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Our governments in general, and Labour in particular, can be expected to break any promise of a half-decent policy. But we can count on them to honour any manifesto pledge guaranteed to push Britain closer to the knacker’s yard.

Hence one could be certain that they’d give the vote to 16-year-olds, just as they promised during their campaign. The policy happily unites the four key aspects of Starmer’s government: power lust, idiocy, subversiveness and cynicism.

Everyone and his brother have written about this awful policy, bemoaning the extra 1.5 million votes Labour may thereby gain, highlighting the immaturity of 16-year-olds that makes them unfit to play an active role in state affairs, castigating the constitutional vandalism involved.

So much for the arguments con, each one irrefutable and self-evident. Just think of yourself at that age and recall whether you were qualified to determine how the country should be governed, and by whom. I certainly wasn’t, and I bet you were no different.

I’ll neither repeat those arguments nor try to add any of my own. That would be like arguing that socialism is immoral and destructive. Every intelligent person knows it already; every stupid person is deaf to rational arguments.

Instead, I’ll concentrate on the arguments in favour of this outrage, those put forth by Labour mandarins and other fruits. Thus Sir Keir Starmer, living proof of democracy’s pitfalls:

“I think it’s really important that 16 and 17-year-olds have the vote, because they are old enough to go out to work, they are old enough to pay taxes, so pay in.

“And I think if you pay in, you should have the opportunity to say what you want your money spent on, which way the Government should go.”

Beautiful. This argument, in these very words, could be heard in Westminster back in the Middle Ages and ever since.

If we put money into the public kitty, we must have a say in how that money is spent. Because of this rationale, guilds and local councils enjoyed considerable power even under the most absolute of English monarchs, such as Henry VIII.

The link between taxation and representation was further strengthened during the American Revolution, with its insistence on none of the former without the latter. Alas, since taxes tripled immediately after the revolution, the newly independent Americans discovered they disliked them even with representation, but that’s another story.

My point is that the reverse slogan, no representation without taxation, is both logical and sound. The link between the two can’t be one-sided – so say basic fairness and political nous.

Sir Keir isn’t bright enough to understand the depth of the hole he dug for himself. By linking taxation and representation, he invited a counterargument, one I made at length in my book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis.

The gist of it was that only taxpayers should have the vote. Consideration also ought to be given to attaching a quotient to each ballot, in proportion to the amount of tax paid. This would restrict equally those who are good at exploiting either welfare provisions or tax havens.

Also, official figures show that 52.6 per cent of UK households receive more in cash benefits than they pay in tax. Developing Sir Keir’s argument to its logical conclusion, all such net recipients should be disfranchised. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?

Taking the argument to the next level, also disfranchised should be anyone deriving more than half of his income from the state, be it in the form of salary, fees or handouts. Such people have a vested interest in the perpetuation of the current government, which can only fortuitously coincide with public interest.

All these proposals flow out of Starmer’s statement as inexorably as wine out of a tipped bottle. (Since I’m in France now, this simile came naturally.)

In essence, rather than rejecting his idea, I’m merely developing it, putting it in a sound multilateral framework. Thus developed, it becomes sensible, making even enfranchised children more palatable if no less insufferable.

But Starmer doesn’t want to develop his subversive idea. As far as he is concerned, it’s fine as it is because it serves the purpose of “modernising our democracy”. Sir Keir wouldn’t know true modernisation if it crept in behind him and bit him on, well, you know.

What he means by the term is demolishing or debauching every tradition that stands in the way of Marxist mayhem. Actually, modernising things can make them not only better but also – more often than not – worse. By way of illustration, I suggest the juxtaposition of, say, Lincoln Cathedral and, say, the Gherkin or the Shard. Not much of improvement is in evidence, is it?

Starmer’s deputy, Angie Rayner, offered her one penny’s worth, which came out as a curate’s egg, good in parts. The good part is her diagnosis of the problem: “For too long public trust in our democracy has been damaged and faith in our institutions has been allowed to decline.”

Hear, hear. Yet I’d also add that this unfortunate state of affairs has been brought about by ideologised nincompoops like Keir and Angie (or their Tory counterparts).

Hence the solution to the problem would be letting them enjoy well-deserved retirement and making sure that people governing us are fit to govern. A generation of sound, prudent, publicly minded governance would repair our democracy and restore faith in our institutions, thereby answering the call of Angie’s heart.

Specifically, not going amiss would be a voting reform limiting franchise only to those who can be expected to cast their vote responsibly and knowledgeably. This would involve some approximation of my sensible proposals, defanging even the bestial nonsense Labour are pushing.

Angie will have none of that: “We are taking action to break down barriers to participation that will ensure more people have the opportunity to engage in UK democracy, supporting our plan for change, and delivering on our manifesto commitment to give 16-year-olds the right to vote.”

Since this proposal is left at that, it doesn’t really link representation with taxation. It’s nothing but a cynical power-grab, designed to perpetuate the rule by exactly the kind of people who are busily turning our democracy into a travesty, our institutions into a laughingstock and Britain into a pauper.

However, I’d like to end on a positive note. In a recent poll, half of the youngsters disagreed with this policy, and only 18 per cent said they’d definitely vote if the elections were held tomorrow.

Labour may well have miscalculated when counting on an electoral boost from their subversive policy. That’s always the saving grace: if this lot were as smart as they are vicious, zealously ideological and self-serving, we’d be in bigger trouble than we are already.

Fortunately, they aren’t. For confirmation, just look at Starmer’s and Rayner’s faces – you won’t find a flicker of intelligence anywhere in sight. They can’t even do subversion properly.

Anyone who has ever watched the BBC cookery show, MasterChef, may feel the series is criminally bad. However, the adverb would be used metaphorically rather than forensically.

In any case, judging by the show’s popularity, few people would share that metaphorical aesthetic judgement. However, they are now told that both presenters, Gregg Wallace and John Torode, are vicious malefactors who aren’t fit to grace the TV screen.

If we ranked all crimes in an ascending order of heinousness, the crimes they committed have been steadily climbing to the top of the list, rising higher than, for example, burglary.

Judging by police records, had Gregg and John knocked off a corner shop or broken into a few cars, they could have got away with it. Such little peccadilloes are usually not even investigated, never mind punished. And they certainly don’t cause an outcry of moral indignation.

Not so with the offences committed by Gregg and John. There, the reaction was swift and decisive.

Gregg was the first to get nabbed. Over 80 allegations were made against him, most relating to inappropriate sexual language and humour.

Just 80? In my advertising days, I probably perpetrated that number of such offences in an average week. This makes me glad my advertising days ended over 20 years ago, when public sensitivity to such delinquency hadn’t yet been honed to razor sharpness. I’d still be doing porridge otherwise.

It’s good to see though that Gregg’s dossier hasn’t yet been forwarded to the Crown Prosecution Service for a possible indictment. Judging by the vector of our judiciary concerns, that outcome will be certain in a few years. So, while Gregg Wallace must resent his summary sacking from the BBC, he ought to count himself lucky that some vestiges of tolerance still survive.

Having taken care of Gregg, the BBC has now come for John. He has been axed from the show too, but he is less of a repeat offender than his partner. In fact, if Wallace was nailed by dozens of allegations, Torode faced only one – but, as far as the Beeb is concerned, his one weighs as heavy as Gregg’s 80 (and counting).

You are bound to gasp with horror, so brace yourself for the shock. John Torode allegedly uttered one racially offensive word on one occasion, when the crew were having a post-filming drink. That was enough for the BBC. Off he goes.

That piqued my curiosity. What was that awful term? Fair cop: the way things are, if it was the dread N-word, the felon should have been tarred and feathered, if perhaps not yet drawn and quartered. So was it?

Since the BBC has declined to elucidate the issue, I had to dip into social media in search of the answer. As far as that source can be trusted, which probably isn’t very far, it turned out that the offensive word had been ‘wog’.

In Britain, ‘wog’ is used colloquially and, yes, pejoratively to describe dark-skinned people, wherever they come from. The common belief that the term stands for ‘Wily Oriental Gentleman’ is just folk etymology in action. In reality, ‘wog’ probably derives from golliwog, the blackface doll from an old children’s book, The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwog.

The word came into general use some time around the First World War, but after the next big war it occasionally expanded its meaning to include anyone not born in Britain. At that time, an MP accused Winston Churchill of xenophobia, saying that to him “all wogs start at Calais”.

The phase has gained some currency, but it’s always (and the word ‘wog’ usually) used in jest or sometimes even lovingly. At least, that’s what I choose to believe every time Penelope applies the word to me, which is rather often. Then again, I may be deluding myself, and perhaps I ought to report her to the DEI committee. Penelope’s saving grace would be that she has no job to be sacked from. (Although she may get in trouble next time she programmes Debussy’s Children’s Corner, in which one piece is called Golliwog’s Cakewalk.)

John Torode had such a job, and he is planning to sue the BBC for unfair dismissal. He might have a case even in our hypersensitive times, for, to use the word the way Penelope uses it, Torode himself is a wog.

He is an Australian, and in his country ‘wog’ is usually not derogatory. In Australia, it tends to refer to Italians, Greeks and other inhabitants of the Mediterranean region. The term is considered inoffensive, although it may be used pejoratively in some contexts.

Torode’s defence is that he doesn’t remember ever using the word and, if he had indeed used it, he certainly meant no offence. The poor chap is on a losing wicket there.

Racism is a crime that doesn’t have to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. A simple, even unwitnessed, allegation usually suffices. And if Torode tries to base his defence on lexical differences between England and Australia, he is on a losing test match, not just a wicket.

The English Common Law relies on precedents and one such scuppers Torode’s lawsuit before it’s even filed. In 2021, the ManU Uruguayan footballer, Edinson Cavani, received a congratulatory note from his countryman.

“Gracias, negro,” he replied, which in River Plate Spanish means something like “Thanks, mate”. When used that way, ‘negro’ or ‘negrito’ has no racial connotations whatsoever, never mind derogatory ones.

Yet that argument cut no ice with football’s morbidly self-righteous authorities. Cavani was fined, banned for many games and forced to issue a grovelling apology. The whole time the poor chap was perplexed, not understanding what he had done wrong.

You’ll easily see that, if wokery rules the roost over usages in a foreign language, it definitely claims dominion over English, whichever one of its variants or dialects is involved. If I were John Torode, I’d save my money on legal fees and look for another job.

The rest of us can lament the country Britain is becoming. If one bad joke or an incautious word uttered in a private conversation can destroy a man’s career, the time won’t be long in coming when the same word would put him in prison.

In fact, that was a prediction I made in my book How the West Was Lost, written some 25 years ago. Quoting from oneself is rather in bad taste, but I hope you’ll forgive this indiscretion:

“Remembering Cassandra’s fate, it is perilous to make predictions. However it is relatively safe to predict that, over the next ten years, more and more people in Western Europe and North America will be sent to prison not for something they have done, but for something they have said. That stands to reason: a dictator whose power is based on the bullet is most scared of bullets; a glossocrat whose power is based on words is most scared of words. At the same time, real crime is going to increase, all to the accompaniment of governmental bleating about giant advances in law enforcement.”

We are getting there, wouldn’t you say? John Torode would certainly agree.  

Prof. MacIntyre, who died in May at the venerable age of 96, wrote After Virtue, generally regarded as one of the seminal works of modern moral philosophy in the English language.

The book came out in 1981, and I’ve since made a dozen attempts to read it cover to cover, the latest one a few days ago. Each of those attempts has failed, miserably.

Several times, including the other day, I managed to get far enough into the book to get its main Thomist premise, doff my imaginary hat in respect and nod my very real head in general agreement. Yet I’ve never got any further, which failing I put down to my two allergies: one to Marxism, the other to bad writing.

I’ve been known to swallow books on Thomist (and other Christian) philosophy before my first coffee of the day, and few of them go down as easily as my morning coffee. That’s par for the course: such books demand an effort from the reader because they delve into highly complex issues.

One must concentrate hard to follow the thread of involved thought, and I’m always prepared to do so. For example, quite apart from the primary sources, I’ve read just about every line by R.G. Collingwood, whose philosophy of history, or rather philosophical history, MacIntyre often cites as one of his inspirations.

But I’m not prepared to do the Herculean labour of wading through the Augean stables of involute, impenetrable style. Happy as I am to do my best trying to understand the author’s thought, I refuse to spend my time trying to understand the author’s language.

I believe that a writer who doesn’t write lucid prose disrespects his art and his readers, and I for one refuse to be thus disrespected. Call it a personal idiosyncrasy, call it pedantry, call it anything you want, but the effort of deciphering MacIntyre’s endless paragraphs full of modifiers with uncertain antecedents is beyond me.

And if that doesn’t defeat me, his approving references to Marx’s criticism of free markets finishes the job. If Aquinas tried to reconcile Aristotle with Christianity, MacIntyre tried to reconcile Thomism with some aspects of Marxism. The first attempt was more successful than the second.

This vindicates yet again my innermost belief that there is no such thing as an ex-Marxist. MacIntyre remained a member of the Communist Party until age 27 and a residual Marxist thereafter, for all his criticism of some of Marx’s postulates. When a grown man accepts any part of Marxist cannibalism, he has a character flaw he never loses. Intellectual acuity can make up for some of it, but not for all of it.

This is a purely empirical observation I’ve never been tempted to reassess. My aversion to Marxism, on the other hand, isn’t merely empirical and rational. It’s visceral. When my eyes fall on Marxist bilge, my knee jerks almost all the way to my chin (or would do if a regrettably large stomach didn’t get in the way).

For all that, many bits of After Virtue I have struggled my way through appeal to me unreservedly. I share MacIntyre’s disdain for the Enlightenment, with its thinkers’ attempts to concoct an anthropocentric moral philosophy independent of Christian teleology.

Following Aquinas, MacIntyre traces the development of that teleology from Aristotle, showing how it produces a coherent, rational philosophy of morality and politics. He argues that the denial of that philosophy leads inexorably to the irrational nihilism of Nietzsche, Sartre or, in later times, Foucault and Derrida.

MacIntyre laudably translates his neo-Thomistic moral philosophy into modern political realities. He contrasts favourably Aristotle’s “goods of excellence” with the modern pursuit of “external goods”, such as money, status and power. MacIntyre strongly opposes Weber’s materialist, Protestant utilitarianism, and I applaud such thoughts whenever I can extricate them from his prose.

He is correct in arguing that commitment to free markets über alles will eventually replace traditional localism with rampant centralism, destroying local communities with their old-fashioned virtues. Where I think MacIntyre goes wrong is in co-opting Marx to his cause.

Marx criticised free markets (‘capitalism’ was the term he used) not because they threatened local communities but because they threatened the power of Marxist cannibals. If MacIntyre’s thought hadn’t been tainted by vestiges of his Marxism, he would have instead followed more closely the nuanced dialectic of many serious theologians who talked about riches.

Including St Thomas Aquinas: “The perfection of the Christian life does not consist essentially in voluntary poverty, though that is a tool of perfection in life. There is not necessarily greater perfection where there is greater poverty; and indeed the highest perfection is sometimes wedded to great wealth…”.

Note the qualifiers: “essentially”, “not necessarily”, “sometimes”. St Thomas wasn’t issuing a licence to Weberian acquisitiveness. He wasn’t giving the same “enrichissez-vous” advice the French statesman François Guizot (d. 1874) offered those who objected to property limitations on franchise.

Aquinas was expressing the fundamental Christian view on pursuing wealth: Go on then, if you absolutely must. But do remember what comes first. Jesus, after all, only said man shall not live by bread alone, not that man shall live by no bread at all. But he also said that his kingdom was not of this world, leaving his listeners in no doubt that it was higher than this world.

Addressing seven centuries after Aquinas a world that no longer could be presumed to put God first, Pope John Paul II said essentially the same thing as did Jesus and then Aquinas: “It is necessary to create lifestyles in which the quest for truth, beauty, goodness and communion with others for the sake of common growth are the factors which determine consumer choices, savings and investments.”

The language is modern; the message is two thousand years old. It’s based on the Christian balance between the two planes, physical and metaphysical, reflecting the two natures of Christ: God and man. The Pope’s reference to the unity of truth, beauty and goodness, by the way, comes straight out of Aristotle’s teachings on the ‘transcendentals’.

Every Christian thinker must be wary of the excesses of dog-eat-dog free markets, but not of free markets in se. The alternative to them is Marxist tyranny, with books such as After Virtue thrown into the bonfire of goodness.

I’ll probably give After Virtue another go, but not soon. It’ll take me a while to catch my breath. Going back to Etienne Gilson’s books will help, by reminding me how lucidly Thomist philosophy can be enunciated. I can almost follow his French better than MacIntyre’s English.

Donald Trump likes Britain, or at least so he says. Or is that what he says?

With the Donald, one can never be sure. When in my youth I taught English as a second language, I used to mark students down for phrasing as imprecisely as Trump does.

And I used to fail them for not knowing the difference among various names for Britain. The other day, Trump tried to make light of his ignorance, but that only made it even more evident.

“You have many different names you go by,” he said. “England, if you want to cut off a couple of areas. And you go UK, and you have Britain and you have Great Britain. You got more names than any other country in history, I think.”

This was supposed to be a joke, but I’d be prepared to wager a small sum that he really doesn’t know the difference. Actually, his own country goes by quite a few names too: America, the United States, the States, Uncle Sam, Texas…

Oops, sorry, Texas is only one political and administrative unit within the USA. But then England is also part of a greater political and administrative union, aka kingdom, that of herself, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. That’s what the United Kingdom means.

Great Britain, on the other hand, is a geographical concept, not a political one. It denotes the biggest island of the British Isles, one that contains England, Scotland and Wales, but not Northern Ireland, which has part of another island all to herself.

Britain is used colloquially as a synonym of either Great Britain or the United Kingdom, and it also used to refer to the British Empire, now defunct. (It’s largely defunct due to the maniacal wartime efforts of FDR’s America, but this is a separate subject.)

Trump isn’t the first man using humour, such as it is, to conceal his ignorance, and he won’t be the last. But, if you happen to meet him, ask him to define all those terms he used – I bet he won’t be able to.

One thing I can say for Trump is that his feelings about the EU and Britain’s place in it are irreproachable. He backed the Leave campaign during the 2016 referendum, correctly saying that we’d be “better off without the EU”.

When asked whether Britain had made the most of Brexit, he said, again correctly, that she hadn’t. Or, to quote verbatim, “No, I think it has been on the sloppy side…”.

That’s putting it mildly. ‘Subversive’ is the adjective coming to mind more readily, but one can understand Trump’s attempt to phrase diplomatically in the runup to his state visit to, well, whatever the country is called.

However, he then tagged on a tail end to that sentence: “… but I think it is getting straightened out.” That’s another manifestation of bone-crushing ignorance.

Rather than “getting straightened out”, Brexit is being steadily and deliberately undermined by our Labour government and its accomplices in the Tory and LibDem parties.

The Labour hierarchy is totally, and the Tory one mostly, made up of virulent Remainers, who have come back as re-joiners. Their collective efforts still make hundreds of EU laws valid in Britain, and the ‘cooperation’ (meaning the unconstitutional efforts to reverse the result of the 2016 referendum) between the EU and Britain is proceeding apace.  

The principal champion of this underhanded campaign is our PM, Sir Keir Starmer. Who, according to Trump, is “straightening Brexit out” so successfully that he deserves the highest praise.

“I really like the Prime Minister a lot, even though he’s a liberal,” said Trump. That makes one of you, Donald.

I can’t imagine anyone liking Starmer, not even his wife or next of kin. What’s there to like? Intellectual vacuity and moral decrepitude? Wholehearted attempts to destroy the country’s economy? Not so much his failure to curtail illegal immigration as his success in encouraging it? His genuflection before every heinous Marxist cause?

I shan’t hold against Trump his misuse of the word ‘liberal’, that being an established usage in his country and, increasingly and regrettably, ours. However, that term now stands for the exact opposite of its real meaning, which used to be advocacy of individual liberty and next to no state interference with quotidian life.

In America, liberalism means, not to cut too fine a point, socialism: stultifying and tyrannical wokery, replacement of individual responsibility with collective security, as much government control and as little personal liberty as is achievable this side of concentration camps.

In Britain, it means more of all the same things, plus the crusade to abolish our national sovereignty and kowtow to rather revolting apparatchiks across the Channel. So none of those things get in the way of Donald’s affection for Keir?

Apparently not, and Trump explained why: “He did a good trade deal with us, which a lot of other countries didn’t do.” Oh well, how else can the president of a great country judge foreign leaders? Especially a president who projects on global affairs solely his experience of shady property deals in places like Atlantic City?

Never mind Starmer being the worst PM in (rather long) living memory, beating to that distinction even the disastrous Gordon Brown. All that matters to Trump is a deal, and I’m glad he failed in his frantic efforts to develop property in Russia. Had he succeeded in that undertaking, he’d like Putin even more than he does now, even though Putin is a war-mongering fascist.

When asked what he thought of the country with multiple names, Trump was enthusiastic, expressing that emotion in his inimitable way. Britain, he said, is a “great place – you know I own property there.” What better reason does one need?

Actually, I own property there too, but that fact plays next to no role in my liking Britain. If I were asked the same question, that fact wouldn’t come up before a hundred others, those involving the country’s history, philosophy, literature, unique contributions to political science, physical beauty, national character, language – and yes, as an afterthought, I do own a tiny piece of it.

According to Trump, he has good reasons for visiting Britain: “I want to have a good time and respect King Charles because he’s a great gentleman.” So he is, but wanting to respect King Charles suggests that Trump doesn’t respect him yet.

If he meant he wanted to pay respects to His Majesty, why didn’t he say so? You know why. The president speaks the way he thinks: imprecisely, chaotically, inconsistently and invariably spurning Mark Twain’s advice to “use the right word, not its second cousin thrice removed”.

That respect Trump feels or aspires to feel doesn’t prevent him from making threats against the sovereignty of Canada, which is part of the British Commonwealth headed by King Charles. I’d rather he respected His Majesty less and international law more.

In conclusion, Trump pulled out of his pocket that old chestnut about the two countries having a “special relationship”, adding that he was confident the UK would fight alongside the US in a war.

That’s probably true, but I’m not sure Britain can expect reciprocal loyalty on the part of the US, for as long as it’s led by Trump. I’ll spare you a compendium of his pronouncements about NATO being obsolete and Article 5 of its Charter strictly optional, but that list would include several pages of entries.

Then again, this week Trump has done another about-face, saying he is now committed to NATO and armament supplies to the Ukraine, provided someone else pays for them. Don’t you wish the most important Western country were led by someone who says what he means, means what he says, does what he promises and has discernible convictions?

A foolish consistency might have been the hobgoblin of little minds to Ralph Waldo Emerson, but not all consistency is foolish. And not all consistent minds are small.

One can’t expect sports in general or tennis in particular to display greater integrity than, say, politics. Whenever aggressive, highly motivated people compete for great prizes, human nature is put to a test it doesn’t always pass.

And prizes at this year’s Wimbledon were the greatest ever: £3 million for the winner, £1.5 million for the finalist – and that’s equally for both the men and the women (we’ll talk about that travesty later). Triple that for additional endorsement income, and one can see how certain corners may be cut.

However, never in the tournament’s history has that scissor job been as blatant as in 2025. Both the men’s and women’s singles champions have served drug bans within the past 12 months, both amounting to a slap on the wrist.

Yannick Sinner twice tested positive for an illegal steroid, and Iga Swiatek’s boost came from a banned heart medication. Both of them received token suspensions, three months for Sinner, one month for Swiatek. The authorities made sure neither player would miss any Grand Slam events.

Sinner actually claimed that the drug entered his system while a physiotherapist, a perfectly legal user of the substance, was giving him a massage. Of course, happens all the time. I’ll try that line if I’m ever stopped for DUI.

Another player tested positive for cocaine a few years ago and got away with a derisory punishment by claiming he had merely kissed a girl who had just snorted a line at a party.

Yet another one was eventually exonerated by explaining that the drugs in her body had come from eating steroid-laden beef. My advice would be to desist from scoffing a whole cow in one sitting, the kind of gluttony that indeed can deliver a noticeable dose of illegal substances.

Really, chaps, let’s heed Ben Franklin’s adage of honesty being the best policy. Tennis authorities should abandon silly subterfuge and make any kind of chemical stimulation legal. That way athletes could openly endorse big pharmaceutical companies, pouring even more money into the sport.

In addition to the plethora of other logos players display on their kit, they could then sport those of Pfizer, Merck, AstraZeneca and others. When making his emetic “I’d like to thank” speech, a player could add to the list his pharma sponsor, “without whose R&D department I woulda never went on to win”.

Speaking of emetic endorsements, few can compete with Bjorn Borg’s. Interviewed by The Times, the ex-champion uttered some sweet nothings about tennis before getting to the heart of the matter:

“I wear a Rolex Day-Date watch. My Day-Date came out in 1956 – the year I was born. When I look at it, I think back to the successes I had on the tennis court. It’s the perfect fit.”

As a former adman, I admire the way Bjorn stayed on brief: the Rolex campaign has always directly linked tennis success with the watches. It leaves the viewer in little doubt that, had Bjorn worn, say, an Omega or Patek Phillippe, he would never have won five Wimbledon titles.

The interview was illustrated with a large photograph of Borg, the promoted item prominently, nay brazenly, displayed on his wrist. I don’t mean this as a criticism: Bjorn’s high-earning days are 40 years behind him, and he has to scratch a living wherever he can find it.

What I do object to strenuously is one of the sweet nothings he did say about his sport: “I love to watch women play. I think they should be paid the same as men and they are [in grand slams]. If you look at men’s and women’s tennis today, they are equal.”

Liar, liar, your shorts are on fire. I’d happily accept the first sentence, but only if the word “play” were excised. As to the other two sentences, they are ridiculous, coming from a man who knows everything there is to know about the game.

The issue of equal pay regularly comes up during every major tournament (including, I’m sorry to say, in this space). Pundits who take issue with this outrage usually point out that men play best of five sets matches, and the women best out of three.

This means that men get paid much less per hour on court. One pundit, for example, calculated that at a recent Australian Open, the winning woman got paid £54,000 per hour more than her male counterpart.

But that, to me, isn’t the whole story. The real problem is that the women are simply not as good, mutatis mutandis. It’s not their fault that they are physiologically weaker and slower than the men, meaning they can’t hit as hard or run as fast. Yet there’s no physiological reason for them not to develop the same technical competence.

That they woefully fail to do, which any viewer of this year’s Wimbledon final will confirm. Amanda Anisimova, the losing finalist (and recipient of the £1.5 million runner-up cheque) has a glaring technical problem with her forehand.

This explains why she lost her final 6-0, 6-0 in 57 minutes, the first time that feat had been achieved in 114 years. Now, it’s not only the prize funds but also the ticket prices that are the same for the men and the women. This year, the cheapest ticket for either final was £240 and the most expensive one £315.

That is if they were bought at the box office, which many weren’t. I don’t know how much the touts were charging, but I’d guess at least double the list price. Borg is fortunate that he didn’t have to pay for his ticket, but those poor souls who did probably couldn’t help figuring out how much that sorry spectacle cost them per minute.

There exists a cabal among commentators, all of whom have to know better, to talk up the women’s game, trying to justify the gross iniquity of equal pay for unequal work. In this case, the chorus sings the same line in unison: poor Amanda was overcome with nerves, which is why she couldn’t hit a forehand over the net and between the white lines.

Of course, she was nervous – everyone appearing on Centre Court is, especially if such appearances aren’t customary for the player. That’s why every male professional spends thousands of hours grooving his strokes to the point where they become automatic and more or less immune to pressure.

‘More or less’ are the operative words. A nervous newcomer to Centre Court is bound to miss a fair share of the kind of shots he’d normally make with his eyes closed. And many a match has been lost because of the pressure of the occasion.

But not love and love, with every other forehand either hitting the net or flying into another county. When that happens, it testifies to an insufficient commitment to the game, to not enough hours spent on the practice court.

More generally, it testifies to the overall lower level of the women’s game, which makes their equal pay just an extension of politicised wokery. But you’ll never read or see a commentator say that in commercial media. Nerves yes, technical incompetence – absolutely not, not if they want to see the inside of a TV studio ever again.

Anywhere you look, tennis displays the same festering ulcers as the rest of society. It would be silly to expect anything else. But I’m sorry to see the likes of Bjorn Borg prostituting themselves so openly. There was never anything wrong with his forehand.

George W. Bush once hilariously said that the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur. That wasn’t meant as a joke, but it worked as one famously, while also providing a strong argument for IQ testing of all presidential candidates.

It’s true that businessmen aren’t held in as high esteem in France as they are in the US or even Britain. But they do exist, and the one I know personally shows how much any country needs such people.

I mean the kind of people whom Labour is busily trying to drive out of Britain, and good riddance to bad rubbish. So enterprising chaps, tens of thousands of them, up sticks and go, taking with them their capital, the jobs and tax revenue they create and, above all, their talent for improving the local communities.

Our neighbour in France, Michel Guyot, is living proof of what can happen to a place when entrepreneurs move in, not out. In 1977, Michel and his brother Jacques, both penniless, made a bold move.

For a token price of one franc they bought the Château de Saint-Fargeau, a 17^th-century Renaissance castle down the road from us. Built for the Grande Mademoiselle, a cousin of Louis XIV, the château wasn’t exactly derelict when the brothers bought it, but as near as damn. The deal was that they would restore it to its past glory, a project bound to take years and millions.

The local councils chipped in, but most funds came from the brothers’ tireless fund-raising. Little by little, they restored the château, displaying not only business and administrative acumen but also good taste.

As parts of the castle came back to life, the Guyots opened them to the public. Tourists began to flock in – this though the nearest train station is 15 miles away, and the nearest airport 100.

By 2000, when we moved into the area, the money brought by tourists had begun to trickle down, with Saint-Fargeau showing signs of a recent makeover. By then Jacques had gone on to develop other ancient properties, but Michel remained hands-on.

At about that time, he found a way not only to keep the restoration money coming in, but also to turn the château into a national attraction. Putting his fecund imagination to work, Michel started two projects that showed he could think on a grand scale.

He created in the château grounds a son et lumière (‘sound and light’) show, reenacting the 1,000-year history of Saint-Fargeau, through Joan of Arc, the Revolution and the Second World War.

Referred to as le spectacle, the production is indeed spectacular. It involves over 700 actors, 50 horses, batteries of cannon and even Sherman tanks. Lit up by searchlights, the show lasts two hours, during which the spectators watch jousts, cavalry attacks, infantry battles, tank raids and victory celebrations. The end of the show is announced by a midnight cannonade reverberating for miles.

The spectacle is advertised all over France, including Paris, and people respond with alacrity. Rivulets of tourists turn into a mighty stream, and the local hotels, cafés and restaurants flourish. Saint-Fargeau itself, public buildings and private residences alike, has lost much of its slightly dilapidated look.

The village has perked up noticeably but, amazingly, without letting mass tourism turn it into a vulgar mini-Disneyland. The place wears better clothes now, but they aren’t gaudy, and the old dignity hasn’t been compromised by the new-found wealth.

It’s not just the château and its spectacle either. For some 25 years ago, Michel embarked on another project, another testimony to his restless intelligence.

He bought an abandoned quarry a few miles from Saint-Fargeau and hired a team of 50 builders and artisans to perform an extraordinary feat: to build a medieval castle using the same techniques and materials as in the Middle Ages. The wood, stone, earth, sand and clay needed for the construction of the Guédelon castle all come from the same quarry or thereabouts.

If the spectacle is held only from mid-July to late August, Guédelon attracts thousands of visitors throughout the year. They come in droves to watch period-costumed artisans at work: quarrymen, stonemasons, woodcutters, carpenters, blacksmiths, tile makers, basket makers, rope makers, carters with their horses – they all ply their trades in an impressive show of archaic craftsmanship.

A gimmick? Of course it is. But it’s done tastefully, with a minimum of kitsch. Both Guédelon and the spectacle are also instructive, especially for children, who always make up a good part of the visitors.

And speaking of instructiveness, Michel Guyot has also created a model farm down the road from the château, and it too has been drawing in large groups of visitors, mostly children. They learn that bacon doesn’t start out in rashers, nor bread in loaves.

Since I’m no longer a child, my knowledge of the farm is strictly hearsay, for I’ve never bothered to visit it in 25 years. But rows of cars, coaches and school buses always parked outside, especially in summer, testify to the project’s success.

I’ve seen similar undertakings elsewhere turning the surrounding area into a contiguous theme park. But I can testify that Saint-Fargeau and other villages around us haven’t paid for their new wealth with their soul. I don’t know whether this is due to the soul’s resilience or to Michel’s taste, but one way or the other the new money hasn’t destroyed the old charm.

Ever since Russia’s full-scale assault on the Ukraine in 2022, the portal of the Château de Saint-Fargeau has been adorned with the Ukrainian flag. This shows where Michel Guyot’s heart is – always in the right place.

According to Manny Macron the British people have been “sold a lie” that leaving the EU would “make it possible to fight more effectively against illegal immigration”.

Manny would have none of that: “Our increasing problems require cooperation, a European approach” rather than what “populists often sold”.

To paraphrase a lawyer joke, “How do you know that Macron is lying?” “His lips are moving.” Manny can’t open his mouth without uttering either a witting lie or an unwitting falsehood. That undoubtedly makes him an expert on the subject of lying, but even experts can get things wrong.

It’s impossible to decode the denotation of Manny’s remarks without first understanding their connotation. So let’s try to do just that.

To the fire-eating European federalists, especially those of the French or German persuasion, the EU is the same thing as the NHS is to the British. It’s the object of their secular worship and heartfelt love. That produces the kind of faith that can be shaken by neither logical arguments nor empirical evidence.

Hence they regard Brexit as a combination of iconoclasm, treason and apostasy. The British people declared their unwillingness to worship that idol, branding themselves as infidels. And infidels must be punished.

But Manny is right: Brexit was indeed tightly wrapped in a tissue of lies.

However, these were told by the likes of him, ideologues who tried to misrepresent Brexit as something it never was because they hated everything Brexit is. I thus place Manny into the same group with our own Remainers, those who now densely populate the Labour front benches (and the Tory ones too, if somewhat less densely).

Most Britons didn’t vote for Brexit because some dastardly liars had told them that leaving the EU would solve every little problem the country has, including that of illegal immigration. They cast their vote for Leave because they wanted to be governed by their own parliament, not by a motley crew of unaccountable Continental apparatchiks.

Populism had nothing to do with it, unless the word is misused to designate anything socialists like Manny dislike. Quite the opposite: the true message of Brexit presupposed an audience well-versed in Britain’s political and constitutional history.

Such an audience is rather small, given the conditions of our comprehensive education. However, Leave campaigners – and all political campaigners have to be populists by definition – managed to boil the message down to a simple binary question: Do you want to be governed by the parliament you elect or by some foreign body no one elects?

Considering that the sovereignty of parliament is the quintessence of the British constitution, and has been for centuries, that concept has penetrated the nation’s DNA. That’s why more Britons voted for Brexit than have ever voted for anything else.

Those who really got the message knew that Brexit made it possible for the nation to solve many hitherto unsolvable problems, such as border control. Since the EU travesty of free movement of people no longer held sway, our government acquired the means to stop illegal immigration once and for all, and to control the legal kind as it saw fit.

Yet no magic wand came with Brexit. That horrendous problem wasn’t going to solve itself – it still required a good government to do so.

However, every government we’ve had since 2016 fell into the range between pathetically useless and downright destructive. They had the means to stop what resembles occupation more than immigration, but they either didn’t want to achieve that end or were too incompetent to do so.

Modern European federalism is a socialist dream come true, and the principal desideratum of socialism is to obliterate every vestige of Western, which is to say anti-socialist, tradition. Mass immigration of cultural aliens serves this purpose nicely.

Blair’s éminence grise, Peter Mandelson, once spelled that out with most refreshing cynicism. We welcome mass immigration, legal or otherwise, he said, because thereby we import Labour voters.

That’s no doubt true. Because immigrants need, or least want, handouts, they are likely to vote for the parties that dangle the larger ones before their eyes. This means socialist parties, in Britain usually Labour.

We are now governed not by any old socialists but by card-carrying Marxists. They are running the country into the ground, and they are doing that not just because they are incompetent. Destroying or at least debauching every British institution and tradition is something their ideology demands. Any weapon useful to that end is welcome, and an influx of alien swarms is one such.

If in 2019 1,843 people made the cross-Channel boat trip, that number has gone up to 44,000 since Labour won their landslide. This represents a gross violation not only of Britain’s territorial integrity, but also of EU law.

It no longer applies in Britain, or rather shouldn’t, but it certainly hasn’t lost its validity in France. And EU law says that immigrants from troubled lands must be accepted by the first safe country they reach.

If that country happens to be France, then it’s the French who must mollycoddle those beauties by giving them room (ideally in three-star hotels) and board. Unless, of course, they can argue that France is much less safe than Britain, which they can’t, not in good faith at any rate.

Hence, by building those internment camps all along the Channel, the French violate their own law – after all, those detainees are bound to want to leave the camps for the sunnier economic climes across the water.

At fault here isn’t Brexit but the socialist governments of France and Britain whose ideological interests converge. Otherwise, HMG wouldn’t need France’s help to stop those boats.

After all, the Royal Navy managed to deter a Nazi invasion of the British Isles. Our navy is but a shadow of its former self, but then rubber dinghies make up a less formidable force than German battleships and U-boats.

As Nigel Farage correctly pointed out the other day, those illegal sailors are committing a crime against the very nation the Royal Navy is supposed to protect. The solution seems simple enough: a patrol vessel should intercept a dinghy and order it to turn around.

If it refuses to do so, the patrol vessel should fire a warning shot and, if the message still doesn’t get home, sink the dinghy. Something tells me that those aspiring migrants would quickly decide that France is safe enough after all.

If this measure strikes you as too radical, then at least the government should announce that no one entering the country illegally would receive any social support whatsoever. No room, no board, no medical care (except in emergencies). No family reunification either: if a family of migrants wish to reunite, let them do so in France or, better still, in their own country.

The pathetic palliatives mooted by the two socialist nonentities, Starmer and Macron, aren’t going to work – largely because neither man wants them to work. Such is the truth of the matter, and everything else is a lie. You know, the sort of thing Manny accuses the ‘populists’ of bandying about.

Valery Gergiev, Putin’s favourite conductor, friend, courtier and accomplice, is to appear at a publicly funded festival near Naples, a news item that has caused protests all over Italy.

Warding them off, Ivan Scalfarotto, a Left-wing senator, said: “I am firmly opposed to Vladimir Putin [and] I stand fully with Ukraine. But banning artists for political reasons is a dangerous mistake: Gergiev is coming to conduct, not to campaign. When we censor art, we risk becoming what we claim to oppose.”

This develops the argument put forth by the Kremlin every time another Putin pet finds himself ostracised in the West: “Art is above politics”. That’s rich, coming from that lot.

Nothing is ever above politics in evil regimes. Art, sport, science, you name it, are all used as conduits of their evil propaganda. When debating with Western visitors, the standard Soviet claim used to be that yes, you may have a higher standard of living. But our ballet is better than yours. All Soviets likely to have contacts with foreigners were briefed to say such things (spoken from personal experience).

Every victory won by Soviet athletes or chess players was trumpeted as a demonstration of Soviet superiority over a decadent West. Every Soviet musician winning a prize at an international competition was held up as proof of communist achievements.

In my youth, Soviet culture minister, Yekaterina Furtseva, always briefed young musicians about to depart for a competition in England, Belgium or France. The briefings inevitably started with a bang of her fist on the desk and a stern command: “I want the top three prizes! You are Soviet musicians!”

That fine tradition is alive and thriving in Putin’s Russia. He recruits musicians in the fine KGB style to carry – and legitimise – his message to the world. Those who succeed in such extra-musical exploits form his inner circle at the Kremlin.

Bashmet, Matsuyev, Berezovsky and a few others curry favour with the fascist regime by acting as its active mouthpieces, with or without musical instruments. And none of them is more hideous than Gergiev, the gangster musician in the service of a gangster regime.

He has been close to Putin since the 1990s, when Gergiev was making his mark as conductor in Petersburg, and Putin was the mafioso deputy mayor of the city. Since then, Gergiev has clung to Putin like a limpet, amassing power and riches for his trouble.

In those days he was a decent enough conductor, solid and technically competent, if hardly deserving of being touted as the world’s greatest. As Gergiev’s reputation grew, he began to collect artistic and administrative posts the way some people collect stamps.

Improbably, Putin appointed him as general director of both the Mariinsky Theatre in Petersburg and the Bolshoi in Moscow. The West followed suit: Gergiev acquired posts in Rotterdam, Munich, Milan and elsewhere, becoming perhaps the world’s busiest conductor.

All sorts of accolades and medals followed, mostly from Putin. But, a gangster himself, Vlad knows how to express his appreciation the gangster way: with money.

Money became Gergiev’s primary interest, something Putin encouraged. Early in his ascent, for example, he granted Gergiev a monopoly on marketing turkey meat in Russia, a concession worth millions.

Gergiev used his ill-gotten gains to set up a charitable foundation, supposedly to support struggling young musicians. However, it turned out that the only musician the foundation supported was Gergiev himself, and he was neither young nor struggling.

Neither was he any longer really a musician, someone serving music and devoted to his art. On the contrary, Gergiev’s perfunctory performances began to bespeak his utter contempt for both the music and the audience. He routinely skipped rehearsals, went through the motions at the podium, then rushed off to the next gig.

A friend of mine, a Dutch musician, told me that Gergiev once showed up an hour late for his concert at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, then conducted an embarrassing clunker and left in a huff. It turned out that he had played a matinee in Brussels earlier that day.

Since I have rather idealised notions about music, I was quite shocked. That little peccadillo, however, was nothing compared to Gergiev’s other coup. A few years ago, he conducted in Moscow in the morning and at New York’s Carnegie Hall the same night – a feat that would have been impossible if he didn’t own a private jet.

The plane, however, is a minor item of his possessions. Receiving inflated fees from Putin’s lieges and embezzling millions from his foundation, Gergiev has become a mini-oligarch. In Russia, that distinction presupposes unwavering loyalty to Putin in exchange for the latter’s permission to pilfer at will.

Recently published documents show that Gergiev has amassed a property empire worth hundreds of millions, and that’s just in Italy. For example, he owns one of the most spectacular palazzos on the Grand Canal in Venice.

That spelled an outstanding debt to Putin, and Gergiev has been working it off tirelessly. He has accepted the position of Putin’s personal ambassador, a sort of cultural attaché. That exalted post comes with a simple brief: vindicating, ideally glorifying, Putin’s fascism, lending it the weight of Gergiev’s reputation.

The conductor took up the role with the kind of dedication he nowadays denies to his conducting. Gergiev has been happily whitewashing Putin’s domestic repression and military aggression abroad.

He was enthusiastic about the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the criminal annexation of the Crimea in 2014. And of course the full-scale attack on the Ukraine in 2022 had no greater champion.

A backlash ensued. Gergiev was instantly dropped by leading cultural institutions including the Munich Philharmonic, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, Metropolitan Opera, Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, and BIS Records.

His engagement at La Scala was cut short by the mayor of Milan, but he was invited to get it back by condemning the assault on the Ukraine. Yet Putin’s poodle condemned nothing. On the contrary, Gergiev was issuing one thunderous panegyric for the criminal war after another.

The UK, Germany, Holland and the Scandinavian countries declared Gergiev persona non grata, while Canada imposed personal sanctions on him, alongside 43 other mouthpieces of genocide. That measure included the freezing of Gergiev’s assets, something the maestro must have found especially painful.

Yet Italy has now signalled her readiness to adopt a more tolerant approach to the glorification of mass atrocities committed by the Putin regime. I do hope other countries won’t take this as a precedent.

“Art is above politics”? Since when?

Just compare Gergiev’s situation with that of Wilhelm Furtwängler, de-Nazified after the war and barred from the podium for quite a while. Only please don’t compare them musically: Furtwängler was arguably the greatest conductor in history, and Gergiev is a pygmy standing next to a giant.

But after the Second World War, Furtwängler suffered prosecution for having continued to perform in Berlin throughout the war. Yet he never joined the Nazi party, he refused to give the Nazi salute or sign his letters Heil Hitler, he helped many Jewish musicians escape Germany, and he resisted attempts to Aryanize his orchestra and its programming.

Furtwängler was forced by the Nazis to sign a couple of documents about the seminal differences between Aryan and Jewish music, but other than that he served his art, not Hitler. I’m not going to immerse myself into the ethical mire surrounding the de-Nazification programme, and nor shall I try to vindicate Furtwängler unreservedly.

But if that musical colossus was judged culpable, the musical pygmy Gergiev ought to be summarily arrested the moment he sets foot on the soil of any civilised country. For once, I’d welcome the suspension of due process. Lock him up and throw away the key, would be my recommendation.

“Accidents will occur in the best regulated families,” said Messrs Pope, Dickens and Tennyson. And if families can fall out, then so can friends, even those of long standing.

The other day I speculated on the nature of the evident amity between Trump and Putin. The two possibilities I mooted were some leverage Putin may have over Trump or, alternatively, a genuine mutual admiration. One way or the other, the friendship appears to be under strain.

Like all psychopathic narcissists, Trump wants to go down in history as the man who solved every problem of the world. Since no problem is bigger than war, it’s essential for Trump’s self-image that he be seen as the ultimate peacemaker, ideally recognised as such by the Nobel Prize committee.

The aggressive war waged by Russia on the Ukraine takes pride of place among the on-going conflicts. This is a war that can escalate out of control, all the way to a nuclear holocaust.

Hence securing any approximation of peace there would be a huge PR coup – this, irrespective of how far that approximation would be from real, lasting peace. A short ceasefire would work, if only for a month. Even merely stopping attacks on Ukrainian cities would do at a pinch.

Surely Putin will play along, thought Trump. That’s what friends are for, isn’t it?

That was ignoring Putin’s nature, formed as it was by the KGB, outpacing even the SS to the distinction of being history’s most evil organisation. And KGB creatures don’t befriend people. They run them, in every way they can.

Putin’s strategy is fairly obvious. For the past 20 years at least, he has been communicating, by word and deed, his plan to rebuild the Soviet Union to its past awful grandeur.

However, of the past Soviet republics and satellites, only Belarus has been cooperative. Others have been playing hard, or rather impossible, to get. Clearly, they had to be forced to re-join the fold, but those devious apostates were alert to the danger.

Hence they attached themselves to powerful international players: Kazakhstan to China, Azerbaijan to Turkey and – most annoying – the three Baltic republics to NATO. The Ukraine was also leaning the NATO way, even to the point of discussing future membership.

Turkey and especially China seem to be off-limits for Russia’s aggression, an attack on a NATO member is one for the future, what with that notorious Article 5 a burr under Putin’s blanket.

That left the Ukraine a clear winner: Putin correctly decided that, since the country was only a NATO ally, not yet a member, the West would use that as an excuse not to be directly involved.

The original plan was to overrun the Ukraine in three days and “hang Zelensky by the balls”, as Putin promised, speaking in the idiom Trump could relate to. However, after three years of heroic and skilful resistance by the Ukrainian army, helped along by Western supplies, Zelensky still keeps his anatomical fixtures, and the Ukraine is still in possession of 80 per cent of her territory.

As the shooting war goes on, hybrid war is also in full swing. The FSB, SVR and other heirs to the KGB have mounted a two-prong propaganda offensive, putting their professional skills to good use.

One prong is putting the blame for the war on NATO’s eastward expansion, which allegedly threatened Russia’s strategic interests. So it did, at that, considering that Russia’s strategic interest is to conquer or at least subjugate Eastern Europe, for starters.

Portraying NATO expansion as an aggressive threat to Russia was a typical KGB canard, but it was avidly swallowed by Westerners craving a strong, muscular leader. One still hears bleating to that effect from all and sundry, especially among the populist Right.

The other prong was threatening nuclear war, thereby stoking the fears of the more faint-hearted Western leaders. Putin correctly calculated that brandishing the nuclear shiv would slow down Western aid for the Ukraine and limit its scope. Hence the threats to sink Britain with one bomb, turn the US to radioactive dust or to create the America Strait beween Canada and Mexico.

The threat also sowed dissent among Western leaders, who proved to be divided and therefore conquerable. As has been their custom since 1949, when NATO was formed, they looked to America for guidance. But the signals they were receiving were mixed.

The Biden administration talked loudly but carried a small stick. It kept its hand firmly on the control valve regulating aid for the Ukraine. Every care was taken that the Ukrainians should have enough to fight, but not enough to win.

Then in barged Trump, full of MAGAlomaniac braggadocio. He’d end that war within hours of his inauguration, boasted Trump. He had that special rapport with Putin, based on a sense of spiritual kinship and common interests.

From the start, Trump made no secret of seeking any possible end to the war, including the Ukraine’s capitulation. Three days into Trump’s second term, America’s military and economic aid to the Ukraine was paused as a way of forcing Zelensky to surrender. That he flat out refused to do.

Hours became days, then weeks, then months. That Nobel Peace Prize was turning into a mirage: the closer Trump got to it, the farther away it turned out to be. Putin expertly strung him along, running Trump the way KGB teaches officers to run their marks.

Trump was getting desperate and ever so slightly irate. He was magnanimously tossing one concession after another on the table, all to no avail. His friend wouldn’t budge.

Of course, Vlad can keep the conquered Ukrainian territory. Sanctions? What sanctions? They’ll all disappear the moment Vlad shows willing. Readmitting Russia to the G8? Consider it done. Restoring full trade relations? Sorted. Influx of American capital and technology? No problem.

Even more important, Trump again declared a pause in armament supplies to the Ukraine, on the transparently ludicrous excuse of America not having enough left to defend herself. All of these concessions came in the way of an advance on future cooperation – Putin offered not a single one in return.

Trump kept ringing him up and they invariably had affable and friendly chats full of mutual respect bordering on admiration. But the war raged on, with Russian drones and missiles turning Ukrainian cities, including Kiev, into rubble.

That showed to Trump something his warped personality couldn’t accept: lack of respect. All his friend Vlad has to do is meet him halfway. No, scratch that: a tenth of the way would do. Just accept a ceasefire, no matter how short, or at least stop bombing Ukrainian cities for a while.

That would be it, job done. Trump would declare his personal victory, and he’d carry his peacemaker’s halo all the way to Stockholm.

Instead, Putin delivered the ultimate insult. The moment Trump put the phone down after the latest chinwag – and I mean the exact moment – the biggest Russian attack on Ukrainian cities in over three years broke out. Hundreds of drones and missiles punctuated Trump’s “talk to you later, Vladimir”.

Donald couldn’t contain himself any longer. “We get a lot of bull**** thrown at us by Putin…,” Trump told reporters. “He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”

(Don’t be surprised at the language. While so far failing to go down in history as the ultimate peacemaker, Trump can claim the honour of being the first US president to use the four-letter word in public. Iran and Israel, he told TV cameras the other day, “don’t know what the f*** they are doing.”)

“I’m disappointed, frankly, that President Putin hasn’t stopped,” added Trump in the voice of a man whose innermost feelings were hurt.

Since any song belted out by Trump is always a medley, he then changed the tune sung only two days earlier. Trump is now prepared to deplete America’s arsenal by providing more weapons to the Ukraine.

He made that promise in a private phone call to Zelensky, presumably a less abusive one than their personal encounter in the Oval Office. Specifically, Trump spoke about supplying “defensive weapons primarily” that the Ukraine needs to resist the escalating Russian raids.

Specifically, 10 new Patriot anti-missile rockets came up in the conversation. Trump has also reportedly removed the US objection to Germany’s transfer of such systems to the Ukraine.

No one knows what tune will next come up in the medley. Trump may ratchet up sanctions against Russia, including secondary sanctions against countries still trading with the aggressor. Or he may issue another advance to Putin by removing such sanctions altogether.

He may indeed supply defensive weapons to the Ukraine, or even offensive ones. (The demarcation between the two is rather smudged.) Or he may decide not to.

One way or another, Trump’s administration shows few signs of understanding the deadly danger of the continuing fascist aggression in the heart of Europe. Vacillations and oscillations only encourage aggressors who correctly see them as signs of cowardly weakness.

Things may soon come to a head, with the West having either to enter the hostilities directly or to surrender. Either eventuality can be prevented by leaving the aggressor in no doubt that the West presents a united front, a stonewall of unshakeable resolve.

So far I’ve seen no signs of the Trump administration’s intention of providing the keystone for that structure. In its absence, Putin’s aggression will continue to escalate, killing more Ukrainians, razing more Ukrainian cities — and giving the Nobel Prize Committee second thoughts.      

The term used to mean the science of politics. Nowadays it can also denote the politics of science.

All intellectual attitudes might have been latently political to Thomas Mann, but he probably thought natural science was exempt from that observation.

No longer. Science these days has acquired aspects of a religious cult and a political ideology. Whatever you may think of cultish or ideological attitudes, they certainly don’t encourage objective, dispassionate thought.

Consider the 2006 book The Trouble with Physics by the American scientist Lee Smolin.

Throughout the book, Prof. Smolin mocks religion, what with its reliance on blind faith rather than hard data. However, he inadvertently shows that science is just as fideistic.

Strewn over his every chapter are little pearls along these lines (the emphases are mine): “Unfortunately, M-theory remains a tantalising conjecture. It’s tempting to believe it. At the same time, in the absence of a real formulation, it is not really a theory – it is a conjecture about a theory we would love to believe in.’

Or, “In the two string revolutions, observation played almost no role… most string theorists continued to believe in the original vision of a unique theory…, but there were no results that pointed in that direction… Meanwhile, the optimists insisted that we must have faith…”.

Prof. Smolin goes on to lament that scientists who have no such faith can forget about having academic careers or receiving research grants. And there I was, thinking that natural science is brutally objective, impervious to fads or political toing and froing.

If certain lines of inquiry are discouraged or even proscribed in physics, then you can imagine what goes on in the study of man.

This term itself would be seen as a political no-no in research papers. As far as today’s censors go, man no longer embraces woman. Insisting that he does is an objectionable, possibly indictable, offence.

And let’s not forget about the 100-odd ‘genders’ in between those binary extremes. Out comes the blue pencil: it’s ‘human studies’, you fascist you. And where do you get off writing about a ‘conference chairman’? It’s ‘chair’ – or you can kiss your career good-bye.

Modernity strives for uniformity in general, but especially when it comes to races, sexes and other large swaths of humanity. When in their 1994 book The Bell Curve Herrnstein and Murray showed, statistics in hand, that average IQ differences between racial and ethnic groups are at least partly genetic in origin, they were demonised.

The point wasn’t about the quality of their research, although Thomas Sowell, a more reliable source than the authors, argued convincingly against it. What incensed the scientific community was the conclusion, however it had been reached. For, if IQ was genetic, then the well-documented IQ differences among various races couldn’t be put down to strictly social and historical factors, such as white colonialism.

When it comes to men and women, certain anatomical differences may still be acknowledged, with reservations. However, anyone talking about the physiological and psychological differences does so at his peril.

An intrepid scholar or writer broaching such subjects must watch his every step not to find himself on the receiving end of today’s version of tarring and feathering. Hence one must both praise Dominic Lawson’s bravery and understand his caution in exercising it.

On the side, Mr Lawson is a strong chess player and the president of the English Chess Federation, which is why he often writes on chess-related subjects. His article Chess Will Never be Ruled by a Queen talks about the demonstrable superiority of men in that ancient game.

This fact is uncomfortable for feminists. They can see why men and women compete separately in physical sports: men are stronger and faster by nature. But chess is a game of intelligence, isn’t it? So are men also smarter by nature?

When transsexuality became fashionable, such issues came to the fore. Various governing bodies have barred biological men from competing in women’s athletic events, correctly stating that they have an unfair advantage.

However, why did the International Chess Federation follow suit in 2023? Its spokesman gave the following explanation: “Of course men and women are equally intellectually capable. However, in chess as a sport other factors like physical endurance may play a role.”

Physical endurance does have a role to play in chess, as any competitive player will confirm. I was one such in my childhood, only giving up chess when I discovered girls. However, in 1990 I went to Hastings to watch the traditional Christmas tournament, which changed my life for the next few months.

Chess is like booze: you may control the addiction, but it never quite goes away. So I relapsed. The very next day I joined the Barbican Club, one of the strongest in London.

The London team championship was halfway through, but they still put me on one of their top boards, and I played half a season, competing for the first time in 30 years. I did rather well, considering, scoring 50 per cent and even drawing with a man who had beaten a grandmaster in the previous round.

But I realised I wasn’t physically up to it. According to Penelope, I was beetroot-red at the end of the games and wound-up to the point of breaking. The team captain wanted me to stay for the next season, but I said no. I like chess, I said, but I’m not prepared to die for it.

So yes, physical endurance is definitely a factor. But here’s the thing: since the advent of chess computers, most events are played at short time limits, often five minutes each for the whole game. My sapping experience was with traditional tournament chess, with games lasting four hours or longer. These days, physicality plays a lesser role – and yet there’s only one woman in the top 100, and she is at the very bottom.

At the same time, tournaments have become much more lucrative than they used to be, and male players may see women’s events as easy pickings. Germany makes cheating not only possible but legal: her Self-Determination Act says that a man is a woman if he so declares.

Lawson cites the case of a trans woman winning the national junior event and getting congratulations from the German Chess Youth organisation. He could have mentioned another example, that one from Kenya.

Dressed head to toe in a burka, wearing spectacles and staying silent, a man registered himself as a woman player and kept winning one tournament after another. When found out, he explained that he had “financial needs”.

Since we’ve more or less eliminated physical strength as the decisive factor, why are men so much better than women? The usual explanation is social: unlike girls, boys are encouraged to take up chess. That’s why they greatly outnumber female players, making it statistically more likely that they’ll win more tournaments.

Mr Lawson demolishes that argument by mentioning Scrabble and bridge. There, women greatly outnumber men at both the recreational and competitive level (85 per cent of Scrabble players are women). And yet men dominate rankings in those games as well.

Mr Lawson knows, I know and everyone knows that factors other than physical endurance are involved too.

Nor is it just about IQ. Mr Lawson points out that, “although the male and female averages are the same, males are overrepresented at the very bottom and the very top of the range.” However, we both know that neither chess mastery nor indeed IQ is to be equated with intelligence.

Bobbie Fischer, arguably the best player ever, had an IQ of 185, and yet he wasn’t an intelligent man outside the chessboard. In his capacity of chess administrator, Mr Lawson must have met many grandmasters who weren’t breathtakingly smart either.

It’s clear that men possess more of the innate characteristics essential to chess success. One such is aggressiveness, a sine qua non of competitive chess. A player isn’t just trying to win the game. He wants to crush his opponent’s spirit and befuddle his mind. “I like to see’em squirm,” as Fischer put it.

And aggression, as extensive research shows, is a function of testosterone levels, which, for all the headway made by feminism, are still higher for men. Spatial awareness is also involved, which again is known to be more of a male characteristic.

In any case, the conclusion conveyed by the title of Lawson’s article is unassailable. Women will never be as good at chess as men.

Nurture probably has something to do with it, as does physical strength. But above all, men’s and women’s brains are physiologically different, and the differences predetermine their relative prowess at chess. (Also at mathematics and philosophy, but, having already dug a hole for myself, I’d better stop digging.)

Reams of scientific papers support this conclusion, but nowadays politics trumps science every time. So let’s just say that boys are encouraged to play with chess pieces, girls with dolls, and that explains why only one woman in history could compete with the top men. Leave it at that, shall we?