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So what else is new, I hear you say. Of course, it’s in trouble.

Farms that have always operated on wafer-thin margins have had that wafer taken away. Strangulated by Labour’s taxes, inheritance and other, many farms have breathed their last.

As a result, domestic food production has gone down. If in 1984 we were 78 per cent self-sufficient, in 2024 that proportion dropped to 65 per cent, and analysts confidently predict a further reduction by a third in the next two decades.

So if this isn’t trouble, I don’t know… at this point, down came a thundering disembodied voice rudely interrupting me in mid-flow.

What are you on about? it asked. The same materialist nonsense that always turns you on? Who cares about producing, or for that matter having, less food? So we’ll ratchet up agricultural imports. Or, better still, start eating less – just look at our obese population.

What you’re talking about isn’t real trouble. Never mind Blake with his “England’s green and pleasant land.” Well, let me tell you: pleasant it isn’t. Green it may be, but the real problem is that it is also too white. And, even worse, too white means too middle-class.

Turned out the booming voice belonged to the authors of a government report who rang alarm bells all over the nation. The countryside, they accused said nation, is “very much a white environment”, which risks becoming “irrelevant” in our multicultural society.

To name just one outrage, ethnic minorities stop visiting, and certainly settling in, the beautiful Cotswolds and Chilterns because said minorities feel “anxiety over unleashed dogs”

Now, keeping a Labrador on a leash in the Chiltern Hills is the kind of cruelty to animals that’s bound to excite the RSPCA. However, one has to thank the authors for identifying, albeit indirectly, the offended ethnic minority.

You see, Muslims avoid dogs because their religion (Muslims’, not dogs’) teaches that a dog’s saliva and fur are impure. That’s why a devout Muslim has to ablute any part of his body that a dog has touched. (I’m using the masculine pronoun because a devout Muslim woman leaves no parts of her body exposed to dogs or leering passersby.) Since water taps may not be readily available up in the hills, you can understand the conundrum.

The Malvern Hills National Landscape caught the drift: “While most white English users value the solitude and contemplative activities which the countryside affords, the tendency for ethnic minority people is to prefer social company (family, friends, schools).”

Hence, the plan is to “develop strategies to reach people or communities with protected characteristics such as people without English as a first language”. Or any English at all, may I add.

This cri de coeur reaches the very depth of my soul. It’s true that England’s countryside can’t be readily confused with a casbah or, for that matter, a bustling Muslim ghetto somewhere in Bradford… Sorry, wrong example. In Bradford, Leeds, Leicester, Birmingham and many other places, it’s the indigenous population that’s being pushed into a sort of ghetto. But you know what I mean.

It’s also true that speaking nothing but Arabic or Urdu may complicate one’s progress through the Cotswolds, English being the language of preference in those parts.

It’s not just canine and linguistic barriers that are keeping those oppressed minorities away. The report is nothing if not comprehensive: “Protected landscapes were closely associated with ‘traditional’ pubs, which have limited food options and cater to people who have a drinking culture.”

And you know what? This is a valid, or at least factual, point. Country pubs are the hubs of social life in the countryside. While it’s true that Englishmen “value the solitude and contemplative activities” of the countryside, they also like to meet friends and neighbours. And traditionally (that dread word), they break their reveries to go down the pub, provided they can find one.

So fair enough: over the past 40 years, I must have visited dozens of country pubs and – are you ready for this? – never once have I seen one that offered such pub grub as biryani, falafel, hummus, samosas or tagines. And not a single one has had the good manners to offer a halal menu.

Moreover, every pub I’ve ever seen – brace yourself – served alcohol. Chaps behind the counters were pulling pints as if they didn’t know that booze is haram (forbidden) in Islam. In fact, a verse in the Koran calls alcohol, and yes, that includes a pint of bitter, “the work of Satan”. I bet those publicans know about this injunction but choose to ignore it. Shame on those white supremacists.

What brings some relief to this deplorable situation is the on-going Labour war on the hospitality industry, including pubs. Extortionist taxes push many of them out of business, over 500 so far, and the number is growing by some 30 pubs a week.

At this rate, before long there won’t be any country pubs left to worry about. But here’s the silver lining: the empty buildings can be converted into mini mosques or perhaps Islamic community centres, to add a touch of sorely missing diversity to England’s green, but regrettably white, land.

Apparently, Wales beat the report to the punch. Its devolved administration has vowed to end racism by 2030 and transform “all areas” of public life in line with its Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan. As part of that forward-looking plan, a 2024 report called for dogs to be banned from the Welsh countryside, thereby making the country “anti-racist”.

If all this sounds deranged, allow me to quote from that irredeemably white, if mercifully dead, author: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” The method becomes clear once we’ve reminded ourselves that a) our government is Marxist, and b) Marxists feel a scriptural and dogmatic loathing of country life.

The scriptural source in question is The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848. This hallowed text pulls no punches: “The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.”

The idiocy of rural life indeed. These words, along with other monstrosities from the Marxist canon, are burned into what passes for our leaders’ minds. And Marxism isn’t just a theory but a call to action.

I’m sure that our cabinet members would deny they are Marxists. They’d probably describe themselves oxymoronically as democratic socialists. But Marxist dogma resonates through their skulls, and everything they do proves they heed this inner voice.

The current wholehearted attempt to destroy the English countryside goes back to that Manifesto. That’s the imperative, and how they go about putting it into practice depends on the situation.

At the moment, they are eviscerating England’s rural tradition in the name of diversity. Should that miraculously go out of fashion, they’d find another pretext, such as global warming, some mythical epidemics or concerns about the well-being of farm animals. The point is to destroy – how doesn’t really matter.

But don’t blame the government, chaps. Blame yourselves: you voted this lot in. The UKSSR, anyone?

Some 15 years ago I wrote a piece in The Mail about Princess Michael of Kent. She had a public, not to say demonstrative, affair with a young Russian mafioso, which was amply documented by panting paparazzi.

Her lover was subsequently riddled with bullets somewhere near Moscow, which gave rise to all sorts of ugly if unsubstantiated rumours about Princess Michael and her husband. I wrote that, if our royals wished to get rid of the monarchy, that was exactly the way to behave.

The Palace issued a protest, and the paper couldn’t get rid of me fast enough. I was quite angry at the time, but later I saw justice in that reaction. In addition to the constitution, history and constitutional history, our royals derive their legitimacy from an aura of love, theirs for their people, their people’s for them.

Attacks on the royals, even marginal ones like the Kents (Prince Michael was 53^rd in the line of succession), risk punching holes in that aura, especially if the attacks are valid and factual. That’s why the press used to wear kid gloves when getting its hands on any royal scandals.

That didn’t mean the royals were off limits. They weren’t, as anyone who has ever seen those brilliant 18^th century cartoons by Gillray, Hogarth and Rowlandson will testify. But it did mean that the press treated the subject responsibly, realising that some lines just couldn’t be crossed.

The implicit understanding was in line with Burke’s maxim: “For us to love our country, our country must be lovely.” This adage rings even truer if ‘country’ is replaced with ‘monarchy’.

Not all British kings could be readily confused with choirboys. Bertie, the future King Edward VII, kept some Parisian brothels in business almost single-handedly. And his grandson, Edward VIII, had to abdicate over the unlovable woman he loved.

The nation giggled about Bertie’s indiscretions and gasped about his grandson’s. Still, the throne remained sturdy even if it had tottered a bit. The quiet heroism of King George VI, who refused to be evacuated during the Blitz and did perhaps as much to boost the nation’s morale as Churchill did, reminded the people why they loved their royal family.

The press continued to treat the royals with tact. Even though gossip circulated about the amorous exploits of Prince Phillip, no scandal ever made the papers, not even during the Christine Keeler affair. Both the Queen and her husband were loved, in a quiet, understated English way.

But then their two elder sons married quite awful women, and scandals began to pile up. The venerable institution tying up the past, present and future into an irreplaceable national continuum desperately tried to shield itself from the shovelfuls of muck thrown at it by tabloids. That didn’t always work – some dirt stuck.

Each particle of it took some mystique away from the royals, and a monarchy demystified is a monarchy in trouble. Monarchy and church have that in common: even a whiff of vulgarity may turn into a hurricane sweeping the edifice away.

Both institutions depend on their flock’s love of something higher than themselves, and in Britain especially the link between monarchy and church is emphasised by the quasi-sacrament of anointment. God’s kingdom is in heaven, a monarch’s kingdom is in earth, but the two realms are inextricably linked.

When photographs of royals in flagrante delicto with American visitors are splashed all over the tabloids, when the heir to the throne writes letters to his mistress expressing his urge to become her female hygiene product, while his wife cuts a wide swathe through the male population of the British Isles and beyond – each such incident by itself and especially all of them collectively drag the monarchy from its exalted perch down into the gutter.

I haven’t seen any statistics, but I’m willing to bet that, even if many Englishmen retain their respect for the monarchy as an institution, few actually love any of the royals personally, certainly not the way the late Queen was loved.

When she died, one could see genuine grief in many people’s eyes (including, I’m sure, mine). They mourned the passage of a monarch whose impeccable life of honour and dignity made her lovely, in the Burkean sense of the word.

King Charles III has turned out better than I feared. His bizarre attachment to certain woke fads apart, he and his new Queen have done much to preserve the aura of dignified mystique around the monarchy. His Majesty’s courage in continuing to serve his realm in spite of suffering from cancer has much to do with that, as I understand only too well.

But the outrageous scandal involving Andrew and his hideous ex-wife may prove the undoing of the monarchy yet.

Andrew, Fergie, the late Diana and her second son are more in tune with the zeitgeist than Charles is, certainly more than his late parents were. They were driven by the old-fashioned duty of service, while the riffraff end of the royal family worship at the altar of self-service.

When Diana screamed “I want to be me!”, she was issuing the manifesto of all-conquering modernity. That was the modern counterpart of the prayer with which the late Queen ended every day, a statement not of love but of amour-propre.

Andrew is covered with Epstein’s muck from head to toe, but even though he has lost all his titles, he is still eighth in the line of succession to the throne. For all of Charles’s efforts to protect that piece of furniture, some of that filth is bound to stain it.

Each blotch doubles as a hole punched through the aura from which the monarchy derives its real legitimacy. This is how most people probably feel about it – the fine constitutional points, while perfectly valid intellectually, fall flat emotionally. And love isn’t mainly, and never merely, rational. It’s an intuitive feeling, not a rational construct.

Polls show that about a third of Britons support replacing the monarchy with an elected head of state, which proportion almost doubles for the 16- to 34-year-olds.

When those youngsters grow up, they may or may not realise that such a development would spell a constitutional disaster tantamount to the dissolution of Britain’s sovereignty. We might as well become America’s 51^st state.

Yet even if their minds develop sufficiently for them to understand such matters, it’s clear that they feel little emotional attachment to the royal family. And it increasingly looks as if this is the family’s fault.

The newly released batch of Epstein’s files turn conjecture into a certainty: his whole operation was set up and run by the KGB.

The files include 1,056 documents naming Putin and 9,629 referring to Moscow. Epstein even met Putin after already serving a prison term for procuring a child for prostitution. (Some 5,300 files also mention Donald Trump, and I for one am anxious to find out what they say.)

This intimate link explains the billions Epstein’s lifestyle must have cost. His known financial activities could have explained, at a stretch, a million or two. Not the billions pouring out of some invisible horn of plenty.

The files also identify the greatest Russian export other than oil: prostitutes. The KGB was, and the FSB is, a great believer in catching flies with honey rather than vinegar. Acting in the capacity of a honeycomb is a beehive of comely young ladies trained to use their charms for both pecuniary gain and information gathering.

Before perestroika, those creatures were mainly used domestically, to entice foreign diplomats, journalists and tourists into blackmailable indiscretions. However, when the borders were open, a swarm of long-legged Russian girls descended on the West.

Some were independent operators; some (most?) were run by the FSB. Apparently, Epstein had a steady supply of Russian labour for the delectation of his guests. According to vigorously denied rumours, some VIPs’ pleasure came packaged with a dose of clap, but hey – soldier’s chances and all that.

The nature and amount of leverage the KGB/FSB obtained from the Epstein bordello must be staggering. I suspect that information about it will be drip-fed into the media for years, with some illustrious names besmirched for ever.

Since every newspaper in His Creation is running extensive reports of an expository nature, I shan’t repeat things you can read elsewhere if you are interested. What I find fascinating is how a small-time wheeler-dealer ended up running – or rather fronting – a major KGB op.

Actually, the link is obvious: Ghislaine Maxwell. Her father, Robert ‘Cap’n Bob’ Maxwell was a KGB asset, and Ghislaine was not only Maxwell’s daughter but also his business associate and closest confidante. It’s inconceivable that she neither knew about her father’s illegal activities nor participated in them.

The current newspaper accounts state that Maxwell became a KGB agent in the 1970s, but (as The Mitrokhin Archives and other documents show) Cap’n Bob’s tenure is of much longer standing

Maxwell was what the Soviets called ‘an agent of influence’, perhaps the most important one next to the American industrialist Armand Hammer. Said influence was exerted through both individuals and ‘friendly firms’. One such firm was Maxwell’s Pergamon Press.

Maxwell, a retired captain in the British army, bought 75 percent of the company in 1951 and instantly made it an unlikely success. Actually, it’s also unlikely that a poor Czech immigrant could have found the required £50,000, which was then serious money, at least £1,000,000 in today’s debauched cash.

If the original investment miraculously didn’t come courtesy of the KGB, the overnight success did. Maxwell signed a brother-in-law deal with the Soviet copyright agency VAAP (a KGB department) and began publishing English translations of Soviet academic journals.

Making any kind of income, never mind millions, out of that would have been next to impossible. Publishing even English-language academic periodicals is a laborious and low-margin business requiring much specialised expertise. That’s why it’s usually done by big and long-established firms, which Maxwell’s wasn’t. Add to this the cost of translation and one really begins to wonder about the provenance of all that cash.

Subsequent close ties between Maxwell and the Soviets dispel any doubts. He became a frequent visitor to Moscow and a welcome guest in the Kremlin. Cap’n Bob met every Soviet leader from Khrushchev to Gorbachev, and they didn’t just chat about the weather.

As an MP, Maxwell made speeches defending the Soviet 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, bizarrely portraying it as some kind of recompense for the country’s betrayal at Munich.

In the ‘70s Pergamon Press prospered churning out such sure-fire bestsellers as books by Soviet leaders. On 4 March 1975, Maxwell signed, on his own terms, another contract with VAAP and published seven books by Soviet chieftains: five by Brezhnev, one by Chernenko and one by Andropov, then head of the KGB.

Under a later 1978 contract he also published Brezhnev’s immortal masterpiece Peace Is the People’s Priceless Treasure, along with books by Grishin and Ponomarev, the former a Politburo member, the latter head of the Central Committee Ideology Department.

All those books were published in huge runs and, considering the nonexistent demand for this genre, would have lost millions for any other publisher. But Maxwell wasn’t just any old publisher and these weren’t any old publishing ventures. The translation, publishing and printing were paid for by the Soviets.

In the ‘80s Maxwell met Gorbachev three times, the last meeting also involving Vladimir Kryuchkov, the KGB boss. As a result Pergamon Press began publishing the English-language version of the Soviet Cultural Foundation magazine Nashe naslediye (Our Heritage), along with the writings of both Gorbachev and his wife Raisa (Charles Dickens and Jane Austen they weren’t).

One objective pursued by the Soviets was propaganda, but this could have been achieved with less capital outlay and greater effect. The real purpose was the old Soviet pastime: money laundering and looting Russia in preparation for ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union’, which in effect was a transfer of power from the Party to the KGB. And the core business of Pergamon Press played only a small role in this enterprise.

Between 1989 and 1991 the KGB transferred to the West eight metric tonnes of platinum, 60 metric tonnes of gold, truckloads of diamonds and up to $50 billion in cash. The cash part was in roubles, officially not a convertible currency. But the Soviets made it convertible by setting up a vast network of bogus holding companies and fake brass plates throughout the West.

The key figures in the cash transfer were the KGB financial wizard Col. Leonid Veselovsky, seconded to the Administration Department of the Central Committee, and Nikolai Kruchina, head of that department. Putin, who ‘left’ the KGB at that time, took a modest part in the looting of Russia in his capacity as Deputy Mayor of Petersburg.

The focal point of that transfer activity in the West was Maxwell, the midwife overseeing the birth pains of the so-called Soviet oligarchy. We know very little about the exact mechanisms of this scam, perhaps the biggest one in history. The actual operators knew too much, which could only mean they had to fall out with the designers.

Specifically, in August 1991 Kruchina fell out of his office window. Two months later Maxwell fell overboard from his yacht. Veselovsky, who handled most of the legwork, managed to leg it to Switzerland, where he became a highly paid consultant. Obviously he knew quite a bit not only about his former employers but also about his new clients, which enhanced his earning potential.

Evidence shows that Epstein, in cahoots with Maxwell, set up one of the laundromats for the Russian cash. His operation was thus multi-purpose, combining business with pleasure – and turning his customers’ pleasure into KGB business.

We don’t yet know how much kompromat Epstein’s bordello delivered to history’s most diabolical secret police, nor how damaging it will turn out to be. It has already pushed our monarchy to the brink, courtesy of Prince Andrew, as he then was, but this is only a warm-up.

New blows are bound to land on political and corporate offices all over the world, and not all of them will be able to pick themselves up off the floor. I won’t be surprised if the ensuing scandals make Watergate look like an innocent peccadillo by comparison.

Meanwhile, I look at the unfolding events with the squeamish wince of a man who accidentally touches a slug. How could the US authorities let that transparent KGB operation run unmolested for decades? Don’t bother replying: the question is rhetorical.

P.S. Some of the facts I cite in this article I first used 13 years ago. The proverb “Everything new is the well-forgotten old” is thereby vindicated.

P.P.S. My programme of learning English as a second language is proceeding apace. As ever, I use sports commentators as instructors.

Thus Jamie Carragher, one of our most perceptive football analysts, wrote that “Raheem Stirling doesn’t get the adoration he deserves”. There I was, thinking that, while God is adored, athletes are at best admired. Learn something new every day.

Then a tennis commentator at the Australian Open suggested that Sabalenka “pick up her intention”. Thus I learned that ‘intention’ and ‘intensity’ are full synonyms, and I’m grateful for this contribution to my vocabulary.

… It knows no peacetime.” So gasped the French writer the Marquis de Custine after spending three months of 1839 in Russia. At the time Russia was in the middle of the Caucasian War (1817-1864) and also trying to conquer Central Asian khanates.

Custine’s subsequent book is a miracle of insight, especially considering that he embarked on his journey without much knowledge of the country. Most educated Russians I know have read La Russie en 1839, and I have yet to meet one who thought that Custine’s observations and inferences were anything other than astonishingly accurate.

Russian studies haven’t been blessed by many equally astute commentators since then. In fact, academics, historians, economic analysts and even intelligence officers have been evincing steadily deteriorating standards of understanding.

The on-going war is a case in point. Ever since it became clear that Putin’s 2022 blitzkrieg had failed, and the war had entered an attrition phase, hardly a day has gone by without some expert sounding the death knell for Russia.

Russia is losing too many soldiers. The country’s economy is on the verge of collapse. Russia has no more soldiers. Her economy has collapsed already. Western sanctions are a noose throttling Russia. Putin will sue for peace at any moment now. Putin is suffering from a fatal illness and, when he dies, his successors will beat a retreat. The Russian people will rise in revolt. The war will end in a month [three months, a year, two years at the outside, take your pick].

This reminds me that only a short word separates a Mr Know-All from a Mr Know-Sod-All. Actually, when it comes to predicting when and how the war will end, I myself fall into the second category. Hard as I’m rubbing my crystal ball, it still remains too murky for me to predict the future.

However, I do know that most Western observers, even those few in command of the relevant facts, base their prophesies on false criteria. They may know much, but they understand little.

It’s a natural human trait, and a generally sound cognitive practice, to use what we know to understand what we don’t know. Alas, most of what Western observers know doesn’t apply to Russia, and neither do sound cognitive practices.

What we know about war economy is that a country has to be solvent to afford that luxury. And by our standards, Russia’s economy lies in ruins.

Because of Western sanctions, Russia has to sell her oil at or even below cost just to keep afloat. Gazprom, the jewel in Russia’s economic crown, has been reduced to a skeleton of its former self – in any Western economy it would have ceased trading long ago. Inflation is rampant, interest rates are sky-high, budget deficits are astronomical, the rouble is dying a quick death, the cost of living is outpacing inflation on its race to the moon, any other than military production has ground to a halt, imports of even staples have ceased, growth is negligible – and so forth.

All true. But do let’s consider the situation in the same country in the run-up to another war, which for Russia lasted exactly as long as the present one: the Second World (what the Russians call ‘Great Patriotic’) War.

Throughout the 1930s, the economy was being switched into a war mode. That wasn’t so much a case of guns before butter as guns and no butter – guns before everything people needed to survive. War factories were running round the clock in three daily shifts – Nazi Germany ambled along at one shift a day at the time (the Nazi economy didn’t go into a full war mode until 1942, three years after the war started).

The Soviet Union suffered a series of murderous famines. Only the ones in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan that killed millions and were deliberately organised as a crowd-control tactic have received wide publicity in the West, but there were many others as well.

The Russians lived in conditions that any Western cattle farmer would have considered unacceptable for his livestock. Compared to those Russians, their descendants today, even after four years of war, live in the lap of luxury.

Stalin’s tyranny was such that Putin’s regime looks like the acme of weak-kneed liberalism by comparison. Just a few thousand political prisoners, a mere couple of dozen dissidents bumped off? Stalin would have regarded such numbers as amateur hour.

In his Russia millions were shot with or without trial, tens of millions of others revived the notion of slavery by being thrown into death camps, where they died while mining minerals and felling trees on a bowl of liquid soup a day and in Arctic frosts.

Most Western visitors ignored the tyranny, or even welcomed it as a bold experiment, but even they couldn’t fail to notice the empty shelves in grocery shops and mile-long queues for bread. What they also failed to notice was that Stalin was creating the world’s most formidable war machine, a juggernaut ready to roll over Europe.

So it would have done had Hitler not beaten Stalin to the punch by starting the war on his terms. The tyrannised, impoverished Red soldiers, most of whom had had family members killed or imprisoned by the NKVD, didn’t want to fight for Stalin. They surrendered en masse, with the Germans taking over four million POWs in the first few months (my father among them). That was a popular uprising in all but name.

The war started on 22 June, 1941, and by late November German officers could see the Kremlin through their field glasses. Every sensible Western observer knew the war was about to end – in Moscow. Instead it lasted another four years and ended in Berlin.

Now let me ask you this. Suppose the US and Britain went to war with, say, China and won, but having lost 40 million and 14 million respectively. How do you think the subsequent generations, including historians, would view that war?

Would they treat it as a resounding triumph vindicating the greatness of the people and their leaders or as the worst tragedy and the greatest national shame ever? Yet the numbers cited represent exactly the proportion of the population the Soviet Union lost in 1941-1945. And the war is still hailed as the highlight of Russian history, the cornerstone of national ideology and identity.

The standards of civilised society don’t apply to the Russians because they aren’t civilised. They are prepared to accept the kind of deprivation and death that would be unacceptable to any Western nation. Here’s an example from history, cited by Dwight Eisenhower, who at the time was the supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe.

He was talking to Marshal Zhukov at the Yalta Conference, some three months before the end of the war. It was decided the Russians would have the honour of taking Berlin, but Eisenhower commiserated with the difficulty of getting armour through the minefields surrounding the German capital.

Zhukov couldn’t understand what Ike was on about. The way we handle this problem, he explained, is just marching some infantry units over the minefields, thereby clearing the way for tanks. Eisenhower shuddered, perhaps imagining the firing squad any Western commander would face if he used the same trick.

(On a different subject, it was at Yalta that Zhukov asked Eisenhower on Stalin’s behalf to bomb Dresden and Leipzig. Both cities had vital railway junctions through which the Germans were sending reinforcements to Berlin, making the Soviet task so much harder. So the bombing wasn’t just a useless act of Anglo-American barbarism, as some (most?) historians would have us believe.)

The upshot of it is that the on-going war will end sooner or later – wars always do. It may end in a week, next month or in three years, and I wouldn’t venture a guess when or how. But it won’t end because the Russians lose too many people and don’t eat regularly enough.

They’ve so far lost only about one per cent of the population – they still have 99 per cent left. And the people aren’t really starving yet, not by the standards of the 1930s or indeed those of my childhood. Let’s wait and see, shall we?

A good friend of mine insists that ‘young people’ is an oxymoron. Well, since he is a priest in the Church Militant, he is entitled to extreme paradoxes.

Being by nature a moderate chap myself, I’d be more magnanimous. My answer to the question in the title is: “Technically yes, but…”.

Even my friend wouldn’t insist that youngsters are less than human anatomically, physiologically and, yes, theologically. Made in the image and likeness, and all that. Moreover, whatever they happen to be now, they have what Aristotle called ‘potentiality’, meaning they may eventually acquire some more indigenous human characteristics than having the same internal organs as a chimpanzee.

After all, if it’s true that humans and chimps share 99 percent of their active genetic material, then the truly distinguishing features of our species are those of mind and spirit. For all the gigantic strides made by comprehensive education, we are still ahead of gorillas in those areas, just.

However, potentiality must be realised to amount to anything tangible. Otherwise, there is always the danger that the coming generations may prove that the ape isn’t so much our evolutionary past as our macabre future.

There is no secret about the ways in which a child’s mind and spirit may be developed in such a way that he grows up qualitatively different from a chimp. I’m not going to detain you with offering a complete or even long list, other than saying that books have always had a salient role to play in that process.

So much more dismayed I was the other day when reading this passage in a well-researched article by Alice Thomson: “The first [finding] is that 28 per cent of children arriving at primary school in 2025 didn’t know how to open a book. Many just jabbed at the cover with a finger. The second is that 67 per cent of 15-year-olds see no reason to leave their homes at weekends, preferring to stay in their bedrooms, online. Between these five and 15-year-olds lies a cohort addicted to smartphones, tablets and social media.”

This addiction to flickering screens is a very serious matter indeed. Miss Thomson doesn’t make this obvious point: it’s not just that the children don’t know how to open a book, but neither have they ever seen their parents do so. If they had, they would be able to imitate the action, what with humans sharing a knack for mimicry with, well, apes.

That means that at least two generations or, at a guess, more (comprehensive education was introduced in 1965) have been taken out of civilisation. You notice that, for all my Luddite tendencies, I blame education, not computers. Computers can be used to good or bad ends, and which it is depends on the person using them.

A computer is a tool like a hammer, which Johnny can use to help Granny hang a picture on the wall or to bludgeon Granny to death. As a very minimum Johnny must be raised to know that the former use of that tool is commendable while the latter isn’t.

Hence the problem isn’t computers qua computers, but the whole educational ethos at home and school. It encourages children to cauterise their minds, eschew any active and productive uses of their brains, and spend their whole days communicating with their similarly backward friends in what doesn’t even resemble human speech.

Listening to children of different ages talking to one another on public transport, I never, and I do mean never, hear them speak in complete, well-parsed sentences. Whole lengthy exchanges are conducted entirely in fragments and interjections.

In God’s eyes, erecting “a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven” with the subsequent disintegration of language was severe punishment: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

It would never have occurred to the Old Testament writers that a time would come when inflicting a Babel on the world would be done not by God as a way of unleashing his wrath, but by some men as a way of keeping the young for ever feral.

Generally speaking, I ascribe this situation to human folly, not to the availability of certain devices. But one has to admit that the arrival of computers and especially AI widens the opportunities for human folly and malevolence to express themselves.

The other day, I stumbled on several YouTube videos featuring the American columnist George Will as the talking head. When I lived in the US back in the 70s and 80s, I regularly read Mr Will’s articles. I didn’t always agree with him, but I always admired his style, verve and a talent for an epigrammatic phrase.

(When OJ Simpson was in 1994 acquitted of the murder he clearly had committed, Will wrote: “This goes to prove that a black man can’t get a fair trial in America.” That gave him a lot of credit in my bank.)

Anyway, I watched a couple of those videos, in which Mr Will was doing a thorough demolition job on Donald Trump, citing facts I hadn’t seen anywhere else. What made me smell a rat though wasn’t so much his content as his delivery.

Will spoke in a monotone drone, sounding as if he was reading from a teleprompter. But he wasn’t doing it well: the intonation was odd, and his sentence breaks came in places where no educated man would have put them. I investigated and sure enough: the videos were deep fakes generated by AI.

Then I thought about minds younger and less cynical than mine being exposed to torrents of false, sometimes dangerous nonsense and having no counterweight of serious books, real music and education worthy of the name. They run the risk of losing their marbles and eventually their humanity.

P.S. Speaking of language, apparently Gen Z, which I assume means youngsters born in this century, have changed the terms in which they describe sexual activity.

Their favourite words are ‘smash’ and the Americanism ‘hook-up’, which lack the light-hearted panache of older slang. Most of them never use, indeed don’t understand, such old phrases as ‘how’s your father’, ‘getting a leg over’, ‘a seeing-to’ and ‘hanky-panky’. And the relatively recent expression ‘discussing Uganda’ didn’t even make the list at all.

That by itself isn’t a sign of cultural decline: the very nature of slang is that it’s transient. But here’s something more serious: most of the respondents never use ‘making love’ either, and it’s not even slang. Apparently, frivolous love is no longer allowed to interfere with the serious business of ‘smashing’.  

Regular visitors to this space know how unwavering I am in my support for any rights claimed by anyone at any time.

Sacred among them is a person’s right to identify as anything the person wishes, even if the newly claimed identity isn’t that of a person.

For example, I identify, for the time being at any rate, as a human male. That’s why I use binary male pronouns and don’t mind being addressed as Alex, Alexander, mate or, for old times’ sake, Mr Boot.

However, if tomorrow I decide to identify as, say, a dachshund, I’ll insist on non-binary, non-human pronouns and also on being addressed as ‘good boy’. Or ‘good girl’, if my new identity is that of a bitch, rather than a son of one. And if you defy my wishes, I’ll see to it that you get a visit from men in blue.

All this is axiomatic and hardly requires reiteration. In any healthy society, sacral creeds ought to go without saying. And of these, the most hallowed is the belief that, when nature mistakenly issues wrong identity papers, such errors must be corrected, surgically or otherwise.

Are you with me so far? Good. I knew you would be. However, judging by your comments over the years, I have to reach the lamentable conclusion that some of you distrust any development that’s unadorned with the patina of time.

I can’t excuse such discrimination, but I understand it. The cockles of our hearts are warmed by the knowledge that something we cherish has passed the test of time; such is a normal human impulse.

Alas, some people succumb to it so thoroughly and shamefully that they begin to harbour doubts about the sacred right to choose one’s identity. Though obviously sympathetic (who isn’t?) to the idea of, say, sex change, they have residual misgivings based on the relatively recent time that this commendable concept reached wide acceptance.

To such doubting Thomases I say, fret not. Things are much better than you think, and, as Donald Trump likes to say without really meaning it, help is on the way. The person to provide such help is the original doubting Thomas, one of the twelve apostles, the incredulous chap who liked to poke his fingers where they didn’t belong.

In 1945 scholars found a Coptic copy of the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus. You might say that’s not an especially old provenance, but what’s important isn’t when the scroll was found but when it was written.

And the existence of this gospel, later called apocryphal, was already known in the 2^nd century AD, which is probably when it was composed. Since a century had elapsed since the events of the New Testament, critics, at that time and later, reasonably denied that the original doubting Thomas could have lived that long.

All the fathers of the church declared the gospel to be a Gnostic forgery, some outsiders disagreed, and arguments have raged on ever since. Not being a biblical scholar myself, I don’t feel qualified to wade into such debates. So I’ll just rely on a time-honoured trick and claim agnosticism in this matter.

However, while the fathers of the church denied Thomas’s authorship and indeed the authenticity of the sayings cited in his gospel, no one has ever denied that the text is very old. The dating of it varies from one scholar to another, but, as I’ve mentioned, most place its composition in the 2^nd century AD.

Therefore, every word in the Gospel of Thomas is densely covered with the aforementioned patina that for some constitutes the necessary validation of wisdom and veracity. This brings us back to the subject of spontaneous changes in identity, specifically ‘transitioning’ from female to male.

So here’s the good news: such ‘transitioning’ was already declared not just possible but desirable 19 centuries ago – and at least some contemporaries believed sex change had a divine blessing.

As I mentioned, the Gospel of Thomas contained 114 sayings attributed to Jesus Christ. In all such compendia, it’s the first and the last ones that carry the greatest weight. With that in mind, the last entry, Number 114, sums up this remarkable document by saying:

“Simon Peter said to them, ‘Mary should leave us, for females are not worthy of life.’ Jesus said, ‘Behold, I shall guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter heaven’s kingdom’.”

Now, I urge you to make allowances for times much less sophisticated than ours. In those days they still hadn’t learned that misogyny, aka sexism, is a crime as heinous as transphobia and homophobia, and more heinous than murder.

Hence the implication that a woman shouldn’t enjoy full equality in heaven’s kingdom. In our own earthly kingdom that sort of statement would put the culprit in the dock possibly, before an employment tribunal definitely.

Yet with that proviso, we must all welcome this ringing endorsement of female-to-male transitioning.

Yes, going the opposite way didn’t receive a similar blessing, but we can infer it from the context. Let’s just say that whoever wrote the Gospel of Thomas was galloping ahead of his time and all the way towards ours.

P.S. A friend who follows the US scene more assiduously than I do has pointed out an interesting paradox involving the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

Apparently, since a loaded pistol was found in Pretti’s possession, a complete role reversal is under way. Those who have insisted for years that not only all firearms but, ideally, even penknives be banned, are now saying the poor man was only exercising his constitutional Second Amendment rights.

At the same time, those who under normal circumstances see nothing wrong with carrying a regimental bazooka into a supermarket are saying that the man had no business toting a handgun. Go figure, as they say in those parts.

Mutinies are a reaction to a particular injustice, real or perceived. Once a mutiny breaks out, only two outcomes are possible. Either the revolt is put down or it gains the concession it seeks. Apart from that, nothing else changes.

Rebellions cast their nets wider. They are out to create a new government or even a new form of governance. Again, two possible outcomes are on offer: either failure, with the old government meting out chastisement; or success, with the new government issuing its own diktats.

Same people, different nameplates on the doors of government offices. Once things have settled down, butchers will continue to butcher, bakers to bake, candlestick-makers to make candlesticks. Life goes back to normal; nothing much has changed.

One up from a rebellion is a revolution. It explodes in city squares, with the shock waves sweeping away palaces, parliaments, institutions – a revolution is a rebellion on both speed and steroids. But it’s also more than that.

A revolution sets its sights higher than any other public outburst. It’s not just out to create a new government or a new political system or a new social structure. It’s after more than that. It wants to create a new man.

Such is the lofty aim that every revolution in history set itself. And all but one failed, some to a large extent, most totally.

The American Revolution, to name one, didn’t produce a new concept of humanity. It created the American variant of a European man, speaking the American variant of a European language and putting an American slant on European culture. One could perhaps argue that over two centuries a distinct, if peculiarly hodgepodge, ethnic type appeared. But a new man is nowhere in evidence.

The French Revolution achieved even less. Never mind producing a new man – it didn’t even succeed in creating a new Frenchman. Tricolour flags went up, culottes went down, heads rolled, France took on the world and lost. The French heaved a sigh of relief and went back to their gros rouge, fromage and cinq à sept. What else can one expect from the people who still refer to the oldest bridge in their capital as Pont Neuf?

The Bolshevik Revolution aimed much higher than that. It set out to destroy everything destructible and even a few things that seemed eternally secure. Then, out of the rubble of the old world a new Superman was to emerge, the Soviet Man.

He’d be new in every respect: he’d replace the old morality based on God with a new one based on class. He’d acquire every Nietzschean characteristic: all-conquering cruelty to enemies, positive emotions reserved only for the parteigenossen, the demeanour of the master of the universe towering over all lesser types.

Like a snake shedding its old skin, he’d leave behind all outdated notions of ethnicity. He wouldn’t be Russian, Ukrainian or Latvian. He’d be Soviet, a nationality defined not by blood but by class and ideology – until such time that class and ideology have seeped into Soviet Man’s bloodstream to create a new, superior human subspecies.

Some 80 million would-be new men had to die in wars, purges, famines and concentration camps to show that project for the monstrous failure it was. And that score is still running up, at one remove.

Only one revolution in history produced a new man, one who changed drastically something infinitely more than just his politics, country, beliefs, deities, morality, even family. He changed his understanding of what it meant to be human – and thus New Man indeed emerged, Phoenix soaring out of the ashes of old humanity towards the endless horizons of eternity.

That revolution exploded not in public squares but in people’s minds, and that is a sine qua non of any revolution worthy of the name, one seeking to create a new man.

God, the wrathful God of the Hebrews who created the world in six days and remained in and above it as both an immanent and transcendent force, never seen but always sensed, miraculously appeared as a man of flesh and blood. He lived as a man, died as a man – and not any ordinary man, but as a tortured, despised, executed criminal – but then came back to life as God.

Unlike the gods of the Greeks and the God of the Hebrews, he didn’t demand men to make sacrifices to himself. Quite the contrary: he sacrificed himself for them. And in doing so he made them understand what it really meant to be created in the image and likeness of God.

If for Plato man was essentially his soul that sometimes regrettably had to use the attached body as a necessary tool, the emerging New Man began to perceive body and soul as a unity, reflecting one between God and man, and achieving the same life everlasting. The ideal to seek was now salvation of the world, not from the world.

New Man learned to think in categories that would have been unintelligible to the Greeks, in categories they wouldn’t have recognised as valid expressions of the human essence. They couldn’t have got their heads around the notion that, since all human beings had the same father, they were all brothers and sisters – regardless of their origin, class, status or wealth.

That equality before God trumped any earthly inequality, making every human being equally valuable in the eyes of God and man. They all deserved love because love was the essence of God and hence of life. That wasn’t just a matter of doctrine – it was a call to action.

Over the next couple of centuries another miracle occurred. Thousands – many thousands! – of public hospitals, leper hospices, orphanages, houses caring for the old, the infirm and widows, shelters and canteens caring for the poor popped up all over the Mediterranean world.

Nothing remotely like that had existed in the Hellenic world. There were a few hostels for travellers, on some days alms were doled out. But the first public hospital appeared only in the 2^nd century AD – and then charitable institutions spread like a brushfire all over the Mediterranean landscape.

Even Julian the Apostate, the emperor who reverted to paganism because he detested Christianity, had to praise the ‘Galileans’ grudgingly for the way they cared for those in need, “not only their own, but also ours”.

Intellectually, Christianity proved to be a successful asset-stripping religion. It absorbed Hellenic philosophy into its own, taking what it found useful and discarding the rest. Over the subsequent centuries, Christian philosophy and theology scaled heights never even approached by any other civilisation.

Moreover, one byproduct of Christian philosophy and theology was the belief that the physical world had to function according to rational and universal laws because it was made by a rational and universal creator. Therefore, the world was rationally knowable, ready to reveal its secrets to human reason and experiment.

This and only this made science, in our sense of the word, possible. No other civilisation has ever achieved anything even remotely close to the same level of scientific mastery attained by Christendom – and today’s godless world is still clipping the same coupons, rapaciously and ungratefully.

The Christian revolution started with a miracle and its success is just as miraculous. Driven from Palestinian slums into Roman catacombs and Byzantine insulae, a handful of believers started a revolution that within three-four centuries conquered the mighty Roman Empire – not by fire and sword but by a sermon of love.

The only revolution that has ever changed man and his understanding of himself. The only revolution that has ever succeeded in that aim. The only revolution worthy of the name.

So repeat after me: “Credo in unum Deum…” Just kidding. You won’t, will you? Not unless you’ve already been saying these words, in whatever language, without my prompting.

Yet even those to whom these words are alien or even abhorrent must be honest enough to acknowledge that this revolution is still with us. Even those who reject it out of hand still unwittingly cling to its beliefs.

Our woke mob elevating every appetite to a reclaimable human right don’t even realise that they are but parasites on the Body Christian. Had a time machine transported them to the Athens of Plato and Aristotle, I’d pay serious money to watch our time travellers trying to explain to the Greeks that all people are endowed with human rights simply because they are human.

They’d be run out of the agora faster than you could say paráfronas (madman). Such concepts are intelligible only in our post-Christian world — and only because it’s indeed post-Christian.

According to Enlightenment mythology, the 20^th century had everything it took to prosper.

Science and technology were booming, with reason finally released from the shackles of religious superstition – hooray!. In 1905, France, a staunchly Catholic country in the distant past, made laïcité (secularism) her official state policy. Things were looking up all over the Continent.

The 20^th century was to become an age of mass happiness. Instead it became an age of mass murder. Two world wars, and history’s two most satanic regimes appearing in between, killed more people in that progressive century than in all other centuries of recorded history.

The fabric of a civilisation lovingly built over millennia lay in tatters. The West suffered irreversible damage, social, cultural, political, demographic, economic – all of it accompanied by an upsurge in hatred, ethnic strife, a loss of faith in traditional institutions, extremism moving from the margins of political discourse into the mainstream.

If the Enlightenment was a game, then the blood-drenched 20^th century was its scoresheet.

The four principal catastrophes I’ve mentioned are too different to be lumped together. Yet they all had something in common, both philosophically and practically.

Philosophically, only an Enlightenment zealot would refuse to acknowledge the abject failure of that exercise in civilisational sabotage. The so-called Age of Reason was in fact an age of dim-witted voluntarism. The Enlightenment should be properly called the Entenebriment – it threw darkness over a brightly shining light. And secularism removed any constraints that in the past had put some brakes on human cruelty. The tethers on the allowable were stretched so far they snapped.

All that created the premises from which wholesale slaughter could proceed. But we are none of us determinists, are we now? We don’t believe that, because things happen, they were bound to happen.

Yes, each of the four principal calamities I’ve mentioned was precipitated by a crisis. But that’s nothing new in history: crises do happen. Some of them have dire consequences, but none has ever wreaked so much devastation within one century.

RG Collingwood explained why we were so unfortunate with his usual succinct insight: “Civilisations sometimes perish because they are forcibly broken up by the armed attack of enemies without or revolutionaries within; but never from this cause alone. Such attacks never succeed unless the thing that is attacked is weakened by doubt as to whether the end which it sets before itself, the form of life which it tries to realise, is worth achieving.”

All the countries involved in turning the 20^th century into a nightmare were beset by such doubts. And, perhaps as a result, the political leadership in all the countries involved at each juncture was weak either morally or intellectually or both.

That was the case in England, France, Germany and Russia before the First World War, in Russia before the Revolution, in the Weimar Republic before the rise of Nazism, in England and France before the Second World War – and I’m only sketching the situation with the main players.

However, all those countries, individually or in alliances, had had weak political leaders before and lived to tell about it. How did the 20^th century manage to dispatch hundreds of millions of people, many of them noncombatants? (For example, the Soviets lost 27 million in the Second World War, but only about 15 million of them were military casualties.)

The answer has to lie not just in weak political leaders, nor merely in the gravity of the crises confronting them. It’s the confluence of the two that turned the crises into catastrophes. Faced with critical situations, the nonentities who happened to find themselves in power at the time had no minds, resolve, courage or moral fortitude to avert the worst.

See what I’m driving at? Apart from the sheer pleasure of it, studying the past – studying anything, as a matter of fact – only makes sense if useful knowledge and understanding emerge as a result. Knowledge and understanding enable one to analyse history, extract useful lessons from it, accept or discard parallels with the present.

I’d suggest that anyone is blind or stupid who doesn’t see that we in the West are currently facing exactly the same confluence of a tottering civilisation, weak (or, even worse, corrupt) leadership and the kind of crisis that could easily turn into a global catastrophe.

The crisis, the most immediate one that is, is unfolding in the Ukraine, a budding European country being devastated by barbaric aggression from the east. Putin’s Russia, a worthy heir to the Soviet Union, follows the same approach to life. It can successfully produce nothing but death.

Historically, the Russians have seen national greatness in terms of territorial expansion. When the targeted territories were inhabited, the local populations had to be enslaved, Russified or, those two aims failing, exterminated.

That process has never had a clearly defined end. The state escutcheon of the Soviet Union featured hammer and sickle superimposed on the whole globe, and that was a statement of intent. When in 1920 Red hordes attacked Poland, the order issued by their commander Tukhachevsky contained the words “On to Berlin, Paris, London! March!”

Poland wasn’t thus the final destination but only a stop along the way. Fast-forwarding a century, the Ukraine is today’s Poland and Putin’s Russia today’s Red hordes.

The Russians have announced their intention to build up a 3-million army this year – this while they continue to lose up to 30,000 a month on the battlefront. This means a total transfer of the whole country into a war mode, after which there is no backtracking. “Mobilisation is war,” said Helmuth von Moltke, and he was right.

 When a military juggernaut powered by evil starts rolling, it can only move in one direction: forward. When its gears go into reverse, it self-destructs.

Thus, Putin’s war on the Ukraine isn’t just Putin’s war on the Ukraine. It’s Russia’s war on Europe, its independence, its security, its whole civilisation, whatever is left of it.

Remember that Hitler didn’t attack all European countries at once: he picked them off one by one. Putin will clearly follow the same pattern: a bite out of Estonia, a nibble out of Latvia, a chunk of Moldova, chew, digest and wait for the West’s reaction. If none comes, proceed as planned.

If this isn’t a crisis, I don’t know what is. That’s one half of a potential catastrophe in place – and so is the other: weak, vacillating, craven, inane political leadership.

The way the West has handled the Russian aggression since it began in 2014 and escalated in 2022 spells a death wish. At first, Western leaders pretended they didn’t understand Putin’s objectives. Later they began to pretend they did.

As a result, they’ve created a Fata Morgana picture of the war in their own minds and those of the public. The war is raging in the real world, while the Western perception of it is lodged in virtual reality.

If it weren’t the case, Western leaders would realise that they need the Ukraine as much as the Ukraine needs them. The Ukrainian army, 800,000-strong, is the only battle-hardened military force in Europe that has the experience, know-how and unbreakable will to stop the barbarian onslaught. All that’s needed from the West is material support, with military and non-military aid, and also moral support that goes beyond empty words of solidarity.

Early in 1918, Sidney Reilly pleaded from Moscow that his superiors in London shift the emphasis of their policy to the Bolshevik revolution:

“This hideous cancer [is] striking at the very root of civilisation,” he wrote. ‘Gracious heavens, will the people in England never understand?… Here in Moscow there is growing to maturity the arch enemy of the human race… At any price this foul obscenity which has been born in Russia must be crushed out of existence… Mankind must unite in a holy alliance against this midnight terror.”

No such entreaties are sounding anywhere in the West, and if they are, no one is listening. Instead, staggeringly incompetent non-diplomats like Witkoff and Kushner dupe the world with encouraging reports of peace negotiations.

As the latest round was unfolding, Putin didn’t release bevies of peace doves over the Ukraine. Instead, he launched unprecedentedly heavy attacks on the energy infrastructure around Kiev. That left almost a million people without light and heat in the midst of -20C frosts.

Meanwhile, Western negotiators pretend they believe that all Putin wants is a piece of Donbass. Enveloping themselves in the smokescreen of such lies, they try to push the Ukraine closer to capitulation.

Any sensible governments would abandon pretence, assess the situation soberly and without keeping both eyes on the nearest elections, and decide what needs to be done to thwart the brewing barbarian conquest. As a minimum, the Ukraine should be given the kind of missiles that can do to Moscow what Russian missiles are doing to Kiev.

It’s also well within our means to police a no-fly zone over the Ukraine and introduce limited troop contingents into parts of the country, the western ones to begin with. Instead, we hear cowardly gasps about the danger of provoking Putin.

Chaps, the only thing that ever provokes evil aggressors is a show of weakness. The only thing that ever deters them is a show of strength. As Golda Meir once said, “You can’t negotiate with people who want to murder you.”

If strong leaders were in charge today, Putin’s murderers would be licking their wounds back in Russia. The people we do have in charge seem to be hellbent on turning the crisis into a catastrophe. In this, if no other, undertaking they are succeeding famously.  

First, a confession: I don’t like opera, especially the 19^th century kind. I find it more emotive than emotional, mawkish rather than moving, musically trivial rather than sublime, and vulgar rather than refined.

Opera in general, and Italian opera in particular, is closer to operetta than to serious music. It’s more in the nature of music’s PR department than of music itself. Music already possesses enough drama of its own not to have to rely on the verbal, typically phony, drama of a libretto. The dramatic potential of the spirit is better revealed in the slow movement of Mozart’s K488 than in all his operas combined.

Even though I may want to exempt bits and pieces of Mozart’s and Wagner’s operas from this observation (and also later works by Berg, Poulenc and Shostakovich), deep down it’s hard to argue either with Gould, who believed that Mozart’s affection for opera was a millstone around his musical neck, or with the wit who described Wagner as “the Puccini of music”. That hits two composers with one stone, not an easy thing to do.

Rossini, who was a better raconteur than he was a composer, came up with another wonderful, but unfortunately untranslatable, aphorism. “Wagner’s operas,” he said, “have some fine moments but many rotten quarter-hours.”

Alas, this translation has to lose the pun. The French expression passer un mauvais quart d’heure, besides its literal meaning, stands for having a generally rotten time over usually a longer period than 15 minutes.

And this is my principal gripe against this genre: I find it a crushing bore. Rarely have I been able to sit through the whole performance, which increases my admiration for the brave souls who can not only tolerate 4.5 hours of Die Meistersinger but actually claim to enjoy it.

Going from the general to the particular, opera becomes tolerable when performed by great artists. Maria Callas, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Fyodor Chaliapin, Elisabeth Schwartzkopf could have reconciled me to opera – but I’ve never heard them perform.

The only three great singers I’ve ever heard live were Renata Scotto, Mario del Monaco and Christa Ludwig, but even Ludwig couldn’t make me take Der Rosenkavalier for a full four hours plus.

Then how does one account for the statement in the title? Simple. One reads Tchaikovsky’s account of the performance of Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar (later known as Ivan Susanin).

The, probably apocryphal, story of Ivan Susanin is an essential part of Russian patriotic lore, and as such is known to every child. According to the story, in 1613, during the Time of Troubles, Polish troops seeking to kill the first Romanov tsar, Mikhail, hired Susanin to guide them to Moscow.

Instead, the hero led the Poles into an impassable thicket where they all soon froze to death, but not before killing Ivan for his trouble.

This tragic story has caused numerous comic variants, favoured by irreverent Muscovites who see a joke in everything, and everything as a joke. The most recent one involves Susanin poking his head into Putin’s study and saying, “Fancy a walk, Vladimir Vladimirovich?”

All this is just the background to the story Tchaikovsky tells in his 1866 letter. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

“You will be able to read in the Moscow News what happened at the Bolshoi Theatre, the day before yesterday (during A Life for the Tsar), and I was there. In my opinion the Moscow public has lost all sense of proportion and reason. The opera did not actually take place for, as soon as the Poles appeared everybody started shouting “Down with the Poles” and so on [Only a Russian would know what the ‘so on’ was – AB] In the scene where the Poles are supposed to kill Susanin, the actor who sang the part started fighting with the choristers – Poles – and as he is very strong he knocked several down; the rest, seeing that the audience was delighted about this mockery of art, truth and decency, fell down too and the triumphant Susanin left, waving his arms, followed by terrific applause from the Muscovites. You must agree that this was the limit.”

I must do nothing of the sort. Instead, I believe that most operatic performances could benefit from little diversions of that sort if they were to provide full entertainment value for the exorbitant ticket prices.

Speaking of which, I can’t understand those who shell out £430 to hear Rigoletto at Covent Garden informing us for the umpteenth time that la Donna è mobile. Let me tell you, a donna who pays that kind of money for that musical trash has to be a) mad or b) tasteless or c) an inveterate social climber. In any case, this donna has to be very upwardly mobile indeed.

By writing this, I know I risk incurring the wrath of those among my readers who happen to be opera lovers, if not opera-goers, at least not at those prices. I’ve noticed that people can tolerate implicit or even explicit attacks on their politics, philosophies or ideas better than they can stomach real or presumed slights of their tastes.

Let me assure you just in case that no such slight is meant, and none should be taken. Our tastes come from our aesthetic experience, innate sensibility and general direction of our spiritual life. These vary from person to person, and everyone is entitled to his tastes – ridiculous as I may find some.

Loving opera doesn’t fall under this rubric: it’s more regrettable than ridiculous. Unlike some genres one could think of (pop, rap, that sort of thing), it’s not totally devoid of some musical content, and even a committed hater like me finds some beautiful moments here and there.

Even though, to quote Rossini again, rotten quarts d’heure are easier to find for being more plentiful.

Lately, I’ve kept you overdosed on Trump. Never before have I written so many consecutive pieces on the same subject, and I’m sorry about this.

However, who else has as much entertainment value in today’s world? Who else makes you gasp every time he opens his mouth? Which other public figure is so thoroughly sui generis? Not a single one.

Our own vapid Marxists are yawn-inducing, destroying the country in an effective but utterly boring way. European politicians, with the possible exception of the aptronymic Meloni (if you get the sexist reference, good; if not, never mind), are as dull as ditch water, and just about as smart. Their ‘far-right’ opponents try to be sinister, but only succeed at being gauche.

Trump is bearing the comic burden all on his own, and he hardly ever takes a day off. Various, and variously crazy, statements pop out of his mouth at a kaleidoscopic speed, only to be repudiated just as fast.

This isn’t an excuse for my current fixation, but it’s an explanation. I open the papers every day only to find that the Trump travelling circus has delivered yet another reason-defying stunt.

This morning, for example, one finds out that Trump has deemed Canada unworthy of joining his much-touted Board of Peace. This is a new development because Canada was previously invited in. But now Trump has withdrawn his invitation because Mark Carney, Canada’s PM, dared to talk back.

I’ve never been a great fan of Mr Carney, not even when he was Governor of the Bank of England. But he said something sensible at Davos: he urged “middle powers” to form a bloc the better to resist economic aggression by “greater powers”.

Neither Trump nor the US was mentioned by name, but the implication was clear. Yet another reprobate spoke out of turn, and no one takes a shot at the Donald and gets away with it.

Instead of offering profuse compliments and thanks to the US and especially Trump personally (doesn’t matter what for), Carney didn’t respond to verbal lashings with the lapidary “Thank you, sir, may I have another”. He didn’t realise that administering punishment to America’s allies hurt Trump more than it hurt them, and he was only doing it out of the goodness of his heart.

Such ingratitude had to be singled out for individual punishment. Canada, explained Trump, only “lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”

Carney must be wondering what exactly Trump meant. Canada, for all her faults, is a successful Western country, a member of NATO, and her head of state is the same King Charles III for whom Trump has declared his undying love.

The only meaning I can find in Trump’s statement is that Canada exists as an independent state only because the US has so far magnanimously refrained from invading her and turning her into a 51^st state. Trump has threatened to do so in the future but, fair enough, hasn’t done it yet. Other American leaders weren’t so accommodating in the past, more than once.

The  two major interventions occurred in 1775, during the American Revolutionary War, and in the 1812 war. The aim was to grab Quebec and other Canadian territories, yet both invasions failed, as did numerous smaller raids in 1837-1838 and 1866-1871.

If Trump means that Canada lives only because he doesn’t follow the example of the Founders and decides for the time being to let Canada carry on, then there is some logic to it. Canada wouldn’t be able to repel the full military might of her southern neighbour as successfully as she did in the past.

But then exactly the same can be said about practically all other countries of the world, except two or three. Since America has the physical wherewithal to conquer them but doesn’t do so, they can be said to survive only courtesy of Trump’s munificence.

Let’s await further developments of this theme, but meanwhile let’s take Trump’s point: Carney’s lack of rispetto disqualifies Canada from membership in that august organisation founded by Trump personally. This is how he expressed that thought in one of his inimitable posts:

“Please let this letter serve to represent that the Board of Peace is withdrawing its invitation to you regarding Canada’s joining, what will be, the most prestigious Board of Leaders ever assembled, at any time.”

Delegates to the 1814-1815 Congress of Vienna, all those comparative pygmies like Metternich, Castlereagh and Talleyrand, might have taken exception to the superlative statement at the end. But they are all dead, so they don’t count.

So fine, Canada isn’t worthy of that honour, not while she’s led by that ingrate Carney. Clearly, Canada doesn’t possess the moral qualifications for joining the Most Prestigious Board of Leaders Ever In History. But who does? We must establish this to understand better the criteria applied.

Thus we find out that the list of honourable invitees includes Putin and his Belorussian poodle Lukashenko, along with representatives of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kosovo, Qatar – and of course no such group honouring Putin and Lukashenko would be complete without the presence of their staunchest European ally Victor Orban.

The Executive Board is naturally headed by Trump, and its other members include that great champion of peace Tony Blair, who dragged Britain into the Iraq war on false pretences, Steve Witkoff, whose sole diplomatic success is once having bought Trump a ham sandwich late at night, and Jared ‘Nepo Baby’ Kushner, a small-time wheeler-dealer raised to a billionaire by his father-in-law’s shenanigans.

So far Starmer, Macron and even that aptronymic Meloni have refused to join this rogues’ gallery, to their credit. They ascribe their reticence to the presence of Messrs Putin and Lukashenko, forgetting that the former is Trump’s friend and the latter a friend of a friend.

That has incurred Trump’s displeasure: those countries too have forgotten they only live because he allows them to. And he had often complimented Meloni without ever grabbing them, yet that gesture of goodwill seems to have been wasted.

Other than overseeing the ceasefire in Gaza and presumably peppering its landscape with the sorely missing rows of Trump Towers, it’s unclear what the Board’s remit will be. The immediate benefit to Trump is more transparent: a positive RSVP must come with a $1 billion cheque attached. I doubt the cheques will be made out to him personally, but, as chairman, he’ll have control of the funds.

The Trump sideshow rolls on, flattening under it all known standards of decency, diplomacy, reason, even sanity. But I can again compliment Trump for his sole good quality: boring he isn’t. Still, I’ll try to get off this subject lest Trump too may lose his ability to entertain.

P.S. Speaking of sideshows, last autumn’s production of Hamlet at the National (Britain’s premier stage) featured Francesca Mills as Ophelia. Now, I thought that, unlike Trump, our theatre had exhausted its capacity for astounding us with perverse developments.

We’ve seen black women playing the roles of white men (but not vice versa – that would be cultural appropriation). I especially remember a woman wearing stiletto heels who played the fearless warrior Agrippa. But that, I thought, was the outer limit of woke perversity. I was wrong though.

You see, Miss Mills is a dwarf, which lack of stature, as you can see in this clip https://search.app/pjpyy, isn’t compensated by any singular dramatic talent. The way she hams up that monologue would be ridiculous even if it came from a 5’10” actress.

“What next?” asks a good friend of mine who sent me this clip. “A quadriplegic Hamlet?” Well, perhaps. As long as it’s a quadriplegic black woman Hamlet.