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My friend Tony and I disagree on swearing. Granted, neither of us would use foul words in written or formal speech, but he decries such usages even in private conversation.

When I say they can have a useful role to play as intensifiers, he says they don’t intensify. Tony may have a point: such words are now so ubiquitous that they’ve lost much of their power to shock.

But not all of it. A few years ago, I had a book party for my latest contribution to the dustbin of English letters. In my opening remarks, I said: “I desperately wanted to invite my good friend Vlad Putin, so I wrote to him, asking if I could count on his presence. He replied, ‘No, you can’t’. And you know what? He doesn’t even know how to spell ‘can’t’.”

The audience gasped, and Tony wasn’t even there. However, a bad word was only alluded to, not used. Still, that was too much for an audience, some of whose members, I knew, weren’t themselves above turning the air blue at the slightest provocation, or without thereof. Nevertheless they found what I considered an innocent joke unseemly in that semi-formal setting.

Fine, I realise I’m no saint and have little chance of earning that distinction in the time I have left. Yet I recognise, and try to follow as best I can, the post-Victorian conventions of written English style.

Moreover, I welcome some of those conventions, such as eschewing rants, criticising with a rapier and not a battle axe, praising without fluff, avoiding unnecessary superlatives and so forth. And yes, no swearwords in the public domain, unless quoting someone else.

That tradition still largely holds in serious writing and public speaking – even though Kenneth Tynan first used the popular four-letter word on television 60 years ago. People who violate that tradition, such as Donald Trump the other day, are seen as barbarians and with good reason, certainly in his case.

Still, as I say, I’m no saint. I swear quite a bit in conversation, which I put down to my having been raised on the wrong side of the tracks, aka Russia.

In the generation of Russians who grew up in the ’60s, swearing was pandemic at every cultural level, from factory workers to scientists, scholars, writers and musicians. In fact, Muscovites used to quip: “Even though he swore a lot, he wasn’t a man of culture”.

For the Russian intelligentsia, swearing was an expression of protest, as I suppose it also was for their Western counterparts, who took Tynan’s provocation as a call to action.

Young Russians thereby protested against the most oppressive regime in history, whereas young Westerners protested against… well, ask them. I haven’t a clue. Let’s just say that they weren’t saints either.

But what about people who actually were saints, those who lived, say, 500 years ago?

Since I haven’t done a comprehensive study, I can’t generalise. I can, however, observe that the standards of the stylistically allowable used to be much laxer in those days.

By way of illustration, I’d like to cite St Thomas More’s rather colourful response to Martin Luther’s scurrilous attack on King Henry VIII.

A bit of context is in order. In 1521, in the early days of the Protestant heresy, Henry produced a theological treatise The Defence of the Seven Sacraments (Assertio Septem Sacramentorum). That strong and polemical restatement of Catholic doctrine was received differently by the Church and Luther.  

Pope Leo X gave Henry the title Defensor fidei (Defender of the Faith), which all English monarchs have kept since then, somewhat cheekily since they are no longer Catholic. Luther, on the other hand, delivered this diatribe:

“[King Henry] would have to be forgiven if humanly he erred. Now, since he knowingly and consciously fabricates lies against the majesty of my king in heaven, this damnable rottenness and worm, I will have the right, on behalf of my king, to bespatter his English majesty with muck and shit and to trample underfoot that crown of his which blasphemes against Christ.”

Thomas More, still some 400 years removed from his canonisation but already possessing the requisite qualities, felt called upon to defend his king, who in his turn was defending his faith. Reading it, you can see how the standards of rhetoric and polemic have changed since then:

“Come, do not rage so violently, good father; but if you have raved wildly enough, listen now, you pimp… But meanwhile, for as long as your reverend paternity will be determined to tell these shameless lies, others will be permitted, on behalf of his English majesty, to throw back into your paternity’s shitty mouth, truly the shit-pool of all shit, all the muck and shit which your damnable rottenness has vomited up, and to empty out all the sewers and privies onto your crown divested of the dignity of the priestly crown, against which no less than against the kingly crown you have determined to play the buffoon.

“Since he has written that he already has a prior right to bespatter and besmirch the royal crown with shit, will we not have the posterior right to proclaim the beshitted tongue of this pracitioner of posterioristics most fit to lick with his anterior the very posterior of a pissing she-mule until he shall have learned more correctly to infer posterior conclusions from prior premises?”

Quite. I couldn’t have put it better myself. Now tell us what you really think.

Remember that Thomas More was not only a scholar, jurist and statesman, but also a prolific writer. He was no bungling amateur bursting into the world of letters without first bothering to learn its rules. More wrote over 20 books, plus countless articles, pamphlets and treatises. Hence, one has to believe that his style of polemical prose was representative of his time, or at least not alien to it.

On balance, I prefer the way serious people frame their arguments these days. As Margaret Thatcher once said to a heckler, “When you shout, no one will hear you.”

But then a part of me wishes English style had retained some of its erstwhile uninhibited quality. In general, one gets the impression that the traits that are (or at least used to be) associated with Englishness, such as restraint, self-effacement, understated emotions, rationality, lightness of touch, tendency to meiosis, are relatively recent embellishments on the national character.

(An early Victorian cookery book has a quarter-teaspoon of Cayenne pepper in practically every recipe. A few decades after it was published, both English cuisine and English style lost their taste for hot spice.)

Thomas More, who was the most respected scholar in England at the time, certainly didn’t evince those qualities in his defence of the king who went on to kill him 14 years later. I’d even suggest that, had he used stronger arguments couched in less impassioned rhetoric, his defence of Catholic doctrine would have had a better effect.

However, historical hindsight is never 20/20. Mine is informed by the Christian apologetics I was weaned on: those by Newman, Chesterton, Belloc, C.S. Lewis, quite a few others. All of them were either Victorian or post-Victorian, meaning that both the English character and style had already been solidified and codified into a pattern that’s still with us today.

None of those men or their literary descendants would even consider churning out More-like prose full of scatological language and metaphors. Tony approves such probity, unreservedly. So do I, come to think of it. But not quite unreservedly.

Our prime minister hardly ever speaks the truth or makes an accurate observation. And what do you know: when he broke that dismal trend the other day, he had to apologise for it.

Watching the back of Nigel Farage pulling further ahead in the polls, Starmer realised he had to do something to slow Reform down. So he did.

Uncontrolled immigration, said Sir Keir, taking his cue from Farage, risks turning Britain into an “island of strangers”. That was a bold statement, coming from him, and Starmer was made to regret it.

All hell broke loose. Starmer’s parteigenossen screamed bloody murder, or rather ‘Rivers of Blood’. That is what the Left call Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech about, well, uncontrolled immigration. Yet the similarities between the two orations are strictly marginal.

Powell was prophesying something in danger of happening. Starmer was commenting on something that has already happened. Powell had to rely on his strong analytical mind; Starmer merely had to keep his eyes open.

Unlike Starmer, Powell was an intelligent and educated man. That was his undoing because he said, among other things: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.

The Roman in question was Virgil, and Powell quoted from The Aeneid. However, his detractors, unburdened by classical education, only heard the words ‘river’ and ‘blood’.

Since then, Powell has been the target of unremitting posthumous vitriol, as conservative prophets usually are, especially when they are proved right. Even the original conservative knew that, which is why he said: “A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country.”

In the same speech Powell also expressed his foreboding less poetically. If immigration continued unabated, he said, the white population would find themselves “strangers in their own country”.

Since Starmer also used the word ‘strangers’, his fellow Marxists squealed so loudly that one could get the impression they’d like to ban the offensive word from the English language. Would they burn every recording of Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night? I wouldn’t put it past them.

Seeing a leadership challenge looming large before his very eyes, Starmer hastily apologised for having uttered the only true statement in his life. Neither he nor his speechwriters, he pleaded, realised that unfortunate turn of phrase would make him sound like that dreadful man, Powell.

This reminds me of a story from the 1920s. When the great pianist Leopold Godowsky instructed his pupil how to play a particular phrase, the boy protested: “But if I play it like this, I’ll sound like Rachmaninov.” Don’t worry about it,” smiled Godowsky. “You won’t.”

His Marxist friends jumped on Starmer’s case not because what he had said wasn’t true, but because it was. If London is anything to go by, white Britons (even co-opted ones like me) already look and sound alien in the nation’s capital.

They represent just over a third of the city’s population, and you don’t need statistics to confirm it. Purely anecdotal evidence gathered during a walk through central London should suffice.

The palette one encounters in the throng is distinctly off-white, and English is hardly ever spoken, especially in a way that betokens a native command. The staffs of shops and restaurants are mostly either from North Africa or the Middle East, or perhaps the low-rent parts of Eastern Europe.

Many of them can hardly speak or understand English. And even some immigrants from the civilised parts of Europe are strictly monolingual in their mother tongue. When the French bakery chain, Pain Quotidien, opened in the King’s Road, Penelope and I had to speak to the staff in French to make ourselves understood.

And I’m talking here about the upscale city centre, not the predominantly Muslim and West Indian areas of South and East London. A blindfolded stranger dropped in the middle of those places who’d then have his blindfold removed would wonder if he is in Pakistan or Jamaica. Another possibility wouldn’t even occur to him.

As I said, you don’t need statistics to realise that Powell’s prophecy has come true. But statistics are available, for those doubting Thomases who refuse to believe the evidence before their own eyes.

Four in ten people living in London were born overseas. One in seven are Muslims, which number includes our illustrious and recently knighted mayor, known in some quarters by his nickname, Sadist Khan.

Nearly one-quarter of Londoners don’t speak English as their main language, and 320,000 of them can’t speak English at all. That’s the population of a sizeable city, such as Leicester.

Some 600,000 illegal immigrants also bless London with their presence, and I find this datum baffling. If statisticians can count them, then the authorities know who they are and where they live. How come they are still at large and in Britain? People committing illegal acts are criminals, aren’t they? Don’t tell me – I know you know, and you know I know.

The usual claim is that diversity enriches Britain’s culture. Well, it certainly doesn’t enrich her economy: migrants take much more out of it than they put in, and that’s before we count the intolerable pressure they put on public services and infrastructure.

Nor can I see how several million newcomers who can hardly string two English words together make the natives more cultured and refined. It’s easier to see how they can make the natives poorer and less safe.

Statistics bear this supposition out, certainly in London, which provides a glittering example for the rest of the country to follow. Over the past few years, shoplifting has gone up 15 per cent in England – but 54 per cent in London. Theft has gone down 14 per cent in England – and up 41 per cent in London.

Muggings, burglaries, robberies, car theft (a category in which London comfortably leads all major Western cities), even murder – crime is spinning out of control at an ever-increasing speed. Hordes of beggars and people sleeping rough may not be breaking any criminal laws, but they certainly don’t add much to the gaiety of the place.

Three of the top four most dangerous towns in England are upmarket boroughs of Central London (which for the purposes of that study were treated as separate towns): Westminster (crime rate of 432.3 per 1,000 population), Camden (195.2) and Kensington & Chelsea (157.3).

Not all of this crime wave is caused by immigrants, as they exert their ameliorating cultural influence on England. But much of it is.

Any sociologist worth his salt and a shot of tequila will tell you that large groups of aliens feeling no historical, cultural or social attachment to a place are bound to have a detrimental effect on its identity. Again, anecdotal evidence comes in handy.

I moved to London in 1988. And the London I moved to a mere 37 years ago was a different and infinitely better place than it is now. Much of this deterioration has been caused by foreign elements in the city having reached or exceeded the critical mass.

A couple of hundred thousand newcomers can make a city more interesting. Restaurants offering exotic fare pop out, French bakeries and Italian delis compete for custom. The city’s soul (especially its tastebuds) may indeed become enriched. But when the indigenous population is turned into a dwindling minority, that soul is ripped out.

The Great Fire of 1666 burned much of London, but it didn’t cauterise its soul. The problem Starmer mentioned is much worse – it shows what devastation his ideology can wreak on a vibrant and flourishing city.

So apology not accepted, Sir Keir. It’s denied for being stupid and cowardly.  

Conservative pundits are gloating: 130 Labour MPs have rebelled against the government’s bill to cut the welfare budget by a mere four per cent.

That earth-shattering reduction of a budget now topping £100 billion a year is to come at the expense of genuinely disabled people, those suffering from MS, Parkinson’s and similar conditions.

Should the bill be enacted, they’ll have to wash themselves and prepare their own meals. Since most of those patients are unable to perform such arduous tasks, they may starve to death in their fetid houses, see if the government cares.

Now, about 11 per cent of all Britons, 7,000,000 in absolute numbers, receive some form of disability or incapacity benefits. This means we have more cripples now than in the aftermath of either World War, which strikes me as incongruous.

Moreover, the number of such benefit recipients has doubled over the past 20 years. Why? The demographics of Britain haven’t changed much since then, and I can’t remember offhand any major wars claiming vast numbers of limbs during that period.

The hard-nosed, insensitive part of me pushes the rest of my system to conclude that perhaps some of those recipients aren’t so disabled that they can’t get a job or look after their own nourishment and hygiene. Such malingerers would be the first place I’d look for possible cuts in the welfare budget.

Yet even those few who, unlikely as it sounds, may be even more hard-nosed and insensitive than I am would agree that MS and Parkinson’s patients can’t survive without help. Choosing them as the first group to suffer benefit cuts looks insane.

However, when Chancellor Rachel Reeves mentioned the forthcoming cuts in her Spring Statement last March, most of the same MPs reacted like ecstatic schoolgirls throwing items of their intimate apparel at pop stars. Why such a change of heart now?

Having calmed down after their fit of Schadenfreude, those same pundits gathered their wits and came up with a credible answer. The dissenting MPs are driven by their numeracy, not conscience.

They’ve looked at the polls, seen where they are heading, pondered the rapid rise of Reform, and realised where Starmer’s stewardship will lead them at the next election: the rough and tumble of private life. That harrowing prospect would have made them rebel with equal gusto against any bill proposed by Sir Keir.

This time around, their lips may be saying “no cuts to disability benefits”, but their hearts are screaming “Starmer out!”. That’s what they really mean – and that’s where I disrespectfully disagree.

This reminds me of the old Persian tale about a tyrannical shah dying. Jubilant crowds sing and dance all over the land, and only one old woman is weeping quietly. “What’s the matter, Grandma?” a passer-by asks. “Aren’t you happy the tyrant is dead?” “Young man,” replies the old woman, fighting tears. “I’ve lived for a very long time, and I’ve seen many tyrants come and go. And you know what? Each incoming tyrant was worse than the outgoing one.”

Nowadays, most people vote not so much for some candidates as against others. The general train of thought runs along these lines: “The present government is rubbish. It’s so [expletive deleted] bad, that the next lot have to be better. [Expletive deleted] me, they can’t possibly be any worse.”

That’s where those hypothetical individuals are terribly wrong. The next lot can be worse and usually are. Perfection is absolute, but rubbishness is relative. There is, by definition, no upper limit to the former, but there always is a new lower limit to the latter.

In this case, the talk in Whitehall is that a Labour leadership contest is brewing, and Starmer may soon be ousted. The signals being sent out suggest that his replacement will combine Disraeli’s sagacity with Churchill’s fortitude and Attlee’s appeal to Left-leaning voters.

Yes, but who specifically? Funny you should ask. Deputy PM Angie Rayner, of course. Why?

That half-literate girl as feeble of mind as she is febrile of ideology is the talk of the town. An éminence grise and PM in waiting, she is supposed to be the big race-neutral hope of the Labour Party and the whole country.

Well, let me tell you, Starmer may have already put Britain into a coffin, but you can rest (or rather tremble) assured the Angie will hammer the nails in. This fire-eating class warrior and member of the Labour Friends of Palestine promised Britons in 2021 that her party “cannot get any worse than a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute pile… of banana republic… Etonian… piece of scum.”  

Angie also supports ‘transgender rights’, whatever they are, and of course Black Lives Matter, something Karl Popper would call an unfalsifiable proposition. Actually, going down the whole list of Angie’s ideological positions is a waste of time. She has never seen a destructive cause she couldn’t love. Just name one at random, and she supports it.

‘Things can’t get any worse’ is idealism at its most simple-minded, but, alas, no one has ever accused the electorate in any country of voting on the basis of an historical perspective and sound political principles.

That unfortunate sentiment was behind the Labour 170-seat landslide at the last general election. People, including some of my readers, were saying, rightly, that the Tories were rubbish and, wrongly, that they had to go.

Now they are gone, possibly for ever, and we have the worst government in British history, or at least one that can successfully compete for that honour. And, given the chance, Angie can prove that things can indeed get much, much worse.

Moreover, replace Labour with any other realistically possible government, and things still won’t improve much if at all. The social, economic, political and cultural foundations of today’s Britain are termite-eaten and so rotten that the resulting cracks can’t be papered over.

The whole rickety building must be pulled down, the site cleared of debris, and a new structure erected. Malignant rot of socialist subversion has penetrated the old one, and, unless the problem is dealt with decisively, the house will come tumbling down like Jericho.

The starting point ought to be the thorough dismantling of the welfare state, to which the true-blue Tory Peregrine Worsthorne wanted Britain to “claim allegiance” back in 1954. So the country did, in one of the worst displays of self-harm in her history.

Neither Britain nor any other European country can keep afloat that leaky raft floating on the rowdy ocean of debt. The problem is so much more than just economic. It’s above all moral.

With 11 per cent of all Britons on disability benefits and over 50 per cent on some kind of state support, the nation has been so thoroughly corrupted that any government could introduce drastic changes only at its peril.

Even if some politicians, say Nigel Farage, don’t start out as socialists, the closer they get to power, the more socialist they get. Even a solidly anti-socialist PM like Margaret Thatcher blessed with the best advice the country could offer was only able to touch things up here or there, shoring the tottering structure up as best she could.

Everything she was able to do has since been mostly undone, by Labour and Tory governments alike. Some of them let the disease fester unimpeded, some try to put a coat of paint on a condemned building. But condemned it remains.

So forgive me if I refuse to gloat over Starmer’s impending demise. On the contrary, I hope Sir Keir hangs on for as long as he can. Whatever comes after him is practically guaranteed to be even worse.   

The title of Françoise Sagan’s 1959 novel asked this question of Brahms, not Burke. But, as an alliteration junkie, I couldn’t resist the temptation of a little verbal playfulness.

Yet the question I ask myself is dead-serious, as is the reply: yes, I do like Burke, passionately. But not unequivocally. Actually, the only person in history other than Jesus Christ whom I do love with no reservations is Bach, but then I’m not much given to hero worship.

Neither, I suspect, is Daniel Hannan. Yet the general tone of his thought-provoking article Tax is Theft suggests that he’d be willing to make an exception for Edmund Burke, whom Lord Hannan calls “the grandfather of Anglophone conservatism”.

I agree with Lord Hannan on most things, including most points he makes in his article, but my understanding of conservatism differs from what I infer to be his.

To begin with, there is no such thing as ‘Anglophone conservatism’, although it’s true that people who call themselves conservatives in English-speaking countries have much in common. However, the differences between, especially, English and American conservatives are as salient as the similarities.

Lord Hannan identifies the similarities precisely and correctly: commitment to localism, not centralism; small, not big, government; low, not high, taxation; free, not corporatist, economy; free, not protected, trade; enlightened patriotism, not obtuse nationalism; limited, not promiscuous, public spending – and I’m sure there are quite a few others.

However, I do have a semantic problem there. All these undoubtedly good things circumscribe libertarianism, but they don’t circumscribe conservatism. Lord Hannan seems to use those terms interchangeably, which obviates the need for one of them. If they are identical, why do we need both words? That’s not how language works.  

Thing is, they aren’t identical. The principal difference between libertarianism and conservatism is their attitude to the Enlightenment and its dicta. Conservatives reject them more or less wholesale, and libertarians don’t.

The former correctly see the Enlightenment as a systematic and, alas, successful attempt to destroy Christianity. That knocked out the cornerstone of our civilisation, which used to be called Christendom, but no longer is.

What English conservatives seek to, well, conserve is the last survivals of Christendom still not expunged or debauched by post-Enlightenment modernity. The primary ones are the monarchy and the Church, with the two inextricably linked.

If this type of conservatism still held sway in Britain, Burke would indeed be one of the formulators (not sure about the ‘grandfather’) of British conservatism. He regarded religion, specifically Christianity, as the bedrock of civil society.

An unrelenting critic of deism and atheism, Burke saw an established religion as the guarantor of constitutional liberties and the upholder of moral and political tradition. And while remaining a lifelong adherent of his father’s confession, Anglicanism, Burke also campaigned for the rights of those who, like his mother, remained Catholics.

It’s from that premise that Burke wrote, prophetically, his scathing pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France that came out three years before the worst excesses of the Terror, including regicide. That book was more than just a polemic.

When castigating what was wrong about the French Revolution, Burke managed to convert homespun traditionalism into a coherent political philosophy. That makes Reflections one of the most significant works of conservative thought, which no self-respecting bookshelf should be without.

Yet Burke was a Whig, not a Tory, and nothing illustrates the difference more vividly than a contrast between his hailing of the American Revolution and Dr Johnson’s opposition to it.

The editor of Burke’s works, EJ Payne, summarised Burke’s account of it as “a revolution not made but prevented.” In common with most Whigs, Burke didn’t recognise the divine right of anointed kings, and hence didn’t reject the principle of replacing a monarchy with a republic – provided the ancient principles of government were thereby upheld.

Burke didn’t detect the slippery slope he was stepping onto: the political (or any other) culture of Christendom ultimately couldn’t survive Christendom. America and France started a downward slide, but then, unlike us, Burke didn’t have the benefit of hindsight.

Burke’s friend, Dr Johnson, a Tory to the core, pointed out a telling, if not especially profound, paradox: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

That was excellent knockabout stuff and a strong rhetorical point. It’s true that Messrs Jefferson, Washington, Madison et al. saw no incongruity between their pronouncements and owning (in Jefferson’s case also procreating) chattel human beings. However, the real issue lay even deeper than that.

The Founding Fathers were deists or agnostics almost to a man, and some of them, specifically Thomas Jefferson, detested Trinitarian Christianity. After the First Amendment proscribing an established religion was passed, Jefferson gloated that it put up “a wall of separation between Church and State”.

Implicitly, this was a dig at England, which Jefferson and most of his colleagues cordially loathed. They wanted to transplant onto American soil the trees of the English Common Law, while severing their roots nourished by England’s Trinitarian faith.

Dr Johnson realised that the American Revolution was inspired by Enlightenment ideas and therefore dismissed it. Edmund Burke didn’t realise that and therefore hailed it.

That’s why throughout the next, nineteenth, century Burke became a seminal figure in what Americans called conservative, but was in fact libertarian, thought. In Britain, however, he remained a marginal presence, with the Whigs seeing him as not Whiggish enough, and the Tories too much so.

The latter understood conservatism in its proper sense, as an upholder of social, political and cultural tradition above all else, but not to the exclusion of all else.

The Victorian Whigs, while also respectful of tradition, believed in laissez-faire economics at home and free trade abroad. They were opposed to protectionism, and their success in having the Corn Laws repealed spelled Britain’s economic success.

Whig ideas put into practice created in the Waterloo-to-Ypres century the greatest economic growth Britain has ever enjoyed, though at some cost to traditional institutions. At the same time the rearguard action by Tory aristocracy was modestly successful in alleviating the pains of this rapid growth and keeping the now threadbare social fabric from being torn to tatters too quickly.

All that ended with the First World War. Out went the Tory aristocracy, gassed in Flanders, taxed in Whitehall. In barged the twentieth century, with the key political confrontation in Britain now being not one between Tories and Whigs, but between Whigs and socialists, or, if you’d rather, the Right and the Left.

The word ‘conservatism’ lost its true meaning, just as the concept it designated lost its true base. It was at that point that Burke came into his own, with Whiggery ruling the roost to the right of the political divide. Modernity took some elements out of Burke and conveniently discarded what really was conservative about his thought: the first two parts in the quintessential conservative triad of God, king and country.

That was no hardship in the US, where post-revolutionary Tory conservatism never existed, nor could have existed. The US polity was and remains essentially an Enlightenment project, however different it may be from its more radical offshoots, such as socialism.

In America, the cocktail of Enlightenment anthropocentric egalitarianism and laissez-faire economics shaken with a measure of Burke has produced what Americans call ‘conservatism’, and Lord Hannan calls ‘classical liberalism’, aka Whiggery.

Conservatism in its true sense is dead in Britain as a dynamic political and intellectual force, but some individual conservatives are still extant. When they try to enter the public arena, they have no choice but to accept the trans-Atlantic political taxonomy.

Thus Margaret Thatcher, a Whiggish radical through and through, is worshipped as a conservative icon. And Lord Hannan has no choice but to create a terrible mishmash of words like ‘conservative’, ‘libertarian’ and ‘classical liberal’.

This is meant as no criticism of either Lady Thatcher or Lord Hannan, good sorts both, although one wishes the latter could have found a way to use the word ‘Christian’ once in a longish article about conservatism. Still, he is realistic enough to recognise that Thatcherite Whiggery is the best we can hope to get in today’s Britain.

That, to him and American libertarians, comprises such excellent notions as free trade, small government, low taxation, minimal regulation. Real English conservatism, on the other hand, may welcome all such lovely things. But they aren’t what it’s all about.

Edmund Burke, that sagest of all Whigs, would dislike the world ‘conservatives’ try to construct, partly in his name – and he would abhor other facets of modernity.

I’m sorry though that, prophetic as he was in most other respects, Burke failed to see that the political ideal he saw in his mind’s eye was incompatible with the Enlightenment – in either its French or American variants.  

President Trump didn’t listen to Tulsi Gabbard, his Director of National Intelligence, and he was right.

A few days earlier, Tulsi listened to President Trump, and she was pathetic.

Back in March, Miss Gubbard, having reviewed piles of intelligence information, testified before Congress that yes, Iran had stockpiled nuclear materials, but no, Iran wasn’t building nuclear weapons.

Since I haven’t read her entire testimony, I don’t know how she explained what Iran was stockpiling those materials for, and building secret facilities to refine them.

As the country is one of the world’s top oil producers, its need for nuclear energy doesn’t seem especially urgent. Even if it were, the country was already producing uranium refined to 60 per cent. That strikes me as a bit of an overkill (pun intended): nuclear power stations don’t need anything purer than 3.5 per cent.

But hey, I have no access to heaps of intelligence provided by half a dozen US services, and Tulsi does. Nor do I have at my disposal, as she does, a huge staff of analysts who go through the data with a fine-toothed comb. Hence, I have to bow to superior expertise.

But then, a few days ago, President Trump who had already made the decision to wipe out Iran’s nuclear facilities, said Tulsi was “wrong”. What intelligence really showed was that Iran had a “tremendous amount of material” and could have a bomb “within months”.

Tulsi instantly concurred, and actually went the president one better. Iran, she said, could have nuclear weapons “within weeks”. Her congressional testimony had been taken out of context by “dishonest media”.

The media may be dishonest but they do understand English, especially the primitive variety of it spoken by Miss Gubbard. I can’t imagine they lied when reporting her assurance that no nukes were in Iran’s pipeline. Nor could they have possibly misunderstood a simple binary proposition: Iran either developing nuclear weapons or not.

I have a much better explanation for this little mishap. Tulsi Gubbard is an incompetent sycophant who regularly commits the deadliest sin of an intelligence officer: telling her superiors only what they want to hear.

For example, she makes strong pro-Putin noises because she knows that’s what pleases Trump at the moment. If Trump changes his tune, Tulsi will sing in chorus, possibly citing new intelligence. Back in March, it suited Trump to believe that Iran wasn’t trying to build nuclear weapons, so that’s what she told him.

For the president then to say that intelligence really showed something very different was tantamount to agreeing with my description of Tulsi as an incompetent sycophant. Sycophancy Trump clearly doesn’t mind, but sometimes it no longer makes up for incompetence in his eyes.

Let’s remember that US presidents get daily briefings from top intelligence officials. Hence Trump saw exactly the same data as Tulsi had seen, and read exactly the same conclusions drawn by the analysts.

Discounting the idea that Iran wasn’t over-refining uranium beyond any peaceful application in March but has since begun to do so, Trump a) knows that Tulsi misleads him and b) is no longer prepared to tolerate that because he now wants to hear the truth.

The truth is that the ayatollahs have been working towards developing nuclear weapons – there is absolutely no doubt on that score. It’s also true that they are crazy enough to use such weapons on Israel, especially since we now know her Iron Dome is rather porous.

That could happen within months, as Trump said, or within weeks, as Tulsi changed her mind to admit. But either way, that’s not a chance either Israel or the US could take.

For it can’t be gainsaid that such a scenario would be mortally dangerous not just for Israel but for the whole world. Israel would doubtless respond in kind, and a nuclear war would break out in the Middle East, with a good chance of its spreading outwards.

The ayatollahs’ hatred of the West in general is only exceeded by their hatred of Israel, and if their missiles can break through Israel’s defences, I doubt the defences of France or Britain would be more impregnable.

With a little help from her Russian ally, Iran could even conceivably get ICBMs with enough range to hit America’s eastern seaboard. After all, ‘Death to America’ rivals ‘Allahu Akbar’ on the list of popular Iranian chants, and the mullahs sing it from their minarets with the same febrile conviction.

That’s why Trump made the decision to join Israel’s attempts to defang Iran’s nuclear capability. I don’t know whether it has been obliterated, as the president claims, or only badly downgraded, but in any case the decision was morally correct and strategically sound.

As a side benefit, even if Trump may not see it as such, Iran will no longer be in a position to offer meaningful help to her military ally, Russia. Having lost his Syrian foothold in the Middle East, Putin will now be deprived of an even more powerful ally, one capable of supplying weapons for the war on the Ukraine.

As for Tulsi Gubbard, she was one of Trump’s eccentric appointments inspired by his seeing loyalty to him personally as not only a necessary condition, but at times also a sufficient one. Giving her the world’s most important intelligence brief was a mistake, but I’m sure the president will now correct it.

In that context, I remember the story of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, whose cantankerous nature had had him shunted to a purely administrative post before the Second World War.

However, after Pearl Harbour, Roosevelt instantly brought King back and gave him the second-highest command in the US Navy. “When the shooting starts,” commented the old warrior, “they send out for the mean sons of bitches.”

In other words, the roar of guns heralds the arrival of able people good at their jobs, and the dismissal of those good only at advancing their careers. If I were a betting man, I’d bet a small fortune on Tulsi being sacked soon. But I’m not, so I won’t.

What I will do is take this rare chance to utter words that don’t often cross my lips: well done, Mr President.  

The Daily Mail is supposed to be conservative, and by and large its editorial content is, in the sense in which conservatism is understood these days.

Or rather misunderstood. Conservatism in its proper, English, meaning is above all about style, manners, temperamental predisposition, prudence, self-restraint and common sense.

It’s emphatically not a political philosophy, economic theory or, God forbid, ideology. That doesn’t mean that conservatives don’t care about politics or economics. They do. However, such quotidian concerns are strictly derivative.

People arrive at conservative views because they are conservatives. They don’t become conservatives because they hold conservative views.

Since so few people understand this, the term ‘conservative’ is routinely misused these days to denote, inter alia, an economic libertarian or a populist. Thus, for example, some MAGA Americans who derive their concept of English conservatism from MailOnline at best, or from Steve Bannon at worst, regard Tommy Robinson as every inch conservative, which he every inch isn’t.

And they fail to understand why I don’t see their current president as a fellow conservative. Isn’t he trying to stop illegal immigration? He is. But there’s more to conservatism than that.

English conservatives don’t suffer from such misapprehensions, or at least shouldn’t. The problem is that many Britons accept things American uncritically, including fast food, revolting soft drinks, verbs made out of nouns – and the definition of conservatism.

Back to The Mail now. It’s an axiom that mass publications should cater to the masses. If they don’t, they won’t remain mass publications for much longer. This explains why I had to qualify my description of The Mail as a conservative paper.

It can only be as conservative as its readers, which, to me, means not very. The paper still employs a couple of truly conservative columnists, but its general thrust is vectored more and more towards the populist end.

(In spite of that, the paper has lost some two-thirds of its circulation in the past five years, but I suspect on-line offerings have more to do with that than a slide towards populism. Yet the slide is noticeable.)

Yesterday I looked at two articles in The Mail, one about Royal Ascot, the other about the euthanasia vote in Parliament. Each had a feature asking the readers to vote for or against the simple propositions based on the stories covered.

The instantly available poll results prove that The Mail is becoming less conservative, as I define the word. Alas, conservatives seem to be a minority in the paper’s readership.

The first article dealt with Royal Ascot, a five-day racing event that’s the highlight of the summer social calendar in Britain. The outing is truly royal: it was founded by Queen Anne in 1711. Since then, the monarchs have been appointing representatives to administer the Royal Racecourse on their behalf.

The event is always graced by the monarch’s presence, emphatically including our late queen, herself a breeder of thoroughbreds. King Charles was in attendance this year in spite of being poorly, and God bless him.

Such a royal pedigree turns Ascot into a magnet for inveterate social climbers. While in our aristocratic past the races used to be the playground of nobility, today they also attract socially insecure individuals hoping that some of the royal glitter will rub off on them.

The moment the event draws to a close, the wives of accountants, sales managers and stockbrokers begin to campaign for next year’s pass to the Royal Enclosure. There a strict dress code going back to Beau Brummel still holds sway: morning dress and top hats for men, formal daywear and elaborate hats for women.

Hoi polloi outside that area, mainly the less enterprising accountants and their wives, still tend to follow suit more or less, with men dressed, and women undressed, formally. Both sexes watch the races with half an eye, the rest of their sight scanning the Royal Enclosure hoping to spot pop stars, retired footballers and other celebs hobnobbing with the princes and princesses.

Champagne gushes in a steady torrent in both areas, but by and large those in the Royal Enclosure handle it better than the accountants and sales managers. Their natural habitat isn’t so much Ascot as the local boozer, and they do their utmost to turn the former into the latter typologically.

Once the combination of drink and hot weather takes effect, the atmosphere develops that magic je ne sais quoi that has English stag and hen parties banned from bars around Europe. And, both last year and this, fisticuffs broke out, as they invariably do on the grounds of Millwall FC.

This year two suited and booted gentlemen went at it hammer and tongs, with the one less handy with his fists ending up bloodied on the ground. All par for the course, I dare say, although in the past that particular course was spared such entertainment.

Having covered that unsightly brawl in a lengthy article complete with gory photographs, The Mail asked its readers: “Are you shocked by this behaviour?” And what do you know, 53 per cent answered no. This means that over half of the paper’s readers don’t have a conservative bone in their bodies.

Another poll appeared in the article about Parliament’s having passed a bill empowering our sainted NHS to offer suicide services to patients not expected to live beyond six months.

Any proper conservative would be appalled by this legislation for any number of reasons, moral, religious, aesthetic – and practical. As I can testify from personal experience, doctors can get such forecasts terribly wrong. In my case, a Scottish haematologist told me “your prognersis is pure” (as best I can reproduce his accent), yet here I am, chuckling about this 20 years later.

I’ve written about this abomination many times in the past, citing examples of the Netherlands and Oregon, the only US state where assisted suicide is legal.

In Holland, doctors have been known to kill even patients who tried to change their mind at the last moment. This reinforces my belief that, once euthanasia becomes legal, sooner or later it’ll become compulsory.

And both in the Low Countries and Oregon, many patients choose accelerated death for fear of being a burden on their families. Shame on the families who go along with that, and shame on the doctors who kill people not to fritter away their estate on bothersome care.

This was a free vote, with the Whips putting their lashes aside. Still, I would have expected the vote to go along party lines, and Labour enjoys a 156-seat majority. Yet the bill only got a majority of 23, with even the Labour Health Secretary Streeting voting against it.

Where the outcome wasn’t paper-thin was in the Mail poll, with 61 per cent replying yes to the question “Do you agree with legalising assisted dying?”. I wonder what Mr Hippocrates would have to say about this bill.

But just think about it: even over a hundred Labour MPs voted more conservatively than almost two-thirds of The Mail’s readers.

Considering that another bill, abortion on demand at any stage in pregnancy, had sailed through Parliament only a few days earlier, our Labour and other socialist MPs aren’t overly concerned about such outdated notions as the sanctity of human life.

Still, many of them found the euthanasia bill unsafe, correctly anticipating its practically guaranteed potential for abuse. No such compunctions among most readers of a supposedly conservative paper.

If this is what British conservatism has become, include me out, as they say in Oregon.    

Peter Hitchens has added another string to his bow. In addition to regurgitating Kremlin agitprop for the benefit of his gullible readers, he now regales them with deranged drivel on the subject of Iran and Israel.

Moreover, he has found a way of weaving the two subjects together into some sort of synthesis. If we lived in a sane world, the result would attract the attention not of a critic bearing arguments, but that of the men in white coats bearing a straitjacket and heavy sedation.

But the world we live in isn’t sane, so let’s pretend Mr Hitchens is and take his turgid musings at face value. In that spirit, let’s begin with this statement that sets the stall:

“For instance, it is pretty much agreed by everyone (except the Kremlin) [and Hitchens himself, I’d be tempted to add] that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a wicked and blatant breach of international law. But when Israel launched huge bombing raids against Iran,… the silence from those in the West who have angrily condemned Russia for years was so dense you could have cut it into cubes.

“How can this be? There may be a technical difference between invading a country’s territory with tanks and troops, and invading its airspace with showers of high-explosive bombs and rockets, but there is not much difference if you are on the receiving end.”

And so forth, in the same vein. You tell me, is the man sane?

Just imagine an English journalist writing immediately after D-Day, that he couldn’t understand how the same people who had decried the Nazi invasion of Normandy in 1940 welcomed the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. “There may be a difference between invading France from the sea and invading her on land,” he would have written, but the difference is merely technical.

Someone less familiar with Hitchens’s oeuvre might think he is merely criticising Israel’s actions, not vindicating Russia’s. But someone cursed with such familiarity would easily detect familiar notes.

In case the author is not only deranged but also dumb, allow me to elucidate the difference that so baffles Hitchens. Putin’s fascist regime invaded a neighbour that presented no threat to Russia whatsoever, violating every international and moral law.

One could say that even Hitler’s grievances against France had more substance to them than Putin’s against the Ukraine. And yet his hordes of murderers, torturers, looters, kidnappers and rapists, have been terrorising the Ukraine for over three years, reducing her cities to rubble.

Even if the Ukraine weren’t our ally, anyone with a modicum of moral sense (a category that demonstrably doesn’t include Hitchens) would agree it’s our moral duty to support this victim of aggression. But the Ukraine is indeed our ally, so supporting her makes sense not only morally but also strategically – especially since Putin doesn’t even bother to conceal that he regards the Ukraine as part of his long-term war on the West.

Still, let’s read on: “Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has also openly said that he intends, by his attack, to overthrow the government of Iran. How is this his business?”

Someone who can ask that question won’t understand the answer. This, though the reply is simple: the government of Iran has been industriously working towards its self-proclaimed goal of murdering every one of the seven million Jews residing “between the river and the sea”.

As part of achieving that objective, the ayatollahs have been busily developing nuclear weapons, credibly promising to use them on Israel once they are ready. The Israelis, on the other hand, have always explained to the world, sensibly, that the size of their country leaves them no margin for error.

They can’t just sit back and wait to be incinerated by Iranian warheads. The Israelis are prepared to do whatever it takes to defend the lives of their brothers and sisters. If that involves bombing Iran into the Stone Age, the direction in which the country has anyway been moving since 1979, then so be it. And if Iran’s fascist government falls as a result, so much the better.

Of course, Russia couldn’t stay out of the narrative for much longer: “Some defenders of Israel’s behaviour respond that it was provoked by various actions by Iran…

“Russia was also provoked by years of eastward Nato expansion and the siting of new missiles in Europe by the USA. But the same sort of people who now excuse Israel’s action –  because of Iranian provocation – have always idiotically claimed that Russia was not provoked, despite all the evidence that it was.

“In any case provocation… is not a justification for aggressive violence, in law or morals. Only fools react to being provoked. It just helps to explain it, and to show that morality in foreign policy is so much bunk.”

God bless him, the man can find moral equivalence everywhere he looks, not just between Russian bestial aggression and Israel’s desperate self-defence, but even between different kinds of provocation. Again, this kind of moral and intellectual numbness is borderline psychotic, at least.

Let’s put this in everyday terms.

Situation A: A man wearing a business suit walks through a bad part of town at night. The local thugs, provoked by this apparition from another world, knife him.

Situation B: The same man happens to be armed. When knife-wielding thugs come at him, he brandishes a gun and shoots them.

In both cases, provocation could be cited. But in Situation A, it was made up for criminal purposes, while in Situation B it was real and called for a legitimate response.

I’m sure you can see the difference. Hitchens can’t, or won’t.

He then inveighs against the very idea of a regime change brought about by external force. Essentially, he is saying be careful what you wish for. Weren’t Saddam’s regime in Iraq, Gaddafi’s in Libya and Assad’s in Syria followed by something even worse?

They were. However, that doesn’t mean that any forcible regime change is ipso facto detrimental. Back in 1944, the Allies were dead-set on forcing a regime change in Germany and Italy, and I’d suggest that worked out pretty well.

Iran is different from the countries so dear to Hitchens’s heart. She has a strong, if suppressed, opposition not only to the ayatollahs but even to Islam, which many educated Iranians see as an alien religion thrust down their throats. The older people among them still remember the reasonably civilised life under the Shah

It’s extremely unlikely that, should the present regime be overthrown, it will be followed by crazed Hezbollah types. And a certain measure of outside control over Iran’s armament programme wouldn’t go amiss either.

Yes, well, you see, Hitchens denies that the ayatollahs are trying to develop nuclear weapons. Who, Iran? Not on your nellie.

“Then there is the complaint that Iran is planning to build nuclear weapons. Well, it may be. But back in 2015, with the blessing of the then US President Barack Obama, the West made a deal with Iran to prevent this from happening, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)… The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Tehran was abiding by these and other conditions.”

And anyway, “Even if the Iranians could enrich enough uranium to make warheads, it could still take another year for them to make a deliverable nuclear weapon.”

I’m sure the Israelis are heaving a sigh of relief even as we speak. They aren’t going to wonder what will happen after the year is out.

“But in [2018] Mr Netanyahu declared that Iran had been hiding a secret nuclear weapons programme, putting it in breach of the deal it had signed.

“Very soon afterwards Donald Trump, then in his first term as President, pulled out of the arrangement. He said it was ‘a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made’.”

The reason Trump did that awful thing was that Iran was blatantly cheating on that agreement. For once, I say “well-done, Mr President”.

Hitchens says something else: “Mr Trump yesterday repudiated the recent assessment, by his own hand-picked Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, that Iran has not been building a nuclear weapon. US intelligence agencies have quietly been saying this since 2007.

“It is extraordinary for a President to have such an open quarrel with the intelligence establishment. The row suggests that Mr Trump has in fact decided to join Israel’s attack on Iran.”

I certainly hope so. Only US B2 bombers carrying Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs are capable of destroying the Fordo nuclear complex located deep under a mountain range.

As for the intelligence that inspired Israel’s action, I doubt the Israelis solely relied on the information provided by a US agency led by a silly Putin admirer with no background in either intelligence or global politics.

It’s commonly believed the Mossad is the world’s best intelligence agency. Moreover, as the past few days have proved, it runs a wide and effective spy network in Iran. Surely they had some intelligence of their own, and acted on it because they had to?

But even supposing that Iran was close to obtaining nukes, it was only fair: “But the great irony is that Israel itself has been hiding a secret nuclear weapons programme, which it began in face of strong American hostility (especially from JFK), and has done so since 1966.

“So Mr Netanyahu’s shocked outrage at Iran’s nuclear secrecy seems a little overdone, even hypocritical. So does Mr Trump’s outrage against Iran.”

It’s that moral equivalence again, this time between a country planning to use nuclear weapons for unprovoked mass murder, and one relying on such bombs as last resort to prevent or, worse comes to worst, avenge such a crime.

“And so the double standards go on,” laments Hitchens. I should hope so.

What prompted Israel’s action was hard intelligence showing that Iran’s reactors are already achieving a uranium purity of 60 per cent. Considering that peaceful uses of nuclear energy require a purity of only about 3.5 per cent (bombs take about 90 per cent), one wonders what the ayatollahs have in mind.

In fact, the very same IAEA whose old report Hitchens saw fit to cite, has recently produced another one, concluding that Iran has already stockpiled enough enriched uranium to produce 10 nuclear warheads. It would have been criminally negligent for Israel not to have taken appropriate action.

One can only wonder how The Mail is continuing to publish such blatant misinformation steeped in bad faith and insane paralysis of mind and morals. Hitchens belongs either in the Kremlin or the loony bin, and I’d magnanimously leave the choice to him.   

Since I started putting my thoughts into the public domain some 35 years ago, I’ve been on the receiving end of many accusations, none of them just.

For example, I’ve been called a racist, which isn’t true. I genuinely believe that all men are brothers and feel no discomfort when meeting someone of a different race.

This is an intuitive feeling I had acquired long before I read Paul’s teaching about “neither Jew nor Greek”, although I’m grateful to the saint for putting into such poignant words something I’ve always sensed to be true.

However, while I believe that fundamentally all races are equal, that doesn’t mean they are the same. They all produce different cultures, and I happen to prefer the one produced by white Europeans.

That doesn’t mean I consider myself superior to, say, an Indian or an African. As I said, I’m not a racist. But I have to admit I’m a culturist, or would be if this word existed. I’m absolutely certain that European culture is better for me and – yes, I know the slings and arrows are about to come my way – better than any other in general.

It’s certainly the only one that’s indigenous to the West. Others sharing our living space should be welcome to live their lives according to the tenets of their own culture – as long as they realise that it’s a guest within ours, and guests should respect and accept the customs of their hosts.

Having cleared myself of the charge of racism, I must now state that neither do I deserve another charge sometimes levelled at me, that of misogyny. “Neither male nor female…” continued St Paul, and he wasn’t prophesising our epicene modernity.

On a personal note, I’ve always preferred the company of women to that of men, and nothing bores me more than an evening out with the lads. That’s one of the reasons I’ve never sought membership in any Pall Mall club (another reason is a near certainty that I wouldn’t be admitted).

Women, I think, are as good as men, and I’d even be willing to entertain the thought that they are better. However, it takes a uniquely unobservant, or else obtusely ideological, person to insist men and women are equally capable of performing the same tasks.

Women can take their innate house-keeping talents to the broader arena of business or public administration. The best post-war prime minister of Britain, and arguably her best monarch ever, were women, for example.

Even when women didn’t rise to the throne themselves they often had a civilising effect on their men, helping them climb to higher rungs on the cultural and spiritual ladder. It was often women who dragged many a royal husband from paganism to Christianity.

France, to name an obvious example, could have remained pagan way beyond 509 had Clothilde not put her foot down and forced her royal husband Clovis to see the light. (England went Christian a century earlier, as I don’t mind mentioning for the delectation of my French readers.)

Yet it’s hard not to notice that women, a few notable exceptions aside, such as Hildegard von Bingen, Héloïse and Elizabeth Anscombe, aren’t as good as men at more theoretical pastimes, such as philosophy, theology and mathematics.

The usual explanation that women have been historically barred from such fields doesn’t cut much ice. At the time the first two ladies I mentioned were leaving their glorious mark, at least as many women as men led a monastic life of contemplation. And Elizabeth Anscombe (d. 2001) certainly wasn’t the only contemporaneous woman with a PhD in philosophy.

It’s just that women’s and men’s brains are wired differently, which, I insist, certainly doesn’t mean that men are superior. Just, well, different.

Neither am I a homophobe, a charge once brought on me courtesy of the Press Complaints Commission that was responding to hundreds of complaints (some accompanied by death threats). I did lose my job at a national paper as a result, yet the charge was false.

I was simply suggesting that heterosexuals, even if they have the misfortune of being Christians, should enjoy equal rights to publicise their take on sexuality. At the time, homosexuals advertised their messages on London buses, whereas Mayor Boris Johnson said no to Christian groups that demanded equal time. Fair is fair, I wrote. Ideally, neither side should use such vulgar media to air its views, but if one is allowed to do so, then so should be the other.

My view of homosexuality is that it’s a sin. But then so is adultery, and he who is without sin… . Adultery is actually worse: after all, God mentioned it in His Ten Commandments, while leaving it for commentators like, again, St Paul to express opprobrium of same-sex hanky-panky.

I’m not going to parade the old cliché about some of my friends being homosexuals, although it is so. Let’s just say that the only moral teaching I recognise as valid says we should hate the sin but love the sinner, and again I accept it intuitively, not just rationally.

That, however, doesn’t mean we should love the sin and teach our children that there is nothing wrong with it, and there’s no such thing as sin anyway. Therein lies the kind of decadence that ushers in civilisational demise, and I don’t think you need me to cite historical examples of such downfalls.

Transphobia? Same again: I certainly don’t hate, and neither am I irrationally scared of, people suffering from gender dysphoria. I’m genuinely sorry for them – but I feel even sorrier for any society that promotes sex change as an inalienable human right to be upheld from the public purse. I don’t hate transsexuals, but I certainly hate teachers who indoctrinate little tots to ponder their sexuality and change it should they find it wanting.

Again, this is another charge to which I emphatically plead not guilty.

However, there is another accusation, that of ageism, that I’ve never had thrown in my face. People must assume that, as an old man myself, I can’t possibly be guilty of that awful failing.

Yet I am, M’lud, guilty as not charged. And it’s specifically because I identify with other old men, understand their strengths and weaknesses, that I don’t think – as a general rule – that men in their 70s or older should be allowed to hold a public office of any import.

Just as I mentioned Elizabeth Anscombe as an exception in another context, you may mention Winston Churchill who led his country through a world war in his 70s, or Konrad Adenauer, who presided over the German economic miracle in his 80s. But you know what they say about exceptions that prove the rule.

Old men accumulate wisdom and experience that can make them invaluable advisors to princes, presidents and prime ministers. That’s why countries have throughout history had councils of elders keeping the rulers on the straight and narrow.

But it takes more than just wisdom and experience actually to be princes, presidents or prime ministers. It takes physical strength, stamina, energy and cognitive sharpness, and such faculties always decline with age.

Thus I can trust myself to write an essay on political philosophy, but not to run a country day to day. My short-term memory isn’t what it used to be: if a few decades ago I could read a long poem once and memorise it for ever, now it would take me hours if not days to do that.

Physically, when I lived in Houston, in my 20s and 30s, I could outlast most tennis players in 100-degree heat and 95-per-cent humidity. I still play tournaments, but have to default when the temperature tips into the 90s.

If in my 40s and even 50s I could more or less go without sleep, now I can’t function without my six hours at night and, ideally, a short snooze in the afternoon. That alone should disqualify me from a serious public office, for presidents and prime ministers can find themselves in national emergencies that can’t be handled by the “old and grey and full of sleep”.

I’ve learned to compensate. For example, I now use bookmarks, which I never had to do in the past. When buying food, I have to write down a shopping list, something I never used to do.

When speaking in public, I nowadays rely on having the text in front of me – gone is the time when I could deliver half a dozen different lectures a day without ever once consulting any notes.

All things considered, I know I wouldn’t trust myself to run a country, even though – and I hope you’ll forgive such arrogance – I’m in better mental shape than Joe Biden ever was or (and I know the skies are going to open and the MAGA god will smite me with his wrath) Donald Trump now is.

Biden’s cognitive decline was plain for all to see, and it took criminal shenanigans on the part of his colleagues and family to insist that old Joe was fit for office. Trump’s age-related problems are so far less severe but just as obvious.

Geriatric decline is a gradual process, and the best way to diagnose it is to compare the way a person was to the way he is. So try to compare Trump in his first term with Trump in his second.

Five years ago, he was unpleasantly eccentric, but he was sharp as a tack. One could agree or disagree with Trump’s policies and ideas, but one couldn’t in good faith question his mental health or indeed common sense.

Alas, the 2025 vintage of Trump is different. In his off-the-cuff speeches he sometimes talks incoherent gibberish, often saying mutually exclusive things within five minutes of each other. I understand and sympathise: although a year and a bit younger, I too sometimes forget things I said five minutes ago.

Trump’s erstwhile narcissism has degenerated into what looks like delusions of grandeur. Hence he says things – and repeats them more than once in what psychiatrists call perseveration – that no sane US president would even think, such as conquering Canada and a good part of Denmark.

Trump changes not just his words but also his policies from one day to the next, and then back again. Remember that his words and policies cause an instant shockwave in the world, with markets collapsing, businesses going under, nations allied with America quaking in their boots.

In an eerie reminder of Joe Biden, Trump stumbled on the steps of Air Force One the other day, and I sympathise. I too am less firm on my feet than I was even a few years ago.

Just in case there is a groundswell of opinion that I should become the prime minister of Britain, I can only repeat the words of the American Civil War general Sherman, who dismissed suggestions he should make a run for the presidency by saying: “If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve.”

I’m just too old for the job, quite apart from a whole raft of other disqualifying characteristics. Mercifully, no one will be crazy enough to moot the idea of me at 10 Downing Street.

My point is that Biden was and Trump is also too old for his job, quite apart from a whole raft of other disqualifying characteristics. Yet the former was and the latter is the US president. This is no job for old men – take it from me.

Please don’t get me wrong. I realise it’s hardly sporting trying to hold President Trump to account for anything he says.

The Donald tends to run off at the mouth before, usually instead of, taking the trouble to think things through. As a result, he often changes his mind back and forth kaleidoscopically, with one lurid verbal picture ousting another, often with little gap in between.

Yet whenever the subject of Russia comes up, one leitmotif remains constant. Trump likes Putin and doesn’t really mind what he does to the Ukraine, whose president he doesn’t like. The Donald may at times be mildly critical of the Russian chieftain, but this is only an ornamentation on the main theme: Putin is a man after Trump’s own heart, and neither Zelensky nor America’s European allies are.

Hence, against my better judgement, I propose you join me in the ungrateful task of interpreting Trump’s remarks at the G7 meeting that drew to a close yesterday. I’ll be happy to entertain any conclusions that may diverge from my uncompromising statement in the previous paragraph. So here goes:

“The G7 used to be the G8. Barack Obama and a person named Trudeau didn’t want to have Russia in. And I would say that that was a mistake. Because I think you wouldn’t have a war right now if you had Russia in.”

What conclusions can one draw from these remarks? First, Trump doesn’t have much time for Barack Obama and ‘a person named’ Justin Trudeau, and for once I share his view. Obama was a bad excuse for a president, and Trudeau for a prime minister.

Justin in particular was a joke, but then he had a bad heredity pulling him down. His mother used to bestow her favours on all and sundry, mainly pop stars and Hollywood actors. And snapshots of her billowing skirt delighted tabloid readers by proving that Margaret Trudeau eschewed a certain undergarment that many ladies in her position would have found indispensable.

Her husband, Pierre, himself Canada’s PM, had the same ideological bend and intellectual vacuity as his son, but unlike him he also possessed quite some panache.

Once, I recall, he received a delegation of workers who had been on strike so long they complained they couldn’t even afford bread. Taking his cue from the apocryphal statement ascribed to Marie-Antoinette, Pierre said: “Mangez de la merde”. I’m not sure that was an improvement on the original, but you be the judge.

Getting back to Trump, things went downhill fast after that dig at politicians he justifiably dislikes. For one thing, Trump got his facts wrong, or at least their causal and temporal relationship.

Why was it a mistake to expel Russia from the G8? The reason Trump cites makes no sense at all. That action was taken in response to Putin’s having started a war with the Ukraine by illegally annexing the Crimea in 2014.

So is Trump saying that, had Putin been allowed to stay in the G8, he would have immediately sued for peace? Sorry, but that just doesn’t add up. Another thought comes more naturally: realising that Western powers are incapable of taking any punitive action, Putin would have escalated the war to a full-blown invasion even sooner.

Still, Trump’s next statement, that Putin “was insulted”, rings true, coming from Trump. It takes one hypersensitive egomaniac to know another, and Trump understands a mind so similar to his own.

“This was a big mistake,” Trump continued. “I can tell you that [Putin] basically doesn’t even speak to the people that threw him out, and I agree with him.” [My emphasis.] The implication is that Trump himself would have reacted to a personal slight in the same criminally irresponsible manner, and I believe him.

“Putin speaks to me. He doesn’t speak to anybody else,” added Trump, paraphrasing himself, as is his wont. Birds of a feather and all that, but what’s astonishing is that he seems proud of his unique status with that mass murderer.

Not that his rapport with Putin has done Trump’s diplomacy much good. Vlad puts his KGB training to good use by leading the US president up one garden path after another, while the criminal war goes on and Ukrainian civilians keep dying.

One would be forgiven for getting the impression that perhaps the best way to speak to Putin isn’t in ego-stroking words. Take it from someone who grew up in a city crawling with Putin types: a punch in the snout works much better. In this case, that pugilistic act can take the shape of imposing tougher and strictly enforced sanctions, while increasing supplies of armaments for the Ukraine.

Trump’s art of the deal doesn’t seem to include an aspect of once bitten, twice shy. Had he allowed his business partners to dupe him commercially as often as Putin dupes him politically, the Donald would have had to declare even more bankruptcies than he did.

Yet the man is nothing if not persistent. Dealt a bad hand, he decided to double down: Trump knows of no better candidate than Putin to mediate the Israel-Iran conflict.

That idea is insane on more levels than one finds in a Trump Tower. For one thing, since Iran and Russia are military allies, one suspects Putin would be ever so slightly biased in his mediating capacity.

Still, credit where it’s due, Trump’s suggestion succeeded in making even Manny Macron sound like a statesman. “Moscow could not be a negotiator because it had started an illegal war against Ukraine,” he said. I couldn’t have put it better myself, even though I do favour the definite article before ‘Ukraine’, for old times’ sake.

Trump also managed to make Sir Keir Starmer look good, which task had until then proved impossible for Labour publicists. Sir Keir manfully rejected the idea of readmitting Putin to the forum, saying he was “happy with the make-up of it.”

If it were up to Trump, all sanctions against Russia would be lifted, Putin would take his seat at the next conference of world leaders, and the Trump Organisation would finally be allowed to build tasteless towers all over Moscow and Petersburg.

Happiness all around, except in the Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe. They’d know exactly what was coming.

Two wars are raging in the world, 1,600 miles apart. One is in the Ukraine, the other in, or rather over, Iran, and either has a potential to escalate into a global Armageddon.

This means that it’s not just the parties directly involved but all of us who have a vested interest in the outcomes. We must join our efforts to help the victims and defeat the aggressors, and the starting point should be a clear understanding of which is which.

Unfortunately, much confusion reigns in that department, with both the strategic and moral implications of the ongoing wars woefully misunderstood or perverted. Most annoyingly, one hears a lot of pacifist noises about the awfulness of any war.

However, lumping all wars together is as unsound as speaking of religion in general. There is no such thing as religion in general – there are only distinct religions, each with its own way of looking at God and man. And there are no wars in general – each can be just or unjust, noble or criminal, holy or diabolical.

This used to be universally understood in the West. Christianity, while accepting that war is evil, still believes that there exist evils that can be even worse. If such evils can only be stopped by violence, then in that instance violence is to be condoned.

That’s why the Church, including such seminal figures as St Augustine of Hippo (whose The City of God first expressed the concept of just war in Christian terms) and St Thomas Aquinas, has always blessed righteous war for as long as it stayed righteous – and damned unjust war for as long as it stayed unjust.

When it comes to Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine, some Western leaders see that war as a schoolyard squabble between two naughty boys both of whom are equally at fault. Worse still, a few of those leaders (fine, you got me, it’s Trump I have in mind) go so far as to blame the Ukraine for starting the hostilities.

It takes a virulent case of moral impotence to see that war in such terms. Russia’s fascist regime invaded the Ukraine with the stated intention of dragging her back into the empire, whatever it happens to be called at the moment. To that end, Russia’s declared objective is to wipe out not only the Ukraine’s statehood but indeed the Ukrainian nation.

Putin and his ideologues have said a thousand times if they’ve said it once that, as far as they are concerned, Ukrainians are merely second-rate Russians; their language is but a dialect of Russian; their history is a sub-set of Russian history; their culture is on the margins of Russian culture. And if it takes disposing of millions of Ukrainians to drive that point home, then so be it.

Thus the war being fought by Ukrainians against Russian invaders isn’t one waged for a piece of territory. It’s a war of national survival, which makes it not only just but existential. Russia’s aggression, on the other hand, isn’t merely unjust but downright criminal.

Anyone who sees that war in terms of moral or any other equivalence abets that crime; anyone who sides with the Ukraine thereby proves that his moral compass is in working order.

For the moment, it’s just the Ukraine that’s the victim of Russian fascism. Yet if we take Russian chieftains at their word (always advisable when dealing with totalitarian dictators), they have in their sights not just the Ukraine, but also all the former Soviet republics.

That’s just for starters: the next step is to rebuild the Russian-Soviet Empire to its former grandeur, which includes conquering not only the whole of Eastern Europe but also Finland. This idea of gradually escalating fascist aggression lacks novelty appeal: just a couple of generations ago Hitler put it into gruesome practice.

If the Russian version of that kind of ideology isn’t stopped in its tracks early, the time will come when it will be too late to stop it by any means other than a cataclysmic war (of course, there’s always the option of capitulation too). Hence the West’s moral and strategic interests converge, and no ambivalence is possible. The Ukraine is us, Russia is them. As clearcut as it gets.

Now what about the brilliant Israeli strikes on Iran? Under attack there is a fascist, theocratic regime whose self-proclaimed objective is to annihilate Israel. This is even worse than Russia’s intention to destroy the Ukraine as a sovereign nation.

The Russians want to enslave the Ukraine, but they don’t wish to murder every Ukrainian. Granted, if they win the war, thousands, possibly millions, of Ukrainians will be exterminated. But most Ukrainians will be allowed to live.

Iran, on the other hand, doesn’t just want to extinguish Israel as a sovereign state. The mullahs want to massacre every Jew between the river and the sea, and the Israelis know exactly which river and which sea, even if many of their demonstrating Western enemies don’t.

Hence Israel’s cause, though as just as the Ukraine’s, is even more vital. If Iran, along with her allies and proxies, is allowed to have her way, every one of the seven million Israeli Jews will die the same deaths 1,200 of them suffered at the hands of Iran’s proxies on 7 October, 2023.

This ought to be clear to anyone with an IQ above room temperature (Celsius). As should be the realisation that demonstrating against Israeli’s strikes on Iran is tantamount to complicity in the mullahs’ crimes, past, present and future.

The crimes are monstrous. Iran has been promoting sanguinary instability in the Middle East since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and especially since the fall of Saddam in 2003. Hezbollah, Iran’s Shi’ite proxy in Syria and Lebanon, murdered hundreds of thousands and kept Assad in power for two decades.

Iran’s Sunni proxies, Hamas, kept running up their own score of corpses, mainly Israelis, until the 7 October massacre proved to be the last straw. By the way, the battle cry of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas isn’t just “Death to Israel”. It’s also “Death to the West!” or more specifically “Death to America!”

Nor is it just words. Iran used her Houthi proxies to cut off global shipping through major Middle Eastern waterways. This ought to be taken as a hint that, should the mullahs be allowed to develop a nuclear arsenal, it won’t be just Israel in mortal danger. Iran’s missiles can carry nuclear warheads to London and Paris as well, perhaps also as far as New York.

Iranian media have been bragging for a while that their country is within weeks of developing nuclear weapons. And anyone who doubts that, the moment they get those bombs, they’ll use them to incinerate Israel first and possibly Western cities second is either a fool or a knave or, as is the case with all those demonstrators, both.

In that connection, I’d like to propose a moratorium on Donald Trump’s use of the word ‘deal’ in any other than the purely commercial sense.

Two of our bravest allies are fighting wars of survival, not only their own but conceivably ours as well. Yet yesterday the US president had the gall to suggest that Israel and Iran strike a deal. Surely he must know that any ‘deal’ allowing Iran to keep even some of its nuclear facilities will sooner or later, probably sooner, enable the mullahs to get their hands on nukes.

Donald Trump lacks any capacity for self-reflection and learning from his mistakes. He has already made himself the world’s laughingstock by first promising to secure a ceasefire deal between Russia and the Ukraine within 24 hours.

That deadline was then extended to a fortnight, later to Trump’s first 100 days in office. Since then, he has been issuing ultimatums to Putin to agree to a deal within a fortnight — or else. These ultimatums have been ignored by Putin and renewed by Trump every fortnight with metronomic regularity.

With Israel too, rather than advertising his much-vaunted art of making a deal, Trump should provide IDF with B2 bombers and the unique bunker-busting ordnance they carry. Better still, the US Air Force should fly those bombing missions itself. That would put paid not only to Iran’s nuclear facilities but also to the country’s fascist theocratic regime.

Which, incidentally, is adopting the tactics of its Hamas clients, but on a much larger scale. All those criminals are aware of the political capital they earn with every Muslim civilian killed. When the pile of bodies grows high enough, Western cities will be overrun with thousands of mostly youthful cretins who seem to think that Israel should just sit back and wait quietly for its impending demise.

Hamas’s puppet masters are doing exactly the same in Iran. Knowing for years that an Israeli attack would come eventually, they’ve decided not to build any bomb shelters and not to install any raid-alert sirens. Instead, they’ve adopted the Hamas trick of siting their military facilities and command centres in residential quarters, hoping to end up with enough dead children to rally those Western cretins against Israel.

So far, Israeli strikes have been delivered with surgical precision, with laser-guided bombs hitting the bedrooms of their targets without damaging the rest of the buildings. Yet some civilian casualties have inevitably occurred, and there will be more.

Here it’s worth remembering that the anti-Israeli rallies started in London and Paris on 8 November, 2023 – before the Israelis even responded to the Hamas massacre the previous day. Since then, Palestinian, effectively Hamas, flags have been flying everywhere every day.

I expect nothing else this time, and Israel had better work fast before the weak-kneed Western governments bow to what is called ‘public opinion’ and start exerting intolerable pressure on Israel to desist. Really, the West has become too spineless, probably also too stupid, to survive.