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Such was the instruction Trump issued to Steve Witkoff before the latter’s departure for the Middle East. Just do the same hard-nosed pragmatism Kissinger did, Steve, and everything will be… Oh well, forget Kissinger. But you know what I mean.

This phrase and its variants go back to Lord Palmerston (d.1865), who showed his aphoristic talent by saying: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies, only eternal and perpetual interests.”

Like most spiffy epigrams, this one is open to criticism. One could point out that national interests are hardly ever “eternal and perpetual”. Thus, in Lord Palmerston’s time, Britain’s interests lay in empire building, but I doubt many people would insist that the same is the case at present.

Be that as it may, the underlying amoral approach to politics was laid down by Machiavelli in his three seminal books, The Prince, The Art of War and Discourses.

Machiavelli is often seen as the founder of political science, a dispassionate study of the world as it is, not as it should be. The opposite of that is utopian idealism, as personified by the likes of Plato, Augustine or More.

However, though he inclined towards anti-clericalism, Machiavelli also said that “there is no surer sign of decay in a country than to see the rites of religion held in contempt”. This highlights the danger of reducing serious statesmen and thinkers to the bare bones of epigrammatic clichés.

Palmerston was a strong statesman, possibly one of our best prime ministers ever, and definitely one of the best foreign secretaries. And Machiavelli, despite all his faults, was one of the most significant political thinkers in history.

Alas, for whatever reason, great practitioners and theoreticians of politics aren’t lying thick on the ground nowadays. Hard though I look at modern politicians, I can’t discern a Palmerston anywhere. Nor is one often regaled with penetrating political thought on Machiavelli’s level.

Hence modern politicians trying to put cold-blooded, realistic statecraft of realpolitik before principles often resemble a savage using a Stradivarius as a clubbing weapon. Still, courtesy of Donald Trump, words like ‘common sense’, ‘pragmatism’ and ‘interests’ now seem to be antonyms of principles, philosophies and values.

Therein lies a problem. For principles are the axle around which the wheels of interests turn. Break the axle, and the wheels will come off, sending the vehicle careering into the ditch.

Principles are ironclad and immutable (“eternal and perpetual”), whereas interests change kaleidoscopically. This happens so fast, often so chaotically, that interests may prove elusive, hard to define and understand. And when politicians can’t boast the mind of Machiavelli or the vision of Palmerston, ‘hard’ may well become ‘impossible’.

For example, before the Japanese made up America’s mind for her by raiding Pearl Harbour, the widespread, not to say dominant, view there was that the European war had nothing to do with the US.

Roosevelt and his ‘globalists’ were talking values, such as democracy, freedom, historical alliances or international law, as a justification for entering the war. At the same time, isolationist America Firsters countered with an appeal to national interests, which, according to them, would be ill-served by belligerence.  

However, much as it pains me to point this out, it was the generally hideous FDR who was proved right, not his conservative opponents. Had America not entered the war, she wouldn’t have become a global superpower enjoying unprecedented prosperity for the subsequent decades as the recognised Leader of the Free World.

That was one instance of principles overlapping with interests, but there are many others. One could mention in this context the British clash of pragmatists and idealists, personified respectively by Chamberlain and Churchill. The former led Britain to the surrender at Munich, the latter to victory. Principles turned out to coincide with interests.

In fact, such cases greatly outnumber situations when principles and interests diverge. And when they do diverge, it often turns out that the principles were correct and the interests misconceived.

Witness the post-war situation. America poured billions into rebuilding the Soviet economy, which was a continuation of the massive effort that started immediately after the Bolshevik revolution. In effect, that meant rebuilding the Soviet war machine since the country’s economy was greatly militarised before, during and after the war.

The principle of opposing communism played second fiddle to the massive investment in new markets before and after the war. Sure enough, American companies made billions from those ventures. But it then cost the country trillions to protect itself from the monster weaned on American investment and technologies.

Had the US followed the general principle of opposing communist evil, she would have kept the Soviet Union on short rations, starved and unable to threaten American (and generally Western) interests all over the globe. I could also mention China in this context, but there is no need: you get the idea.

Principles and values don’t just appear out of thin air. Before reaching their final form, they undergo historical development. Even Christian tenets had taken several centuries before their true meaning sank in, and a few more before they could be translated into concrete political realities.

The same goes for sound political principles that, in the West, can be traced back to Judaeo-Christian morality. Yet it was a case of careful adaptation, not wholesale borrowing: you can’t run a state on the Sermon on the Mount or even on the Decalogue. But it was indeed adaptation, not abandonment.

Having said that, politicians aren’t religious zealots who go on repeating Luther’s statement “Here I stand, I can do no other.” (Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders, for the German-speakers among you.)

Following principles shouldn’t lead to collective suicide, and compromises are inevitable. But before they are made, there should exist something to compromise.

It’s like studying a foreign language: one has to learn every rule of grammar first before understanding when and where it’s possible to deviate from them. If deviation comes before the rules, incoherence will result.

That’s where politics is different from property development, an activity that formed and informed the mindset of Donald Trump and his special envoy. A property developer builds his fortune deal by deal, hoping that credits will exceed debits. Once another high-rise has gone up and the profit has been banked (or losses written off), it’s on to the next project, with the old one consigned to pleasant or bitter memory.

No principle is involved, just interest, compounded or otherwise. And, as Vespasian explained, money doesn’t smell. Nor does it impose any intellectual demands beyond primary-school arithmetic.

This is an over-simplification, but it serves the purpose of highlighting the complexity of thought needed to identify true political interests. At the risk of upsetting some of my friends, I have to say that neither Trump nor especially Witkoff seems capable of the deep and nuanced thinking required.

But they don’t need to be. Simply following first principles would help them secure long-term American interests.

With both diplomatic missions regrettably entrusted to Witkoff, that is Israel and the Ukraine, the principles involved are simple to grasp, as are the country’s long-term interests.

Israel, for all its numerous faults, is America’s friend, as is the Ukraine, for all its even more numerous faults. Conversely, Hamas Palestine and its Arab backers, such as Qatar, for all their merits that are more obvious to the Trump Organisation than to the US, are America’s enemies.

It’s both moral and pragmatic to stand by the country’s friends against their enemies. Allowing terrorist organisations to overrun Israel would empower them no end, creating a serious threat to the US and an existential one to some of America’s smaller friends in the West.

Also, allowing Putin to extinguish Ukrainian sovereignty will have the same effect on Europe as did allowing Hitler to extinguish Czech sovereignty. Putin will be emboldened to press on. And America’s allies will realise they can no longer rely on America – meaning that America will no longer be able to rely on them.

And, should another major war break out in Europe, America again won’t be able to sit it out. The country’s interests are too intricately intertwined with European ones.

So when that functional illiterate Witcoff sets off for another diplomatic junket, a much better instruction would be to proceed from first principles, not from what he may see as the country’s interests but what is in fact fool’s gold. Only that way would he be able to serve the country’s interests as they are, not as they appear to be on a balance sheet.

P.S. Speaking of fool’s gold, the boss of Rolex gave Trump a gold table clock and a 1kg gold bar engraved with the president’s name. A week later, Trump announced he would lower his tariff on Switzerland from 39 to 15 per cent.

This sort of thing may be called bribery in some quarters, but then Trump has a particular affection for the shiny yellow stuff. Even the airliner he received from the Qataris featured lots of gilded surfaces, reflecting the refined taste of both donor and recipient.

How does he get away with this?

Allister Heath is a sensible young man, and his article in today’s Telegraph does a good job tearing the new budget to shreds.

This is what he meant to do, and he did it well. But in the process the sensible Mr Heath did something I don’t think he intended. He delivered a scathing, if unwitting, denunciation of democracy.

Writing about our Labour government and its new budget, he moaned that “they have unleashed full-blooded socialism on a country that never voted for it”. Really? What does he think the country did vote for?

Essentially, Mr Heath is saying that the country first elected a Marxist government and then gasped with horror when it started acting in character. Or did they not realise they were electing a Marxist government?

That makes the electorate thick, irresponsible and illiterate. If they couldn’t read up on the record of every member of the Labour front bench, they are illiterate. If they could do so, but chose not to, they are irresponsible. And if they did the responsible amount of study and still didn’t realise they were voting for Marxists, they are thick.

What should have tipped them off, but didn’t, was Starmer’s waffle when he was asked to define the ‘working people’ he was promising not to hit with new taxes.

Anyone with a modicum of nous should have known that Marxists define working people as those who aren’t working and are therefore dependent on the state’s largesse. People who actually do work aren’t ‘working people’. They are marks for highway robbery.

If Mr Heath means that some of the things Labour announced yesterday weren’t in their election manifesto, then that’s true. But it in no way changes my regretful branding of the electorate as thick. How else would you describe people who believe every word politicians, especially Left ones, utter during election campaigns?

Mr Heath is effectively saying that, the British electorate being what it is today, democracy is no longer operable, not in its present form at any rate. Any functional democracy ought to have in-built safety valves blocking self-destructive voting.

To use an extreme example, if people vote to sell themselves into slavery, there should be a tripwire mechanism preventing them from doing so. There isn’t though, as witnessed by the fact that the 2024 election ushered in a close approximation of slavery, or perhaps an intermediate stage on the road to it, if you’d rather.

“This is it, the day we all dreaded,” writes Mr Heath, “a milestone in Britain’s descent into collectivism of the most repugnant kind.” He describes the situation accurately enough, while making it sound as if that dreaded plunge came unexpectedly.

Yet anyone with half a brain knew exactly what to expect. Marxist budgets don’t enrich or stimulate; they punish. Marxist taxation pursues punitive and authoritarian goals, not economic ones. Taxes are frontal assaults in the class war, something Marxist governments always wage and, in the absence of robust opposition, win.

The inevitable result, ever-present in history, is that, when Marxists run a country, they run it into the ground. What part of it did the British electorate not know or understand?

Many people were saying that the Tories were useless, and I couldn’t agree more. Hence, they had to be ousted, went the next argument. Surely things can’t get any worse?

That’s where I emphatically disagree, and did at the time. Things can’t always get better, but they can always get worse.

Thus, hardcore Marxism is infinitely worse than the Socialism Lite practised by the Tories. The Tories were vapid, inane, cowardly and incompetent, but at least they weren’t evil. They genuinely wanted to make things better, although they didn’t have a clue how to do so.

This Marxist government is evil, which Marxism is by definition. Evil governments don’t want a free and prosperous country. They want to turn people into a dependent herd, with the state cracking the whip.

If any parts of the constitution stand in their way, such survivals of the past will be destroyed mercilessly. This doesn’t just include such basic constitutional provisions as property rights, which this Marxist government interprets as its own right to confiscate property.

Even the jury system, an institution that has existed in Britain for 800 years, since the reign of Henry II, also finds itself in Labour’s crosshairs. David ‘Celebrity Mastermind’ Lammy, who holds the posts of Deputy Prime Minister, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, has announced that henceforth some 95 per cent of criminal cases will be tried by a single judge.

Even the Bolsheviks had their troikas, three judges including a CheKa officer, the local party secretary and the state prosecutor. Yet British courts will make do with just one member, and never mind the eight centuries of constitutional tradition.

When that distinguished class warrior, David Lammy, appeared on Celebrity Mastermind, he expressed his firmly held views that the Rose Revolution (under way at the time) took place in Yugoslavia, Marie Antoinette won the Nobel Prize, and Henry VII succeeded Henry VIII. Now that functional moron is vandalising the world’s most venerable jurisprudence.

The details of that constitutional sabotage haven’t yet been released. Apparently, jury trial will be reserved only for cases of murder, manslaughter and rape. In other words, a man who rapes a woman will be tried by a jury of his peers, whereas a man who beats a woman to a pulp won’t be afforded that luxury.

This is similar to the way jury trial works in France, where it’s reserved for the most serious crimes only. In such cases, the jury is usually made up of six members, one of whom is a professional lawyer.

That system has its pluses and minuses, as does ours. But if Lammy didn’t know the difference between Marie Antoinette and Marie Curie, he may be unaware that the French legal system is fundamentally different from ours.

It’s based on the Napoleonic Code that goes back to Roman Law. The English Common Law, on the other hand, is precedent-based. As such, it can be traced back to no English counterpart of Justinian or Bonaparte. English law, developed gradually and organically, is as different from French positive law imposed from the top as our Parliament is different from the French Assemblée Générale.

Someone like Lammy may be ignorant enough not to know such primary-school basics, but that’s not why he is gunning for our ancient legal system. He and his Marxist accomplices have declared war on all ancient institutions specifically because they are ancient.

This lot are driven by hatred and the urge to punish, destroy and totally control the rump country left over after they finish. That’s what Marxists are; that’s what Marxists do.

And if democracy, as it now is, can’t protect itself from an ignorant, irresponsible and generally thick electorate voting for collective suicide, there is something fundamentally wrong with democracy. That’s what follows ineluctably from what Allister Heath said.

But he couldn’t have made this logical inference even had he wanted to. He writes for a respectable newspaper after all.

“Like priest, like parish”, goes a Russian proverb. This is a rough equivalent of our “birds of a feather flock together”, except that the English saying implies avian parity, whereas the Russian one conveys an ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Translated into the language of political realities, when presidents (or prime ministers) form their cabinets, they often look for their doppelgängers, or at least candidates with qualities similar to their own.

You may contest this observation, but I challenge you to come up with any other explanation for the presence of Robert F Kennedy Jr in Trump’s cabinet. Among many traits the two men share, I’d like to highlight one: bad taste.

Both Plato and Aristotle devoted much attention to what they called ‘transcendentals’, objective ontological properties of being they defined as Truth, Beauty and Goodness.

These existed as One – meaning that a deficit in one transcendental also diminished the other two. In other words, what’s true and moral is also beautiful, what’s beautiful is also moral and true – and hence what’s ugly can be neither true nor moral.

I’m reminded of this simple truth whenever Donald Trump opens his mouth in public, which is to say all the time. You see, we may argue against ancient Greek metaphysics all we want, but this idea rings true.

That’s why I can’t take seriously anyone who displays horrendous taste. My judgement of a person or, for that matter, an idea starts out by being aesthetic. Any evidence of bad taste, and I don’t explore any further.

Trump, he of orange tan, rotten grammar, crude manners, nauseating narcissism, bombastic delivery, boundless egotism, insatiable thirst for sycophantic praise, is the epitome of bad taste. In fact, I can’t think of any other American president even remotely close to him in that department. Even LBJ looks like an elegant, eloquent raconteur by retrospective comparison.

Yet even before we talk about Kennedy’s taste, I struggle to think of what it is exactly that qualifies him for the post of health secretary.

He is on record as a fierce opponent of any vaccination, including the kind that, since 1955, has reduced the world’s polio cases by over 99 per cent and eliminated them altogether in most countries.

Fluoride in water is, according to Kennedy, an “industrial waste” and “dangerous neurotoxin” that lowers IQ in children. He himself must have drunk the stuff by the gallon on this evidence.

Kennedy also makes a believable claim that a part of his brain was eaten by a worm. His CV includes such adventures as dumping a dead bear in Central Park and sawing off a whale’s head. In other words, the man is away with the fairies, which is where Trump must have detected a kindred spirit.

Then, upholding his fine family tradition, Kennedy is highly libidinous, which is again a trait he shares with his boss. But, where Trump self-admittedly approaches courtship in a straightforward manner by grabbing a woman’s private parts to render her docile, Kennedy expresses himself in poetic idiom.

This is where his taste comes in. It appears that during the 2024 presidential campaign Kennedy was conducting an affair with Olivia Nuzzi, a journalist who at the time worked for New York Magazine.

She has since been sacked because it turned out that the young lady had been using notches on her bedpost as pitons on her climb to the top. One such notch was Kennedy, but there had been a few other prominent politicians as well.

When wooing his fair lady, Kennedy used the technique that had worked in the past for troubadours, minstrels and other poets, not least Shakespeare.

The Bard, for example, wrote, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?/ Thou art more lovely and more temperate…”, but that was oh so 16^th century. Kennedy expressed his feelings in more up-to-date versification:

“Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest… I mean to squeeze your cheeks to force open your mouth. I’ll hold your nose as you look up at me to encourage you to swallow. ‘Don’t spill a drop.’ I am a river. You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you. My Love…”.

According to his inamorata’s jilted fiancé, who revenge-published this poetic masterpiece, the cited verse is the only one fit for public consumption. Everything else is lewd.

Quite apart from adultery, am I the only one to detect elements of S&M and B&D coercion in Kennedy’s lyricism? But never mind his unorthodox, possibly illegal, amorous tendencies. It’s his taste that attracts me at the moment.

Applying the standards set by Plato, Aristotle, later Augustine and, still later, Aquinas, I maintain that a man capable of delivering himself of such effluvia has to be a mendacious, immoral idiot.

I’d suggest that a chap like that isn’t fit to be a proverbial dog catcher, never mind a cabinet minister in a great country. But Trump’s criteria are evidently different from mine.

Here I have an admission to make. When I was courting Penelope, I wrote her a bawdy limerick every day. This genre is the upper limit of my poetic attainment, although, judging by the fact that Penelope still keeps those yellowing pages in a secret hidey-hole, the verses weren’t too bad, as far as such things go.

But that was just a joke, comic doggerel. Aware of my limitations, I would never attempt to write real poetry. God may or may not have given me some writing ability, but certainly not in that genre. And no sane man would ever write Kennedy-style verse in all seriousness, nor expect to produce any effect on the recipient other than an emetic one.

Then I look at photographs of Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth naked to the waist (from the top down, as I hope you understand) and see a torso densely covered with tattoos. Let me tell you, a Tahiti denizen of Gauguin’s time had nothing on Pete in the area of body art.

Does one detect a certain deficit of taste there as well? I go over the mental list of the men of impeccable taste I’ve ever known, and not one of them had a single tattoo, much less used his whole body as a broad canvas to paint on.

Now, I can’t level similar criticism at two other members of Trump’s cabinet: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Foreign Secretary Mark Rubio. But they seem to be outsiders whom Trump barely tolerates.

Rubio and Bessent are the ministers who try their utmost to prevent Trump from acting on his insane instincts. One such instinct is to deliver all of the Ukraine to Putin (who, with his elevator shoes, is another exemplar of bad taste), by twisting the Ukraine’s arm into accepting peace terms that amount to capitulation.

At the same time, both Kennedy and Hegseth are committed Putinistas. During the presidential campaign, for example, Kennedy parroted the Kremlin line by saying: “But we must understand that our government has also contributed to its circumstances [the on-going war] through repeated deliberate provocations of Russia going back to the 1990s.”

And the Russian press agency Tass once complimented Hegseth for sporting, at a meeting with Zelensky, a “tie, featuring bold white, blue, and red stripes arranged in the same order as on the Russian national flag.” That’s like Putin wearing a MAGA cap.

So there we have it: Rubio and Bessent against Hegseth and Kennedy, with Trump leaning towards the second two. If you believe Plato and Aristotle, taste – or rather the absence thereof – must have something to do with that.

Call it a paradox, but this is the most innocuous explanation I can offer for the US stance on Putin’s aggression. God knows I’ve put forth the less innocuous ones often enough.

P.S. Speaking of that, I watch football matches not only for the enjoyment of the game, but also in the hope that the commentators, native speakers every one of them, may enlarge my English vocabulary, originally acquired second-hand.

Thus, over the past few weeks, I’ve learned that ‘innocuous’ can also mean ‘annoying’, ‘infamous’ is a synonym of ‘famous’, ‘melodramatic’ of ‘dramatic’, and – my particular favourite – ‘amount’ can stand for ‘number’, as in “the amount of matches”. Learn something every day.

Even as we speak, Roman Abramovich is fighting his corner in Jersey courts.

At issue are his property rights, except that Jersey powers that be have finally cottoned on to the fact that neither the corner nor indeed the property is really Abramovich’s.

Western people find this hard to understand. If a chap shows assets in the billions, invests them in legitimate Western businesses and lives high on the hog off the proceeds, everything is hunky dory. Even if his past looks a tad shady in places, well, let those who are without sin… and all that.

Such is an understandable human weakness. Institutions are like individuals: they base their judgement of what is happening at present on what has happened in the past. The experience of a tax haven like Jersey is multifarious, and financial people there are on guard against criminal activities, such as money laundering.

They know that many drug barons, Mafia dons, counterfeiters and other criminals have tried to launder their ill-gotten gains through Jersey’s banks, and the fund managers there tend to be vigilant, more or less. The Abramovich case, however, has caught them unawares.

Jersey financiers have dealt with many criminal individuals. But now they are face to face with a criminal state, which throws all their notions of private property out of kilter. I keep repeating the same mantra because repetition, as we know, is the mother of all learning, and this is something normal people find hard to learn.

Russia is a criminal KGB/FSB state, which modifiers highlight its founding principles, mentality, goals and modus operandi. This state is waging war not just on the Ukraine, but, in its hybrid version, on the West at large. All Russian wealth, whether held in the country or elsewhere, is its war chest.

This wealth may have any number of nominal owners but only a single real one: the Kremlin in general and Putin in particular. Messrs Abramovich, Deripaska, Usmanov, Lebedev, Vekselberg et al. are only proxy owners who use parts of the war chest to infiltrate themselves into Western countries.

The purpose of that infiltration can only be understood in the context of the hybrid war Russia is waging on the West. All these ‘oligarchs’ are malignant cells implanted into Western societies for the purpose of destabilising, and ultimately killing, the host organisms.

These organisms have proved suicidally hospitable. There are many reasons for such welcoming generosity, the prime one being greed. It comes naturally to the mercantile mind to accept billions in foreign investment without asking too many awkward questions about the provenance of the loot or the ends it will serve.

Then there is also fear: the real owner of the capital, the elderly ghoul in the Kremlin, keeps referring to doomsday weapons as an unimpeachable collateral. He may not mean it quite the way it sounds, but better safe than sorry.

And let’s not forget ignorance: few Westerners understand the true nature of Putin’s Russia or know much about it. Even those who don’t especially like it see Russia as a country similar to many others, naughtier than some to be sure, but still within the pale.

They can’t get their heads around the unique nature of Russia as the only major country in history whose entire economy, legality, social structure, foreign and domestic policy are controlled by a secret police acting hand in glove with organised crime.

In England, pinstriped gentlemen populating Pall Mall clubs generally assume that a chap is what he says he is, especially if he is quick to order the next round or, better still, throw a lavish party at a reputable London address or, even better, in the shires. If social standing used to derive from political power, now it’s more or less the other way around.

The pinstriped brigade can’t see in their collective mind’s eye a country that’s not a country but an extension of an OCG, a government that’s not a government but a hostile general staff, gregarious well-heeled chaps who aren’t socialites but enemy agents of influence.

The worst example of this criminal stupidity was the ennoblement of Evgeny Lebedev, whose father, Alexander, was once head of the KGB station in London. Alexander later became an ‘oligarch’, meaning a man chosen to act as a frontman, a proxy owner of Putin’s war chest.

He then used some of the money to buy two London newspapers, along with the respectability that conferred, and put his son Evgeny in charge. The latter became widely known around town for throwing Lucullan feasts for the people who matter, mostly politicians and high-flying businessmen.

Boris Johnson was a regular guest there, and, when becoming PM, a peerage was a sort of thank-you note he sent to a custodian of subversive KGB funds in England. Only being polite, old boy, what?

This, however, is so far an isolated event in Britain. Not so in France. I came across an article this morning that shows that things have slid downhill much more precipitously there.

The Legion of Honor (Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur) is France’s highest and most prestigious order of merit. It’s bestowed on people who have distinguished themselves in serving the Republic in either a civilian or military capacity.

In the past, Russian recipients of the honour included such illustrious people as the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, his wife the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, along with other internationally renowned artists, writers and scientists.

Today’s list of the legionnaires, by contrast, reads like a Who’s Who in the KGB. Two former heads of that sinister organisation, Stepashin and Putin himself lead the way. Following in their footsteps are transparent villains like Gennady Timchenko, Sergey Naryshkin, Vladimir Yakunin, Sergey Chemezov, all ‘former’ officers of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate responsible for foreign intelligence. (Putin himself explained that “There is no such thing as a former KGB officer. This is for life”.)

Then come a whole raft of Russian supremacists, each one a passionate supporter of Putin’s aggression against the Ukraine, in fact the West. One wonders exactly what kind of services were provided to the French Republic by such Putin poodles as Matvienko, Sadovnichy, Mikhalkov, Panfilova, Posner and others, whose name is… well, I’ve belaboured that Biblical pun for all it’s worth.

I feel sorry for my French friends, several of whom sport the coveted red ribbon. They worked tirelessly and brilliantly for the honour and are rightly proud of it.

I wonder how they feel about sharing it with ophidian foreign trash who, rather than providing service for the Republic, have done all they could to undermine it. I’m going to ask them, but I know what they are going to say.

In the past, many children entered primary school unable to read. These days, say their teachers, they enter primary school unable to speak.

The second generation formed by the Internet is upon us, and I’m becoming more and more convinced that Darwin got it the wrong way around. The ape isn’t our past; it’s our future.

We can bring it nearer by shedding one by one the distinguishing features of humanity, including the gift of speech. Like any other gift, this one isn’t delivered beautifully shaped once and for all. A gift is a potential. Unless developed, it may be lost.

This is exactly what’s happening to primary school pupils today, according to teachers from all over the country. They get pupils knee-deep in devices whose screens they swipe with virtuoso dexterity. Yet they are incapable of speaking properly.

Children don’t know how to make a transition from the online world to the real world. Moreover, they confound the two.

Flickering screens form the entirety of the tots’ beliefs, ideas and identities. The information they receive is unfiltered, often fake and largely irresponsible, and children themselves lack the critical faculties necessary for self-protection.

Even worse, so do their parents. They too grew up with devices nurturing their vices.

A chain-smoking daddy won’t be persuasive when lecturing his son on the harm of tobacco. Similarly, parents themselves formed by online sources won’t be able to protect their children from poisonous fumes emanating from screens.

Little children lie about their age to gain access to adult content, largely made up of sex, violence and assorted conspiracy theories. Arguments have raged since TV sets became ubiquitous about the damage caused by such material.

I used to think those fears were exaggerated: a boy isn’t going to commit murder just because he watched John Wayne firing his six-shooter, nor will a girl become a prostitute because the same film showed ladies of easy virtue in a Texas bordello.

But that argument was only valid when children were exposed to other formative influences as well: newspapers, magazines, conversations with grown-ups – above all books. Take those away, and a child may well go feral.

This isn’t just a theory. Primary school teachers tell harrowing stories from their everyday practice. For example, while boys used to learn about girls from Hans-Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, today they get such education from Andrew Tate and similar ‘influencers’.

As a result, one primary school mistress complained about getting a note in which a precocious pupil said he liked her breasts and asked if she’d like to have sex with him in the playground. Her reply wasn’t reported, but I’m reasonably certain she rejected the advance.

The same precocity explains why girls are routinely abused in primary schools. In the past, that sort of fun started in older age groups, but there were no social media at the time.

Raised by the Internet, children learn to communicate in semiotic interjections only, reserving any semantic content for the kind of vile language that suggests familiarity with most sexual variants. They exchange such messages with other recipients of social media, and many grown-ups provide parental guidance by joining in. They grew up the same way and now can give their offspring the benefits of their larger vocabulary.

One teacher said: “They’re exposed to too many devices. We’re getting children who can’t talk; they can swipe, they can take a photo, they can access the internet but the speech and language is being affected. Their parents at pick-up are staring down at their phones.

“They’re struggling with attachment. They’ve got the money, you go into the house and they have massive flatscreen TVs but no books.”

Little boys routinely swap nude pictures they get from the net or else take themselves by sneaking up on girls in their class. Unfortunately, they are also buried under an avalanche of other types of pornography: intellectual, political and aesthetic.

There isn’t a conspiracy theory the net flogs that pupils don’t take as a fact, and they avidly self-diagnose with all sorts of ailments they saw described on social platforms. Thus Year 5 and 6 pupils (aged 10 or 11) routinely complain of ADHD, which is a fashionable excuse for laziness.

Most of them have never heard of Nelson or Wellington, but they know for certain that the CIA murdered Kennedy, the Queen ordered Diana’s assassination, the Earth is flat, aliens land their UFOs on that flat surface, and the Covid vaccine contained microchips.

If children used to know they were divided into boys and girls, these days they learn from the net that there exist dozens of other options. They are encouraged to run through a quick checklist of their own psyche and physique to determine which of the 102 ‘genders’ they belong to – and they learn that such belonging is their enforceable right.

Teachers complain that they have to devote a big chunk of every lesson to battle what they call “online conspiracy”. Such warriors are the teachers we know about. But I’m willing to bet that many teachers don’t join those hostilities.

After all, most of them were Internet babies themselves. Their own verbal skills may be marginally better than their charges’, but whenever their memoranda appear in the press, one can see the authors are functionally illiterate. People who can’t form a single coherent, grammatical sentence are expected to teach pupils how to speak, think and behave properly.

Such people may be teachers or parents, but the catastrophic effects of their educational efforts are easy to predict. One such effect is instantly apparent: little feral creatures growing up unable to speak properly, but passionately committed to every bit of wicked propaganda they see on the net, can vote.

At present the voting age is 18, but it will be lowered to 16 during this Labour government. Those juvenile savages with undeveloped minds and no knowledge of anything valid or important will be deciding who will govern the country.

We’ve had ample opportunity to observe how these days it’s not the politicians who affect the electorates but vice versa. Now that Western democracy has entered its age of senile malignancy, incompetent, irresponsible voters elect governments in their own image.

That image doesn’t remain static – modernity is progressive if nothing else. Hence young minds warped by the net will be migrating from voting booths to Westminster (Capitol Hill, Rue de l’Université, Platz der Republik etc.). Are you looking forward to that bright future? I am not.

Let’s start by stating the obvious: Trump likes Russia and respects Putin, while disliking the Ukraine and despising Zelensky.

Anyone who denies these observations couldn’t have been following the current events closely. Specifically, such a lazy commentator must have missed the disgusting scene played out in the White House on 28 February.

Trump and Vance pounced on Zelensky like rabid attack dogs, screaming invective, treating the Ukrainian president like a misbehaving skivvy, stabbing at his chest with their index fingers. Visceral hostility was unmistakable, even if in subsequent encounters Trump moderated it somewhat.

Nothing like that ever happens with Putin. He gets a red carpet treatment even when Trump expresses mild disagreements. Putin is Trump’s friend and so he remains despite the odd argument.

The Donald can barely conceal his irritation with the Ukraine’s obduracy. Why couldn’t that so-called country give Putin whatever he wants, letting the US – specifically the Trump Organisation – and Russia do profitable business together? Russia, after all, is stronger and richer than the Ukraine, and Trump respects strength and wealth above such incidentals as morality, international law or even long-term strategic interests.

It’s against that background that one should look at the 28-point ultimatum, aka peace plan, that the Ukraine has until Thursday to accept or face the consequences.

First, one general remark that really cancels out every specific item on the list. Even assuming that Putin signs this ‘plan’, which isn’t a foregone conclusion, in what parallel universe does one have to reside to believe Russia will comply with its terms?

Russia, both before Putin’s tenure and during it, has broken every treaty she has ever signed. Following Bertie Russell’s logic, that doesn’t necessarily mean she’ll break this one. But following sound logic, it means precisely that.

Putin will treat any ceasefire as a chance to regroup, rearm, restock and come again with renewed strength. Anyone who doesn’t see this is either unqualified to comment on Russian affairs or else isn’t acting in good faith.

With that in mind, let’s look at some salient specifics.

Point 1. Ukraine’s sovereignty will be confirmed.

Coming from a fascist regime hellbent on conquest, such confirmation is meaningless. Russia has confirmed the Ukraine’s sovereignty on hundreds of occasions from 1994 onwards, and continued to do so even as Russian bandits murdered, raped and looted their way through the Ukraine.

Point 3. It is expected that Russia will not invade neighbouring countries and NATO will not expand further.

Does ‘expected’ strike you as an ironclad guarantee? Also implied here is parity between Russian aggression and NATO expansion. This is false: NATO expansion is strictly defensive, whereas Russian aggression is offensive in more ways than one.

Witness the fact that Sweden and Finland, which made a point of staying outside NATO for 70-odd years, applied for membership immediately after Russia invaded the Ukraine.

Equating Russian invasion with NATO expansion is a cynical sop to Putin and nothing but.

Point 5. Ukraine will receive reliable security guarantees.

Apparently, a separate document states that the US and her NATO allies will apply to the Ukraine Article 5 of the NATO Charter: an attack on one member is an attack on all. But Trump has stated on many occasions that he regards Article 5 as only a statement of vague intent, not an unbreakable guarantee.

Since Point 7 obligates the Ukraine to forswear NATO membership for ever, somehow I doubt that Trump will be more inclined to honour Article 5 when it’s a non-NATO member that comes under attack.

6. The size of the Ukrainian Armed Forces will be limited to 600,000 personnel.

For a peacetime army, that’s too many. For a country at war, that’s too few: the Ukrainian army currently has 800,000-850,000 personnel.

As Point 28 makes clear, this reduction should happen before the ceasefire comes into effect, meaning that the Ukraine should lose 25 per cent of her army while the war is still going on. That will enable Putin to grab even more territory and kill even more Ukrainians. Some peace plan.

Point 8. NATO agrees not to station troops in Ukraine.

In other words, NATO won’t offer the Ukraine the only security guarantee that could make a difference.

Point 10. The US guarantee comes with strings attached:

• The US guarantee may be soft, but it must be paid for in hard cash.
• If the Ukraine invades Russia, it will lose the guarantee, such as it is. Since the Ukraine will never do so, this item is meaningless to the point of being idiotic.
• If Russia invades the Ukraine, she’ll lose all the benefits of the ‘peace plan’. In other words, when a rebuilt Russian army rolls over an enfeebled Ukraine, Russia will again be rebuked. Big deal – just look at the effect current sanctions are having.
• The next one is my favourite. It says exactly how Russia will break the peace treaty: “If the Ukraine launches a missile at Moscow or St. Petersburg without cause, the security guarantee will be deemed invalid.”

First, this suggests that launching swarms of missiles at other Russian cities is perfectly acceptable, as long as not a single one is launched at Moscow or Petersburg. Since the Ukraine wouldn’t under any circumstances break the peace treaty by attacking any Russian cities, this seems nonsensical.

But the subtext is clear. When Russia is ready to pounce again, she’ll fire a single false-flag missile at Moscow and declare the treaty null and void. The FSB has form in such tricks: it was by using a similar stratagem that it put its man, Putin, into the Kremlin.

Point 13. Russia will be reintegrated into the global economy.

All sanctions bite the dust, all bygones are bygones, Russia rejoins the G8, and – here’s where Trump’s business acumen comes in:

“The United States will enter into a long-term economic cooperation agreement for mutual development in the areas of energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centres, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic, and other mutually beneficial corporate opportunities.”

Remember the billions the Trump Organisation has made in Qatar since last year? Multiply that by 10 or even 100. Isn’t that what diplomacy is all about?

Point 14. Frozen funds will be used as follows: $100 billion in frozen Russian assets will be invested in US-led efforts to rebuild and invest in Ukraine, with the US receiving 50 per cent of the profits.

That’s what rebuilding the Ukraine means. But it’s not all it means: “The remainder of the frozen Russian funds will be invested in a separate US-Russian investment vehicle that will implement joint projects in specific areas. This fund will be aimed at strengthening relations and increasing common interests to create a strong incentive not to return to conflict.”

Allow me to explain: whether or not the Ukraine is rebuilt, the US and Russia will profit handsomely. Fair is fair.

Point 20. Both countries undertake to implement educational programmes in schools and society aimed at promoting understanding and tolerance of different cultures and eliminating racism and prejudice.

Specifically, the ecclesiastical extension of the FSB, the Moscow Patriarchate, will be invited back to the Ukraine to continue its subversion, Russian propaganda media and the use of the Russian language won’t be curtailed in any way and – this is the kicker: “All Nazi ideology and activities must be rejected and prohibited.”

By signing this, Zelensky will confirm Russia’s mendacious casus belli claim that the Ukrainian government is neo-Nazi, and that Russia invaded to de-Nazify the country. Putin, on the other hand, will be able to claim that this war aim has been achieved.

Point 21. Territories:

• Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk will be recognised as de facto Russian, including by the United States.
• Kherson and Zaporizhzhia will be frozen along the line of contact, which will mean de facto recognition along the line of contact.
• Russia will relinquish other agreed territories it controls outside the five regions.
• Ukrainian forces will withdraw from the part of Donetsk Oblast that they currently control, and this withdrawal zone will be considered a neutral demilitarised buffer zone, internationally recognised as territory belonging to the Russian Federation. Russian forces will not enter this demilitarised zone.

Commentators well-disposed towards Putin attach a great significance to that de facto business. De jure those lands will still belong to the Ukraine, so what’s the problem? The problem is that Russia will impose her fascist rule on the Ukrainians currently living there.

Also, the Ukraine will cede to Russia territories Putin has been unable to grab since 2014, where the Ukrainians have built mighty fortifications. And anyone taking seriously all that demilitarised zone business is, putting it politely, naïve.  

Point 25. Ukraine will hold elections in 100 days.

When, and whether, the Ukraine holds elections is no one’s business but her own. In any case, three months is a risibly insufficient time to resume normal democratic procedures in a country ravaged by brutal invaders.

Point 26. All parties involved in this conflict will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war and agree not to make any claims or consider any complaints in the future.

This means the International Court in the Hague must withdraw the arrest warrant it issued for Putin’s war crimes. It’s as if hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians haven’t been killed, raped, robbed, left homeless, their children kidnapped to be ‘re-educated’ in Russia. All is forgiven, Vlad, the slate is squeaky clean.

Any Ukrainian official putting his name to this obscenity will be betraying those dead and abused, along with common decency. This so-called peace plan is a beastly betrayal of the Ukraine – something to be expected, considering the source.

Nathan Gill, the former leader of Reform UK in Wales, has been sentenced to 10-and-a-half years in prison for taking bribes to deliver pro-Putin interviews and speeches.

He has received some £40,000 to shill for Putin in various media and also in the European Parliament whose member Gill was for several years.

In addition to Putin’s coffers, another source of Gill’s extra income was Viktor Medvedchuk, Ukrainian oligarch and Russian agent. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Gill received Putin’s ruble both directly and through Medvedchuk’s mediation.

The latter owned two TV channels that transmitted pro-Putin and anti-Ukrainian propaganda round the clock. After 2014, when Russia attacked the Ukraine by annexing the Crimea and part of East Ukraine, Medvedchuk was legitimately regarded as an enemy agent of influence.

It’s testimony to the Ukraine’s commitment to free speech and due process that Medvedchuk’s channels weren’t shut down immediately and he himself thrown into prison. As it was, the legal rigmarole lasted several years, and only in 2021 were the two mouthpieces of enemy propaganda taken off the air. Medvedchuk himself escaped to Russia, to join his daughter’s godfather, Putin.

In 2018, while the debates about those two seditious channels raged on, Gill, then an MEP made a speech in which he rebuked the Ukraine for violating that sacred freedom of speech. How can the West support a country, he asked rhetorically, that shuts down opposition media? (He wasn’t all talk either. Gill also acted as a talent spotter, getting his Russian handlers in touch with other like-minded MEPs.)

By that logic, William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, ought to have been allowed to broadcast his pro-Nazi propaganda from London, rather than having to flee to Berlin en route to the British gallows.

Gill and other Putinversteher realised that as well as you and me. They were preaching that drivel not just on its face value but to register support for Russian fascism. Gill was acting as a paid agent, but others… well, we’ll talk about the others a bit later.

Once Russia’s full-scale aggression began, Gill et al. began to act as conduits for the Kremlin line vindicating that crime.

Putin, they were saying, was provoked by NATO’s eastward expansion. So it was all NATO’s fault. Russia was an innocent victim, lashing back. And the Ukraine isn’t squeaky clean either. Look, corruption is rife there, and opposition TV channels are being shut down.

In the past 11 years I’ve heard such lines a thousand times if I’ve heard them once. Some, such as Rodney Atkinson, Mr Bean’s elder brother, acted as Putin’s propagandists out of sheer stupidity. Others… well, we’ll talk about the others a bit later.

In the end, Gill pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery and got his marginally just deserts. As far as I am concerned, he ought to have been charged with treason and sentenced to life in prison (the death penalty for that crime was abolished in 1998).

Gill was an agent of influence subverting public opinion in favour of an evil foreign power openly hostile to Britain and regularly threatening to visit a nuclear holocaust on these Isles. But even if we don’t recognise that a state of war exists between NATO and Russia, what Gill did is still high treason.

We should take our cue from America, where Jonathan Pollard, the former U.S. Navy analyst, spent three decades in prison for spying for Israel. And the last time I looked, Israel is America’s staunch ally.

As it is, Gill will probably be out in a few years and receive his hero’s welcome in Putin’s Russia. Still, a short stint in prison is better than none.

Now I must fulfil my promise and tell you about those mysterious “others” sharing Gill’s views if not necessarily his pecuniary motivation. For ‘understanding Putin’ is a popular sport on the populist Right and neo-fascist Left (the other day I wrote an article showing where the two groups converge).

For example, when Nigel Farage, Reform leader, still led UKIP, he appeared on Russia Today, Putin’s propaganda TV channel, 17 times. I don’t know what the appearance fee was, or if there was one at all, but RT was a platform for foreign visitors to voice their admiration for Putin.

“I’ve appeared on RT occasionally,” said Mr Farage. “They are a broadcaster with an audience. They may well have a political agenda, but you can’t ignore them.” Now imagine a British politician saying the same thing about Der Stürmer in, say, 1938.

“Herr Streicher may well have a political agenda, but he is a publisher with a readership. We can’t ignore him.”

Gill’s line about that dastardly NATO isn’t alien to Farage either. He has been known to suggest that Putin’s aggression was provoked  by “the endless eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union”.

Farage also expressed his unreserved admiration for Putin as a political operator, if not necessarily a human being. That qualifier can be safely ignored: that’s how Putinversteher couch their sycophancy to establish their bona fides.

And Farage’s good friend, Donald Trump, has certainly uttered more glowing praise for Putin than for all Western leaders combined (not that I think they deserve praise — but at least they aren’t threatening to incinerate Britain).

Anyone analysing the current war in the Ukraine in good faith would know exactly which side Trump is on. His latest attempt to sell capitulation as equitable peace and shove it down Zelensky’s throat is yet another proof of Trump’s sympathies.

I’ll say one thing for the Donald: he isn’t being paid by Putin every time he says the KGB man is a strong leader, a patriot and an overall good egg. George W. Bush wasn’t paid either when he said: “I looked into Putin’s eyes and I saw a soul. I trusted him.” He spoke from his stupid heart, but compliments to Dubya for his eyesight. He saw something that doesn’t exist.

Then there is our own dear Peter Hitchens. His boundless sycophancy to Putin and admiration for “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe” have been my frequent subject over the past decade at least.

I shan’t repeat what Hitchens has said about Russia, Putin and the aggression against the Ukraine. Just write down, as stab points, the Kremlin line on the current events, and produce a checklist. Then go down that list, and you’ll find that Hitchens, just like Gill, has been regurgitating each point, in some cases verbatim.

It’s true that – as far as I know – he hasn’t drawn Putin’s ruble. Instead, Hitchens is handsomely paid by The Mail, and I bet he has received more than £40,000 for mouthing enemy propaganda.

True, his pay comes from a reputable British source, not a hostile foreign power. But Hitchens’s motivation would only matter in a court of law. Outside that august institution, I fail to see any substantial difference between him and Gill.

In passing her sentence, Judge Mrs Cheema-Grubb said that the harm caused by Gill had been “profound” and “damaging” to people’s trust in their politicians. I wish someone could explain to me why the harm caused by Hitchens is any less “profound” and “damaging” just because he is paid by The Mail and – presumably – not the FSB.

Personally, I would have liked to see Hitchens and other Putinversteher next to Gill in the dock. But that’ll have to remain a cherished fantasy, I’m afraid. Although one never knows.

If the country in question is the Ukraine, the answer is simple: accept Trump’s proposal for ending the war with Russia.

No Ukrainian president this side of the Russian agent Yanukovych could accept that deal without being rightly branded a traitor. Zelensky certainly won’t, and neither would any opposition leader baying for his blood.

Trump has gone President Wilson twice better: the latter only had a 14-point plan for post-war peace. Trump’s plan has 28, but then the Donald thinks on a large scale.

There is another difference: the war that prompted Woodrow Wilson into action had a clear-cut winner, the Entente, and a woeful loser, Central Powers. Europe was thoroughly exhausted by the war, her armies exsanguinated and demob-happy, her spirit broken.

In the current case, the situation is different. The Ukraine has heroically limited the Russian aggressor to only marginal gains for almost four years, and the country is still fighting and hurting Russia all over her territory.

I submit that no one but a Russian agent – whether de facto or de jure is irrelevant – could come up with those 28 points, which the Ukraine would rather die than accept. They include the surrender of the Donbas, including the parts of it that the Russians have been unable to capture in 11 years of fighting, and the abandonment of the fortified line of defence the Ukraine has constructed.

Trump has put a property-developer’s spin on that idea, in that the Ukraine would retain the legal ownership of the area, charge rent and act as the absentee landlord to Russian invaders. What would happen if the tenants were late with the rent, say by a year or two? Would the Ukraine be expected to evict them?

That would be hard to do because the Ukraine is also expected to halve the size of her army, relinquish her long-range weapons currently wreaking havoc on Russia’s energy infrastructure and decline any Western assistance.

In exchange, the US would offer some unspecified security guarantees, doubtless ones as iron-clad as the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. It was in exchange for those guarantees that the Ukraine gave up her nuclear weapons, and we know how brilliantly that has worked out.

Some other points are cultural. The Ukraine would be obligated to accept Russian as a state language and welcome back the ecclesiastical extension of the FSB, the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, currently banned.

Incidentally, our papers misled their readers by suggesting that it was the ROC as such that is banned in the Ukraine. That’s simply false, and it’s up to you to decide whether this falsehood springs from bad faith or, more likely, ignorance. The ROC is a house with many mansions, and the FSB Patriarchate is only one of them.

When it was still active in the Ukraine, it was involved in a massive propaganda effort for the benefit of its sponsor. No sane country would have tolerated such a malignant presence in wartime. Still, the current coverage constitutes progress: a few years ago our papers led their readers to believe that all Eastern Rite confessions were ousted from the Ukraine, or perhaps all Christianity altogether.

Another falsehood widely peddled is that the Russian language is banned in the Ukraine. It’s true that official business is transacted in Ukrainian, but Russian is still widely used and its users aren’t harassed. I can testify to that: every day I follow Ukrainian analysts and podcasters, all of whom speak a Russian as good as mine, or even better for being more current.

Since Putin’s first objective in this war is expunging the Ukraine’s sovereignty, it’s easy to see that each of those 28 points will do much to advance that goal and nothing to thwart it. If that ‘peace’ plan were accepted, Russia would catch her breath for a few months, replenish her arsenal, beef up her army and come again, rolling over the Ukraine’s enfeebled and disarmed rump forces.

Putin’s first objective would be accomplished; the Ukraine would exist only as a Russian protectorate, not a sovereign state. It would be time for the Russians to take the next step, attacking a NATO country. That’s what fascist aggressors do when they sense weakness: they pounce.

I call this a Trump plan, but that’s not quite accurate. The president so far hasn’t endorsed that travesty, leaving it for his envoy Steve Witkoff and his Russian counterpart to thrash out the details. Now, the only way for Witkoff to be more closely allied with Russia would be to prance around in an FSB uniform, complete with a general’s insignia.

The poor man may not even be aware of how he comes across. His sole qualification for the job is a long career in property development and friendship with his colleague, Trump. He knows how to say “The same deal I’d give my own mother I’m gonna give you”, but I doubt that geopolitics had ever detained him for long before he got perhaps the world’s most important diplomatic job.

It’s still possible, I’d even say likely, that Trump will disavow his envoy after Zelensky tells him exactly where he can put those 28 points. The Donald is smart enough to leave himself an out, and he may need one.

The position of both presidents, Ukrainian and American, can’t be properly understood without the background of two scandals, one each.

Some high-ranking energy officials in the Ukraine have been caught in massive corruption, at the time when many Ukrainian cities are left without power, when those Ukrainians who aren’t dying at the front are donating their last pennies to the war effort.

A scandal of that magnitude has to rebound on Zelensky, even though there is no evidence of his involvement. More important, it gives the Russians and their stooges the world over the pretext to say that no aid should be sent to a country where it’s likely to be purloined, ending up in fat offshore accounts.

Granted, the Ukraine is as corrupt as any former Russian colony in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe – although much less corrupt than Russia herself. Russia is run by an OCG (organised crime group) made up of the FSB/KGB and assorted mafias. As such, it’s corrupt ontologically, and the only way to change that is to throw the ruling gang out and start afresh.

The Ukraine is corrupt not at her core but at its periphery, which she has proved by flashing the corrupt officials out after a thorough investigation. In any case, we ought to support the Ukraine not because she is a paragon of virtue but because a) she is a budding democracy, a pro-Western country and our friend, b) she is a victim of brutal aggression making a mockery of international law and c) she is fighting against an evil power that wishes to subjugate not only her but the rest of Europe as well.

Still, the scandal has made Zelensky’s position a bit shaky, meaning that under no circumstances can he accept the terms of surrender dictated by Putin and transmitted by Witkoff. He’d be branded a traitor and put in the slammer faster than you could say abuse of power.

The other relevant scandal involves the Epstein files, which Trump has magnanimously agreed to release knowing he didn’t have the congressional votes to stop them. I don’t know what is or isn’t in those files, but their contents doesn’t really matter.

We’ll find out within 30 days, but meanwhile rumours are rife that Epstein transferred to the Russians some compromising information on Trump, what the Russians call kompromat. That has strengthened the hand of those detractors that have been claiming all along that Putin has something on Trump to make him toe the line.

Whether or not that is so makes no difference. The very fact that such a possibility is mooted means that Trump can ill-afford to ram Witkoff’s blackmailing terms down Zelensky’s throat. If he did so, the ghost of Epstein would emerge from his grave and point an accusing finger at Trump – there, Donald, I knew all along you were a Russian agent.

All things considered, the Witkoff deal looks like a non-starter, but appearances may well be deceptive. What seems to be certain is that Putin is broadening his subversive operations to include NATO countries.

The other day, his operatives blew up the railway line in East Poland that carries much of the military aid to the Ukraine. Bizarrely, 40 per cent of the Poles blamed the Ukraine for that sabotage, which strikes me as counterintuitive. Why would the Ukraine cut off her own blood supply?

Then it turned out that the two saboteurs involved were indeed Ukrainian nationals, which added more grist to the mill of the country’s enemies. That’s ridiculous: there is no shortage of pro-Putin Russophile, Russophone Ukrainians happy to do Putin’s dirty work. Recruiting such traitors is a doddle for a country run by career KGB officers.

It is, however, reasonably clear that this crime will only be the first in a series of other acts of sabotage aimed at communicating to Europeans that, if they want to live in peace, they should throw the Ukraine under the bus. I’m sure the Polish government will stand firm – the Poles know exactly what to expect from the Russians.

I’m not so sure about the American government or indeed ours. Wait and see is all I can suggest. But make no mistake about it: if that fascist juggernaut rolling out of Russia isn’t stopped by force, God only knows how far it will go.

The first group to be exterminated needs no introduction: you all know that homophobia has been moving up the list of the most serious crimes for years.

Unlike other serious crimes, this one is defined broadly, covering the whole range between physical assault and simply quoting Leviticus or Romans in public. At either end of the range, the offender can expect no mercy – he’ll definitely lose something: his job definitely, his family probably, his liberty possibly.

Nor can such a villain expect to remain undetected. If he quotes St Paul at his most offensive in public, at least one listener will shop him to the authorities. That’s what civic virtue demands – we must all protect society from those seeking to undermine it.

But I bet you’ve never heard of gumphobia, and I don’t blame you. I’ve just coined this word for the same reason words are ever coined: new concepts, in this case forensic ones, demand new words.

You may be perplexed: ‘phobia’ means inordinate fear, and you’ve never heard anyone scream with horror at the sight of chewing gum. Wince squeamishly, maybe, but not scream.

Let’s kick etymology into the long grass, shall we? Someone citing Romans 1: 18-34 isn’t necessarily scared of homosexuals either, which doesn’t prevent him from being tarred with the homophobic brush.

Now that, following the advice of great rhetoricians, we’ve established the terms, let’s see the context.

John Wright, 54, spent 10 years teaching physics at Marlborough College, one of our top public schools. His professional record was spotless, which is probably why he was chosen to accompany his pupils on a school trip to Singapore and Malaysia. (You understand that parents able to pay school fees of £60,000 a year could afford the airfare.)

Both countries have laws that don’t exist in Britain: Singapore bans chewing gum, while Malaysia criminalises homosexuality. Commenting on those laws, Mr Wright summed them up in a terse alliterative phrase: “No gum, no gays”.

That blatant display of gumphobia (you can thank me for learning a new word) and homophobia (not to mention racism) couldn’t go unpunished. You’ll be relieved to know that it didn’t.

One pupil identified the offence for what it was and, doubtless with his parents’ blessing, dutifully reported Mr Wright to the headmaster. The transgressor was summarily sacked, with no elaborate inquiry deemed necessary.

According to a colleague, the racist gumphobic homophobe had some previous: “He said some other things, but none as bad as that. John was a lovely teacher and friend. He was known for making flippant comments and would often do that in front of pupils and senior teachers. But he didn’t mean any offence, it was just him being cheeky and silly.”

How naïve can one get? Britain is rapidly turning into a Marxist state, and in such countries joking is no laughing matter. But it’s good to know where the line is drawn: none of Mr Wright’s “cheeky and silly” wisecracks had been as bad as his seemingly innocuous “no gum, no gays”.

So it was for that verbal crime that he lost his job and any prospects of getting another one. He also lost his life: unable to handle the blow, the teacher hanged himself.

I’ve seen it all before in the country I left, hoping never to see it again. Not only did I observe it in the Soviet Union, but I myself suffered a similar fate, although self-evidently without killing myself.

Before emigrating, I had taught English literature at a specialised school and, part time, the art of translation at university. I lost both jobs because some of my charges did their civic duty and reported me to the administration.

The literature course included the Angry Young Men, English novelists of the 1950s. John Braine’s book Room at the Top was the flagship of that movement, and I recommended it for the reading list, as the curriculum required. Alas, that novel contained a few sex scenes, mild even by the standards of that time, never mind ours.

Still, when the parents of one pupil espied him reading that capitalist filth, they informed the administration that I was purveying pornography. Since I had already been reprimanded for making sly anti-Soviet remarks, the headmistress kindly gave me the option of resigning, so that she wouldn’t have to contact the KGB.

At the university, a student asked me about Finno-Ugric languages, and I explained that the most prominent users of that group were Finland and Hungary. They must have been the same people in the distant past, I said. But then they split up, and today one half lives God knows where, and the other God knows how.

Since Hungary was a fellow communist state, that little bon mot was reported up the line, spelling the end of my academic career. In Marxist countries, words are deeds.

It also works the other way, just about. When jokes are criminalised, we know we live in a Marxist state or, if you’d rather, a fascist one – distinction without a difference.

Marxist states may be carnivorous like the Soviet Union or relatively vegetarian like Britain, but both can kill. Back in the old country, not everyone of the millions murdered by the regime was executed, starved to death or sent to the uranium mines. Many died of strokes or heart attacks caused by public persecution and vilification, or fear of becoming an unemployable pariah.

Informing on friends, family and colleagues wasn’t just encouraged – it was demanded as a sacred civic duty. Failure to do so was itself a crime — the Russians referred to the appropriate law as “knew but didn’t tell”.

People responded in their millions, denouncing anyone uttering an incautious word or simply rolling his eyes when a sanctified name was uttered. Semiotic irreverence was as bad as the semantic kind.

Those denounced would be shot at the nearest wall under Lenin, tried and either executed or imprisoned under Stalin, turned into non-persons under the subsequent chieftains. Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Pasternak all died before their time as a result of public demonisation.

(Of the Big Four of Soviet pre-war poetry, only Mandelstam died in a concentration camp. Tsvetayeva killed herself after her husband and son perished in the purges; Akhmatova was silenced for decades; so was Pasternak, who died to the accompaniment of thunderous attacks in the press.)

Parallels with today’s Britain are screaming to be heard. Is anyone listening?

The differences from the Soviet Union are receding into the background, whereas the similarities are moving into the forefront. Our list of punishable offences isn’t exactly the same, but that’s immaterial.

Marxist regimes are glossocratic, using words to bully the population. What kind of words doesn’t really matter – they are simply the wires pulled to move the puppets. In the Soviet Union, one could get in trouble for implying that communist countries are impoverished; in Britain, the mandated code is different.

But the primary reason for it is exactly the same: the ruling elite putting its foot down on the throat of a supine populace.

Neither the little scum who denounced  Mr Wright nor his parents, who probably egged him on, were truly offended by that “no gum, no gays” comment.

Nevertheless they felt obliged to act that way because totalitarian glossocracy demands not only benign acquiescence but active demonstrations of loyalty. Once glossocratic simulacra of ethics are accepted as real, those on the receiving end leave actual reality and enter a virtual world, one in which old certitudes no longer apply.

But our despots who use wokery as herd-controlling bullwhips will end up whipping themselves. As their scourges crack all over the land, people are fleeing in horror and disgust.

Last year, 257,000 people fled the country, and this year we may expect double that number. Those fugitives are the kind of people who generate much of our tax revenue, use private medicine – and pay exorbitant fees at public schools, such as Marlborough.

I suspect that most of those people have left for strictly economic reasons, but many also cite their revulsion at emetic wokery and the climate of fascistic tyranny it produces.

Public schools are struggling to find pupils, and most they do manage to recruit come from places like China. And, during my current tour of London’s private hospitals, I’m amazed to see empty waiting rooms. Squeezed by Marxist despotism, Britons can no longer afford private education and medicine, and those who can are running away in droves.

Things are only going to get worse – they don’t call Left-wing tyranny progressive for nothing. People who today lose their jobs for disloyalty to woke glossocracy, may lose their liberty tomorrow, and their lives the day after.

Or, as John Wright so tragically showed, we may not have to wait that long. RIP.

It wouldn’t be a gross exaggeration to say that Donald Trump is a litigious man.

He sues at the drop of a hat and, according to those who used to do business with him, doesn’t mind being sued. They testify that “Sue me” was his stock response to any disagreement, especially when he was in the wrong and dealing with opponents whose pockets weren’t as deep as his.

Many took Trump at his word. Between 1973 and 2016, he and his businesses fought over 4,000 legal cases in federal and state courts, including battles with casino patrons, million-dollar property lawsuits, personal defamation lawsuits and over 100 business tax disputes.

I don’t know whether this amounts to a world record, but one thing is indisputable: Trump knows his way around courthouses. That’s why his threat to sue the BBC for up to $5 billion ought to be taken seriously.

The bone of contention is a BBC Panorama broadcast in which Trump’s 2021 speech was cut and pasted to make it sound as if he urged his supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell”. Edited out was a section where Trump told his fans to demonstrate peacefully.

When Trump screamed bloody murder, or rather “reputational and financial harm”, the BBC apologised for that “error of judgement”, promised never to air the episode again, but refused to offer compensation. Hence the lawsuit may be on, making the questions in the title above relevant.

The UK’s one-year deadline to bring a defamation suit expired long ago. That’s why Trump said he’d file “someplace in the US”, probably Florida.

That means American criteria, more restrictive for plaintiffs than in Britain, will apply, and the BBC has already laid out its line of defence.

Trump would need to prove that the content aired was factually wrong and defamatory; that he suffered harm as a result; and that the BBC knew the video was false and hence acted with “actual malice”. According to the Beeb’s lawyers, he’d be on a losing wicket.

First, since the episode didn’t run anywhere in the US, it couldn’t possibly harm Trump. Second, it demonstrably didn’t harm Trump since he was elected anyway. Third, there was no malice involved, just the innocuous desire to shorten the speech.

I’m not qualified to judge the legal niceties involved, but on a purely logical level those arguments appear weak.

First, there is something touchingly retro about the BBC’s claim that whatever is aired in the UK can’t be watched in the US. Surely the Corporation must be aware of the Internet, YouTube, social media and other such newfangled innovations?

Second, reputational damage to a public figure acting on the global stage is real no matter where it was suffered. Even assuming that no Americans saw the show, Trump’s ability to negotiate with, say, other NATO members may be diminished if he is seen as a chap who tried to foment insurrection in a democratic country.

That he was elected anyway is God’s own truth, but that’s like saying that firing a gun at a man is perfectly fine as long as he doesn’t die of his wounds.

As for ideologically inspired malice, I don’t know how hard it is to prove. However, I could take a decent shot at showing that the BBC is a consistent mouthpiece of Left-wing propaganda and, as such, loathes everything Trump stands for. And surely a professional news organisation could have shortened Trump’s speech without making him sound like the Pancho Villa of DC?

At the time the show aired, various ‘liberal’ media were flogging the idea that Trump sought to undermine democracy by having his fanatical stormtroopers take over the Capitol, oust the elected representatives, lynch Biden and install Trump as dictator.

Against that noisy background, the BBC’s “error of judgement” takes on a different dimension, that of besmirching the reputation of a presidential candidate and branding him for ever as an aspiring dictator. This doesn’t strike me as a particularly hard point to argue logically if not forensically, but I did say I’m no legal expert.

If I were the BBC, I’d launch a different defence, either in addition to the points it has made already or instead of them. My defence would pivot on connotation, not denotation – not only the literal meaning of Trump’s words but also the likely inference his fans took out.

Knowing as I do some MAGA fanatics personally, they were likely to suffer from selective hearing. When Trump said something to the effect of “let’s march on the Capitol, demonstrate peacefully and fight like hell”, they probably didn’t hear the middle entreaty or else thought Trump didn’t really mean it.

When Henry II said to no one in particular “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”, he might not have meant that the knights within earshot should ride down to Canterbury and murder Becket. But they did anyway.

For four years, from 2020 to 2024, Trump was screaming at anyone willing to listen, and quite a few of those who weren’t, that the Democrats had stolen the 2020 election from him. Regardless of whether or not that was true, his shrieks injected enough electricity into the air to galvanise his fanatical supporters into action – even against his explicit wishes.

This is a reminder of something that’s obvious to me: the style of politics is as important as its substance – and the style can nullify the substance. That’s why I demur whenever Trump is described as a conservative.

He isn’t. He is a Right-wing radical who promotes some conservative ideas. Apart from his madcap urge to wage a trade war on the world, most of his domestic policies strike me as sound. I wish we could borrow some of them, such as his struggle against wokery, net zero idiocy and illegal immigration.

But in promoting his conservative policies, Trump displays his anti-conservative traits, which I fear may eventually undermine his initiatives by causing an equally radical Left-wing reaction.

There is no doubt that America, along with every other Western nation, is badly in need of conservative reforms. But if such reforms are to have a lasting value beyond any short-term gains, they ought to be introduced in a conservative way: incrementally, prudently and, if possible, quietly.

Trump is incapable of any such moderation. His natural language is that of tasteless, loudmouthed demagoguery, which makes people want to disagree with him even when they think he makes sense. That sort of politicking divides the population into friends and foes, two extremes who are always at daggers drawn.

Trump’s political style exposes him to the same dangers that proved the undoing of many other radical movements. They tend to attract fire-eating zealots who put their minds on hold and respond to shamanistic shrieks, not so much to the underlying arguments.

Demagogues like Trump exude powerful energy that whips up fanaticism in his supporters, turns politics into a cult, and even solid ideas into mere slogans one can scream at the top of one’s voice.

Before long, MAGA, like many other radical movements in the past, will break up into three factions: those who think it’s too radical, those who think it isn’t radical enough, and those who think it’s radical in a wrong way. That fate befell all other revolutions, and a revolution is what Trump is undertaking.

French, Russian and Nazi German revolutionaries, having got rid of the offensive establishment (‘deep state’ in MAGA speak), started to kill one another. Once the genie of radicalism is let out of its bottle, it’ll refuse to go back in. (It’s only on this issue that I equate Trump with those others, by the way.)

That’s the kind of atmosphere Trump has created in what Americans call their conservative movement, and one can already see MAGA fracturing. The signs are everywhere: the breakup between Trump and Musk, the bitter clashes between the late Charlie Kirk and Nicholas Fuentes, the apostasy of Marjorie Taylor Greene.

And of course the passions of the loathsome Left are running as febrile as those of the righteous Right – this is the common ground on which all radicals converge. In the process, enough electricity has been generated in the political atmosphere to heat up debate for a generation at least.

It’s against that background that I’d launch the BBC’s defence if I were its lawyer. I don’t know whether it would carry the day, and I suspect the BBC can win without my help. But I hope Trump sues and the BBC loses.

That organisation consistently violates its Royal Charter, which states that “The Mission of the BBC is to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain.” Impartial? High-quality? Distinctive? Instead of informing and educating, the BBC brainwashes and indoctrinates.

Trump will never collect the astronomical sums he mentions even if he wins, but if he manages to pin the BBC’s ears back, he’ll be doing us all a service. Good luck to him – even if his taste in interior decoration runs towards the aesthetic excellence of a Turkish bordello.

(No, Penelope, I’ve never been to one; this is just a figure of speech.)