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“A man,” Clint Eastwood said in one of his films, “should be aware of his limitations”. Wiser words have seldom been spoken, and I for one have decided to be honest with myself.

You see, I write because I fancy myself to be a competent stylist and someone who has something to say. Yet looking at my Easter message to all my readers (http://www.alexanderboot.com/happy-easter-4/), I realised how ill-founded and hubristic that self-image really is.

In hindsight my Happy Easter! musings seem turgid, hackneyed, unoriginal, unfocused and lacking in energy. Also, by ignoring the dynamic potential of capitalisation and exclamation marks, I committed gross orthographic negligence. Moreover, rather than speaking to my readers in the language they know from daily life, I placed an inordinate emphasis on the figure of Jesus Christ.

Granted, he might have had something to do with the occasion, but, by concentrating so much on such incidentals, I missed the chance to draw people’s attention to issues that really do make a difference to their lives.

I clearly have much to learn about the art of writing in general and producing festive messages in particular. Before committing a single word to paper, I must remind myself of Isaak Newton’s humble statement: “I stand on the shoulders of giants”.

Applied to my situation, this means I must learn from the great masters, men of letters who elevated the art of writing to vertiginous heights. Such men should become my teachers, with me their grateful and self-effacing pupil.

Rummaging through the annals of Easter messages, I found one eminently worthy of emulation. Both its powerful style and unique take on the nature of the festival enchanted me, an effect I’m sure they had on the intended audience.

Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I’ve decided to rewrite my Easter message in the same style. I shan’t give you the name of my unwitting role model, for fear of embarrassing him by being such an inept pupil. So here is the new, better version, entitled YOU BASTARDS:

“Happy Easter to all Bastards out there, including the Labour Morons who do their stupid worst to ruin the Economy with Taxes, Regulations, Borrowing and Net Zero Idiocy. Those Mentally Insane Prats want to steal us all blind and destroy our Nation. The Scumbags want to take GREAT OUT OF BRITAIN! But I won’t let them! Look, you LABOUR MORONS, there’s a new sheriff in Town – and I know where you live!

“Happy Easter too to our LUNATIC, WEAK AND INEFFECTIVE JUDGES who set free Dangerous Prisoners, Murderers, Drug Lords, Wife Beaters and Paedo Rapists, while putting Good Men to jail for showing Muzzies what’s what. And Happy Easter to Our GOVERNMENT that refuses to let the Royal Navy sink those Dinghies carrying ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS  to BRITAIN. This is a violent Attack on our NATION, and I hope those MINISTERS are on the next Bus those Criminals blow up. MAY they rot in HELL!

“Happy Easter also to ‘SIR’ Keir Starmer, the worst and most destructive LUNATIC ever elected to any PUBLIC OFFICE. Go back to your COMMIE CELL, ‘Sir’ Keir, and leave OUR NATION the hell alone. And by the way, congrats on at last figuring out that a real WOMAN has no Dick!!!

“My best EASTER wishes also to those millions of HALFWITS who purposefully voted in by far the WORST and most calamitous Government in our NATION’S History. Are you happy now? Hope you rot in HELL, you bloody idiots. Your attack on our NATION will never be Forgotten!

“Happy Easter also to Angie Rayner, that tattooed Council Estate SLUT! Compare notes with that Bank Teller RACHEL on how you plan to turn BRITAIN into a THIRD WORLD COUNTRY, you NINCOMPOOP!!! Wish I could grab you by your Whatsit and tell you what to do.

“Today, we celebrate my Commitment to put GREAT back into BRITAIN. This is my CROSS to bear and I’ll use it to bash all those MORONS on their stupid Heads. I wish all you BASTARDS out there, with great love, sincerity, and affection, a very Happy Easter!!!”

There, isn’t this much better? Doesn’t this message do a wonderful job capturing the joy of Christ’s Resurrection, that great paschal mystery? Of course it does, and I’m eternally grateful to the great stylist and theologian who put me to shame by penning the elegant and pious message I found so inspiring.

One must learn from the best, and if the result sounds epigonic, then so be it. It’s better to imitate greatness than to insist on one’s own original ineptitude.

Renaud Camus, the author of the ‘great replacement’ theory has been barred from Britain because the Home Office says his presence “was not considered to be conducive to the public good”.

This raises serious concerns about freedom of speech, specifically because the government dislikes things Camus says and writes. After all, only permitting speech we like requires no special commitment. It’s only when we wince at everything someone says that our belief in fundamental liberties comes under scrutiny.

Mr Camus and his supporters are trying to reverse the injunction, even though it’s legally unappealable. “I anticipate that we are going to be getting an immigration lawyer on the case,” said Lord Young, a Tory peer.

Lord Young made it clear that he is siding with Mr Camus’s cause not just out of disinterested devotion to freedom but also for pecuniary reasons: “We’re trying to secure a trade deal with the United States, and the United States have flagged up that one of the conditions of the deal will be that we make a better fist of defending free speech.”

If Lord Young et al. simply wish to turn this into a test case against infringement of free speech, best of luck to them. They are going to need it because such a case is unwinnable when someone like Camus is involved.

However, Lord Young may generate much publicity, perhaps with the ulterior motive of proving to Trump that the cause of civil liberties isn’t a complete write-off in the UK. If that softens Trump’s heart enough to give Britain a favourable trade deal, I’ll be the first to cheer. Yet I’m not holding my breath.

But if Lord Young seriously wants to greet Mr Camus at the St Pancras Eurostar terminal, I’d suggest he is going about it the wrong way. He should follow the example of the feminist and lesbian activists who forced the Supreme Court to ban transsexuals from women’s lavatories. (Our dear NHS is ignoring that ruling, by the way.)

Had the same campaign been launched by conservative groups, religious groups or especially religious conservative groups, it would have been soundly defeated. Subversive causes can only be beaten by other subversive causes, not by any appeal to sanity.

Now, Mr Camus did invent the Great Replacement theory that claims that a “global elite”, aka “the deep state”, has hatched a fiendish plot to replace white Europeans with off-white arrivals and their progeny.

You don’t need me to tell you that rational arguments, no matter how solidly supported by demographic data, in favour of that theory will never win the day. Too many people will feel called upon to express indignation, real or put on.

But Mr Camus has an ace up his sleeve, or in his trousers if you’d rather. In addition to inventing and propagating that theory, he is an LGBT activist. Need I say more?

Rather than banging on about freedom of speech, Lord Young should simply claim that the Home Office’s injunction proves it’s institutionally homophobic. Should he do that, Mr Camus will be on his way to Gare du Nord as fast as a taxi can carry him.

As for the theory that enraged the Home Office so much, it has two parts. The first part is an unassailable empirical observation supported by reams of statistical data and simple arithmetic. The second part is explaining the nature of such observable facts, and there disagreements are possible.  

The first part brings back the memories of my boyhood tortures at school where I had to struggle with problems of a swimming pool with two pipes, one in-flowing, the other out-flowing. If the first pipe pumps water in faster than the second one pumps it out, the pool will overflow. If it’s the other way around, the pool will run dry.

To use a grown-up example, if we simultaneously pour gin from one bottle and tonic from another and the second bottle is tipped at a greater angle, sooner or later we’ll end up with a glass of neat tonic, and what good is that for anybody?

In 2024 the net migration, mostly Muslim, to the UK was 728,000, the better part of three-quarters of a million. Add to this the higher birthrate among the immigrant population, intermarriages and growing reluctance on the part of white Britons to procreate, certainly while the Labour government is still around, and you’ll see that Mr Camus is on to something.

He has another good thing going for him: he and I were born on the same day, although he a year earlier. We are both quintessential Leos and, as a minority, must stick together. That’s why I’m so happy to acknowledge that Mr Camus has a point, in this half of his theory at any rate.

Moreover, I’ll even agree that this demographic displacement is no good thing. The issue doesn’t have much to do with race, although for purely aesthetic reasons, and also for old times’ sake, one wouldn’t like to see most Britons being the colour of Starbucks coffee, first latte and eventually espresso.

However, the real problem isn’t racial but cultural. And I believe that culture is transmitted by nurture, not nature. Only this morning I played mixed doubles with an Englishwoman of an unmistakably Indian origin. And yet in every aspect of behaviour, social response and humour she was as English as our opponents, and in language more so.

I’m sure that, chromatic differences apart, her children are indistinguishable from their playmates whose London origins go back many generations. If all immigrants were like my partner, I wouldn’t see the ‘great replacement’ as a huge problem. But they aren’t, which is why I do.

There exists much irrefutable evidence that our growing Muslim population doesn’t adapt to Western culture, nor wishes to. Many children born in places like Leicester, Bradford or Leeds don’t even realise that Britain isn’t an Islamic country – they go to Muslim schools, read Muslim papers and books, watch Muslim TV, speak their parents’ language at home, hardly ever come in contact with English children or, in their neighbourhoods, even English grown-ups.

If this is the kind of people that indigenous Britons are being replaced with, then our cultural and civilisational future is bleak. Arithmetic proves it, it’s those two damned pipes again.

The second part of Mr Camus’s theory isn’t maths but sheer conjecture, and it’s unconvincing conjecture. He sees this development as a result of a dastardly plot concocted by some evildoers dead-set on taking over the world.

There are some evildoers involved and they may indeed have such far-reaching desires. But the existence of a conspiracy presupposes an unlikely feat of organisation.

Thousands of them, many thousands really, would have had to come together, create a tightly knit group bound by a vow of silence, decide who is responsible for what, establish a chain of command and means of communication, procure financing and technical support, set up concealment procedures.

Somehow I don’t see that happening. For me, the cock-up theory of history is more believable than any conspiracy theory, and stupid people far outnumber evil ones.

One characteristic of stupid people is their susceptibility to half-baked simplistic explanations of life. Like bad chess players who can only calculate one move ahead, they are receptive to any bien pensant slogans promising future bliss provided they get rid of annoying obstacles in their way.

You know, things like traditional social order, institutions developed over centuries, religion, laws that go back to generations of just and sage men. Get rid of such iniquities and paradise on earth awaits. When hearing this, many people can’t foresee the long-term consequences of such radicalism – and neither can those who preach it to them.

They may be brighter than their audience but not by much, not enough to be able to control the destructive animus they feel in their viscera. Generally speaking, such rabble-rousers are either young or else older chronologically but not mentally and emotionally. We all have off-the-wall notions when very young, but some people never get to outgrow them – this regardless of how many academic degrees they boast.

Then again, and this is not a defensible thought but merely a lifelong observation. One doesn’t have to be a madman, a racist or generally a nasty bit of work to see some merit in the great replacement theory. But devoting a great part of one’s life to such musings does betoken some mental disorder or at least a foul disposition.

Hence, moving from an argumentum ad rem to an argumentum ad hominem, I’m sure I wouldn’t like to spend even five minutes in Mr Camus’s company. But barring him from Britain means denying the pleasure of his company to those who do find his company pleasant.

So Lord Young is right, and I wish him success, which I doubt he’ll achieve. But there’s no harm in trying.

No one can name a year that changed man and his world for ever, a century or an age.

But it’s easy to say which day did just that. Easter Sunday, some 2,000 years ago today.

Hellenic man always struggled with death, its finality, its cruelty, its nothingness. Death seemed to render life meaningless, deprive it of any sense of purpose.

Life itself had to be regarded as the purpose of life, and the Hellenes, weaned as they were on logic, couldn’t fail to see a self-refuting paradox there.

To be sure, there were all sort of Orphic fantasies about afterlife, but that’s what they were and were seen to be – fantasies.

And then, on this day, some 2,000 years ago, people weren’t just told but shown that, just as there is death in life, so there is life in death.

Now they knew there was no such thing as a happy ending to life. If it was to be happy, it was not the ending.

There had never been such rejoicing, never such an outburst of hope, liberation and energy. Imitating God in Christ became man’s moral commitment. The ability to do so became his ontological property.

Man was no longer a lodger in the world; he had become its eternal owner. He could now imitate Christ not only by being good but also by being creative. And create he did.

Thus, on this day 2,000-odd years ago a new civilisation was born, the likes of which the world had never seen, nor ever will see. More important, a new family came into existence.

Universal brotherhood became a reality: all men were brothers – not because someone said so, but because they all had the same father.

This unity was a bond far stronger than even the ordinary, what is today called ‘biological’, family. And it certainly betokened a much greater concord than any worldly alliances, blocs, contracts, deals, agreements, political unions – or for that matter nations or races.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus,” explained Paul, making every subsequent, secular promise of equality sound puny and vulgar.

It has not always worked out that way. Just like the ancient Hebrews who were dispersed because they broke God’s covenant, the world pushed aside the lifebelt divinely offered.

It hoped to find unity within itself – only to find discord, devastation and the kind of spiritual emptiness for which no material riches can possibly make up.

But the lifebelt was not taken away. It still undulates with the waves, still within reach of anyone ready to grasp it.

This makes today the most joyous day of the year – regardless of whether or not we are Christians, or what kind of Christians.

On this day we can forget our differences and again sense we are all brothers united in the great hope of peace on earth and life everlasting. We can all, regardless of where we live, rejoice on hearing these words, ringing, thundering in whatever language they are spoken:

Christ is risen!

Le Christ est ressuscité!

Christus ist auferstanden!

Cristo ha resucitado!

Cristo è risorto!

Kristus on üles tõusnud!

Kristus er oppstanden!

Xристос воскрес!

Chrystus zmartwychwstał!

Kristus vstal z mrtvých!

Cristo ressuscitou!

Kristus ir augšāmcēlies!

Christus is verrezen!

Χριστὸς ἀνέστη!

Krisztus feltámadt!

Kristus är uppstånden!

Kristus prisikėlė!

Kristus nousi kuolleista!

Hristos a înviat!

INDEED HE IS RISEN!

In his typically thoughtful and good-natured Telegraph article, Charles Moore talks about “cultural” Christians, the type I usually call Christianists and religionists.

These are people, my late editor Roger Scruton comes to mind, who realise that a successful society can only be built on a foundation of a shared metaphysical premise and its derivative morality.

Moreover, they know that only religion, in the West specifically Christianity, can play such a unifying and edifying role. They themselves don’t believe in God but they do believe in the social utility of God’s word.

I can’t blame them for their lack of faith, just as I can’t blame anyone for any failing that’s none of his fault. Faith, after all, is a gift in the precise meaning of the word: something presented by an outside donor, in this case divine grace.

But I can blame such people for a lapse in logic or, perhaps, also knowledge. Reducing Christianity to its moral teaching, as laid down in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere in both Testaments, is simply ignorant. (I can again selfishly refer you to my book on Tolstoy, who was the chief culprit and, in the couple of decades before his death in 1910, the most influential one in the world.)

But people like Scruton know all that. That’s why theirs is a lapse of logic, not erudition.

As materialists, with or without some mystical longings, they have to believe that every word in the Bible is a lie. Well, perhaps not every word but only those that describe supernatural events, yet this is simply a pedantic qualification. Since the Bible is the word of God, everything in it is supernatural, even the dietary dicta and moral injunctions.

I’ve heard Christianists try to soft-pedal their position by saying that ‘a lie’ is too harsh a word. Perhaps ‘false’ would be kinder. Yes, I’d usually reply, it would be kinder. But it would be less accurate.

For the Scripture is full of eyewitness accounts of many miraculous events, including the one we’ll be celebrating tonight, the Resurrection of Our Lord. If someone rejects such accounts as false, he has to believe that those eyewitnesses were liars who hadn’t seen things they claimed to have seen. So yes, a lie is a harsh word, but it adequately describes Christianists’ view of Christianity.

This means they believe that a successful social fabric can be woven out of a tissue of lies, which is unsound on many levels, logical, intellectual and above all moral. And religionists are even more misguided.

They believe that a successful society can be built on any old religion, not necessarily Christianity. What, Islam? Buddhism? Animism? Zoroastrianism? The only other religion that had a profound effect on our civilisation was Judaism, but, since its spread is biologically limited, it can’t — nor wishes to — aspire to universalism.

Both Christianists (“cultural Christians” to Lord Moore) and religionists are partly right. Unlike most people, they see clearly the accelerating disintegration of the West and correctly attribute it to atheism and resultant materialism. The opposite of that is religion or rather specifically Christianity.

Yet Christianity can never succeed in its social, cultural and moral missions unless most people believe it’s true. And most people can only ever believe it’s true if it is indeed true. A false doctrine can command a wide following for a while but, as communism proves, sooner or later it’ll collapse like the walls of Jericho.

So much for what Lord Moore describes as “cultural Christians”. But another, similar type also exists, one I’d call “cultured Christians”.

These people laudably lack Tolstoy’s consistency. The good count rejected not only the Christian religion but also Christian culture, even, when in his dotage, the glorious part of it he himself had produced. By contrast, the people I’m talking about worship at the altar of Christian culture.

They crisscross the world trying to satisfy their voracious appetite for Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals, mosaics and frescoes, icons and paintings on religious subjects. When they are in the presence of those masterpieces, they look at them with veneration and love.

And yet they dismiss completely, at times contemptuously, the inspiration behind those tributes to God in Christ and Christ in God.

Such ‘cultured Christians’ are less culpable than the ‘cultural’ ones, in that they correctly see that things we all love so much can’t have a formative social effect. They are too esoteric for that because most people don’t possess the requisite education and taste to appreciate great culture.

But less culpable doesn’t mean completely off the hook. If people don’t see God in, say, Rheims Cathedral, all they see is shapes, proportions, details like flying buttresses or façade sculptures (many of them headless due to modernity’s favourite genre of art criticism).

That means the most important thing goes right by them – not intellectually, because they know all about it, but spiritually and emotionally. And without its spiritual and emotional appeal, great art loses much of it greatness.

Only the technique remains, and ‘cultured Christians’ appreciate its subtleties perfectly well. They are, however, missing out on the joy real Christians feel first, before admiring Gothic ornamentation or Romanesque succinctness.

The upshot is that both surrogates of Christianity, ‘cultural’ and ‘cultured’, miss the point. But not so badly as common-or-garden vulgarians who are indifferent to such matters altogether. Which is to say most people these days.

Religious and scientific quests both start at the same point: an act of faith.

In religion, it may be called revelation; in science, a hypothesis. A scientist senses intuitively that a certain proposition must be true, which inspires him to embark on arduous research at the end of which his hypothesis is either proved or disproved.

The research involves experiments (performed both by the scientist himself and his colleagues or predecessors) and an interpretation of their results, efforts both empirical and rational. That’s where a religious quest may differ, although it doesn’t have to.

St Augustine wrote: “Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.” St Anselm later expressed the same thought, confirming the appropriate sequence of the quest. Mutatis mutandis, a scientist will agree that he goes through roughly the same progression from an act of faith to ultimate understanding.

Looking specifically at Christianity, which seems appropriate today, the empirical evidence comes from the experience and testimony of numerous believers and eyewitnesses, such as the evangelists, and tangentially even non-believers, such as Tacitus, Pliny or Josephus.

And the science of rational interpretation is called theology, basically applying a philosophical apparatus to the word of God. Rational interpretation is essential for scientists, but not necessarily for believers, as history proves.

After all, how many of the billions of Christians have over the past two millennia ever opened a single theological treatise? An infinitesimally tiny proportion, I’d guess. This proves that even if a believer’s reason is excommunicated, he can still remain in communion with Christ.

But it doesn’t have to be excommunicated. If God gave us reason, it couldn’t have been just to enable us to calculate compounded interest, solve word puzzles or understand how protectionism hurts the economy. Human reason seeks to make everything, including God, intelligible.

The very definition of God precludes any possibility of complete intelligibility: a higher system can understand a lower one, but not vice versa. Yet, just as in science, any approximation to the ultimate truth is a step forward, advancing human knowledge to a higher plateau if not to the very summit.

Both theological and natural sciences pose questions and seek answers. In fact, Jacques Maritain described theology as “the science of first principles”, which purview makes it the overarching science, with fields like physics or biology merely its subsets.

Be that as it may, theology does answer questions, those asked by both believers and atheists. The latter tend to pose such enquiries in the hope of starting an argument they fully expect to win, and most of such squabbles begin with variations on my title above.

What they are implying is that, no matter how sound the theological argument is, they are going to dismiss it a priori. That’s a gross logical error on several levels.

An atheist is perfectly within his rights to say “I don’t believe in God, and nothing you say will change my mind” and leave it at that. I happen to disagree with that view, but I respect it as a faith in its own right.

Yet the moment an atheist says “If God exists…” or “If Jesus is God…”, he accepts that possibility for the sake of argument. This means he gatecrashes a different system of thought, accepting the terms on which that system is impeccably cogent.

If he then tries to keep one foot out and the other in, the resulting split is guaranteed to sprain his intellectual abductor muscle. Even an extremely intelligent atheist will then sound dumb.

The brightest illustration of this observation is David Hume who applied his intellectual gifts and literary brilliance to the perennial issue of reconciling God with the existence of evil. If God is merciful and good, Hume kept asking, then why does he allow suffering? If that’s beyond his control, then how omnipotent is he? And if he doesn’t know what’s going on, is he really omniscient?

Countering such questions is called theodicy, vindication of God. Its principal argument is based on free will, God’s gift enabling us to make our own free choice between good and evil.

We are free to help a blind man across the street or to push him under a speeding car, for example, just as God is free to punish us if we choose wrong and, one hopes, reward us if we choose right. And, though Christ showed a clear path to individual salvation, we remain free to take that path or not.

If our will weren’t free, if we were but puppets on God’s string, one would struggle to see why God would have bothered to make us so different from animals, or indeed to create us at all.

Moreover, if we accept as a given that God loves us, that indeed God is love, then we must find it hard to explain how such love could have been expressed by turning us into marionettes, or else pre-programmed robots. God’s is the absolute freedom, but if we are truly created in his image, ours has to be at least a relative one. Only God can be totally free, but that doesn’t mean man has to be totally enslaved.

Such arguments are irrefutable within the intellectual world our atheist has entered, and if he tries to refute them he’ll inevitably sound stupid, regardless of how brilliant he may be outside. That’s where he should stay, outside, thereby keeping his reputation for brilliance intact.

(I wrote a whole book about one such man, Leo Tolstoy, whose personality was voluminous enough to accommodate every known misapprehension of such subjects and also some uniquely his own.)

One such question always crops up on Good Friday. If Jesus was God, how come he didn’t exercise his divine power to save himself from an agonising and humiliating death?

Our hubristic modernity can’t fathom the possibility that someone may choose not to use his power under some circumstances. If something can be done, it must be done: such is the ubiquitous conviction. Yet the very notion of free will presupposes the possibility of self-restraint, choosing not to use some of the powers God possesses.

Such self-limitation of God is called ‘kenosis’ in theology, literally ‘self-emptying’. The term was first used in this context in St Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, and it’s vital to grasping the meaning of Christ’s Passion.

Chalcedonian doctrine established the dual nature of Christ as fully God and fully man. The latter is consistent with kenosis: Jesus refused to use his divine power to solve every problem he encountered in his earthly life.

As God, he chose to sacrifice himself to redeem the sins of mankind. And as a man, he freely accepted the burden of humanity: he needed to eat and sleep, he could be tempted by Satan, he asked God the Father to stay the executioners’ hand, he suffered agonising pain on the Cross.

Such arguments won’t lead an atheist to Christ. But if a man asks probing questions not because he wants to proclaim his atheism, but because he genuinely wants to know, then the answers may help him in his quest for the truth. As Pascal said, “If you are looking for Me, you have already found Me.” And even Jensenists may be right.

How many times do I have to tell foreign visitors that Scottish men don’t wear skirts?

It’s kilts, chaps, not skirts, and, if anything, wearing them makes those Scots more, rather than less, masculine. Alas, they are all too eager to prove that by wearing nothing underneath and raising their hems over their heads at the slightest provocation.

The laddie doth protest too much, as Shakespeare would say – but I won’t. Instead I’d like to draw your attention to the landmine ruling… no, make it the landmark ruling of the Supreme Court.

That august body boasts a fine tradition of judicial review going back all the way to, well, 2009, when Tony Blair, PM at the time, somehow found the traditional parliamentary institutions wanting. That was part of his assault on Britain’s constitution, in the course of which he created the Supreme Court, a redundant and therefore harmful body.

This time around, however, that appellate court got things almost right by ruling that: “The definition of sex in the Equality Act 2010 makes clear that the concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man.” In other words, a conversion from laddie to lady isn’t legally recognised.

Or is it? In handing down the judgement, Lord Hodge threw a smokescreen of waffle around it: “The Equality Act gives transgender people protection not only against discrimination through the protected characteristics of gender reassignment, but also against direct discrimination, indirect discrimination, and harassment, in substance in their acquired gender.”

First, the Court talks about sex being either-or binary, then it decries discrimination against “their acquired gender”. I am confused, but then I find modernity generally confusing.

On the plus side, those strapping lads who have replaced their kilts with skirts, with or without parallel alterations underneath, won’t be admitted to women’s lavatories and dressing rooms. Those .001 per cent of British women who, according to Sir Keir Starmer, have penises, are men in the eyes of the law.

The issue came to a head in Scotland, whose devolved government (another Blair contrivance) mandated that any public board should have 50 per cent female representation. That raised a question that in the recent past wouldn’t have occurred to any sane person: What constitutes a woman?

According to the Scottish government, anyone in possession of a gender recognition certificate (GRC) was a woman who must be treated as such under the 2010 Equality Act. The Scottish courts rubber-stamped the decision in 2023, which had wide-ranging implications for the whole UK.

Characteristically, mad laws can these days be challenged only by half-mad people, in this case radical feminist and lesbian groups. Normal people, those who rely on millennia of tradition, evidence before their eyes, science, and also moral and aesthetic judgement, are effectively disfranchised in such cases.

Someone who looks and sounds like Jacob Rhys-Mogg wouldn’t be able to share with the public his views on the matter, which I suspect are no different from mine. He’d be heckled, shouted down, possibly assaulted. And his political career would be over.

But wild-eyed, bra-burning zealots, riding into battle with their pronoun weapons at the ready, enjoy quite a bit of latitude. They worship at the altar of a different piety espousing equally respectable but different perversions, which earns them a share of voice.

Using that privilege, Marion Calder, co-director of the feminist group that launched the successful challenge against the Scottish government, said the ruling delighted “the vast majority of women across Great Britain”.

I’m happy for them, but I’m neither a feminist nor even a woman, although I have been trying to get in touch with my feminine side (unsuccessfully, according to Penelope). And, according to Miss Calder, men have no dog in this fight. The issue of public decency and indeed sanity doesn’t come into it. It’s all about women’s rights.

She then went out of her way to make sure her delight wouldn’t be misconstrued: “In day to day life, you can go around and it doesn’t really matter what your sex is. But in certain circumstances it is very important, such as prisons or women’s sport, changing rooms or rape crisis centres. This is where it’s actually important.”

Particularly for a certain sub-set of womankind: “Especially for the lesbians who intervened in this case, if they hadn’t actually won today it would have been illegal for lesbians, or gay men, to have a group of more than 25 people if they didn’t admit the opposite sex and we’d have the ridiculous notion of a lesbian with a penis.”

A straight woman with a penis, on the other hand, is perfectly all right, provided she doesn’t try to sneak into a women’s dressing room. Am I missing something or has the world gone mad?

My conviction that it’s the latter was reinforced by Kate Barker, chief executive of LGB Alliance, who said: “The ruling confirms that the words ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ refer to same-sex sexual orientation and makes it absolutely clear that lesbians wishing to form associations of any size are lawfully entitled to exclude men – whether or not they possess a GRC.”

Earlier I described the Supreme Court ruling as a “landmine” decision, and it wasn’t just indulging my propensity for playing on words. Call me selfish, insensitive and reactionary, but I haven’t had many sleepless nights worrying about transsexuals stealing lesbians’ thunder.

As framed and communicated urbi et orbi, this wishy-washy ruling is exactly what one would expect from a redundant legal body designed as a weapon against our ancient constitution.

The Court should have stated that the issue isn’t about transsexuals entering women’s lavatories or tennis tournaments, and it’s not about protecting the exclusive same-sex rights of lesbians.

The situation is simple, so simple in fact that it should never have reached the jurisdiction of an appellate court: a laddie can call himself a lady, have his manhood snipped off (or not, as the case may be) and swap his kilt for a skirt. But in the eyes of the law and society he remains a man, full stop.

And if he is still a man, it should go without saying, and certainly without a Supreme Court decision, that he can’t enter spaces reserved for women. Anyone who says otherwise should have not just his genitals but also his head examined.

As it is, this landmine ruling leaves plenty of room for further challenges, meaning that the mental disease afflicting our society will continue to progress and fester. So forgive me if I don’t rejoice at this half-justice.

I like my justice like I like my wee dram: full-strength. There, I’ve now exhausted my reserves of Scottish lore. “Haste ye back,” as they say north of the border.

“Wars aren’t won by generals,” Bismark once said. “They are won by school teachers and parish priests.”

Adjusting for our heathen time, we must replace parish priests with universities. But otherwise the Iron Chancellor was right.

Modern wars are either won or lost not by armies, but by nations. And nations become strong when their minds are properly educated and their hearts are properly primed.

If that condition isn’t met, the strongest army on paper will become the weakest army in battle. And vice versa – as the Ukraine is showing, a smaller nation blessed with a strong mind and morale can keep a major power at bay.

Both mind and morale don’t just happen by themselves. They must be developed and nurtured, which indeed makes schools and universities the smithies of nationhood.

If such institutions are in default of their mission, a responsible government must do all it can to get them back on track by any legal means necessary. If that means war, then so be it.

Such is the approach of the Trump administration, which seems to be in a combative mood. There are two other wars in which the US is currently involved either directly or indirectly: the trade war America is waging on the world and the aggression Russia is perpetrating on the Ukraine.

Trump’s approach to both covers a broad range from idiotic to criminal, but he is on the right side in the war he is waging on American universities, specifically Harvard. Acting in the capacity of loaded guns is the federal funding, which the government may withhold at its discretion.

That’s precisely what the Trump administration did when it froze more than $2 billion in such funding for Harvard. The immediate reason was the White House’s commitment to “ending unchecked anti-Semitism and ensuring federal taxpayer dollars do not fund Harvard’s support of dangerous racial discrimination or racially motivated violence”.

That was a reference to a wave of pro-Palestinian, at base anti-Semitic, rallies regularly held at Harvard and other universities under frankly incendiary slogans. But the issue is even worse than that.

American – and European – universities are increasingly replacing their core business of education with indoctrination, trying to turn their students into ignorant woke zealots committed to DEI subversion. Rather than educating the students’ minds, the universities are inflaming their passions, and pernicious passions at that.

Trump’s message to Harvard is that if that’s what you want to do to your students, by all means continue. But the federal government isn’t going to pay for it.

Harvard President Alan Graber predictably screamed bloody murder, or rather threat to academic independence. The Department of Education, he wrote, wants “to control the Harvard community”, jeopardising its “values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge”.

I don’t get this, and neither by the sound of him does Trump. If Harvard is such a stickler for its independence, it shouldn’t need federal billions to stay afloat. And if it wants the money, it should accept the strings attached to the purse – and in this case the strings are much needed.

I don’t know whether Trump can win the war against DEI madness, but it’s certainly one worth waging. Otherwise an agricultural analogy comes into play.

One way to combat a blight caused by locusts is to catch as many male ones as possible and turn them into drones by castrating them with radiation. When then released into the wild, the insects try to mate with their females but fail to produce any progeny. This disrupts the reproduction cycle and eventually wipes out the whole crop-destroying population.

That’s what taking one or two generations out of normal intellectual life does to the mental and moral health of a country. And this is exactly what Western universities do by churning out alumni well-versed in such disciplines as Black Lesbian Paraplegic Studies and proudly displaying degrees in cultural and intellectual subversion.

Just as I was sensing a nice warm feeling about Trump appearing somewhere in my breast, he had to go and spoil it all by uttering what my good friend called “the most revolting statement I’ve ever heard from a politician in my whole life.”

That was really saying something considering that my friend is roughly my age and must have heard quite a few revolting statements. He was referring to Trump’s comments on yet another war crime committed by Putin’s fascists, a murderous rocket attack on Sumy city centre.

That was Putin’s way of celebrating Palm Sunday (for botanical reasons, it’s called Willow Sunday in Russia), although I don’t think he got his theology right. On that day, Jesus entered Jerusalem to begin his Passion that led him to the Calvary on Friday.

Someone as committed to ‘traditional values’ as Putin claims to be ought to know that the idea was self-sacrifice for the sake of others, not sacrificing others for the sake of evil. Vlad made a mistake, and that was how Trump interpreted the war crime that killed 34 civilians and injured over 100, as a lapsus manus.

Putin, he said, “made a mistake”, sort of like capitalising words that shouldn’t be capitalised. Asked to elucidate, Trump added that “they made a mistake… you’re gonna ask them”.

But the real mistake, he explained, was made by Biden and especially Zelensky who is “always looking to purchase missiles”. Then came the statement that upset my friend so much.

“You don’t start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles,” Trump told reporters. “When you start a war, you got to know you can win.”

Yes, that’s why Zelensky didn’t start that war. Putin did, by committing an act of aggression aimed at rebuilding the Soviet empire and dictating terms to the West, certainly its European part.

Trump’s idea of avoiding that war against a stronger enemy is for the Ukraine to have surrendered the moment Russian hordes crossed the border. Things like honour, liberty, sovereignty don’t come into that.

Nor should Zelensky “hope” for missiles and other US assistance. That was explicitly guaranteed the Ukraine under the terms of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. In exchange for the Ukraine relinquishing her nuclear arsenal, the signatories, the US, Britain and Russia, undertook to protect the country’s territorial integrity.

No one took Russia’s promises seriously, but the US and Britain were supposed to be civilised countries bound by their word. Thus, Zelensky shouldn’t have had to “purchase missiles” or beg for them. Military hardware ought to have been provided to the Ukraine without quibbles or charges the moment Russia violated the terms of the Budapest Memorandum.

But then Trump has a peculiar idea about America’s contractual obligations. If he wasn’t president at the time they were signed, as far as he is concerned they are null and void.

He didn’t mind spelling out that notion in his own inimitable fashion: “The War between Russia and Ukraine is Biden’s war, not mine. I just got here, and for four years during my term, had no problem in preventing it from happening.

“President Putin, and everyone else, respected your President! I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS WAR, BUT AM WORKING DILIGENTLY TO GET THE DEATH AND DESTRUCTION TO STOP. 

“If the 2020 Presidential Election was not RIGGED, and it was, in so many ways, that horrible War would never have happened. President Zelenskyy and Crooked Joe Biden did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin.”

I fully expect Trump to develop this thought on Good Friday by saying that, had he been president at the time, Jesus would never have been crucified. Nor would either World War have happened, the Bolsheviks wouldn’t have taken over Russia, and the Great Depression would have been avoided.

I don’t know whether the latest round of Trump’s pronouncements on the Ukraine are among the most revolting political statements I’ve ever heard. Let’s just say there are quite a few close seconds, and the Donald can claim proud ownership of many of them.

There’s a scandal with strong dental implications unfolding in America, and sides must be taken. Hence I have to repeat what Leo Tolstoy said on a different subject: I cannot remain silent.

The other day, the American comedy show, Saturday Night Live, used an actress with prosthetic teeth to mock the White Lotus star Aimee Lou Wood for her characteristic English incisors.

Miss Wood took exception to that, calling the parody “mean and unfunny”. Since I haven’t seen the sketch, I don’t have a view on its quality. But I do have a view on English teeth, which I regard as a badge of national honour.

Foreigners tend to make fun of them, but only because they are secretly envious of the English, aware that they themselves drew a losing ticket in what Cecil Rhodes called “the lottery of life”.

Recognising this, Spike Milligan, though himself half-Irish, wrote a song celebrating his better, English, half: “English Teeth, English Teeth!/ Shining in the sun/ A part of British heritage/ Aye, each and every one/ English Teeth, Happy Teeth! Always having fun/ Clamping down on bits of fish/ And sausages half done/ English Teeth! HEROES’ Teeth!”

Penelope, my better half in the more usual sense of this phrase, is also a proud possessor of that hallmark of Englishness, which, as you can see in the photograph, does her looks no harm. I often say, only half in jest, that her teeth are the foundation on which our 40-year marriage rests.

If you like the English and their language, you must also like their teeth, it’s as simple as that. For it’s the language that gave the English dental structure that most endearing overbite.

Many English vowels are enunciated with the lower jaw retracting slightly, and I’ll leave you to decide the nature of the causality there. Did God who, as we know, was Himself an Englishman, make the English that way to make it easier for them to speak the best language in His creation? Or did the language have a formative effect on the English dental structure?

One way or another, the link exists. American sounds, by contrast, are formed deeper in the mouth and involve the lower jaw much more. Over time, this phonetic peculiarity has produced the heavy, jutting jaw typical of that nation. Such sound production also creates more resonant waves, making many Americans talk more loudly than they intend.

That’s partly why one can always hear two Americans talking across the restaurant floor. The other, non-phonetical, reason is the inherent American belief that, since all men are created equally interesting, even strangers must find whatever they say to each other fascinating.

Interestingly, both that tendency and indeed the jutting jaw begin to disappear the higher up the American class ladder you climb. Paul Fussell, whose seminal (and humorous) book on American social divisions, Class, I can’t recommend too highly, compared upper-class and lower-class American profiles and reached the same conclusion.

The higher the social class of an American speaker, the closer his accent moves to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, making his speech no louder than British, and his jaw no heavier. Though less pronounced in Britain, this tendency also exists here, which is why “chinless wonder” is a widespread prole putdown of the upper classes.

It pains me, as a patriot of England, to admit that, while the English lead the world in dental configuration, they don’t enjoy quite the same excellence in the quality of their dentistry. On the other hand, I find the American obsession with perfect teeth quite ludicrous.

Without wishing to go too far out on a limb, I’d suggest that this reflects the overall American tendency to uniformity. By contrast, English teeth may be imperfect but they are a marker (sometimes the marker) of individual character.

Thus, I much prefer Miss Wood’s teeth to the gleaming gnashers of her co-star, Walton Goggins. They make one think of Wedgwood porcelain more than of any part of human physique. One’s teeth, Mr Goggins, aren’t supposed to gleam in the dark, nor especially to light up a room when the electricity is out.

Speaking of the link between the English overbite and phonetics, when I was studying English at my Moscow university, by some quirk of nature a few of my fellow students had that same overbite. And what do you know, they found it much easier to produce authentic English sounds.

I don’t know whether the formative effect of phonetics on oral structure has been covered in medical literature. Perhaps it has been, unbeknown to me. But my lifelong observation suggests the link exists, and not just in English.

The French, for example, produce most vowels labially, which often gives them slightly protruding lips, predisposing them for… Well, I’d better quit while I’m behind. I don’t want to get into more trouble than I’m already in.

At first glance, this title may strike you as odd. After all, Trump’s hopes for winning that coveted accolade were mainly linked to him ending Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine – within 24 hours or thereabouts.

Yet it turned out that the deal our peace-maker had in mind was the unconditional capitulation of the Ukraine. To begin with, Trump sided with North Korea, Russia and Belarus to vote against condemning Russia for that aggression, or even recognising it as such.

Then he agreed with Putin that the Zelensky government was illegitimate because it refused to hold elections while 20 per cent of the country’s territory was occupied by the Russians. Consequently, Trump had accepted every Russian demand before the negotiations even began.

Proceeding from that wobbly platform, his representatives have now proposed that the Ukraine be treated the way the victorious Allies treated Nazi Germany, splitting it into sectors. To be fair, the Ukraine will be magnanimously allowed to control one of them.

The nuanced differences between Nazi Germany and the Ukraine seem to have escaped Trump. First, the former was the aggressor and the latter the victim of aggression. Second, Nazi Germany was thrashed, while the Ukraine is still holding her own. And third, Nazi Germany was an anti-Western totalitarian dictatorship, while the Ukraine is a pro-Western democracy, albeit not as perfect as Trump’s version of that form of government.

Predictably, the Ukrainians refused to bend over and offer Trump his favourite gluteal tribute. There go his chances for the Nobel, right? Wrong.

For at the other end of the earth the Donald has managed to achieve an improbable peace-making feat that has been defeating diplomats’ best efforts for centuries. Surely, that accomplishment merits the ultimate recognition.

You see, Asian, what used to be called Oriental, countries have a long history of animosity towards one another. The Chinese hate the Japanese, so do the Vietnamese, the Chinese hate the Vietnamese and also the Koreans, who too detest the Japanese. The Japanese both hate and despise them all. China wants to occupy Taiwan, and the Taiwanese have stated their intention to fight to the last man.

And the less said about China and India, the better. It’s only by a tremendous exercise in self-restraint that the two countries have so far refrained from lobbing nuclear bombs at each other.

This maelstrom of ill-will also draws in Malaysia, Cambodia and Indonesia. All those countries are at daggers drawn with their neighbours in the region, especially Japan but also China and India.

Such sentiments go back a long way, centuries definitely, millennia in some cases probably. Wars involving the countries mentioned are too numerous to count (including some during my lifetime) and if, as is prudent, you believe their rhetoric, they are nowhere near finished.

But then rode in Trump, wearing the white vestments of a peace-maker. And, in one fell swoop, he made those warring nations realise they have more things in common than those setting them apart. Unity has emerged out of disunity, friendship out of enmity.

Trump set out to cut off America’s economic nose to spite China’s face by introducing 125 per cent tariffs on all Chinese imports. The Chinese responded in kind, which has effectively put paid to all trade between the world’s two biggest economies.

The other day I tried to argue that, while that American policy made no economic sense at all (unless the underlying aim is to impoverish US consumers), it could be justified in terms of strategic necessity. Communist China is getting too strong and too dangerous, making it vital for America to repatriate some manufacturing while also enfeebling China.

That argument owed more to my reluctance to come across as an anti-Trump zealot than to any serious analysis. Repatriating strategic industries does make sense, and not just for the US. But that would take much more than just stopping trade with China.

Also, although the tariffs will damage China, they certainly won’t destroy her. Trade with the US accounts for only two per cent of China’s GDP. Losing that would hurt, but the Chinese are used to pain. And even if they weren’t, there would be precious little they could do about it without asking their communist rulers for another Tiananmen Square.

Then again, ready remedies are on offer. China may simply start dumping her exports on Europe and all other continents except the southern half of North America. And her strategic position has been strengthened no end because all those other countries have also been hit with punitive tariffs, although neither they nor anyone else can figure out what it is they are being punished for.

With the world’s biggest economy declaring war on them, the problems those countries had with one another began to look trivial. Now they are ready to close ranks against the common enemy, which is America expertly guided to the precipice by Trump’s hand.

Japan and North Korea have already signed an agreement with China, and you aren’t getting any prizes for figuring who will be the senior partner in that alliance. The other countries I’ve mentioned are in the advanced stages of similar negotiations, and even the EU is making overtures to Peking.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez visited China yesterday, and Xi told him that China and the EU should “jointly resist the unilateral bullying practices” of the Trump administration. Sanchez agreed with alacrity: Spain and, by implication, the EU aren’t going to follow America’s suit.

Also, the EU and China are discussing the possibility of removing European tariffs on Chinese cars, to be replaced with a minimum price instead. Next Xi will visit Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia, while his ministers are holding high-level discussions in South Africa, Saudi Arabia and India. The subject is the same: greater economic cooperation.

If that doesn’t get Trump his Nobel Peace prize, I don’t know what will. One thing for sure: he isn’t going to win one for economics.

When the stock market crashed last week, Trump just shrugged. Who cares?

Well, he should, considering his braggadocio during his first term, when he took the credit for the markets going up. Make up your mind, Donald: either your policies affect the stock market or they don’t. If they do, then the same person responsible for the ups is also responsible for the downs, as dialectics would suggest.

Then came a little legerdemain, with Trump declaring out of the blue a 90-day suspension of the worst tariffs. He had obligingly told his loyal lieutenants about that a few hours in advance, giving them time to buy at rock bottom. When the stock shot up, his friends cleaned up, with, for example, Musk rumoured to have made over $30 billion.

The market euphoria didn’t last, and the bond market crashed next. When that happened to the shares, Americans, 65 per cent of whom are involved in the market one way or another, cringed. But what happened to the bonds was even worse.

US Treasury bonds finance the country’s sovereign debt, to the tune of some $36 billion. Their yields determine the cost of public (also, indirectly, private) borrowing. And the yields depend on the traders’ confidence – or in this case lack thereof.

Markets are unsentimental, and they aren’t going to kiss any portion of Trump’s anatomy. With the US economy suddenly unpredictable, and its government playing Russian roulette with each chamber in the cylinder loaded, some invisible button got pushed and institutional investors began to get out of the T-bills.

As an immediate result, the cost of borrowing went up, just at the time when America needs to refinance $9 trillion of her debt. Inflation rise is sure to follow, and more borrowing will be necessary to fund even more borrowing.

Add to this the rising prices of all goods wholly or partly imported, which is to say just about all goods, and US consumers are going to bear the brunt of Trump’s illiterate brinkmanship. Hence, if he is to make that trip to Stockholm at all, it won’t be because of his seminal contribution to economics.

Yet, as far as I’m concerned, he is still in the running for the Peace Prize. That’s the least the Nobel Committee can do for someone who made China, India and Japan see eye to eye.

Donald Trump sees the world in terms of deals, deals in terms of personal relationships, and personal relationships in terms of who’s on top.

America is top dog in the world, Trump is top dog in America, and as long as foreign leaders recognise this and pay appropriate obeisance, he sees them as friends – in the same sense in which Vito Corleone saw his underlings as friends.

(I know I’ve drawn analogies between Trump and The Godfather before, but that’s the kind of shoe that fits.)

If, however, they choose to play silly Barzinis, then no punishment seems severe enough. Trump will remind them who is boss even if that means destroying the economy of the whole world, including the US.

That’s what he did, explaining that foreign countries had “ripped us off left and right, but now it’s our turn to do the ripping … I know what the hell I’m doing.” What he was doing in the full knowledge was wiping untold trillions off the world’s wealth in one fell swoop.

Trump proved his ability to turn people into millionaires, provided they were billionaires to begin with. He was also taking a sledgehammer to millions of nest eggs, and everyone ran scared, fearing that perhaps Trump didn’t really know what the hell he was doing.

With his characteristic flair for English, Trump branded them as “weak and stupid people” and coined his own neologism, “panicans”, because only weak and stupid people used the old word ‘panickers’.

When a loose cannon careers about, crushing everything in its way, then the best thing to do is get out of its way. But there was nowhere for those uppity foreigners to go, what with Musk’s project of mass emigration to Mars still being in design stage.

Hence foreign leaders had to reenact the opening sequence in The Godfather and offer Trump their respect in exchange for his protection.

Trump commented on that submission with his customary elegance: “These countries are calling me up, kissing my ass … they are dying to make a deal.” With the Pope, supplicants only have to kiss his ring, but then it’s Trump and not His Holiness who is truly infallible.

“Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything,” is how Trump described their supplications. I don’t know whether he told them that one day he’d expect them to provide a service, but The Godfather ethos seems to demand that sort of thing.

His personal objective thus achieved, Trump must have cast a panoramic look at the world’s economy and found it lying in ruins. Having extracted from the economic primer every prerequisite for a global recession, possibly depression, he knew he really was top dog.

Now he had shown the world his true power, people were offering him proper rispetto. Actually, this was the sort of respect offered to a chap who pulls the safety pin out of a hand grenade on a crowded bus, but that didn’t matter to Trump.

Something else did though. His capi de regime were getting restless. You see, some of them, such as Musk, Bessent and a whole raft of major donors got caught in the crossfire.

Musk, for example, lost $8.7 billion as a direct result of Trump’s affection for tariffs, and he had been a loyal lieutenant. Bessent too suffered huge attrition, although, as a former hedge fund manager, he wouldn’t own up to the number of billions wiped off his books.

When Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade advisor, tried to tell those dissenters to shut up and follow the leader, all hell broke loose. Musk called Navarro “a moron” who is “dumber than a sack of bricks”. Leader, schmeader, that was serious business they were talking about, billions, for crying out loud.

That gave Trump a dilemma. Dropping his trousers to let foreigners pay their respects was one thing, but upsetting his nearest and dearest wasn’t on. What if they did a Tessio and switched sides?

An announcement followed that all tariffs above the ironclad 10 per cent were being suspended for 90 days. The markets and, more important, the wealth of his loyal servants, shot up, and Trumps capi di regime began to smile again. This, though Trump had declared just two days earlier that “my policies will never change”.

After that, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, and indeed his Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, explained that had been the plan all along. Trump had staged that little demonstration of power to gain “leverage”. They didn’t explain what the leverage was for and whom it was against, leaving that to their listeners’ imagination.

Let me see if I understand. So the plan was to crash the world’s markets and, just as the world was bending down to pay its respects, to withdraw – well, suspend – most tariffs, putting the economic roller-coaster on a steep upswing. Do I get this right?

If I do, then let me draw your attention to a little fact. At 9.37 AM yesterday, when the markets had hit rock bottom, Trump posted that “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” Why was it such a great time?

Buying low makes sense only if you confidently expect the market to climb up soon or at least eventually. Yet no one expected that, quite the opposite. Every economist, analyst and commentator was sure that, since Trump had declared that his policies would “never change”, the market was going to continue its accelerating downward slide.

Buying under such circumstances would have meant throwing good money after bad. Only one thing could have made yesterday a great time to buy: foreknowledge that the tariffs would be dropped the next day and the markets would surge in consequence.

And only one man, Trump himself, possessed such foreknowledge, which he could then vouchsafe to some of his loyal servants, such as Musk and Bessent. Did they follow that advice? And if so, how much did they make from such knowledge?

I wonder if Bessent and Leavitt realise what they said. They actually hinted at the possibility of market manipulation, an offence for which uncountable traders have been sent down for rather long stretches.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that’s what Trump did – only that it looks as if he might have done. The trick is as old as the hills: you find a way to depress the market, buy as long a position as your finances allow, then watch the market shoot up, sell and laugh all the way to the bank.

Have Tessio whacked, reward your loyal capi di regime, make everyone else pay their osculating respects… well, I don’t want to keep banging on about The Godfather. It’s just that the analogy refuses to go away.

A question, if I may. What happens after 90 days? Another roller-coaster ride? More people losing their pensions and more of Trump’s friends making a killing?

Let’s just say I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of Trump’s lieutenants eventually got done for insider trading. But, I hasten to add, the Donald himself will have to remain above suspicion, like Caesar’s wife.