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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?

It was in America 50-odd years ago that I first followed the heated debates between ‘evolutionists’ and ‘creationists’.

In those days, I hadn’t yet pondered those issues as assiduously as I have since. But even in that larval stage of my intellectual development, I was appalled at the paucity of the arguments put forth by both sides.

The warring parties didn’t even realise they were at cross purposes. The confusion began by both insisting that Genesis and Darwin are mutually exclusive, whereas no contradiction between them exists: being omnipotent, God is capable of creating things gradually as well as instantly .

In fact, when Darwin published his Origin in 1859, some English theologians, such as Charles Kingsley, praised the book for providing another peephole allowing us to catch a glimpse of God’s design.

But Kingsley, sorely misguided as he was in most other areas, was immeasurably cleverer and better-versed in philosophy than those American jousters of my youth. They just screamed themselves hoarse, making spectators believe that one could be either for science or religion, but never both.

With all my respect for Americans, and this isn’t just a phrase, philosophical training doesn’t rate close to the top of their list of priorities. France, on the other hand, is different. There, philosophy, from atomism to Thomism and onwards, is taught at school. French youngsters can be overheard arguing about the relative merits of Foucault and Derrida, for example. (Both are considered philosophers in France.)

One would expect such education to elevate the discussion of life’s origin to a higher level than I encountered in America, c. 1975. Alas, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Talking to some French youngsters, intelligent ones who have gone to all the right schools, I was surprised to find out that they haven’t advanced the argument one bit. It’s still creationists versus evolutionists, and devil take the hindmost, as long as it’s the former.

The intellectual level is just as poor, and the emotions just as febrile. In fact, those French youngsters wouldn’t even discuss such self-evident things, refusing to stoop to the level of someone as insanely reactionary as me.

This adds another piece of evidence to my observation that, evolutionally speaking, the Enlightenment has gradually created an intellectual catastrophe affecting the world at large, not just any specific country. Most people aren’t just unable to think properly – they don’t even know what constitutes proper thought.

If they did, they’d know that it’s not theologians but scientists (many of whom, such as Hoyle, Watson, Creek et al., were themselves atheists) who identify problems with Darwin’s theory. In that spirit, try to guess which insane reactionary was the author of these two statements:

“Not one change of species into another is on record… we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.”

And, “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

No, it wasn’t a charismatic fundamentalist preacher in America’s Bible Belt. It was Darwin himself, pointing out two of the gaping holes in his theory.

In the intervening 175 years, science has never proved a single one of his conclusions of a more sweeping nature, those concerning macroevolution, one species becoming another. (Microevolution, a species developing to adapt to its environment, isn’t disputed by anyone — and hasn’t been since Plutarch and Lucretius.)

Unlike Darwin himself, today’s politicised Darwinists don’t even try to see how his assertions tally with the most elementary scientific data, such as the dearth of intermediate forms of living creatures in the fossil records. In fact, empirical evidence supports not the appearance and development of new species but the degradation and disappearance of the old ones.

Scientists now agree that about 99 percent of the species that have ever inhabited the earth are no longer with us. Really, that book ought to have been called The Disappearance of Species.

In fact, Darwinism, as a universalist, materialist explanation of the world, has been refuted not only by logic but also by every natural science we may wish to consider, from microbiology to physics, palaeontology, cosmology, biochemistry and geology.

Darwinism is taught as fact at schools in America, France and elsewhere not because it’s scientifically irrefutable but because it’s politically indispensable. Not only does it attack traditions of Christendom more effectively than Marxism does, but it also rivals Marxism for far-reaching social and economic implications.

One no longer has to leave the realm of seemingly objective biological science to explain both socialism, with its class struggle, and capitalism, with its dog-eat-dog struggle for economic survival. Even more fundamental is Darwinism’s demotic insistence on the purely animal nature of man.

In Christendom, man was regarded as unique among all living beings because his life was believed to have a higher transcendent purpose. As long as that view was more or less universally shared, no consumer society in our modern sense could arise.

There were in-built limits to man’s consumption because it was recognised that there were no in-built limits to man’s being. Obviously, man has always consumed, but that activity couldn’t have been paramount for someone who believed he was created in the image and likeness of God and would therefore live eternally.

For consumption to be elevated to the defining feature of society, the very concept of man had to change. For consumption to reign supreme, the whole society had to become consumptive.

That is precisely the service Darwin provided, though not single-handedly. If we are nothing but highly developed apes, then we aren’t qualitatively different from animals.

We differ only in the range of our activities that all reach their resolution and apotheosis in consumption. Thanks to our evolved minds, we don’t have to stick to bananas. We can consume cars, computers, jet travel – and we can feel good about ourselves while devoting our lives to the pursuit of animal-like happiness.

Modern people are ever prepared to shrug their shoulders with indifference whenever yet another length of flimsy yarn is spun at them. They open their arms to such primitive fallacies as Marxism and Darwinism not because they are persuaded by their rational arguments but because at heart they don’t really care one way or the other.

They hear vague materialist noises in those doctrines, and that’s all they want to hear. Having created our modern, virtual world, materialism needs virtual science to vindicate itself. 

As long as money remains tangible and plentiful, people feel no need for any other reality. The assumption is that Chimaera’s fire may singe everything else, including supposedly objective science, while sparing the only reality that really matters. Alas, this reality is no less inflammable than any other, and more so than some.

History will obligingly provide empirical proof of this observation but, until it does, people will continue to cling to their uncritical faith in Darwinism. It’s no less fideistic than Genesis but, unlike the latter, has the advantage of easy appeal to immature minds happy to boil the whole complexity of life down to primitive binary choices.

Such as the one between ‘creationism’ and ‘evolutionism’ – yes or no, black or white, no other hues anywhere in evidence, no nuances entertained. Oh well, as long as those people are happy, for as long as they are happy.

This question pops up in my mind every time I fail to explain Trump’s action in a way other than the one the question implies.

Fact 1: The Ukraine is a victim of Russian aggression. Since February, 2022, the country has been desperately fighting for her survival as a sovereign nation.

Fact 2: Putin has built a fascist regime in Russia whose declared aim is the restoration of the Soviet empire along Stalin lines.

Fact 3: Large swaths of that empire are now NATO members, supposedly presenting a united front against any aggression.

Fact 4: The Ukraine, unlike Russia, has been developing civilised institutions with the clear intention of shedding Russia’s tyranny and joining the West.

Fact 5: This gives the West a vested interest, both moral and strategic, in helping the Ukraine in her fight against Russia’s brutal invasion.

Fact 6: Western countries, including the US, have been acting in that spirit since the first foray of Russian troops into the Ukraine’s territory in 2014.

Having renounced direct military involvement, they’ve been assisting the Ukraine with armament supplies and intelligence data. These have been coming in a steady trickle sufficient to keep the Ukraine in the fight, but not to enable her to win.

Fact 7: The Ukrainian army has acquitted itself with courage and skill, beating the Russians to a virtual standstill and making them pay dearly for every inch of Ukrainian territory they claim.

After three-and-a-half years of desperate fighting, and having lost over a million soldiers dead and wounded, the Russians have barely managed to occupy 20 per cent of the Ukraine – this in spite of their huge numerical superiority and vast reserves of military hardware.

Fact 8: Over the past few days, the Russian offensive has begun to escalate. In keeping with their usual practice, the Russians target residential areas of Ukrainian cities, especially Kiev.

This morning, they hit the Ukraine with 550 Shahed drones and ballistic missiles, the biggest such attack since, well, a few days earlier, when 537 drones and missiles were launched.

Fact 9: The Ukraine can use her home-made AA defences to ward off drone attacks, more or less, but not to intercept ballistic missiles.

The country heavily depends on Western missile defences, such as the Patriot systems. But the rockets for those systems are running out, leaving the country’s civil population at the mercy of Russian brutality.

Fact 10: At the same time, the Russians are stepping up their preparations for escalating another major summer offensive. North Korea has sent over another 30,000 contingent to reinforce her evil accomplice. Moreover, German and Dutch intelligence shows that the Russians are increasingly using chemical and other weapons banned internationally.

Add these 10 facts together, and ask yourself what should be the only rational and moral action on the part of the Ukraine’s most important ally, the US.

Correct. The US must step up its supplies of armaments to the Ukraine, especially the defensive weapons required to protect civilians. At the same time, the US president should use the available communication channels to exert maximum pressure on Putin.

If you don’t desist, the message should be, we’ll arm the Ukraine to a level sufficient for winning the war, not just keeping the invaders at bay. The US economy is ready for the long haul. Is yours, Mr Putin? Especially if we hit all your foreign customers with huge secondary sanctions?

Yet Donald Trump has done exactly the opposite. He has been trying to practise his much-vaunted art of the deal to bring the two parties to the negotiation table.

President Zelensky has stated publicly that the Ukraine is ready. President Putin has stated, both publicly and privately, that the war will continue until its root causes have been eliminated. He didn’t mean the real root causes, himself and his fascist regime. He meant the Ukraine’s sovereignty.

The last time Putin told Trump to mind his own business was in a long phone conversation yesterday. Trump expressed (feigned?) disappointment, saying: “I didn’t make any progress with him at all.” 

And nevertheless, the US, meaning Trump, announced the suspension of arms supplies to the Ukraine, especially those of missile and air defence systems. Moreover, America looks as if she is going to thwart Germany’s plan to buy two Patriot systems and hundreds of rockets from the US for the Ukraine.

Doing this at the crucial point in the war runs so contrary to America’s strategic interests, along with her moral and contractual obligations (remember the Budapest memorandum?), that it’s hard to find a rational explanation.

The one Trump has put forth, that America has sent so many weapons to the Ukraine that she hasn’t enough left to defend herself, doesn’t cut much ice. The US has demonstrated its capacity to step up armament production to any level, almost instantly.

That’s why FDR described America, correctly, as the Arsenal of Democracy. Trump’s frustration with America’s NATO allies not pulling their weight is perfectly understandable. That problem must be solved, and those countries have already taken some steps in that direction, albeit meek ones.

But first things first: let’s stop this fascist attack on the West and, that done, sort the accounting out. Trump’s action, taken at this moment, is inexplicable rationally.

This brings back the question in the title. Since long before his first term, Trump has always acted as an admirer and champion of Putin’s regime. A compendium of his panegyrics of Putin would run several pages of small type, and one could detect genuine sympathy there.

Ever since the beginning of Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine, Trump has been the most prominent putinversteher, someone who feels Putin’s pain and sympathises with his bogus concerns. Considering the broad pro-Ukrainian consensus in America, Trump has had to couch such sentiments in moderate terms, but not enough to conceal them.

Even now, after Bucha and Mariupol, Trumps talks of Putin as a friend, a slightly wayward one but a friend nevertheless. Suspicions of bad faith have been persistent, although an investigation of Trump’s dealings with Putin didn’t reveal any indictable offence.

That could mean that no offence had been committed or that the parties involved had been good at covering their tracks. I incline towards the second possibility.

Before he entered politics, Trump had aggressively pursued business with Russia. Now, Russian commerce is controlled – actually owned – by organised crime fused with the ruling KGB elite. Hence Trump had to lie with those dogs, and catching their fleas would have been hard to avoid.

This is conjecture, but it’s borne out by Trump’s subsequent behaviour. He incessantly talks about ending the war, but one gets the distinct impression that he’d see the Ukraine’s capitulation as an acceptable conclusion.

When discussing the causes of the war, Trump and some key members of his cabinet routinely repeat Kremlin propaganda, often word for word. At the same time, they treat Zelensky as an annoying supplicant, rather than as the leader of a country heroically trying to stem the fascist onslaught on the West.

Whatever Putin may have on Trump has to be something major. The Donald isn’t exactly known as a choirboy in matters fiscal or sexual, and many of his transgressions are in the public domain already.

For the Russians to have real clout they’d have to possess a dossier of earth-shattering misdeeds. I for one find it possible to believe Trump might have provided material for that file.

Still, I’m prepared to entertain other explanations of Trump’s actions. But not any other explanations. Those suggesting that, by helping the Ukraine, America has denuded her own defences, needn’t apply.

Israel isn’t just the embodiment of evil, but its sum total in the world. And if you believe otherwise, you may find yourself on the wrong side of the UN.

Since its founding, that august organisation has passed twice as many resolutions against Israel as against the rest of the world combined. For example, between 2015 and 2023 that score stood at Israel, 154, all other countries, 71.

It so happens that the Russian aggression against the Ukraine started in 2014 and escalated to a full-blown invasion in 2022. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have since been murdered for their audacity of being Ukrainian.

If you follow the events there as closely as I do, you are familiar with hundreds of speeches in which Russian chieftains have denied that a legitimate Ukrainian nation exists and claimed that Ukrainians are racially inferior.

To prove their own racial superiority, the Russian invaders have been razing Ukrainian cities, murdering, torturing, looting and raping civilians. And whom does the UN consider the greatest villain during that period? Why, Israel, of course.

Some 10 million people have been murdered in Central Africa over the past few decades. That, as far as the UN is concerned, is a minor peccadillo compared to the unspeakable audacity of Israel’s attempts to survive in the face of Muslim brutality.

Over 2.5 million have perished in Sudan’s civil war, which is still raging. That’s most regrettable, the UN seems to think. But not as criminal as Israel’s self-defence.

However, until now the UN has had in its sights mostly Israel herself and those other countries that assisted her in any way. Now that guardian of world peace has narrowed its focus to target private companies that do business with Israel, however tangentially.

Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Caterpillar, our own BP, Barclays and University of Edinburgh and countless others have been named as culprits for benefitting from “the Israeli economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now genocide.”

One implication is that one of the world’s most advanced economies celebrated for its contribution to technology and science depends for its survival on “illegal occupation”. The author of the document can’t even do diatribes properly.

The indictment’s conclusion is damning: “Genocide, it would seem, is profitable.”  

I’m sure the board members of the guilty companies will start wearing hair shirts under their Savile Row suits. Their own black hearts have been bared for the world to see. There they were, trying to do the best they could for their customers and shareholders, only to find out they are complicit in genocide.

And their governments are complicit with the companies, making the circle truly vicious. Only the other day, our Parliament voted (385 for, 26 against) in favour of proscribing the direct action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. One nay vote was cast by Diane Abbott censured by her own Labour Party for anti-Semitism.

Last month, members of Palestine Action broke into an RAF base in Oxfordshire and sprayed two planes with red paint, the latest crime in its history of using or threatening violence or serious damage to property to advance a political cause.

The vote makes the Mother of All Parliaments complicit in genocide. Britain’s membership in the UN, including its Security Council, has to be incompatible with such evil.

Now, according to Al Jazeera, hardly a pro-Israel source, since the Hamas massacre of 1,195 Israelis on 7 October, 2023, about 1,000 Palestinians have been killed during Israel’s subsequent attempt to protect her citizens. If this is genocide, the Israelis are rather poor at it. Perhaps they should take an advanced course in Russia or Rwanda.

The UN has 193 member states. And only one of them, Israel, has its legitimacy denied by most other members. This is odd, considering that Israel came into existence as a result of Resolution 181 adopted by the UN on 29 November, 1947.

One could be forgiven for wishing the UN got its own act together before castigating a heroic nation, the sole oasis of civilisation in the Middle East. Brushing up on the definition of genocide wouldn’t go amiss either.

International organisations in general span the full range from useless to pernicious. The UN is both, and has never been anything but.

I was a boy when I first began to follow the UN, specifically its 1961 fiasco in the Congo. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld tried to intervene in the ongoing massacre, only to die in a plane crash that the CIA believed was engineered by the KGB. The carnage proceeded unabated.

Since then, every attempt by the UN to mitigate similar massacres all over the world has only succeeded in making them worse. Kashmir, Cambodia, Somalia, Burundi, Rwanda, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Burma, now the Ukraine – take your pick.

To single out one typical event, in 1995 the Serbs murdered more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, the UN-declared safe zone. As the genocidal massacre went on, UN troops were looking on in sheer impotence.

What is the UN actually for, other than providing sinecures for bureaucrats superfluous in their own countries? It’s nothing but a talking shop, with most of the talk being anti-Western invective. The UN has no legal or moral authority, and venting anti-Israeli vitriol seems to be its principal raison d’être.

Israel is an easy target because she is the focus of two pet hatreds prevalent among UN members: Muslim (and other) anti-Semitism and anti-Western, anti-capitalist animus. And if Israel is the target, the UN is the firing range.

If there were any justice in the world, that malignant organisation would be kicked out of New York and Geneva and moved to, say, Kashmir or Ramallah. All civilised nations would walk away, leaving the UN to its own devices: sputtering spittle at Israel and other Western countries – and supporting itself by its own fundraising in Central Africa.

Alas, there is no justice in the world, so those beasts will continue to bite the hand that feeds them: all those capitalists profiting from genocide.

Sarah Vine, poor Michael Gove’s ex, loves what Glastonbury used to be and hates what it has become: “It’s not really a music festival at all, despite the line-up. It’s just a sprawling outdoor echo chamber for a self-selecting group of champagne socialists.”

True. And Miss Vine ought to be commended for the expert flogging she administers to that loathsome, hypocritical group, especially the celebs within it.

For all their bleating about the environment, they turn Glastonbury into a helipad housing fleets of choppers. Those ecowarriors don’t mind paying £13,950 for a return ticket to fly to the festival from London in one of those carbon-spewing monsters.

Nor are they really music lovers: “Hardly anyone’s there for the music any more, sometimes not even the musicians,” writes Miss Vine. “Everyone has an agenda. And it’s always tediously Left-wing.”

The article is well-written and makes good, poignantly phrased points. However, as I reach up to doff my non-existent hat, my hand stops in mid-air. You see, I have a need to ask not only ‘What?’ but also ‘Why?’.

‘Why’ questions tend to uncover causality links: events setting other events in train, ideas causing a chain reaction, social and cultural trends developing to their natural conclusion. A lifelong exercise of such inquisitiveness has led me to believe that, if something ends up unspeakably rotten, some rot had to be there from the beginning.

Miss Vine clearly doesn’t think along such lines, which is why she waxes nostalgic for the wonderful early days of Glastonbury:

“Remember when festivals were just about having fun and listening to some great music? When the acts went on stage and did their thing, for better or worse, and then just headed back to the trailer to pass out with a couple of accommodating groupies and a bottle or two of Jack Daniel’s?”

Listening? Great? Music? Oh, come off it. If we refer to pop excretions as great music, then what terms do we reserve for Mozart and Beethoven?

Performers at Glastonbury and other such gangbangs have never played any music. They’ve merely screamed the shamanistic chants of an anomic cult, satisfying not an aesthetic need but a thirst for a quasi-religious experience expressed in orgiastic terms.

If you don’t believe me, just gauge the audience’s response to that pop din. When real music is played, people listen in silence. Sometimes, when it’s played exceptionally well, the listeners have tears in their eyes. When the music stops, they applaud.

I’ve been to concerts of some of the best musicians in history, yet never once did I see the audience at places like Carnegie Hall or Salle Pleyel jump up and down, screaming hysterically while the music was played, with the women throwing their knickers and/or bras at the performers. Yet this sort of behaviour is expected and encouraged at pagan orgies like Glastonbury.

That’s not how you listen to music, chaps. That’s how you dance around a totem pole, whipping yourself to orgasmic frenzy. And if music elicits this sort of response, it isn’t music. It’s something entirely different.

Miss Vine’s tender recollections of Glastonbury as it was in her youth bring to mind the French playwright Emile Augier, who in 1855 coined the phrase nostalgie de la boue, which can be loosely translated as my title above.

That sort of ‘music’ was exactly the same in 1970 as it is in 2025. Perhaps back then there was a smidgen more musical content in those pagan rites, something missing altogether these days.

In fact, traces of swing or rhythm and blues, primitive music but music still, are prominent in the output of the early pop stars, such as Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry. But even in those salad days of rock ‘n roll, music played second fiddle to the cult. Presley in particular became a Christ-like figure, even acquiring aspects of resurrection after his death.

This religious-surrogate aspect of pop became particularly prominent with the Beatles who started out as singers of cute little songs and ended up as false prophets, cult leaders of a civilisation gone to pot, in more ways than one.

Somewhere along the way they acquired the help of musically trained assistants, so their later records display competent harmonies and even direct quotes from real composers, including Bach and Beethoven. Paradoxically, it is precisely in their late albums that music, even at its most primitive, no longer mattered.

No one listened to it any longer anyway. Instead, hysterical audiences of youngsters were hanging on to every garbled word of the semiotic message they discerned behind the expertly harmonised pulse. Unlike real music, the Beatles had no spiritual content as such.

Theirs was a glossocratic appeal, the marching orders screamed by a victorious modernity. In some extreme cases, the orders were literally understood and faithfully followed.

Charlie Manson and his ‘family’ went on a rampage of horrific murders partly as a result of the message they had perceived in the songs of The White Album. Charlie, aka ‘Jesus Christ’, claimed he was in extrasensory communication with his gods, John and Paul. Perhaps he was at that, for he heard nothing in the music of the Beatles that wasn’t there.

While the Beatles still tried to preserve a semblance of musicality, their followers have abandoned any such attempts. More and more, pop began to acquire overtly satanist characteristics. More and more, it began to appeal not just to the darker side of human nature but to the sulphuric swamp splashing underneath it.

The appeal continued to be quasi-religious, in the same sense in which the antichrist is the negative image of Christ. While Jesus redeemed his followers by dying on the cross, the messengers of the new god would commit suicide or else die of alcoholism, drug overdose or in due course AIDS. Improbably, they were all portrayed as innocent victims of some unidentified enemy who, contextually, could only be ‘the establishment’.

In the process, pop has become a big business, perhaps the biggest of all. Illiterate, tone-deaf adolescents can become billionaires overnight, provided they can tickle the naughty bits of their mass audiences in a particularly effective way.

They belch their anti-capitalist invective all the way to the capitalist bank, and many critics sneer at the alleged paradox. Yet none exists. The drug-crazed pop stars simply demonstrate the nature of modern business activity.

Businessmen no longer sell products. They create markets and sell brands. They slap together sub-cultures. They fuse the markets and the sub-cultures into a uniform whole. In this case, pop music is only a part, although the most important one, of what passes for the modern ethos.

It is the heart of the new glossocratic Leviathan whose tentacles are numerous and ever-reaching. Pornography, fashion, show business, a great part of the publishing and record industries, electronic media including the Internet, drugs – all reach for the immature hearts and minds of the modern young.

It was Prof. Allan Bloom who in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind commented on the unprecedented importance music had assumed in modern times. All his students seemed to define their personalities in terms of pop music. Music was ever present in the background of people’s lives; it was their philosophy, their love, their secret, their true essence.

Above all, ‘music’ provided food for the ogre of modernity: anomie, an aggressive attack on social, moral, cultural and political norms. This is the essence of the dominant sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll culture of modernity.

The central element of that triad is ubiquitous. That deafening, incoherent, electronically enhanced noise can be neither produced nor listened to without one’s mind being addled by narcotics.

“A bottle or two of Jack Daniel’s”? Seriously, Miss Vine? What about mainlining heroin, popping Ecstasy, freebasing cocaine, smoking meth? Or, in your day, puffing on weed and snorting the odd line of coke?

Memory does play tricks on people no longer in the first flush of youth. Yet the kind of ‘music’ played at Glastonbury is and always has been an extension of the pharmaceutical industry more than anything else.

The drugs go in and out of fashion, the chants change words. But the inspiring animus never changes: hatred of the West as it now is and especially of the Christendom that it used to be.

Muck is always muck, and Glastonbury has always been “tediously Left-wing”. It’s nothing to feel nostalgic about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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