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The other day, the leaders of major European countries signalled their intention to thaw Russian assets frozen in the West, some £100 billion’s worth, and use them to help the Ukraine.

Though it remains to be seen whether they’ll act on this worthy intention, the Putin gang are running scared. How do I know that? By the reaction of their loyal stooges in the West, of whom few are more loyal than Peter Hitchens, a frequent visitor to this space.

Read his articles and you’ll know exactly which way the wind is blowing in the Kremlin. That wind, like any other, often changes direction, and Hitchens is a reliable weathervane.

Putin and his gang identify not just the Ukraine but the West as their enemy in this war. While fighting the Ukraine the old-fashioned way, the Russians are waging hybrid war on the West, especially Europe.

This includes electronic sabotage, psychological warfare, rampant propaganda, frequent violations of European airspace, incessant efforts to turn European countries against one another – and of course recruitment of both witting agents and the kind Lenin called ‘useful idiots’.

As the immediate goal, the Russians want to paralyse the West’s will to support the Ukraine. In that, they are succeeding, largely through the efforts of their de facto agents, including Trump, the hard-Right European parties so close to his heart and the putinversteher in Western media, such as Tucker Carlson and Hitchens.

The effort is multifarious. It starts with portraying Russia as, to quote Hitchens, “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”, rather than the aggressive fascist dictatorship she actually is. Then they insist that it wasn’t Russia that launched an unprovoked assault on the Ukraine but more or less the other way around.

The message is ubiquitous: NATO members conspired to provoke Russia into a violent response. The idea was to force Eastern European countries into NATO, arm them to the teeth and leave Russia no option other than launching a pre-emptive strike.

That’s how the war started and, but for those wicked countries, it would have ended long ago. Putin wants peace and he is prepared to accept it, provided his reasonable demands are met. It’s only perfidious Europeans and Zelensky who are warmongers – they want to continue the carnage indefinitely in the hope of destroying Russia, that stronghold of Christianity and conservatism.

If you read Hitchens’s current outpouring on this subject, you’ll find all such themes. To wit: “America once wanted this war. Now, with a new leadership and after years of failure, it no longer does.”

America, NATO in general, never wanted this war, and I’d like to see evidence to the contrary. They did read Putin’s intention correctly and tried to forearm the Ukraine in anticipation of Russian aggression. “A new leadership” is Trump who sees politics in Nietzschean terms of Übermensch and Untermensch, siding with the strong regardless of the use to which they put their strength.

And it takes a brain cauterised by ideological fervour to describe the Ukraine’s heroic struggle as a failure. With slightly more committed Western support, the Ukrainians would have thrashed the Russians two years ago.

As it is, though vastly outmanned and outgunned, they’ve kept the fascist invader at bay for almost four years, frustrating Putin’s real aim: enslaving the Ukraine and wiping her off Europe’s civilisational, cultural and political map.

However, that’s not how Hitchens, with his power of Putin’s convictions, sees it: “The entire purpose of the war, the defeat and removal of Vladimir Putin, has failed. President Trump didn’t even agree with that aim, and he won’t help anyone else pursue it.”

The second sentence is actually correct. Trump sees Putin as his Russian doppelgänger, someone sharing his disdain for Europe and his fanaticism for a ‘deal’. But Hitchens’s first sentence was sent to him from the Kremlin, one hopes only osmotically.

Anyone who has followed the events with a modicum of objectivity knows that it was neither the Ukraine nor Europe that started the war. It was Putin, making it counterintuitive that his real purpose was “the defeat and removal of Vladimir Putin”. In fact, the purpose of the war was the defeat and removal of the Ukraine’s pro-Western government and its replacement with a puppet regime à la Yanukovych’s.

To be fair, Hitchens doesn’t lump all Europeans together. The true culprits are “idealistic Left-wing warmongers, a type now common in the capitals of the EU.” I’m wiping my brow even as we speak: since I don’t live in an EU capital, I may still be a warmonger, but not necessarily an idealistic Left-wing one.

Then comes the kicker, which has become almost a catchphrase in Hitchens’s musings: “Ukraine is losing the war into which it was manoeuvred and shoved by others – both from the West and in Moscow – for their own cynical ends. One of those others has lost interest. The other will fight on indefinitely and mercilessly if the conflict goes on.”

In spite of that, there’s weeping and wailing in the Kremlin: the money Putin’s gang purloined from the Russian people, then laundered and parked in the West is in danger.

And Hitchens feels duty-bound to weep and wail with the worst of them. After all, other than giving the Ukraine all the weapons she needs, confiscating Putin’s ill-gotten gains is the only way Europe has of causing real damage to Russia’s criminal regime.

Whatever other aims they may pursue, the Putin gang’s personal ambitions are expressed through money. Practically every member of the Putin entourage is a billionaire, or rather the proxy holder of Putin’s billions. Every penny was made by methods that would draw long prison sentences anywhere in the West.

Moreover, both the real and nominal holders of those assets are indicted war criminals. The West has as much right to claim that money as the Allies had to confiscate Hermann Göring’s looted art collection.

Any way you look at it, morally, strategically or legally, the proposed action is amply justified. But, as you probably realise, that’s not how Putin and his British mouthpiece see it.

Hitchens is amazed at “Sir Keir Starmer’s enthusiasm for stealing Russian money to keep the Ukraine war going a little longer. … This money does not belong to the countries where it was placed by Russia for safekeeping, under the normal rules of law and civilisation.”

Under those same rules, it was wrong to confiscate Göring’s art collection. Yet such rules don’t apply when our ally is fighting for its survival in the face of evil and illegal aggression.

Still, I admire the gall of a Putin sycophant talking about “law and civilisation”. Some of us would stop for a second and consider the incongruity, but our hero won’t be detained by such incidentals.

In any case, it’s not the money that the Ukraine needs: “Ukraine’s basic military problems are manpower and weapons.” Very true. But, straining every brain cell I possess, I discern some connection between those things and money.

There I’m helped along by the millennia of history. Thus, Cicero (d. 43 BC) already knew that “unlimited money is the sinews of war”. And that was said at a time when wars were fought with cold (and relatively inexpensive) steel, not with missiles at a few million a pop.

This is yet another illustration to my pet theme: when an ideology speaks, the mind stays silent. I’m not a great admirer of Hitchens’s intellect, but even he wouldn’t have written anything so manifestly stupid on any other subject.

It’s clear that the Kremlin gang are worried: Europe has identified Putin’s Achilles heel. As ever, Hitchens’s antennae are finely tuned to Putin’s feelings. And he is ever ready to translate those soundwaves into what I hope one day will be classified as enemy propaganda.

A Stalin courtier once dared to quote to him that capitalist-imperialist swine John Adams by saying “Facts are stubborn things.”

“Then so much the worse for the facts,” replied the great oracle with his mirthless smile. It was one of those accidents that often signpost the lives of geniuses. Archimedes’s bathtub, Newton’s apple – and Stalin’s blueprint for our modernity, one he drew with unwitting nonchalance.

Modernity is driven not by ideas but by ideologies. And any ideology vindicates the crazier quantum claims by creating a parallel universe, one that has nothing to do with any palpable reality.

Any mention, no matter how casual, of facts grounded in actual reality rings alarm bells in an ideologue’s mind. Not for him the inductive method Aquinas borrowed from Aristotle, one that proceeds from a particular fact to a general theory.

(As an aside, much as I love Sherlock Holmes stories, Conan Doyle was, I think, mistaken when calling Holmes’s investigative technique ‘deduction’. It was in fact induction: observing minute facts and building a hypothesis on their basis.)

An ideologue never lets facts interfere with his delusions. If they do, then both facts and their bearers are treated the way ideologues treat their enemies. True becomes false and vice versa.

A significant part of our dominant ideology is an imaginary equality, and real irrelevance, of all creeds. Thus, to paraphrase Chesterton, Christianity and Islam are seen as very much alike, especially Islam.

Hence, stating the obvious fact that Britain is still a Christian country, if only technically speaking, is off limits. Anyone who says that isn’t just woefully misinformed. He is an enemy seeking to destroy everything held sacred in the parallel universe. Off with his head.

But Britain has a state religion, Anglicanism, a Christian confession! screams the condemned man being dragged to the scaffold. Our monarch is the Supreme Governor of that church! comes a muffled cry as his face is shoved onto the block. Our law, culture, politics all have Christian antecede… – the falling axe cuts off the last word.

The method of execution is metaphorical, but execution itself is real, ubiquitous and ineluctable. One man who can testify to that is a London school master banned from working with children after telling a Muslim pupil that “Britain is still a Christian state”.

(Another aside if I may: in Britain, as distinct from the US, colleges and universities have students, but schools have pupils. Yet the article I read about this incident treats this distinction with callous disregard. Makes me wonder which side of the Atlantic I’m on.)

Islam, he continued, digging a hole for himself, is a minority religion. That’s why the sinks in the boys’ lavatories are for washing hands, not feet, the use to which the pupil put it.

However, added the teacher, dropping into the hole, there is an Islamic school a mile down the road. If it’s so important for the pupil to observe the fard aspects of wudu, he’ll be welcomed there.

The pupil complained, and the school administrators didn’t ask him what parts of the teacher’s statement weren’t true. None of that mattered, in the virtual reality of ideology.

The hapless teacher was summarily sacked. A month later he was referred to a local safeguarding board and the Metropolitan Police.

The latter decided there was no case to answer, for the time being. But the former ruled that the pupil had suffered emotional trauma caused by hurtful statements about Islam.

Hurtful they might have been. But were they true or false? That distinction didn’t even come into it. Hell hath no fury like an ideology scorned, if you can stand another paraphrase.

The jobless school master is suing the school, invoking such outdated notions as freedom of speech. I can’t see what he is upset about. He was perfectly free to choose between keeping shtum or speaking out of turn and facing the consequences. He chose the latter, so what’s his problem? Sorry, what’s their problem?

This brings back my nightmarish memories of the country ruled for 30 years by the oracle who dismissed those stubborn facts. I went to school after Stalin died, but the curriculum still remained shaped by that great educator.

I mentioned the other day that, 40 years after Rutherford split the atom and at a time the Soviets were mass-producing weapons based on that achievement, I was taught that “the atom is the smallest and further indivisible particle of matter.”

Moreover, the Russians were responsible for all the great inventions in the history of technology. Polzunov invented the steam engine; Lomonosov, the lightning rod; Mozhaisky, the aeroplane; the father and son Cherepanovs, the locomotive; Kotelnikov, the parachute; Popov, wireless transmission; Petrov, the electric arc; Ladygin, the electric bulb – and so on.

It was called ‘Russian priority’, and anyone who denied it, even inadvertently, was in even bigger trouble than the London school master who dared suggest that Britain was a Christian country. Thus my uncle, a chemistry professor, referred to Portland cement in a lecture.

That was in the early 1950s, and little did he know that the most common type of cement had Russified its name the day before. Uncle Yuri was arrested for spreading anti-Soviet falsehoods, and only interference by his friend, the minister, saved him from a stretch in labour camps.

Britain’s Marxist government treats transgressors more leniently, for the time being. But its treatment of facts is becoming creepily similar, which worries me no end. When truth no longer matters and ideology rides roughshod over facts, tyranny is just around the corner.

I draw a mental picture of Starmer with Stalin’s moustache and recall the American communist Lincoln Steffens. After visiting Bolshevik Russia in 1919, he said: “I’ve been over into the future and it works.”

I too have been over into the same future, in fact spent the first 25 years of my life there. And let me tell you: it stinks. Let’s just hope that future never arrives in Britain, shall we?  

When asked if women could have penises, every reflex of our illustrious prime minister impelled him to reply with an unequivocal affirmative. Such a statement, however, might have upset those of his supporters who still retained a few vestiges of sanity.

Some hedging was called for, but luckily that’s one art form in which Sir Keir excels. So he went against his innermost instincts and begrudgingly admitted that 99.99 per cent of women are deprived of that anatomical fixture.

Translating dry percentages into living, breathing absolute numbers, Starmer thereby claimed that 34,000 British women are blessed with the appendage in question.

This is such obvious nonsense that one has to reach a melancholy conclusion: Starmer et al. are away with the fairies. They seem to live in a virtual world out of touch with any reality perceived by the five senses.

This is the prime symptom of schizophrenia, except that, unlike real madmen, our woke loonies have the option of returning to sanity. They retain God’s gift of free will – and exercise it by throwing the gift back into the deity’s face.

Hence the true diagnosis is transmania, which in its turn is a subset of a broader clinical picture. This lot wish to create a new reality, one in which decency, common sense, even powers of observation have no place. The human mind is excommunicated, along with all five senses. An ideological commitment to destroying our civilisation reigns not just supreme but alone.

That’s why hardly a day goes by that we don’t read about another sane person finding himself on the receiving end of virulent attacks. His crime is saying that men are men, women are women, and never the twain shall meet, not within the same breast at any rate.

Even people like JK Rowling, those who boast impeccable Left-wing credentials, aren’t spared hatred for uttering something newly controversial, such as that men, however they identify, can’t have periods. Fortunately for Miss Rowling, she can hide behind an impregnable wall of her multi-billion fortune and ignore her detractors.

Many others have the same views but not the same protection. School masters and university professors have been known to be summarily dismissed by suggesting that men can’t become women and vice versa. Scientists who publish research to that effect suffer the same fate.

However, and I don’t know whether you’ll accept this as a consolation, our plight isn’t so bad, relatively speaking. Compared to France in this respect, Britain almost looks like a bastion of conservatism.

Reading the official mission statement issued by the French Foreign Ministry, I came across a sentence whose first part I’ll leave out and invite you to complete: “… is a priority of French foreign policy.”

Here’s your multiple choice: A. “Stopping Russian aggression in Europe…”; B. “Projecting strength independently of the US…”; C. “Cultivating essential military and economic alliances…”; D. None of the above.

If you’ve chosen D., I congratulate you on your astuteness. For the actual opening says: “Decriminalisation and the protection of the rights of LGBT+ people…”. Globally, that is.

That by itself should be enough to realise that France’s acceleration downhill is even faster than ours. Still, by way of illustration here’s an incident that happened in Paris the other day.

An odd-looking couple were walking down the street. The woman topped the man by a head, which attracted second looks from the passersby. That revealed that the giant woman started life as simply a tall male, something that Frenchmen are trained both to notice and not to notice at the same time.

One passerby, however, must’ve missed the training programme. He said something he thought was funny but the couple took as an offence. A scuffle ensued, with the ‘woman’ exchanging blows with the offender.

Onlookers instantly formed a circle around the warring parties. Yet most of them must have attended the requisite indoctrination classes, which is why they ganged up on the humorous chap. “Shame on you!” they cried. “How dare you hit a woman!”

As he ducked a right cross, the unwitting pugilist screamed back: “She isn’t a bloody woman! (Ce n’est pas une putain de femme!). She’s a man!”

It was those few words and not, say, affray that proved his undoing. Police promptly arrived, arrested the man and threw him into a remand cell where he’s awaiting trial. You see, failure to accept a transwoman as a woman is a criminal offence in France.

As far back as in 2010, France became the first country in the world to declassify gender dysphoria as a mental illness. And since 2017, transsexuals have been allowed to change their legal sex without undergoing surgery or receiving any medical diagnosis.

A French equivalent of JK Rowling wouldn’t be able to hide behind the ramparts of her billions. She wouldn’t have just caused the ire of the woke brigade. She would have committed a crime and would have had her collar felt.

France has form in such progressive legislation, as befits a revolutionary republic. Thus all sodomy laws were repealed in 1791 during the French Revolution, making France the first country in history to decriminalise homosexuality. In Britain, a similar law only came into effect in 1967, with the retrograde Britons being two centuries too slow on the uptake.

Everywhere you look, France remains the frontrunner of progress, with Britain lagging behind but straining every woke muscle to close the gap. For example, conversion therapy, for both homosexuals and transsexuals, has been banned in France since 2022.

After all, such therapy, it was explained to the interested parties, can lead to low self-esteem, and what could possibly be worse than that? Nothing, really. Nevertheless, though Starmer’s government has vowed to introduce a similar ban in the UK, it has so far failed to do so.

All told, next time you feel like swearing whenever you espy Sir Keir’s likeness on a newspaper page or a TV screen, do what I do. Look across the Channel and experience that warm feeling of schadenfreude. The French are even worse off than we are.

From 1987 onwards, the executive branch of the US government has been issuing an annual NSS (National Security Strategy) document, and the Trump administration followed that tradition the other day.

That was the only tradition it followed. For every one of the document’s 33 pages constitutes an about-face on America’s traditional policies, alliances and strategic goals – indeed on the way she sees herself in the world. Not to cut too fine a point, Trump has destroyed the post-war world order in one fell swoop.

This legal document is bitterly critical of Europe, and it’s difficult to describe the criticism as unfair. The NSS states that:

“The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”

The continent’s sole hope lies in “the growing influence of patriotic European parties”, without which “it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.”

A translation is in order. “Patriotic parties” are mostly, though not exclusively, such fascisoid groups as Germany’s AfD, while “non-European” should be more accurately rendered as non-white. Let’s call a spade a spade, shall we?

Most of the patriotic parties so close to Trump’s heart are also consistently pro-Putin, as, for all his half-hearted pronouncements to the contrary, is Trump himself. Thus, while Europe is facing “civilisational erasure”, it’s in America’s strategic interests that Putin’s war on the Ukraine should stop, so that Trump could restore “strategic stability” with Russia.

If that means throwing the Ukraine under the bus, then so be it. Had the Donald been president, that war wouldn’t have started in the first place, and he could now stop it instantly – but for certain “unstable minority governments” in Europe that harbour “unrealistic expectations for the war.” One such expectation is that unprovoked fascist aggression mustn’t be rewarded, but then the Donald did tell you it’s unrealistic.

The document states that: “We will oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the world, especially among our allies.”

No such opposition is mentioned to the rather more terminal restrictions of that kind in the country with which Trump wishes to restore “strategic stability”, meaning to form a new alliance. This makes one doubt the sincerity of his commitment to democratic goodness. At least here, in the Anglosphere traditionally allied with America, dissidents are only cancelled, not defenestrated or poisoned with radioactive compounds.

Then the NSS document echoes the Kremlin’s gripe by stating America’s commitment to “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”

Do let’s add a touch of reality to that much-maligned NATO expansion. The Soviet Union, so aptly described by Reagan as an “evil empire”, enslaved every nation it could all along the perimeter of Russia. Some of those nations were incorporated into the USSR, others merely controlled by it. The control was absolute and violent, as in Eastern Europe, or soft, as in Finland (hence the term ‘finlandisation’).

Those nations hated the Soviet Union, as concentration camp inmates hate their guards. When that colossus tottered, they broke free instantly. However, Eastern Europeans, unlike their western neighbours, knew their history. They knew that sooner or later their perennial oppressor would grow new muscle and come again.

That’s why they sought – begged for – the kind of protection they hoped NATO could provide. NATO agreed to provide it, taking the side of the victims, not their oppressors. The Kremlin screamed bloody murder, of course, claiming that expansion was a preparation for a full-scale attack on Russia.

Everyone knew that was tosh. NATO was created and is maintained as a purely defensive alliance designed to thwart Russia’s aggressive expansion throughout her history – and especially in the past 100 years. It’s because Russia is still pursuing such ambitions that Kremlin chieftains are so riled about the growth of NATO.

The NSS statement thus tells all other victims of Russian imperial conceit, such as the Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, to abandon any hope of liberty. They are in the Russian sphere of influence, and there they’ll remain in perpetuity, or at least while Vlad’s best friend lives in the White House.

Now, I could happily sign my name to much of the NSS criticism of Europe, including Britain. Our civilisation is fighting a rearguard action against the onslaught of barbarians, most of whom are already within our gates.

Wokery, ecozealotry, unrestrained immigration, denial of academic and civil liberties, Marxist economics, demographic replacement are all vices going unchecked and unopposed. Moreover, Britain and continental countries have all neglected their defences ever since the big war, relying instead on the US to protect them. I don’t know about “civilisational erasure”, but civilisational erosion is plain for all to see.

By the same token, criticism of the Ukraine as a country riddled with corruption even at high levels of government is equally justified. The recent scandal that, according to that Putin stooge Peter Hitchens, tore a “halo” off the Ukraine’s head, is indeed abominable.

Of course, that halo existed only in Hitchens’s Kremlin-weaned imagination. Everybody knew even before the scandal that corruption was rife in the Ukraine. By the same token, Poland’s government was not only corrupt but also nasty in 1939. Yet Western powers came to her defence, knowing their own turn would come next.

The conviction existed at the time, to be enshrined in post-war treaties, that national borders shouldn’t be changed by force. Holding them inviolable was the only way of preventing a global catastrophe.  

Yes, many aspects of both Europe and the Ukraine are loathsome. Yet none of them justifies the betrayal clearly spelled out in the NSS document.

As far as Trump is concerned, NATO is dead de facto, if not yet de jure. This at a time when Europe has woken up to the need of arming herself. The awakening isn’t complete – the bleary eyes are still being rubbed, and the legs are sliding out slowly from under the blanket. But there’s no chance of going back to sleep. All Europe needs is some time, and that’s what Trump is denying it.

Russian jackboots stamping out the Ukraine’s liberty won’t stop if successful. A subsequent attack on a NATO country, probably one of the Baltics, while a distinct possibility before this NSS document, has now become a certainty.

Since it’s clear that Trump’s America won’t honour her obligations under the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, Europe will then face a stark choice. It’ll either have to go to war with Russia or sit back and watch former Russian satellites returning to her orbit one by one.

Europe has Russia outmanned and potentially outgunned, but none of this matters in the absence of will, the readiness to die defending freedom. That’s why there’s every danger that a soporific Europe will choose the second option, thereby putting a noose over its own head and kicking out its supporting stool of moral rectitude.

All the ‘patriotic parties’ Trump sees as his natural allies, are isolationist, which in this context means pro-Putin: neutrality in the face of evil is tantamount to its support. Such parties are undermining whatever will to resist is still extant in Europe.

Europe’s hope of survival lies with the Ukraine, whose heroic army is fighting not only for her freedom but also for ours. That’s why it’s not only morally but strategically necessary for the West to unite in its commitment to stop evil from engulfing the continent.

The NSS document states clearly that America no longer sees herself as part of that unity. If anything, her sympathies lie with the aggressor, not his victims, present and future. “Strategic stability” with Russia is mentioned as a goal; strategic stability in Europe isn’t.

I hope that Europe will finally jump out of bed and go to work, redoubling its efforts to stop the fascist juggernaut rolling in from the east. Freedom is worth fighting for, and it’s certainly worth straining financial sinews for.

As for the US, Trump’s misreading of her national interests is lamentable. He seems to want both to eat his proverbial cake and have it, meaning both to keep America’s leadership of the West and to forgo her commitment to it.

Trump is being disingenuous when describing that position only in terms of costs, not benefits. Yes, the US has been contributing disproportionately to the defence of the West. But that investment hasn’t been without dividends.

America has been able to bankroll her prosperity with promiscuous borrowing only because her debts are denominated in dollars, the world’s reserve currency. The Bretton Woods system established in 1944 paved the way to America’s status as a superrich superpower, with all Western currencies pegged to the dollar, which itself was pegged to gold.

Nixon (unfathomably seen as a conservative) destroyed the link to gold in 1971, after which US debts have been settled with paper only, and the paper has been flying off the Fed’s printing presses. That practice is in danger of collapsing if America abandons her concomitant commitments to European security.

Europe will have to tighten its belt by what Trump calls “paying up” for her own defence. But America’s belt will have to add a few holes too if the US no longer wishes to be the leader of the free world. Yet Trump seems to think America can continue to lead the West while allying herself with its existential enemies.

Things don’t usually work out that way, and I hope America doesn’t act in the spirit of Trump’s NSS document. A vain hope, I know, but one has to hope for something.

The word ‘saviour’ shouldn’t be bandied about lightly at any time, especially during Advent. From late November to late December, even non-believers are well-advised to reserve that title for you know whom.

However, King Charles III isn’t out to save our souls for life everlasting, not yet at any rate. The task he has set himself is less grandiose, although still lofty. He wants to save our planet, which word combination has the same effect on me as the word ‘culture’ allegedly (apocryphally?) had on a certain German politician of the past.

As an intermediate task, His Majesty threw the weight of his stature behind scientists preaching the impending catastrophe of a world soon to be cooked well-done. “It seems very peculiar to me,” complained the king, “that in other areas everybody takes what the scientists are saying as absolute vital truth, but in this case for some reason or other it is not so apparently simple.”

Fancy that. However, before my heart bleeds out for those present-day Cassandras, let’s just say that far from “everybody takes what the scientists are saying as absolute vital truth”. Those who do must have played truant in school when history was taught.

Ever since Aristotle laid down the absolute vital truth that the heart, not the brain, is the centre of neurological activity, wise people have taken scientific pronouncements with a grain of salt, possibly also with a wedge of lime and a shot of tequila.

Euclid’s geometry, Ptolemy’s astronomy, Newton’s physics, transmutation of species, telegony and so forth were all taken as absolute vital truth and then superseded. Why, when studying physics at a Soviet school back in the 1950s, I was taught that “the atom is the smallest and further indivisible particle of matter.”

Granted, outside Soviet schools, that hadn’t been absolute vital truth for some 40 years – but it had been once. The Supreme Governor of our state church should really believe in only one absolute vital truth, one whose Advent his church is celebrating this month. And he should know that all scientific truths are relative – something to hold the fort until a superior truth arrives.

Every time the subject comes up, I recommend the book Heaven and Earth by Ian Plimer. This eminent climatologist tears the global warming alarmism to shreds, showing it’s nothing but unscientific rubbish, politically and ideologically motivated.

He cites reams of research, each point referenced to dozens of research papers, proving the cyclical nature of climate. The Earth (‘our planet’) has been warmer than it is now for some 85 per cent of its history: the Roman and Medieval Warming Periods, for example, featured much higher mean temperatures than today.

Plimer isn’t the only scientist who rejects what to His Majesty is the absolute vital truth. As far back as in 1997, over 30,000 scientists signed the so-called Oregon Petiton, arguing in simple words the same case Prof. Plimer later presented as meticulous research.

Although some of the signatories had dubious credentials, most were serious scholars. So let’s just say, generously, that the issue is still open to debate. But no debate is allowed of any theory that promises to degrade the West, in this case economically.

Plimer kindly attributes the whole global warming nonsense to faulty research methodology. While bowing to his expertise, I still think bad faith also had a role to play. Witness the ease with which climate activists float to other anti-Western causes, such as pro-Palestinian anti-Semitism (Greta Thunberg is a case in point). Give them a cause and they’ll find a mob.

Once the ‘smart’ (in fact, heavily politicised and lightly educated) set has declared anything as absolute vital truth, one disagrees at one’s peril. So the bandwagon of wokery rattles on, and jumping on it promises any number of rewards, both social and financial. Conversely, failure to do so may spell the end of one’s career, either in politics or in science.

As for King Charles, he is worried about his grandchildren, meaning, actuarily speaking, he believes that the global fry-up will arrive this century. If he doesn’t save our planet, he will leave them a “ghastly legacy of horror”.

I sometimes wonder about the constitutional remit of our monarchs. Their power has been attenuating steadily since the Glorious Revolution, and these days they are expected to steer clear of political topics. Hence His Majesty must see global warming not as a political topic but as a moral imperative.

Yet saving our planet is definitely not part of his monarchic job. Leave that sort of thing to Greta, I’d suggest; you know, that evil child Prince Charles (as he then was) feted at Davos in 2020.

Rather than having sleepless nights over warm weather, His Majesty should worry about his realm, his dynasty and his church, all of which are in dire straits. If instead he starts championing voguish and wokish issues, he runs the risk of making his position redundant. What do we need him for if we already have that swivel-eyed Ed Miliband?

British monarchy has a vital constitutional role to play, sitting as it does at the centre of the ganglion where all political synapses converge. Yet republican sentiments are rife at the grassroots, especially among the kind of cultural demi-monde that has elevated global warming to the status of absolute vital truth.

Monarchy does run against the grain of modern post-Enlightenment sensibilities if only because it’s an ancient, traditional institution. Our paedocratic world is fuelled by the infantile certainty that anything of value started in this generation, while everything old puts brakes on the inexorable march of progress.

Another few governments like the present one might well encourage the people to deliver a redundancy notice to the monarchy, as perhaps personified at the time by His Majesty’s grandchildren. Averting that civilisational catastrophe ought to occupy the king’s every waking – as opposed to woking – moment.

He ought to have no time left in his schedule to expand on modern rubbish, the kind that’s here today and gone tomorrow. Instead of worrying about things he can do nothing about, he should do all he can not to leave his grandchildren the true “ghastly legacy of horror”,  a rudderless republican Britain cast adrift and heading for the rocks.

And the foot is clad in a Russian jackboot, coming down on Europe’s throat.

During the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878, the Russians were trying to grab the Straits, their perennial strategic goal.

Britain’s strategic goal, on the other hand, was to keep the Russians off those vital waterways. And I know it’s hard to believe, but in those days Britain still had enough clout to get her way.

I’m not sure popular song charts existed at the time, but if they had, one song would have been firmly perched at the top. Written by GW Hunt, it captured the Zeitgeist so accurately that there wasn’t a pub or a music hall where drinkers, singers or drinker-singers weren’t belting it out:

We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too!
We’ve fought the Bear before and while we’re Britons true!,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.

Quite apart from its spirit-rousing effect, the song gave rise to a new word, which, however, no longer applies to its country of origin, nor indeed to any of her allies. Only one European country is jingoistic these days: the Bear still roars, while Britons are no longer true, at least not in the sense meant in the song.

America, as personified by her administration, is no longer true to her historical and moral foundations either. Yet it’s good to see that an attempt is being made to reinforce her commercial foundations, if only at a cost to the other two.

Yesterday Steve Witkoff and that nepo baby, Jared Kushner, spent five hours spinning their wheels in the company of their Russian counterparts, Dmitriev and Ushakov. Or rather it was the Russians spinning the wheel, with the two Americans cast in the role of hamsters.

Going into that latest exercise in futility, Putin helpfully informed Europeans that he was ready to start a pan-continental war at any moment, tomorrow if need be. Even though Putin was probably unfamiliar with that 1877 song, he osmotically paraphrased its first two lines close to the text.

The participants described the talks as “useful” and “productive”, another way of saying they were meaningless and absolutely guaranteed not to produce any results. The starting point was the discussion, and Putin’s rejection, of the slight modifications to the original 28-point plan, misattributed to Trump.

In fact, it was composed by Dmitriev and Ushakov, who then showed they are up to date with technology by using Google Translate to render it in bad English. The provenance of the plan was established by textual analysis, but in any case it was clear that the text was exactly what State Secretary Rubio said it was: the Russian wish list.

Witkoff then coached his new Russian friends on how to sell that Ukraine capitulation plan to Trump, by telling him he is the ultimate peacemaker to be blessed, the plan is actually his, and no statesman in history has ever displayed such boundless sagacity. The end of the war (which would never have started had TRUMP BEEN PRESIDENT!!!) is nigh.

The talks were doomed for the reason many Westerners don’t understand, or pretend not to. Skipping the unnecessary details, the Russians have one overarching wish: annihilation of the Ukraine – physical, political, cultural and civilisational. Putin will reject any plan served on any other platter, for accepting it would spell his own suicide, and not just the political kind.

But what does Trump want to get out of it, other than the elusive bauble of the Nobel Peace Prize? There one has to sympathise with the Donald, who finds himself in a pickle.

His approval rating has fallen faster than that of any other recent president. It now stands at -19 per cent, with 57 per cent disapproving and another 4 per cent not sure.

The Republican Party is running scared, and it has already begun to lose elections, notably in New York City. A bloodbath in next year’s mid-terms seems likely, which may effectively turn Trump into a lame dog president facing a hostile Congress.

In some ways, he has fallen victim to his own intemperate braggadocio. Constantly praising himself in the most tasteless manner I’ve ever seen in Western politics, Trump promised Americans rivers flowing with liquid gold. No inflation whatsoever, rapid growth, better standards of living, that sort of thing.

Since the liquid gold has failed to materialise, Americans seem to hold Trump in default. They correctly see his trade war on the world as a failure, but it’s not just the economy. Many Americans still believe in the country’s higher purpose, and they remember the past, when America supported victims, not aggressors.

The past isn’t especially distant: even Joe Biden, awful president though he was, called Putin a criminal and declared his unequivocal support for the Ukraine. The actual support fell rather short of the Ukraine’s expectations and needs, but at least America’s moral position was spelled out, which meant something.

The US came out as the Ukraine’s ally, and so did Europe. Europe’s position has remained unchanged, but Trump’s America now sees herself as an unbiased mediator in a conflict that has nothing to do with her.

Yet this is a copout. Passersby who maintain their neutrality when a woman is being raped are de facto on the rapist’s side. The same goes for the rape of a country: a refusal to take sides means taking the side of the aggressor, in this case Putin’s Russia.

Trump increasingly looks like the leader of his family clan first, his country second and the free world not at all. For example, acting through the same duo of Witkoff and the Nepo Baby, he has already proposed turning Gaza into a property developing venture, presumably spearheaded by the Trump Organisation.

He sees in his mind’s eye that whole beleaguered sector becoming a giant theme park for the whole family, complete with high-rise hotels, casinos, health spas and any number of Trump towers, each decorated in his own impeccable taste.

If his plan for the Middle East was gauche, his plan for the Ukraine – as much of it as one can glean from scraps of information – is downright sinister. Trump seems to be in favour of shunting Europe aside as an annoying irrelevance, then joining Putin in divvying up the Ukraine and stripping her assets.

The 300 billion euros in Russian assets frozen in Europe are to be thawed and used as grist to the mill of Russo-American joint ventures. These are to include not only reconstruction projects in the Ukraine, but also mutual exploration of the Arctic and even Mars.

The EU’s idea of confiscating the money and using it for Ukrainian aid was vetoed by Belgium, which spared Trump the effort of doing it himself. He thinks in dollars and cents, not morals and sense. If this means holding the victim down to assist the rapist, then so be it.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Putin’s proxies are already waving before US companies such tasty carrots as access to Russian hydrocarbon assets, rare earth metals and gas production.

Neil Chapman, senior VP of Exxon Mobil, has had a secret meeting in Doha with Igor Sechin, head of Rosneft. Exxon and other US corporations are also exploring the possibility of acquiring shares in Lukoil. Both Rosneft and Lukoil are currently under American and European sanctions, which on this evidence won’t survive for long.

Meanwhile, Putin keeps saying that he is prepared to fight until every last Ukrainian bites the dust, and if Europe wants some of it too, he’ll be happy to oblige. Europeans are finally waking up to the catastrophe that has been brewing for 80 years.

Having been relying on the US for their defence, they have run their own armies down to the level of inadequately armed police forces. One British and European expert after another points out that, in the likely event of an expanded Russian aggression, the continent, especially its western half, is ripe for plucking.

Meanwhile Trump makes no secret of his contempt for his European allies and what he correctly identifies as their freeloading on America’s defence spending. If they “don’t pay up”, Putin can have them, see if Trump cares.

Putin is much more of a man after Trump’s own heart: decisive, strong, disdainful of democratic and legal annoyances, eager to do business with partners who don’t mind dealing in stolen goods.

But Putin is more than that: he is a Russian jingoist hellbent on restoring Stalin’s empire.

He is convinced that, for all its bulk and riches, Europe is nothing but a soft target for a fascist aggressor with a lean and hungry look. Putin is convinced that no NATO country will come to the aid of, say, Estonia should Russian troops sweep into, say, Narva.

For as long as that conviction continues to ring true, another European war will remain likely. And we already know that this time around America won’t come to our aid – not while Trump is president.

“To appreciate good music, one must be mentally alert and emotionally receptive,” said Rachmaninov. “Music is like poetry; it is a passion and a problem. You can’t enjoy and understand it merely by sitting still and letting it soak into your ears.”

Hence, one of history’s greatest pianists consistently refused to play for wireless broadcasts. He didn’t want his listeners to get too comfortable and complacent.

I wonder what Rachmaninov would say about today’s widespread practice of putting classical recordings on as background noise to dinnertime conversations. When this happens to Penelope and me, we ask, at the risk of being rude to our hosts, either to turn the music up, stop eating and talking, and just listen, or turn it off.

People who treat the highest achievement of man’s spirit with such cavalier disdain think they thereby display their high culture. In fact, they display symptoms of a disease fatal to culture, in its broadest possible sense.

In Rachmaninov’s time, vinyl records and wireless were the only media exposing people to music outside the concert hall. These days, we are so technologically advanced that we can have a steady hum of Bach and Beethoven buzzing in our ears all day long, at home, in restaurants, in the car – even in the MRI tube. Music is increasingly turning into Muzak.

Yet music transcends just nice sounds, which has been known at least since ancient Greece. There, it was a central part of the school curriculum, considered essential for both intellectual and moral development.

“Music is a moral law,” wrote Plato, “it gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, and life to everything”.

Both he and Aristotle believed that music built character, creating harmony between the soul and the universe. Yet no such harmony can be achieved to the accompaniment of clanking silverware, glug-glugging of wine being poured, the guests paying compliments to the hostess and laughing at one another’s jokes.

It’s a truism that music is a tripartite collaboration involving the composer, the performer and the listener. But truisms achieve that status because they are true, as this one is.

The composer spends a lifetime looking for truth that hides among the sounds, waiting to be found and brought out. The performer preparing a piece for the concert platform spends hours every day for months trying to understand the composer’s truth and how best to divulge to the audience what it is (you understand I’m talking about serious musicians, not the Lang Langs of this world).

Yet all such efforts will be in vain if the listener doesn’t match them with his own. He too must spend a lifetime training his mind, soul and taste to open them up to the musical truth.

This requires quite a bit of learning and experience accumulated over many years. Above all, it takes tremendous concentration when listening: all quotidian problems forgotten, all extraneous thoughts expunged, all mental, emotional and aesthetic receptors attuned to their sharpest.

Anyone who thinks that modern life encourages such exertions must have been living with his eyes closed and his ears plugged. We live in a world that, to use the old advertising slogan, takes waiting out of wanting.

In this world, as I once wrote, “We have replaced religion with (at best) religionism, freedom with liberty, wisdom with cleverness, sentiment with sentimentality, justice with legalism, art with pickled animals, music with amplified noise, statecraft with politicking, love with sex, communication with soundbites, self-confidence with effrontery, equality before God with levelling, respect for others with political correctness, dignity with amour propre – in short, everything real with virtual caricatures.”

Real music has no place in this virtual world, which is why it has been largely ousted by pop rubbish or, even worse, perverted by it, bringing real music down to the level of pop.

People who attend concerts these days claim, truthfully, that they enjoy music. But without making the requisite effort, they are incapable of understanding it.

They perceive all those sonatas and symphonies the way they perceive pop excretions. Music to them is just pleasant sounds and familiar tunes, and an evening at a concert is mere entertainment not qualitatively different from a dinner out or a stadium outing.

This kind of demand creates its own supply. Mass-produced fleet-fingered ignoramuses happily provide the lighthearted entertainment sought; some even rap with the public between the pieces, adding aspects of stand-up comedy to their acrobatic acts.

Discrimination has become a swear word, with people forgetting its original meaning of discernment. That’s why today’s audiences reward every performance, no matter how inept, with thunderous applause, which becomes frenzied if the hack enjoys great publicity. Listeners who can actually judge a performance properly make up a negligible minority in any concert hall.

Would it be a great exaggeration to say that genuine believers also make up a negligible minority at any church service? For everything that holds true for perceiving music also applies tenfold to perceiving God.

Even as one’s senses must undergo a rigorous training programme over a lifetime for one to be able to grasp musical truth at a concert, so do one’s soul and mind require utmost concentration to grasp God’s truth in church. One can’t just sit back and listen to the liturgy any more than one can just sit back and listen to music.

A church service isn’t just a pleasant pre-lunch outing on a Sunday morning, nor is a concert just a pleasant pre-dinner outing on a Saturday night. If one doesn’t leave the church or the concert hall drained by the effort of intense concentration, one has missed the point.

It’s no accident that music and religion are so closely intertwined: they both signpost a path to the highest summit the human soul can ever scale. Yet any climb takes an exertion of mind and will, which isn’t something the modern lot can muster if no material payoff is beckoning.

Just as music and religion can guide a soul to a vertiginous height, so can their perversions dump the soul into a putrid swamp. Electronically enhanced pop din does that in music; shamanistic sectarian convulsions, in religion.

The audience does participate in both activities, but it does so gonadically and hysterically, not solemnly and spiritually. If Satan was the ape of God to Augustine, so is pop (I use the term collectively, without  differentiating among its variants) a ghastly simulacrum of music.

Unlike real music requiring everlasting effort, pop delivers instant gratification, that overarching desideratum of modernity. It too forms character, just as Plato and Aristotle taught. Except that the character thus formed is facile, sensual without being sensitive, incapable of mental, spiritual and aesthetic subtlety.

It was Prof. Allan Bloom who, in his seminal 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, pointed out that pop music was more important to his students than real music had ever been in history. The youngsters identified themselves by the rock group that tickled their naughty bits most effectively.

That, wrote Bloom, filled young minds with the dross of a shallow, commercial culture of sex and rebellion. Bloom spoke of the “addiction to music” that he saw in the context of a broader decline in intellectual and moral development.

Plato and Aristotle would agree, and so would Rachmaninov.

P.S. Moving smoothly from the sublime to the gor blime, football commentators continue to teach me the meaning of English words. ‘Jeopardy’, I’ve learned, means ‘jealousy’.

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.