Protestant work ethic as the propellant of economic prosperity, then there isn’t a single Western politician acting in that spirit. The constituents of that ethic are hard work and thrift, and both are too far outside the cardinal sins for today’s governments to countenance.

Which ‘right-wing populist’ politicians do battle for fiscal conservatism, which is the political expression of the Protestant (in fact, any sensible) work ethic? Not one, meaning that none of them is right-wing, although they are all indeed populist. Centuries of populism have rendered fiscal conservatism unthinkable.

An electorate will instantly vote only for those promising instant gratification, something for nothing. Granted, some voters aren’t like that, but they aren’t the ones who form the critical mass. Once that point has been reached, a countdown button is pushed for global bankruptcy.

Yet people, like pagan deities, are still athirst. Their appetites are translated into wishes, wishes into demands, and demands into inalienable rights. Over a couple of centuries, this has created a certain politico-economic model that any government can challenge only at its peril.

That’s why no Western governments are paying their way, nor is a single politician, however right-wing, populist or conservative, insisting they should. The most right-wing of them all in public perception, Donald Trump, is desperately trying to add trillions to the public debt, a valiant attempt copied everywhere, if in a scaled-down version.

This kind of penny has to drop sooner or later, and it’s only a matter of which country will go bust first. Starmer’s government is doing its level best to make Britain win this race, but several contestants are still neck and neck.

People sense this is the case, hence the tune they sing even at football matches. But how would they exercise their vocal chords should a ‘right-wing populist’ politician suggest that the whole economic model of the welfare state be scrapped?

If he said that we must balance the budget first and then start repaying the national debt, and if that means dismantling the welfare state, then so be it? This is pointless conjecture because such words can no more cross any politician’s lips than a call to slaughter every firstborn son (slaughtering babies before they are born is perfectly all right though).

That’s why His Majesty’s Loyal ‘right-wing populist’, Nigel Farage, is converging in his economic policies not just with Starmer but even with Corbyn. In France, the economic views of their own equivalent, Le Pen, are barely distinguishable from those held by the Trotskyist Mélenchon, or, in Holland, by Geert Wilders, another right-wing populist of modern nightmares.

You’ll notice that I’ve singled out the most obvious aspect of modern politics, economics. The situation in all other aspects is equally dire: culture, social structure, education, manners are all of them populist and none of them conservative. All have been cut to the egalitarian stencil of modernity, created in its vulgar, deracinated image.

So yes, had I been in that stadium yesterday and known the popular tune, I might have joined in. Provided, of course, that Penelope had stayed at home: she has no truck with such swearwords.

P.S. Speaking of modern politicians, I take vicarious delight in the squabbles unfolding within Trump’s administration. Apparently the black eye sported by Elon Musk a couple of weeks ago was caused by a punch thrown by Treasury Secretary Bessent in retaliation to Musk’s rugby tackle on him.

Why can’t today’s politicians settle their disagreements in the manner of Burr and Hamilton or, for that matter, Canning and Castlereagh? It would be so much more dignified and conducive to public good.  

John Adams, the second US president, identified the founding constitutional tenet of the American republic as “a government of laws, not of men.”

A third possibility never occurred even to that sage man, an oversight corrected by Donald Trump. Under his tutelage, America is run by a government of neither laws nor men, but by that of just one man, Trump himself.

Watching from afar, I’m amazed that a nation that has always venerated its constitution can so blithely watch it being crushed underfoot. The checks no longer check, the balances have lost their fulcrum, laws have fallen by the wayside. But one law looms large: Trump’s arbitrary will.

He began his second term in office by issuing a blanket pardon to all 1,500 people arrested after riots at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 – including those few directly involved in assaults on police officers. Trump started as he meant to go on.

A new legal principle was beginning to take shape: no one wearing a MAGA cap and playing lickspittle to Trump is ever guilty of any crime, even if convicted of one. Any such conviction will be quashed by a presidential pardon.

The mechanism usually involves an intercession by dubious characters Trump sees as his political and cultural kin, most prominently the rapper Kanye West and his ex-wife Kim Kardashian. It was this hideous couple who set the wheels in motion during Trump’s first administration.

In 2018, Kim, who turns a bad case of lipoedema into a cash-spinner, interceded on behalf of Alice Marie Johnson, 70. She was serving a life sentence for cocaine trafficking, a little transgression she had committed, according to Kim, only “to keep a roof over her family’s heads”.

I don’t know if Miss Johnson’s tough childhood was also cited, along with her having suffered the trauma of sexual and/or racial abuse, but one way or another Trump was moved. A few days later, after Kim’s then husband, Kanye West, had paid his main man Donald a visit in the White House, Johnson was freed.

When Trump returned to the White House, he was seething with hatred of the American judiciary who he knew were out to get him and his supporters. Well, not on his watch. He was prepared to pardon any MAGA convict irrespective of his crime.

(“Even paranoiacs have real enemies,” goes the old saying. Trump’s feelings weren’t wholly unjustified, for the Biden administration had disgracefully tried to commandeer the law to pursue Trump and his acolytes even when nothing illegal had been committed. However, Trump’s vengeance outdoes Biden’s bungling ten-fold.)

The scale of that planned undertaking was so large that a special position had to be created in the administration, that of ‘pardon tsar’. Or rather, in this case, tsarina, for Trump found a perfect candidate for the job: the very same Alice Marie Johnson.

One can see some warped logic in that appointment: an army general knows how to fight a war, an economist knows how to run the economy – and a pardoned criminal knows how to pardon criminals.

Such as the Chicago gangster Larry Hoover, serving six life sentences for running a cocaine empire with sales of $109 million a year. This pardon can also be traced back to that 2018 meeting of souls between Donald Trump and Kanye West, whose affection for the Donald is only matched by his declared admiration of Hitler.

Hoover is languishing in a Colorado maximum security prison, but he was also sentenced to 100-200 years for murder in Illinois, meaning he is unlikely to go free soon. But miracles do happen, especially when Kanye and Don are such good pals. For the time being, Trump has issued a federal pardon.

“It’s very important for me to get Hoover out,” said Kayne. “Because in an alternate universe, I am him.” I can just see his main man Don flashing an avuncular smile. Misusing ‘alternate’ for ‘alternative’ comes right out of the Trump textbook of English, while the MAGA cap covers up Kanye’s self-declared identification with a murderous drug runner.

The president can justifiably claim to be rappers’ best friend, always provided the ‘artists’ sport the regulation headgear. During his first term, he pardoned a whole batch of degenerates, and last week he laid his exonerating hands on NBA Youngboy, convicted of gun crimes.

And, should ‘P Diddy’ be found guilty of sex trafficking, he needn’t fret. “I would certainly look at the facts,” said Trump. Or, by the looks of it, just one fact: the design of the criminal’s baseball cap.

Trump’s underlings are quite forthright about this novel approach to jurisprudence. Last week, Johnson told Fox News she had pardoned two TV stars guilty of bank fraud because they were the “Trumps of Georgia”. And Ed Martin, Trump’s pardons attorney, freed a sheriff doing a tenner for bribery because “No Maga [is] left behind”.

Trump isn’t the first president abusing the pardoning privilege. Both Obama and Biden did so as well, the latter issuing a wholesale pardon even for those friends and relations who hadn’t even been indicted yet. Well, foresight is better than hindsight, we can all agree on that.

Yet Trump’s natural tendency to rule by fiat, bypassing legislative and judiciary bodies, poses a greater threat to the Constitution. Thus he usurps the constitutional domain of Congress by imposing arbitrary tariffs. Yet the executive branch can only take control of international commerce in an emergency.

The nature of such emergencies has never been tightly defined, although it’s assumed that constitutional documents understood them as wars or natural disasters. This gave Trump a loophole to interpret an emergency as anything he says it is.

Hence he can wreak havoc on domestic and international commerce unimpeded by any constitutional constraints. Perhaps the president could benefit from a remedial course taken by any naturalised American, specifically the chapters on the separation of powers and the three branches of government.

America is a resilient country able to withstand recessions, depressions, wars, civil unrest, assassinations of presidents. But that resilience comes from the country’s solid constitutional core that has stayed intact ever since the Civil War put the final touches on it.

An egomaniac bully combining the traits of a Mafia godfather and a self-appointed messiah can cause an accelerated erosion of that core. This would have a devastating effect even if some policies he pushes through are beneficial, as Trump’s doubtless are.

His attempt to slash government spending is ham-fisted and only marginally successful, but the instinct behind it is good. Trump’s refusal to be swayed by the net-zero madness should make any Briton envious, as should his effort to stem the flow of illegal immigrants.

But the constitutional sabotage Trump is perpetrating, along with his much-publicised corrupt shenanigans, will undo all the good things he does and make the bad things much worse. I don’t think America can afford a president like that.

When I read the headline Flagrant Sexism is Spoiling the French Open, I was shocked.

That reaction wasn’t caused by the putative demise of the year’s second Grand Slam event. What little of it I’ve seen suggests that the tournament is running smoothly enough, and it’s certainly not lacking in attendance statistics.

The word that went through me like a jolt was ‘sexism’. The effect was especially jarring because the offensive term appeared in The Telegraph, our supposedly conservative broadsheet.

The only context in which this coinage should ever befoul a conservative paper is scathing mockery of the New Age jargon. Using it as a meaningful term is an outrage.

This is no trivial matter for he who controls language controls the mind. By accepting glossocratic usages as meaningful and standard, a conservative paper betrays its core readership and its heritage. To use a tennis term, it forfeits a match to the enemies of everything such a paper is supposed to uphold.

It was only after I overcame the initial shock that I read the rest of the headline, which then led me to read the rest of the article. I undertook that effort to find out what on earth the author, Fiona Tomas, could possibly mean.

If I understand the word ‘sexism’ correctly, which is never to be taken for granted with this lexical stratum, it denotes a preferential treatment of men over women (never the other way around). Like all such non-words, it boasts astounding elasticity, easily expanding to castigate any attempt to suggest that men and women are biologically different.

At that point, sexism can neatly segue into other transgressions regarded as felonies by the New Age lot, such as misogyny, transphobia, homophobia and, well, conservatism. But the term’s narrow meaning is unequal treatment of men and women, in this case those playing in the French Open.

Such inequality could be interpreted as the two groups getting unequal prize money. But that charge no longer applies: the prize money is the same even though the men spend twice as long on court and show ten times the skill. I’ve often fumed in writing over that gross iniquity, brought about as it was by heinous political pressure exerted by the kind of people who wield words like ‘sexism’ naturally.

Anyway, the wrong side won that battle a long time ago, so in what form has sexism reared its ugly head at this year’s Roland Garros? Alas, curiosity can not only kill a cat, but also draw a chap into an article he knows will be idiotic and pernicious.

It turned out that Miss Tomas’s beef concerns the allocation of prime-time slots to men’s matches, leaving the women to do battle while Parisians and European TV audiences are at work. That, according to her, constitutes sexist bias at its most glaring.

She quotes one of the more vociferous players, Ons Jabeur, as “summing it up magnificently”: “Honouring one side of the sport shouldn’t mean ignoring the other.”

Now, as a Muslim, Miss Jabeur grew up with a religion whose tenets famously place a strong emphasis on equality between the sexes. Thus, one can understand the strength of her feelings, while still lamenting the weakness of her argument.

Honouring one side over the other has nothing to do with it. Rien, as they say at Roland Garros. The decision to schedule men’s matches at a time when more people can watch them is dictated by commercial considerations and also a proper concern for the audience.

Jabeur’s – and vicariously Tomas’s – argument would only make sense if more spectators would rather watch a women’s match than a men’s. But that’s not so, as any tennis fan would tell you, other than those who like peeking under short skirts more than watching a great game.

Show me a spectator who says that he’d watch Ons Jabeur play Coco Gauff in preference to, say, Alcaraz playing Sinner, and I’ll show you a liar – or else an upskirting pervert.

Miss Tomas anticipated that line of argument and set out to preempt it: “This flagrant sexism is based on the flawed rationale that women’s matches – by virtue of being played over three sets rather than five – lack quality, which risks broadcasters being left unsatisfied and fans not getting as much bang for their buck.”

What’s flawed isn’t the organisers’ rationale, but Miss Tomas’s silly notion. First, women’s tennis is inferior to men’s not just because it’s played over three sets, not five – although, in terms of “much bang for their buck”, enjoying five sets and not three does offer more enjoyment, other things being equal.

But they aren’t. Men’s tennis is vastly superior on every level, including those that have nothing to do with men being physiologically faster and stronger. This is something Miss Tomas either doesn’t understand or refuses to accept.

That’s why, having dug a hole for herself, she spurns traditional wisdom and goes on digging: “Aryna Sabalenka’s forehand was exceeding speeds of some men’s players at last year’s US Open.” Irrelevant if true.

That sentence alone proves that, unlike most spectators, Miss Tomas has never struck a tennis ball in anger. If she had, she’d know that any of those feeble-hitting men would play Sabalenka, world Number One, off the court without losing a game.

There’s more to a tennis shot than sheer pace. It’s true that Aryna Sabalenka, an Amazon six footer built like a middle linebacker in American football, can hit her forehand with awesome power. But all professional (and most semi-professional) male players hit the ball with a much greater variety of spin and placement – and an infinitely higher consistency.

Anyone can whack the ball very hard, provided you remove the net and the requirement to keep the ball between the white lines. Any grown-up without obvious physical impairments could probably drive a tennis ball the length of several city blocks.

But only a highly skilled player can strike the ball hard over the net and into the court time after time, moving his opponent corner to corner and keeping the rally going for 30 shots if he has to.

Watch the French Open, and you’ll notice that the women can hit hard and they can hit consistently, but they can’t hit hard consistently. Most points even between top players end with one of them dumping the ball into the net or driving it several feet over the line.

The men, however, usually commit fewer unforced errors in five sets than women do in three. For example, Sabalenka can’t hit three of her monster shots in a row, an inability that shows she hasn’t worked as hard on her technique as the men do.

Miss Tomas thus satisfies two essential requirements for a modern journalist: wokery and ignorance of her subject. Let me tell you, this young woman is going places. There’s no way of knowing where The Telegraph is going. Judging by this article, the paper has already arrived.

Since Trump first started uttering statements in public, he has been obsessed with tariffs. Over the past 40 years or so, the obsession has gradually turned into a mania.

Any country that had a trade surplus with America was ripping her off, such was Trump’s understanding of economics. And even countries like Britain that had a trade deficit with America were plotting to turn it into a surplus so that they too could start ripping America off.

The only way for America to protect herself against such predators was to hit back with punitive tariffs, thereby making America great again. Entreaties by conservative economists, such as Milton Friedman, were falling on deaf ears.

He and his University of Chicago colleagues were arguing that a country’s economic strength is defined by her imports, not exports. It’s when the former exceed the latter that a country has a favourable trade balance.

After all, if a butcher can afford to spend more on vegetables than a greengrocer can spend on meat, which one is doing better? Those bastards who are ripping America off, that’s who. No rational arguments could dislodge Trump sitting astride his idée fixe.

During his first term at the White House, when Trump was still compos mentis, he introduced a 25 per cent tariff on steel imports and declared victory: he saved 2,000 American jobs. Happiness all around; tariffs had done their job.

So they had, but that wasn’t quite the job Trump had in mind. True enough, 2,000 jobs of steel workers were saved. And then what happened?

A tariff is a tax imposed on both foreign exporters and domestic consumers because it makes the goods, in this case steel, more expensive. The trouble is that 80 times more Americans were (and continue to be) employed in steel-using industries than in steel-making ones. The cost of doing business went up in those industries, and redundancies ensued.

Some 77,000 of them, which equalled a net effect of 75,000 American jobs sacrificed at the altar of Trump’s mania. Now, Trump may be becoming deranged, but not so much that he has forgotten Einstein’s caution that, if you continue to do the same thing over and over again, you can’t expect different results.

In his current tenure, the president has taken those wise words to heart and refused to do the same thing over again. Rather than persevering with 25 per cent tariffs on steel, he has doubled them to 50 per cent. And now the new generation of Friedman’s colleagues at the University of Chicago are again warning that the measure will harm US consumers and cost US manufacturing jobs.

General Motors has already announced closure of plants in Maryland, Michigan, Ohio and Ontario, citing steel tariffs as part of the reason. Trump has winced at that development, yet has so far failed to do anything about reversing his bungling raid on the economy. But don’t despair: these days the Donald reverses his decisions as often as he brushes his dentures.

At the same time, he has announced his “Big, Beautiful Bill” of sweeping tax cuts accompanied by only token reductions in public spending. This is another crazy idea, and if he wants to find out how crazy, he ought to study Liz Truss’s tenure as Britain’s PM and why it only lasted 49 days.

This is something that even his closest acolytes know. In fact, when Elon Musk left DOGE the other day, he correctly stated that a bill can be either big or beautiful, but not both. Economic experts – but what do they know, eh? – are confidently predicting that any attempt to put this bill into practice will add four more trillion to the already existing national debt of 36 trillion, while pushing annual deficits over seven per cent of GDP.

No wonder credit rating agencies have stripped America of its top AAA rating, and investors are now charging five per cent interest on America’s borrowing. This can only rise if Trump persists in his amateurish bungling, and America is already paying a trillion dollars a year to service her national debt.

Musk cuts a frustrated figure. Say what you will about him, but he can add up with the best of them. Unfortunately Musk found out the hard way that his mathematical ability counts for nothing when it comes to negotiating his way around the political Beltway.

He took his job at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) fully intent on fulfilling his task of cutting two trillion a year off public spending. Alas, Elon had to discover that, for all his business acumen, when it comes to DC politics he is a rank amateur.

He, and his former boss Donald, should read the book The Triumph of Politics by David Stockman, Reagan’s head of OMB. He too attacked a similar task, albeit it with smaller targets, only to find himself buried under an avalanche of Washington mandarins.

Stockman realised it’s impossible to introduce large tax cuts without similarly huge cuts in spending. These he was unable to achieve, but neither Musk nor, more important, Trump learned from that experience.

As a result, Musk claims only $175 billion in savings, but even that amount doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The actual figure is probably half that but, even if Musk’s sums are correct, considering the gargantuan size of the federal budget, $175 billion falls within the range of a rounding error.

Many years ago, there was an exhibition of amateur art at the V&A. The clever poster advertising it said, “Noah’s Ark was designed by an amateur. The Titanic was designed by a professional.” I’m sure the headline worked as a way of drawing punters in, but the implied idea manifestly doesn’t work in politics.

Expertise gained in making cars, launching rockets or, for that matter, manipulating the US bankruptcy laws to one’s benefit doesn’t translate to the political arena.

This is a difficult idea to sell to today’s public paper-trained to believe that an expert in one area has to be an expert in all. Hoi polloi take on faith political ideas mouthed by various actors and pop stars whose credibility is boosted by the time they spend on TV screens.

Trump knows this, which is why he has successfully turned a negative into a positive, a standard weapon in the arsenal of any adman. Yes, I’m an outsider, he shouts at every turn. That’s why I can work miracles. I was on TV, wasn’t I?

Hence at least 20 members of his administration stepped into their jobs straight off the screens of Fox News and other media outlets. Most of them are puerile eccentrics, putting it mildly, who even lack the capacity to learn on the job, as Stockman eventually did. But then he was a bright young economist to begin with.

To be fair, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, is a grown-up economic professional and there are a few others. Yet their influence is negligible because Trump wants sycophants around him, not intelligent advisors. By all accounts, the latter have to turn into the former if they want to stay in their jobs.

One word out of turn, and their wildly erratic and unpredictable boss can sack them with the same ease he paraded in his TV show The Apprentice. Hence they wisely tell their boss things he wants to hear, pretending they don’t realise how deranged he is becoming.

The American presidential democracy can’t oust a bungling president as efficiently as Britain’s parliamentary democracy can get rid of a bungling prime minister. But it has other, mostly legal, ways to protect itself.

That’s why, as Tocqueville spotted with his eagle eye two centuries ago, political problems sooner or later become legal in America. The courts have already tried to stop Trump’s tariff madness, with him so far being able to slow them down with appeals. Yet it doesn’t take a genius to realise that legal challenges will be coming thick and fast.

And, if the Americans’ standard of living shows a decline, as most economists are predicting it will, after the mid-term elections Trump may become a lame duck president unable to push his madcap ideas past a hostile Congress and obstreperous courts.

That situation will be fraught with such dangers not only for the US but for the whole residually free world that it’s hard to wish for it. Yet we may have no choice.

According to our chief legal officer, Attorney General Lord Hermer, anyone who thinks Britain should withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is a Nazi.

That made me aware of another aspect of my personality, for I too hold that view. I don’t know whether Lord Hermer regards this belief as a sufficient condition for being a full-fledged National Socialist, but if he does, I’m half a step removed from buying a brown shirt and screaming “Sieg heil!”.

Lord Hermer described people like me as those singing a siren song that doesn’t even have any novelty appeal. “This is not a new song,” he explained.

“The claim that international law is fine as far as it goes, but can be put aside when the conditions change, is a claim that was made in the early 1930s by ‘realist’ jurists in Germany most notably Carl Schmitt, whose central thesis was in essence the claim that state power is all that counts, not law.”

Schmitt was indeed a Nazi philosopher, although one not without certain nuances. His political thought was authoritarian and statist, a platform from which he criticised liberal democracy. Schmitt came up with the notion of a “state of exception”, essentially meaning that the law laid down by the ruler may supersede the rule of law.

He became a hugely influential political and legal philosopher, but characteristically his influence is now mostly felt on the intellectual Left, through such Frankfurters as Benjamin and Adorno. At this point I become confused.

Specifically, I can’t decide how unimpeachable my Nazi credentials are. Yes, I think Britain should leave the ECHR – mea culpa, guilty as charged. And yes, I too criticise liberal democracy at times – another mea culpa.

Yet I know for a fact that I’m not a statist. In fact, my problem with liberal democracy is precisely that it inexorably leads to growing political centralisation and hence greater state power. And I certainly don’t believe that the government and its leaders should be exempt from the rule of law.

Oh yes, I almost forgot – I despise every word ever uttered by any member of the Frankfurt School. I’m mildly surprised though that these thinkers, most of whom were Jewish, found so much in common with Carl Schmitt, a rank anti-Semite. Statist anti-Western ideology must trump even tribal loyalties then.

So can I please be absolved of the charge of Nazism? I believe in a small state whose power is limited by law. Schmitt didn’t. I also believe in individual sovereignty vested in, but not usurped by, a sovereign parliament. Schmitt didn’t. I believe not in a strong leader but in a strong society. Schmitt didn’t.

Yes, his notion of ‘exception’ isn’t without merit, as long as the outer limits of exception are set by law and are so narrow as to exclude peacetime altogether.

At wartime, the central government may have to assume emergency powers outside the rule of law, and that’s where Schmitt’s ‘realism’ is justified. At all other times, however, his realism is tantamount to statism run riot, which is rather the opposite of my own political thought.

You could see me wipe my brow even as we speak. I’m not a Nazi after all, this is one conclusion I gratefully reach. Another conclusion is that Lord Hermer is a half-witted demagogue who doesn’t have a clue about Britain’s constitution, which is an unfortunate lapse for someone in his position.

People who, like me, want Britain to leave the ECHR aren’t insisting “that state power is all that counts, not law”. On the contrary, the opposite view that law is all that counts, not state power, is much closer to our convictions. However, we believe that the law that counts should be laid down by our sovereign parliament accountable to the British people, not by a socialist supranational bureaucracy accountable only to itself.

In fact, by committing Britain to the yoke of the ECHR, the state increases its power pari passu with its diminishing accountability. The outcome of that arrangement is paradoxically much closer to Schmitt’s idea of a state, in spirit at any rate.

Like all Leftist demagogues, Lord Hermer tries to make up for his understated intellectual ability with fiery rhetoric designed to stigmatise, not to persuade. That lot use words like ‘Nazi’ or ‘fascist’ to describe anyone they don’t like, the vermin mostly found on the political Right.

That’s like simpleminded conservatives branding every liberal a communist, although there the distance between a communist and, say, Lord Hermer is shorter than that between a constitutional monarchist and a Nazi.

He also equated the ECHR with international law, in essence saying that leaving the former means refusing to recognise the latter. That’s like equating the EU with Europe, as in “If you are a Remainer, you hate Europe”.

I heard that charge levelled at me by a chap who hadn’t crossed the Channel in 40 years, didn’t know a word in any European language, was ignorant of European culture – and yet called himself a European, unlike me. “How are you any more European than me?” I asked, to which he replied: “You are a Remainer”. The argument had thus come full circle, and that circle was truly vicious.

International law comes not from a bunch of Continental jurists banging their heads together but from an intricate system of treaties, blocs and alliances – and of course from the Western concept of legality that goes back to the book I doubt Lord Hermer has ever clapped his eyes on.

Historically speaking, Britain has nothing to learn about human rights from the French, Germans et al., whose own relatively recent record in that department is less than exemplary. This view, and I realise Lord Hermer will be surprised, is fully compatible with our ancient constitution.

If he persists with bandying ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi’ about, Lord Hermer ought to be reminded of the old saying about a teapot and a kettle. And, to make sure no cliché is left unused, what goes around comes around.

“Black lives matter.” Had someone said this to you 10 years ago, you would have felt genuine concern for the chap’s mental health.

What a stupid thing to say. Of course they do. And grass is green, ice is cold and water is wet. Why state the bleeding obvious? What do you expect me to reply, that black lives don’t matter? Any human life is invaluable and inviolable. Surely that goes without saying?

However, this statement would today elicit a different reaction because connotation has triumphed over denotation. Whoever utters that phrase now means something other than what he says.

Chances are that same chap has never uttered a word of protest when some ten million black lives have been lost in assorted Central African genocides over the past few decades. The deadliest massacres have been perpetrated in the Congo, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda – and one is currently under way in Sudan. Yet not a peep from any ‘community leaders’ and their rent-a-mob flock.

However, in 2020 thousands of rioters slashed and burned their way through American cities when a drug-addled criminal, George Floyd, was accidentally killed by a white policeman trying to arrest him. And no riots break out in America when thousands of blacks are killed every year by other blacks.

In other words, black lives don’t really matter in any absolute sense. They only begin to matter when taken by whites, especially those popularly seen as lackeys to the establishment. Thus concern for black lives is only a smokescreen laid to conceal the real meaning underneath.

Or look at net zero, another issue that excites certain swaths of public opinion. I’ve seen chaps with degrees from venerable universities sputter spittle over the issue. Yet there is not a shred of evidence supporting the underlying popular myth of global warming.

Any disinterested climatologist will tell you that 1) CO2 is a trace gas in the atmosphere, and the anthropogenic part of it is a trace gas within a trace gas, 2) the Earth goes through regular cycles of warming and cooling, while for 85 per cent of its lifetime the temperatures were higher than they are now, 3) the cycles are mostly caused by solar, volcanic and marine activity, with anthropogenic CO2 playing a role so negligible that it can be safely disregarded.

And so on ad infinitum, pile upon pile of scientific data. But no rational arguments will ever make a dent in the resolve of those who are prepared to destroy Western economies for the sake of a scientific fallacy.

One can respond rationally only to the face value of a statement, not to the sub-cortical animus behind it. Yet this subtext is all that matters. Saving ‘our planet’ is another puff of the same smokescreen laid to hide some nefarious designs taking shape behind it.

If you need any more examples, take your pick. Any cause cherished by our vociferous classes will do, such as the pro-Hamas campaign gathering momentum throughout the West, especially on campuses and in major cities.

You can argue until the sacred cows come home that this whole issue is ridiculous. After all, millions of people became displaced after the Second World War, including those hundreds of thousands of Jews who built the State of Israel. Tens of millions of refugees have been forced to migrate since, mostly from the downmarket parts of the world.

Yet the Palestinian Arabs, those who refused to live in Israel, are the only group still claiming refugee status decades later.

Israel, the tiny oasis of the West, is surrounded by populous Muslim states, most of them wealthy and all of them capable of accommodating their co-religionists. They don’t though, do they? Instead they are happy to see that enclave of wild-eyed deracinated Jew-haters drumming up support all over the West.

Every time ‘Palestinians’ commit yet another terrorist atrocity, either in Israel or elsewhere in the West, there’s a gasp of indignation lasting about two days. This is followed by months of incessant riotous protests against the victims trying to defend themselves.

Again, it ought to be obvious to any unbiased observer that the real issue has nothing to do with the protesters’ declared ends. Many of the idiots chanting “From the river to the sea” don’t even know which river and which sea. Their mouths may be screaming “Free Palestine”, but an unrelated message thunders in their viscera.

More examples? Thought you’d never ask. This one is more specifically British than generally Western. It has to do with the EU, a contrivance that still commands affection within certain tiers of the population, especially those in government, the media and, again, on campuses.

Spearheaded by Starmer’s cabinet, they are trying to override the greatest democratic mandate in British history and push the country back into the EU by stealth. Again, what’s so special about a single European state that’s worth sacrificing Britain’s sovereignty for?

Economy? But Britain on her own is doing better than most EU members, even though the full benefits of economic independence have been squandered by a succession of our awful governments.

Defence? One of the most pernicious arguments is that Britain should join forces with the EU to resist Russian aggression. Yet we already have one military bloc, NATO, to which both Britain and all EU countries, other than Austria, Ireland, Malta and Cyprus, belong. It has its structure, lines of communication, allocation of resources, well-rehearsed procedures.

Granted, the US is at the hub of that ganglion and lately she has been quite fickle. Still, it’s easier to refashion some of the systems within the old and trusted bloc than to create a new one, which may or may not prove viable.

Yet our membership in this superfluous concoction will entail many concessions to EU laws and regulations. So many that one is tempted to think this is the real purpose of membership, another desideratum covered up by a billowing smokescreen.  

It’s impossible to put forth a sensible argument in the hope of persuading anyone to abandon all those silly notions. For one can argue only against arguments, not the subcutaneous animus lurking underneath.

All those slogans may be inscribed on the flags of modernity, but carrying them into battle are people who don’t care about the face value of any slogans. They care only about their own hatred of our whole civilisation – not just of what it has become but of what it has always been over the past two millennia. None of it deserves to survive, as far as they are concerned.

They’ll happily expunge millions of lives, black, white, yellow or polka dot, as long as the object of their loathing is destroyed too.

They’ll dance on the ruins of every Western economy destroyed not by CO2 but by that net zero madness, provided the ‘capitalism’ they detest is buried under the rubble.

They’ll champion the Palestinian cause and then abandon it sharpish, once the only oasis of Western civility in the Middle East has been wiped off the map.

They’ll drag Britain back into the EU not because they think Britain will be better off, but because the great British institutions lovingly nurtured over centuries will bite the dust as a result.

Such is the order of the ongoing battle, and if we continue to attack the giant slogans everyone can see and hear, we’ll only be charging meaningless windmills. Our enemy isn’t the smokescreen, but the militant malcontents who hate everything we love.   

P.S. Both world markets and US courts abhor Trump’s tariffs. Yesterday the latter ruled them illegal, while the former responded to the ruling with an exuberant surge.

Displaying a touching concern for democracy, the White House appealed the decision, saying, or rather screaming, that “unelected judges” have no right to curb Trump’s attempts to alleviate what he calls a “national emergency”.

I have a solution. If Trump refuses to recognise any other than an electoral mandate, he should put the tariffs to congressional vote, as the US Constitution demands. If the two Houses vote in favour of the tariffs, that’s it, job done. Yet if they vote against, it may be difficult to argue that they aren’t elected either.

As the presidential plane landed in Hanoi, Brigitte Macron was videoed striking her stunned hubby-wubby under the chin.

The incident has received much publicity worldwide, yet some vital angles have been left uncovered. That’s understandable because no one knows for sure what caused that violent outburst, nor how often Mme Macron has to discipline Manny in that fashion.

When hard data aren’t available, one has to resort to conjecture reinforced by observation. As Sherlock Holmes explained to the hapless Dr Watson, there’s a big difference between seeing and observing, and most of the shocked onlookers saw but failed to observe.

To begin with, since the video is less than two seconds long, we don’t know whether what we saw was a single punch or part of a combination. I rather think the latter because the blow showed some pugilistic expertise.

Many commentators described it as either a slap or a push in the face. But it was neither. As anyone with experience of street fights will tell you, Brigitte struck Manny under the chin with the heel of her palm. I don’t know if she is indeed a man, as rumour has it, but she certainly throws a punch like a cage fighter.

This is one of the premier blows in the repertoire of violence, designed to inflict damage on the adversary while preserving the attacker’s knuckles from the likely damage of a fist punch.

If delivered with enough force, the blow can break the target’s neck, but I doubt Brigitte had a lethal intent. More usually, the open-palm uppercut is delivered to make the target lean backwards, leaving the lower part of his body exposed.

That’s why that distracting uppercut is usually followed by a knee in the groin, and I suspect that’s what Brigitte delivered, although the video was cut off before Manny bent forward, his face contorted in agony. The next blow in that combo would have been a chop on the back of the neck, but let’s not overindulge in guesswork.

From as much as I could lip-read, Manny moaned, “What’s this for, maman?”, to which Brigitte seems to have replied, “If I knew what it’s for, I’d have killed you, mon petit.”

Inadvertently though, Mme Macron served the noble cause of equality between the sexes, correcting the imbalance in the coverage of domestic violence. While much attention is paid to wife-beating, husband-beating receives much less publicity, although it too is rife.

Judging by that lip-read exchange, Brigitte wasn’t punishing Manny for any particular transgression. It’s more likely that the chastisement was meted out prophylactically, as part of a regular disciplining regimen.

Considering that the couple started their relationship when Manny was a 15-year-old schoolboy and 40-year-old Brigitte his mistress, in more ways than one, such interpretation isn’t far-fetched. That age difference has led some unworldly individuals to accuse Brigitte of paedophilia, but that shows woeful ignorance of French laws.

In fact, 15 is the age of consent in that naughty country, and Mme Auzière, as she then was, wasn’t committing statutory rape. However, she could have still found herself on the wrong side of the law by having sex with someone under her authority.

I could give you a long list of British teachers, both male and female, serving time for that sort of thing, but there is no point. Unlike the straitlaced Britons, the French are notoriously laissez-faire in such matters, so do let’s bin all that talk about paedophilia once and for all.

However, a marriage that got off to that kind of auspicious start probably has an element of domination to it. After all, before seducing Manny, Mme Auzière must have had many occasions to tell him to keep quiet in class (“Ferme-la, mon petit”) or even give him six of the best.

Admittedly, I don’t know if corporal punishment was as widespread in French schools as it was in British ones at the time. But if it was, this would put the current incident into a context of long standing.

Judging by the reaction in French social media, many people chose to put a political spin on the punch. According to them, Mme Macron was expressing her disagreement with her husband’s policies, in fact her revulsion with his whole tenure, a feeling widely shared across the nation.

Such people insist that the accompanying dialogue was rather different from the one I think I lip-read: “C’est pour la France, mon petit!” “Mais maman…” “Ferme-la!”

In any case, one chap wrote that Brigitte had done what all of France (toute la France) would have liked to do. I suppose there is always room for such partisanship but, inept though Manny undoubtedly is, Descartes is supposed to have postulated that “all knowledge comes from comparison between two or more things.”

It pains me to admit this, but compared to Sir Keir Starmer, Manny is an intellectual colossus and a statesman of no mean attainment. This, however, is a dubious compliment: the bar is set so low that there is no need to jump – one can simply step over it.

Some other commentators took Manny at his word and gave credence to his statement that the vicious punch was part of normal spousal horseplay. They even implied that it could have been part of an elaborate sex routine.

Now, though one wouldn’t put anything past the French, one has to doubt that the presidential couple would practise S&M in full view of several onlookers equipped with smartphone cameras. Anyway, I didn’t see my task today in reaching a definitive conclusion.

Rather I merely wanted to explore all the possibilities, leaving it for you to choose the likeliest one. I do wonder, however, if Lady Starmer has had any hand-to-hand combat training.   

“There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so,” said Hamlet, a victim of two pandemic blights: relativism and solipsism. Both eventually led to the belief that no absolutes exist outside each man’s own perception of the world.

When applied to matters philosophical, religious, cultural and generally civilisational, relativism is deadly. Yet when applied to politics, it’s essential. A government that obtusely refuses to budge on political principles may be as harmful as one that has no principles at all.

The same policies may be good or bad depending on the situation and the rationale behind them. Tariffs are a case in point.

They are fool’s gold when introduced for purely economic reasons, as a way of making the economy stronger. The opposite effect is much more likely.

Modern economies are driven by markets, and markets are ultimately driven by consumers. Since tariffs raise the price of imports, and economic autarkies no longer exist, consumers suffer and markets rebel.

President Trump finds this out every time he goes crazy on tariffs: markets just won’t wear it, and it’s impossible to disfranchise them in a market economy. Each time this happens, Trump backs down, as he did yesterday, magnanimously allowing the EU an extra month to relocate its export manufacturing stateside.

Chances are, come 1 July, he’ll back down again. Hitting America’s best allies with 50 per cent tariffs on top of those that exist already is bound to elicit retaliation in kind, and no one ever wins a trade war. Everyone loses, every economy comes out the poorer.

Yet politics doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, live by economy alone. Sometimes economic suffering may be justified, and has to be endured, by strategic necessity, in which case economic first principles must be set aside for a while.

Hence tariffs can have an important role to play in the drama of geopolitical strategy. They can reward good behaviour, punish misbehaviour and discourage future lapses in conduct. That’s why I have to praise senators Lindsey Graham, a Republican and Trump’s golf chum, and Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat.

Appalled by the continuing slaughter of Ukrainian civilians, they introduced legislation to hit with crippling secondary sanctions countries keeping Putin’s economy afloat. These include a 500 per cent tariff on any country that buys Russian oil, gas, uranium and other products, and I hope Xi is listening. He’ll have to choose between being Putin’s friend and America’s trading partner, a choice that can only go one way, as things stand at the moment.

Apparently, at least 70 senators support the bill, which means they can override a possible presidential veto. The situation in the lower House is less clear-cut, and there Trump could expect to kill the bill by vetoing it.

But will he veto it? Since, contrary to what Bertie Russell thought, the past is the only reliable predictor of the future, one has to fear he will.

Trump has said many times that sanctioning Russia could cause Putin to walk away from peace talks, which argument is defeated by a simple question: What peace talks? Those in which Putin has been expertly giving Trump the run-around, stringing him along while continuing his murderous war?

One hates to accuse a president of the United States of bad will, but it’s hard to explain this president’s actions and statements in any other way. For example, when Trump introduced sweeping tariffs in the first days of his White House tenancy, he exempted Russia – but not his European allies and nor, tellingly, the Ukraine.

However, barring NATO’s direct military involvement, the only way for the West to stop the fascist onslaught on Europe is to cut off the economic lifeline of Putin’s regime. The senators seem to realise this, but the statement Trump issued yesterday, after the largest aerial attack on Kiev in this war so far, makes one doubt he does.

“I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him,” wrote Trump. “He has gone absolutely CRAZY!.. Missiles and drones are being shot into Cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever.” 

Putin hasn’t gone “absolutely CRAZY”. He has always been absolutely EVIL, which has never prevented Trump from having “a very good relationship” with him, too good for some tastes. Yet the notion of evil doesn’t sit comfortably with the modern idea of progress, with the world supposedly going from strength to moral strength.

It’s more natural for today’s lot to ascribe evil acts to emotional instability rather than an immanent flaw in human nature revealing itself as savage brutality in extremis. Yet chaps like Stalin or Hitler weren’t mad – they were rational and consistent evil-doers. So is Putin.

In his very next sentence Trump contradicted himself. Putin, he wrote, “wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it”. That’s reason enough, wouldn’t you say? Massive morale-sapping attacks on civilians are the stock in trade of modern wars.

Using this tactic isn’t a symptom of madness. It’s a result of cold-blooded calculation.

Americans didn’t nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki because of the cities’ military importance, did they? Without passing judgement one way or the other, that was done to save American lives that would have been lost in trying to take the Japanese islands one by one.

Whether Putin is crazy or evil or both, surely his intention of swallowing “ALL of Ukraine” ought to be thwarted, if only because it’ll be much costlier to stop the Russian juggernaut once it rolls over the Ukraine and beyond. So can we expect the president to endorse the bill? Not so fast.

Because Trump then offset his opprobrium of Putin by displaying ill-advised even-handedness. Contrary to all incontrovertible evidence, the president likes to insist that both Putin and Zelensky are equally culpable in igniting the war, especially Zelensky.

Thus, he wrote, “Likewise, President Zelenskyy is doing his Country no favors by talking the way he does. Everything out of his mouth causes problems, I don’t like it, and it better stop.”

President Zelensky is trying to rally his country in its heroic effort to resist the invader who “wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it”. Hence Trump’s statement is yet another variation on the same theme: there’s nothing to choose between Putin and Zelensky. The former is guilty of attacking, the latter of not capitulating (having first provoked Putin, there Trump also echoes the Kremlin dictator).

One suspects that Trump’s real problem with Zelensky isn’t “everything out of his mouth”, but everything that isn’t: sufficiently ardent gluteal obeisance to the Donald. And the scenic route to his heart has to start from that point of departure, which non-negotiable condition Zelensky hasn’t fully grasped.

I hope that the emerging bipartisan support for the Graham-Blumenthal bill will hammer some sense into Trump, on this issue at least. Whether or not it does, it’s good to see that some people in DC see this war for what it is: a barbarian assault on the West, not just the Ukraine.

Behavioural similarities between Don Trump and Don Corleone are increasingly hard to ignore, although some differences still persist.

For one thing, people were only expected to kiss Don Corleone’s hand. Then Don Trump is a loudmouthed bully who speaks in a language of insults and threats, whereas Don Corleone spoke softly but carried a big lupara.

Then again, Don Corleone made people an offer they couldn’t refuse, whereas Don Trump, for all his deal artistry, often makes them an offer they can’t possibly accept (or, due to his use of the English language, even understand).

Such as his current offer to destroy European exports with 50 per cent tariffs unless those smelly American-hating foreigners move their production stateside by 1 June. Now, I don’t know if Don Trump has ever visited a factory but, if he has, he must know it takes longer than a week for a manufacturing facility to up sticks and move across the ocean lock, stock and barrel.

Even without the benefit of first-hand experience, Don Trump must realise that what he is demanding is an impossibility. Hence his ultimatum isn’t so much an opening move in a negotiation as a blackmailing ploy.

“Okay, EU,” he seems to be saying, “you can’t do that, I guess. But what can you do for me, to wet my whistle? Gotta be something big or your exports will sleep with the fishes.”

EU Trade Commissioner Sefcovic replied the only way he could: “EU-US trade is unmatched and must be guided by mutual respect, not threats. We stand ready to defend our interests.”

That means both sides are going to the mattresses, you put our exports into a hospital, we’ll put yours into a morgue. As always, it’s the foot soldiers, in this case consumers, who’ll bear the brunt of hostilities. The cost of at least some of those tariffs will be passed on to them, but that’s not the only casualty they’ll suffer.

Markets all over the world have again headed south, as they always do when Don Trump starts blackmailing other countries. This means people are taking yet another hit on their savings, investments and pensions. Don Trump’s mafioso tactics will affect at least two-thirds of all Americans, which is roughly the proportion of the population involved in securities markets.

Add to this the long-suffering bond markets, and the picture gets even darker. Every time Don Trump practises his art of a blackmailing deal, investors get out of US government bonds. As a result, the US has to pay higher interest rates on her sovereign debt, and the country has already lost her top AAA credit rating.

Another similarity between Don Trump and Don Corleone is that both put the family above all else, although the latter’s understanding of the word went beyond just his next of kin. Both relied on their sons as the most trusted lieutenants.

Don Trump’s sons, Don Jr and Eric, are busily cultivating the fields he has ploughed. They are striking billion-dollar deals all over the Middle East, with office towers, hotels, golf courses and other facilities to be built – with the host countries picking up much of the costs.

Jared Kushner, married to Don Trump’s daughter Ivanka, has built a $5.5 billion empire (emirate?), mostly in the Middle East. He has thus done considerably better than Don Corleone’s son-in-law did (remember your Godfather?), and he has even managed to break through his partners’ zoological anti-Semitism. You Sheik mine, I’ll Sheik yours, is the order of the day, and never mind parochial animosity.

All those camel drivers know to stay on Don Trump’s good side. This they’ve proved over the past couple of weeks.

Don Trump visited that part of the world recently, and a most productive visit it was too, for the US possibly and in the distant future, for his family definitely and straight away. His sons were getting writer’s cramp signing all those deals on his behalf, and the Don himself got his whistle wetted to the tune of a $400-million jumbo jet, appointed in his favourite style, early King Farouk.

His regime in Israel had to be shunted aside, much to its capo’s indignation. But that capo has only himself to blame: where are his billion-dollar tokens of appreciation for Don Trump? Where is his rispetto?

Whenever Don Trump has to deal with foreigners, he acts in the Don Corleone mode. Bully those who can be bullied, pacify those who are too strong to bully, betray those he sees as insignificant, be comfortable only with his fellow mafiosi, even those hostile in the past. They speak the same language, go after the same quarry, and they don’t have the silly scruples of civilians.

Well, I think this metaphor has expanded to its outer limit. The trouble with President Trump is precisely that his fiefdom isn’t a mafia family, but a great Western country that’s the linchpin of the world order that emerged out of the Second World War.

Trump’s corrupt bungling leaves that world order in a maelstrom of chaos reigning in every walk of life: economy, defence, diplomacy, alliances. Under his aegis, America is rapidly running out of friends – his demonizing the country’s friends and allies as its enemies is turning out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If the world doesn’t end up in an economic meltdown and a war of all against all, it’ll be in spite of Trump’s efforts, not thanks to them. This leaves only a few questions to ask, which is what I’ll do even though I don’t propose to have the answers.

One: How did a man like that ever end up as president of the United States?

Two: If he was the better option in two elections (and he was), what does it say about the current state of democracy in America and elsewhere?

Three: How can he continue to get away with corruption on such an epic scale? The MAGA lot made a huge brouhaha about the corruption of the Biden family, but his son Hunter only used his father’s position to help himself to the odd million or two. With Trump’s family, the scale is greater by orders of magnitude, and yet the word ‘impeachment’ hasn’t yet crossed anyone’s lips.

Four: is there any way of stopping Trump before he plunges the world into an unmitigated disaster, economic, military or both?

Five: and this one is ever so slightly facetious. Can Don Trump do the Brooklyn-Italian accent? As a native New Yorker, he should be able to without much trouble. That would be true to style.

“How could anyone possibly object to sexual-suppression chemicals being given to convicted sex offenders?” This question is rhetorical to Judith Woods who asks it in a Telegraph article.

Anticipating that some such naysayers are still on the prowl out there, she then preempts their ridiculous objections:

“Now, I am quite sure there are Dear Readers out there crossing their legs who are also really very cross at my upbeat tone. I will, of course, be accused by various chaps of sexism for my attitude towards emasculation. To them I say this: any woman, which is to say the vast majority, who has been sexually assaulted will have a very different perspective on the sanctity of a man’s genitalia.”

This last statement is as irrelevant as we’ve learned to expect from our columnists, especially – and I know I’m about to commit a crime of misogyny even though it’s not meant as such – those as young and pretty as Miss Woods.

I have no doubt that such victims would be happy to cut off their offenders’ genitalia with a dull butter knife. I’m equally sure that the nearest relations of a murder victim would gladly see the killer flailed alive. This certainty, however, falls short of an argument any reasonably intelligent person would recognise as such.

This whole subject has come up because Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood is rolling out a voluntary pilot scheme for the voluntary chemical castration of sex offenders in 20 prisons. Should the scheme prove a success, it’ll become mandatory.

Now Miss Mahmood describes herself as a “devout Muslim”, meaning, inter alia, that for her the notion of mutilating criminals rests on a sound scriptural foundation. Yet those of us brought up in a different tradition may indeed object to this scheme, even at the risk of incurring Miss Woods’s scorn.

Some objections are based on our moral and legal tradition, meaning they will be dismissed out of hand. But for old times’ sake, punishment may deprive a criminal of his liberty or even life, but it must not deprive him of his dignity because doing so offends the Western concept of humanity.

We should no more castrate rapists than we should cut off thieves’ hands, a common practice in some cultures. Such punishment doubtless prevents re-offending, but this train of thought will be derailed on its slippery slope. What about criminals convicted of GBH (grievous bodily harm)? Should they have their limbs amputated, those used in the commission of the crime?

We don’t do such things and neither should we castrate sex offenders, chemically or surgically. If their crime is serious enough and there is a palpable danger of recidivism, they should stay in prison for ever.

Some obvious objections to the scheme are less abstract. To begin with, the concept of a sexual offence has lately shown most remarkable elasticity. Thus, in 1900, there were merely 24 prisoners serving time for sexual offences in Britain. Today they account for 21 per cent of our prison population, or about 20,000 in absolute numbers.

Discounting the possibility that over the past century British men have developed such uncontrollable libido that they force themselves into women on an industrial scale, one has to believe that these days a sexual offence is defined rather more broadly.

Miss Woods hints at a possible outer limit of this definition by writing: “A shocking number of men joke about sexual depravity.”

I can confess to this from personal experience for I too have committed this verbal indiscretion, and more than once. Miss Woods doesn’t say that repeat offenders like me should be arrested, but the general tenor of her article suggests she’d welcome such an outcome.

At present, however, she is talking specifically about rape, not an unfortunate attempt at humour. And that crime is according to her more pandemic than Covid: “Every one of my girlfriends will openly say they know someone who has been raped (for a troubling number that “someone” is themselves)…”. [It should be ‘she’, not ‘they’, but I did tell you the author is young, meaning undereducated.]

So that’s where she got the idea that a “vast majority” of women have fallen prey to sex offences. What’s a vast majority anyway? Almost every one? Pull the other one.

Far be it from me to accuse Miss Woods of dishonesty, but my experience is different, and so is Penelope’s. We don’t get around as much as Miss Woods probably does, but then we are much older. Hence it’s a fair assumption that between us we’ve known as many women as she has – yet only one of them was a rape victim.

I have, on the other hand, had an academic colleague who was sentenced to five years for having consensual sex with a girl a few months short of her 18^th birthday, which was the age of consent in Russia at the time. I’ve also read of many cases in more civilised countries when men had rape charges thrown out, but not before they had served time in prison.

According to the law that evidently didn’t exist in 1900, if a man doesn’t stop as requested at any moment during even a consensual sex act, he is a rapist. I don’t want to shock you with salacious details, but sometimes a man can’t stop in mid-stroke even if he wants to. No matter: off to the pokey with him.

Patting a woman’s rump or planting an unwanted kiss on her lips would nowadays be classified as a sex crime, not just a show of boorish manners. I don’t know if such offenders get custodial sentences but, if they still don’t, rest assured they soon will. I rather think castration would be a tad too severe in such cases, don’t you?

Miss Woods does have concerns, “primarily about the way this treatment has been linked to the early release of prisoners in order to free up spaces in our overcrowded jails. The idea that simply taking medication would allow serious sex offenders to walk free early and spend less time behind bars is absolutely unacceptable.”

For once I agree: it is indeed unacceptable. But what’s the point of chemical castration otherwise? To prevent a rapist from forcing himself on his fellow inmates? Warders? Prison doctors? Visiting lawyers? And why would a prisoner agree to chemical castration if he is staying in prison anyway? It’s that deficit of logic again.

Miss Woods herself states throughout her article that the purpose of this barbaric idea is to prevent an ex-con from raping a swath through womankind once he has been released. If her purpose was to confuse me, she has succeeded.

Chemical castration involves administering two drugs, a serotonin inhibitor, to prevent a chap from thinking dirty thoughts, and a testosterone suppressor, to prevent him from acting on such thoughts. Here my confusion deepens.

The feminist line, that leitmotif of chick-lit and, by the looks of it, also chick-punditry, is that rape has nothing to do with sex, not in any primary sense at any rate. It has all to do with hatred of women accompanied by a desire to dominate and abuse them violently.

I’ve always struggled with that line, thinking that, if such were the case, it would be easier and far less messy simply to beat a woman up. A few quick punches, 10 seconds max, job done – another woman has been dominated and violently abused. Why go through the rigamarole of… well, you know the time-consuming steps involved in rape.

But if this line doesn’t work for me, it clearly works for feminists like Miss Woods. So how would that problem be solved by suppressing a criminal’s libido? He’d simply choose another way of expressing his misogyny, all the way up to murder. He isn’t after instant sexual gratification, is he now?

The next step would be turning an offender into a vegetable with frontal lobotomy, pace One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That procedure would certainly deter re-offending but, I repeat, we don’t, or at least shouldn’t, do such things in England. And if we start doing them, it won’t be England any longer.