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The British state took (only my innate moderation prevents me from saying ‘extorted’) 44.4 per cent of GDP last year.

That was before our Marxist government embarked on a new offensive in its class war, so you can confidently expect that proportion to grow fast. In fact, 44.4 per cent is merely a point of departure – for the moon.

In France, that proportion was already higher last year, standing as it did at 57 per cent. Theirs is vectored the same way as ours, so France is taking giant steps on her way to the 85 per cent proportion that existed in Stalin’s USSR. One shouldn’t overwork this analogy, but the trend is unmistakable.

When the state accounts for nearly or over half of a nation’s economy, that economy is no longer free. And, if you believe Hayek, neither is the nation – old Friedrich saw freedom as contingent on, and directly proportionate to, economic liberty.

Though Hayek had a point, I think he pushed it too far. I call that type of thinking totalitarian economism, which is less harmful than other forms of totalitarian thought, but still not sufficiently nuanced for my taste. However, an argument can be made that a state that controls much of the people’s livelihood gains concomitant control over the people.

Hence the 60 per cent of GDP in France and 50 per cent in Britain (with both levels probably to be reached this year) empower the state way too much. But that, after all, is the ultimate goal of socialism, and few will deny that both countries are socialist to a most lamentable degree.

However, it’s not just the size that counts, and I can’t believe I’ve just uttered this clichéd innuendo. It’s also how the money taken away from the people is used. And there the French are clearly getting much better value out of their state’s rapaciousness.

Put me blindfolded into a car (ideally a passenger seat), and I’ll instantly tell you whether the road I’m on is in Britain or in France. The surface on French roads is much smoother, and one seldom encounters a pothole. Moreover, roadworks aren’t nearly as ubiquitous there.

French roads also drain much faster and they are often bone dry an hour after a downpour, as heavy as a rain turning British roads into waterways. And their central reservations are designed to block off the blinding lights of oncoming traffic much more efficiently than ours.

It’s true that French motorways are toll roads raking in millions every year, whereas, one or two exceptions aside, British roads are public. But French N, D and C roads are public too, maintained by different tiers of local government. And they too range from good to impeccable.

Moreover, any roadworks that do happen in France are completed much more quickly. A few years ago, for example, a new 15-mile motorway bypass near us was built in just over two months. If you’ve ever observed similar projects in Britain, I can see you smiling sardonically.

Even assuming that roadworks are done by private contractors, this still shows that French civil administrators are better at their job than their British counterparts. We have much fun tittering about the backhanders taken by corrupt French officials, but our own administrators seem to be corrupt in more fundamental ways, those affecting their core duties.

When I wrote my first book back in the late 1990s, I mentioned that, during the 17 years that I’d lived in the King’s Road, its entire 2.5 mile length hadn’t been free of some roadworks for a single day. Seventeen years have now turned into 37, but the numeral is the only thing I have to change in that statement.

Nor is it just the roads. French healthcare is also better than ours, although it’s doing its level best to catch up, or rather down. Again, I’m speaking from personal experience. Not only have I done thousands of miles on French roads, but I’ve also had the misfortune of spending long enough in French hospitals to be able to compare them to our private and NHS ones, which I also know not from hearsay.

While not quite as good as the former, the public insurance-funded hospital in provincial Auxerre is better than NHS hospitals in London. Moreover, it doesn’t take as long to get to hospital there, this though we live in the middle of nowhere, if Burgundian woods can be so described.

When I needed an ambulance, one arrived in 10 minutes, which would be pretty good going even for London with its profusion of medical services. French firemen are also trained as paramedics, which allows the French to roll both services into one, at least in the provinces. This administrative legerdemain saved my life on a couple of occasions, which gets me back to the question in the title, slightly modified.

Why are French public services so much better than ours? Yes, the French have to pay more for them, but at least they seem to get their money’s worth.

I can’t really answer that question, at least not in a few words. What saddens me is that even in the generation preceding mine, the British public administration was the envy of the world. Now it’s rapidly becoming the world’s laughingstock, and the same goes for British education.

The system of state-funded grammar schools, supported by secondary moderns with a greater accent on practical skills, and privately funded public schools, ensured that 25 per cent of the people were well-educated and the rest competent enough to look after themselves in the economic rough-and-tumble.

One could say that most Britons were educated well, if not equally well. But that inequality was a burr under our socialists’ blanket, and they got rid of most grammar schools in the name of equity, that E in today’s pernicious DEI. Parents were thus faced with the choice of either sending their children to moron-spewing comprehensives or paying public-school fees.

Since the law of supply-demand was still in force, public schools, liberated from comparable state-funded competition, began to raise their previously modest fees to a stratospheric level. Fees at Eton and other top public schools, for example, are now around £65,000 a year and growing, but even minor public (meaning private) schools are becoming too expensive for most families.

At the same time, the level of state-funded education remains high in France, although not as high as it used to be – socialist erosion exists there too. Still, French youngsters don’t seem to have reading problems after finishing secondary education, which is often the case in the UK.

Everywhere one looks, it’s not just the roads but public services in general that are better in France, which suggests that socialist corruption is making greater and faster inroads in Britain. And, as our American cousins would put it, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Now our government isn’t just old-style socialist but downright Marxist, the brutally competent and efficient civil service of yesteryear is rapidly receding into a fond nostalgic memory. The fact that the French are going the same way is little consolation – and schadenfreude isn’t a commendable emotion anyway.

Both the British and the French are rapidly cutting off their nose to spite their face, but the British are even better at that metaphorical surgical procedure. Well, at least we are better at something.

It saddens me to report that one of the two principal political parties in the US shows signs of most unfortunate disunity. Not that the Democratic Party has ever spoken in one voice, but these days the sound is especially discordant.

In my day, the Democrats used to split more or less along the Mason-Dixon Line. Those to the south of it overlapped with the bulk of the Republican Party, while those to the north tended to be what Europeans oxymoronically call democratic socialist, and Americans misname ‘liberal’.

The good news for those who, like me, favour political harmony is that such a geographical demarcation no longer exists. The bad news is that it has been replaced with a different split: one between Trotskyists and bog standard socialists.

Neither group bears any relation to what used to be seen as a mainstream political party in the West in general and America in particular. And the Trotskyist wing is most visibly championed by Zohran Mamdani, who in a couple of days is likely to be elected mayor of New York.

President Trump routinely refers to Mamdani as “100 per cent communist lunatic” and “total nut-job”, which, contrary to Trump’s usual tendency to hyperbole, is an understatement, or rather a misstatement.

True enough, Leon Trotsky would have happily signed his name to every political idea Mamdani campaigns on, except perhaps those that reek of anti-Semitism too much. But it’s a mistake to ascribe extreme political views to mental instability.

Neither Lenin nor Stalin nor Hitler was insane. Lenin’s cannibalistic ideas had been fully formed in his mind and put into practice long before syphilis made final inroads on his mind. Stalin developed some paranoid tendencies in the last few years of his life, but he had been perfectly rational in his criminal policies until then. And Hitler, although somewhat hysterical, kept his marbles almost to the end.

People who ascribe evil to madness should brush up on their theology, ideally, or moral philosophy, at a pinch. They’ll find out that evil has full residency in human nature, if only negatively, as the absence of good. The choice between the two is thus perfectly normal either way and it’s always free. Evil people are simply those who have chosen wrong. They aren’t insane – and neither is Mamdani.

Trump, however, is half-right: Mamdani is definitely 100 per cent communist, with a distinct Trotskyist bent. He describes capitalism as ‘theft’ and the police as ‘evil’. Consequently, he plans to crush the former with taxes and replace the latter with social services.

He also wants to freeze the rent for millions of apartments, even those that are already rent-controlled or rent-stabilised (I know a difference exists, although it escaped me even when I lived in Manhattan). New York landlords will respond the same way they always do when the local government plays silly buggers: they’ll keep their properties vacant and put repairs on hold.

To compensate, Mamdani wants to create 200,000 union-built, “100 per cent affordable” apartments, and fair enough, they would be affordable for the prospective tenants. But at a total cost of $100 billion over ten years, they would be zero per cent affordable to the city.

By comparison, his other project, free buses for all, costs a mere pittance of $800 million a year, while his plan to subsidise food to the tune of $60 million a year sounds dirt cheap. Both are likely to end up as a pie in the sky.

But it’s another brilliant idea that especially intrigues me since it illustrates both the economic difference between our two countries and the ideological similarity between Mamdani and our own dear government.

He wants almost to double the minimum wage to $30 an hour. In our money, it adds up to the magical number of £46,000 a year that holds a particular significance for PM Starmer and Chancellor Reeves.

They won their landslide partly on the promise not to raise taxes on “working people”. Since it’s obvious that neither doctors nor lawyers nor stock brokers, many of whom put in 90-hour weeks, do any work, analysts struggled with establishing how HMG defined that category.

Now, as the autumn budget is rapidly approaching, Rachel in Accounts has helpfully elucidated the issue. She won’t raise taxes for the “working people”, meaning those who are on – are you ready for this? – less than £46,000 a year. The fat cats who earn more than that will be “squeezed till the pips squeak”, as one of Rachel’s illustrious predecessors, Denis Healey, put it so robustly.

And there’s the rub: what the American Marxist Mamdani sees as the minimum wage, our homegrown Marxist Reeves regards as untold riches to be expropriated. Just think how much wealthier the US is – and hence how much richer the pickings for their communists.

Another difference is that Mamdani is more honest: he openly talks in rank Marxist terms, such as “public ownership of the means of production”, whereas Rachel still couches her Marxism in pseudo-democratic cant. However, when Marx talked about the means of production, he had in mind the burgeoning factories of the Industrial Revolution which in those days accounted for most of the economy.

By contrast, today’s New York City doesn’t produce much apart from services. The only NYC products I can think of offhand are pastrami, bagels and dill pickles, but I don’t think Marx would have counted these as industrial output. Mamdani ought to bring his Marxism up to date.

Of course, another difference between him and Rachel is that she’ll be able to act on her plans, whereas Mamdani will probably be held back by the harsh reality of New York finances or, barring that, by the state government. But it’s the thought that counts, and Mamdani’s is to the left of common or garden socialism – and way to the left of even such ‘liberal’ mayors of yesteryear as Lindsay, Beam or Koch.

But there is every indication that one law of socialism is still inviolable. The law says that, when Marxists take over or are even about to, people run away, and to this law there are no known exceptions. Apparently, this is already happening in New York, with many wealthy people and corporations fleeing to places like Florida and Texas.

As a former 10-year resident of the Lone Star State, I’m pleased to find out that it already boasts more bankers than New York. I look forward to the time when Wall Street ups sticks and moves lock, stock and barrel to, say, Sugar Land, Lubbock or San Antonio.

What I find amazing is the ethnic aspect of Mamdani’s meteoric rise. This Uganda-born Muslim is seldom reticent when spouting toxic pro-Hamas and anti-Israeli propaganda, with thinly veiled anti-Semitic overtones.

Jews tend to be sensitive to that sort of thing, and open anti-Semitism is seldom a way to electoral success in a city where Jews make up over 12 per cent of the population. Yet a curious phenomenon is unfolding, and not only in New York. Many Jews vote for those who hate them, thus going Jesus Christ one better.

After all, Jesus only said “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”. He didn’t say vote for them, and yet ‘liberal’ Jews do just that, by casting their ballots for candidates loyal to ‘Palestinians’, meaning Jew-hating Hamas.

This, I believe, is to some extent a reflection of a phenomenon widely described in psychological and psychiatric literature: Jewish self-hatred. Englishmen may hate England, and Frenchmen may hate France, but neither people are likely to hate themselves for being, respectively, English or French.

Some Jews seem to be different, and I for one struggle to see any other explanation of why so many of them support that virulent anti-Semite, as simple arithmetic suggests they must. Moreover, it appears that George Soros, himself Jewish, bankrolled Mamdani’s campaign. Some things seem to matter more than ethnic solidarity, and I wonder what they might be.

One way or another, I hope New Yorkers defy the polls and spare themselves what’s likely to become the most destructive administration in the city’s history. My thoughts are with them: one has to renounce the devil on this All Saints’ Day.

The naughty chap formerly known as Prince Andrew of York has been disgraced, divested of all his titles and deported to Norfolk. Henceforth, he’ll be known as the commoner Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, a surname of rather recent vintage by royal standards.

It goes back to the First World War wreaking havoc on German-sounding names. Many of them had to become Anglicised under the pressure of anti-Hun sentiments.

Even the poor German shepherd had to become an Alsatian in Britain, although his canine kin stubbornly kept their original name in the US. But that name change isn’t as momentous as some others.

For it wasn’t just the lowly dog but also our rather Germanic royal family that had to become properly naturalised. King George V took one look at his own royal House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and decided it simply wouldn’t do.

“Henceforth,” he declared, “our House and Family shall be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor.” That done, there remained the small matter of another branch of the family, specifically the king’s second cousin, Lord Louis Battenberg.

He too had to Anglicise his name and, having undoubtedly considered and rejected such obvious possibilities as ‘Smith’ or ‘Jackson’, Louis settled on an easy option. He transposed the two halves of his surname, translated the German ‘berg’ as ‘mount’ and came up with ‘Mountbatten’.

The name had a nice ring to it, so nice in fact that, according to some unverified reports, it inspired a Jewish cobbler in Brooklyn to change his name to ‘Mountginz’. But I wouldn’t give much credence to that story.

Anyway, it has been known for a while that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as he now is, is a bad boy who tends to think with the part of his body not known for housing reason. Having started by outlining some historical background, I might as well continue in that vein and point out that such libidinousness has a fine tradition in his family.

One report says that, on a visit to Thailand, Andrew once had forty prostitutes delivered to his hotel in just four days. This outdoes the relatively restrained exploits of his father, which gave rise to much gossip but no reliable reports of Gargantuan amorous voracity.

In fact, heredity junkies have to go back to Andrew’s great-great-grandfather, Edward VII, to dig up the family roots of such rapaciousness.

When he was still Albert the Prince of Wales, the future king already showed a great lust for life. He reportedly had five 10-course meals a day, each course accompanied by a few glasses of appropriate French wines. That gave ‘Dirty Bertie’ a 48-inch waist at the time of his 1902 coronation, which was only a point of departure. Yet that’s not what gave him his nickname.

For wines weren’t the only French product Bertie had a huge appetite for. He loved France and always spent much time there, having numerous affairs with a cross-section of Gallic womanhood, from aristocratic ladies to actresses to Folies Bergère dancers.

But above all, he was a valued patron of Parisian bordellos, including the most exclusive of them, Le Chabanais near the Louvre. Bertie brought to such pursuits not only his vigour in love-making but also his creativity in cabinet-making, a rare talent among aristocrats.

Following his precise specifications, furniture manufacturer Soubier designed a ‘love chair’ (siège d’amour) enabling the corpulent king to have sex with two women simultaneously, without crushing either of them with his bulk. For decorum’s sake, I’ll spare you the technicalities, but I doubt that even such innovations enabled Bertie to match Andrew’s rumoured record of forty in four days.

Andrew’s shenanigans embarrassed his brother on numerous occasions, as they did their parents earlier. Moreover, they brought the monarchy in disrepute, providing grist for the republican mill. That’s why I think justice has been done: Andrew deserves everything he has got.

Yet justice needs to be leavened with mercy, and I don’t believe Andrew deserves more than he has already got. Moreover, comparing his misdeeds to those of his great-great-grandfather, I wonder how much worse they are.

Andrew did keep objectionable company by being friends with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, both undoubtedly sleazebags. But, for all the Gallic glitter of Le Chabanais and other Parisian bordellos, I doubt that everyone Bertie rubbed shoulders with there was an upstanding citoyen or citoyenne.

Andrew is supposed to have had sex with Virginia Giuffre, 17 at the time, who was one of the girls Epstein kept on tap for his guests’ delectation. Even if true, which it probably is, 17 isn’t 12 – these days, with sex education on most curricula, it’s more like the new 30.

Epstein was guilty of trafficking young Virginia to Andrew, but the latter’s guilt is less clear-cut. As that notorious photograph shows, the girl wasn’t unduly distressed, and she was there of her own accord.

Virginia lived through her ordeal, got married, had three children, received a hefty settlement from Andrew when the scandal broke out and eventually killed herself at 41, unable to get away from her abusive husband.

Andrew might have violated the letter of the law, but anyone in his place would have assumed that the girl was of age. Anyway, are we sure all the young ladies Bertie entertained in his love chair were legally old enough for such games?

Edward VII did combine business with pleasure. His diplomatic efforts, boosted by his popularity in France, made the Entente Cordiale possible. The formal agreement was signed in 1904, and a little part of me wonders whether it played a significant role in drawing Britain into the great war ten years later.

Still, Edward didn’t have our benefit of hindsight and he served his country as best he could. But then so did Andrew, who served with distinction as helicopter pilot aboard the HMS Invincible during the Falklands War. Part of his duties was acting as a decoy to draw fire away from other ships during an attack, which took suicidal courage. 

So a cad, yes. An embarrassment to the royal family, no doubt. Entitled, definitely, but then he was a royal prince, and wouldn’t you feel a wee bit entitled in his place? So by all means, take his titles away, banish him to Sandringham – but then leave him alone. He has paid for his transgressions.

Yet all sorts of sanctimonious moralisers who are themselves without sin are baying for Andrew’s blood, with the family of the late Virginia Giuffre demanding that he be extradited to the US, arrested and tried for his ‘crimes’. Many British voices echo such bloodthirsty urges, but then some of those same people would happily have the whole royal family drawn and quartered.

I wonder if I’m the only one who feels pity for Andrew. Like many wartime soldiers, he had difficulty adjusting to civilian life, and he did behave abominably on numerous occasions (his marriage to a totally unsuitable woman was one such). He doesn’t deserve to remain part of the functioning royal family. But he does deserve to be left in peace.

A false flag action is one designed to appear as though carried out by someone other than the real perpetrators. Two notorious examples spring to mind, both going back to the onset of the Second World War.

On 31 August 1939, a gang of SS operatives dressed in Polish uniforms seized the radio station at Gleiwitz on the Polish border and broadcast an anti-German message in Polish. The next day, citing that incident as a casus belli, the Nazis launched the invasion of Poland.

The other evil power, the Soviet Union, wouldn’t be outdone. On 26 November 1939, the Soviets shelled their own outpost at Mainila on the Finnish border. Several soldiers were killed, the Soviets blamed the Finns for committing an act of aggression and invaded the country.

(Fragments of an exploded shell disperse in the direction of its trajectory. Thus it was instantly clear that the barrage came from inside Russia. Moreover, the Finnish artillery was positioned outside the range needed to reach Mainila. But these facts only came to light after the war.)

However, the term ‘false flag’ may also describe an action whose perpetrators deliberately misrepresent their motives for the sake of subterfuge. In that sense, most of our on-going riotous demonstrations, such as Free Palestine, No Genocide in Gaza, Black Lives Matter, Stop Oil, No Nukes, Save the Planet and so forth, are false flag – regardless of the messages inscribed on the flags they do fly.

If you look at the first three examples, the demonstrators pretend to be driven by commendable concerns about the wanton taking of innocent lives. If they were really driven by attaching a high value to a human life, we could argue about the particulars but without taking issue with the underlying biblical principle.

One particular we could argue about, by the way, is the misuse of the word ‘genocide’ to denote any mass killing. Whenever this solecism is committed, I mention the books Murder by Government and Lethal Politics by Prof. Rummel. He distinguishes ‘democide’, the killing of large numbers of people for whatever reason, and ‘genocide’, which he defines as murder by category, ethnic, racial or religious.

Thus, the Hamas murder of 1,195 Israelis on 7 October 2023 was genocide since those people were killed simply because they were Israelis. That started yet another war in which many ‘Palestinians’ were killed. However unfortunate, that action wasn’t genocidal – they weren’t killed because of their race, ethnicity or religion.

But that’s quibbling about semantics. Let’s just agree that killing people for whatever reason is always unpleasant, even though it may sometimes be necessary. Pacifists protesting against any killing whatsoever may be accused of naivety but not of bad faith – unless bad faith is what they demonstrate by wrapping their protests in false flags.

How do I know their flags are false? Simple. Their concern for human lives is highly selective and clearly biased against the West.

For example, Muslim bandits murdered hundreds of Nigerian Christians this summer – for no reason other than their religion. According to Prof. Rummel’s taxonomy, this qualifies as genocide, yet one doesn’t see any marches in European capitals demanding that the genocide of Christians be stopped.

When South African whites infringed on the civil rights of the black population, anti-apartheid marches regularly gridlocked traffic in many Western cities. Yet one doesn’t see many demonstrations against the systematic genocide of millions in Central Africa over the past few decades, in places like Sudan, the Congo, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda – to name just the deadliest massacres.

Hundreds of thousands are being murdered in Darfur even as we speak, and yet no outburst of moral indignation is anywhere in evidence. Chaps, why have you doused your flaming conscience?

Don’t black lives matter anymore? Or do they only matter when white policemen accidentally kill a drug-addled criminal resisting arrest? What about thousands of black Americans killed every year by their black compatriots? Don’t their lives matter? And if they do, why is no one setting American cities ablaze in protest?

Come to think of it, even the truly bestial violence of 7 October 2023 incongruously had produced vigorous anti-Israeli protests before one or two rather anaemic anti-Hamas marches even took place. All this makes me certain that the slogans emblazoned on assorted placards and screamed by thousands of hoarse throats are there to hide the real animus behind the actions. If that’s not false flag, I don’t know what is.

All this is so obvious that I’m almost embarrassed to say it. The real motivation behind the rallies is harder to pinpoint, if only because it’s multifarious.

Some people, especially young ones, are natural troublemakers who’ll happily join the fun, especially at the expense of ordinary people going about their daily business. Youngsters are natural contrarians – I know; I was once young myself.

That motive, springing as it does mostly from hormonal activity, is innocuous enough. Some others, those that I suspect are dominant, are quite a bit more sinister than that.

One of them is simple old-fashioned racism, exactly the vice those marchers will claim to find especially abhorrent. What’s racist behind their actions is their unspoken premise.

Blacks killing blacks is only the cause for a what-do-you-expect shrug. Our fire-eating marchers want to save their shoe leather when news of yet another such atrocity breaks out. The same goes for murderous ‘Palestinians’. They don’t know better, do they? But Israelis [and any other Western or pro-Western group] should.

The marchers would never admit to having such thoughts, and they may not actually have them. But this is exactly what their intuition says, even if their words don’t.

These are all secondary motives though. The primary one is anomie, a state of growing disconnect from the West, not just as it currently is but as it has always been. For a wide raft of reasons, whole generations of Westerners have been raised in the spirit of hostility to their civilisation. And it’s but a short step from hostility to hatred.

When such animosity boils over, those people, thousands of them, are ready to join any rally regardless of the ostensible message on its false flags. That could be anti-hunting today, anti-fishing tomorrow, anti-birdwatching the day after – it really makes no difference.

And if the demonstration is likely to annoy our friends and excite our enemies, so much the better. Down with Israel, Down with oil, Down with all white cops (not just those directly involved in accidental killing), Down with the West – this last one remains unspoken but not unfelt.

This is their version of what in the politically incorrect past was called Hottentot morality: If enemies of the West kill its friends, that’s good. If friends of the West kill its enemies, that’s bad. Put out more false flags.

I wish psychologists, philosophers and sociologists bumped their heads together to get to the bottom of this mass phenomenon. But I doubt they ever will: most people in those professions today probably sympathise with our false flag marchers – if they aren’t actually within their ranks.

Sarah Pochin’s remarks about the predominance of ethnic minorities among models used in advertising have poked many a hornets’ nest.

Some people were appalled, some mildly irritated, some jubilant, but all agreed that advertising is generally a Left-wing industry. Empirical observation confirms that view: I can count on the fingers of one hand all the conservatives I met during my 30 years in the business on both sides of the Atlantic.

In general, it’s hard to deny that some professions attract certain human types. For example, one doesn’t have to read reams of research to agree that more homosexuals are to be found among interior designers than among bridge designers, or among Chelsea drivers of Priuses than among Cockney drivers of taxis.

In that vein, a search for political conservatives is unlikely to be rewarded among advertising executives. This sounds incongruous. After all, advertising is the cutting edge of capitalist competition, with brands fighting for market share like alley cats killing one another for morsels of food. So what is it about the business that attracts Lefties?

Fundamentally, both Left-wing politicians and admen see their task as replacing actual reality with the virtual kind. Socialists don’t care how the real world works and what motivates real people.

They treat people not as individuals but as a faceless, amorphous crowd moved around by spoken or unspoken commands. The commands may be semantic or semiotic, and they can be perceived and obeyed only in virtual reality.

Real people just want to get on with their lives, work hard, use their earnings to create a decent life for their families. Those who have spiritual and cultural interests want to have the freedom and leisure time to pursue them. Every now and then they want to have a good time on holiday.

This is the actual reality that socialists seek to pervert and replace with the virtual kind. They invite real people to play a virtual game, that of politics. Politicians are after increasing their own power, and they see power as a zero sum game. The more of it the people have, the less is left for the politicians.

Hence they replace governance with politicking, and the reality of people’s lives with a parallel universe in which politicians lie through their teeth, while communicating semiotically that this is how the game ought to be played. They pretend to be telling the truth, people pretend to believe them, and before long the tissue of lies is woven into the fabric of polity.

The rules of the game preclude the people from using their reason. Should they do so, they’d see that there is nothing noble about the state extorting half of what they earn, then squandering most of the money on what politicians call services but what is in fact their own self-service.

Most causes portrayed as virtuous and essential reside in the virtual world and have nothing to do with reality. Allowing half the population not to work, destroying the economy in the name of unscientific nonsense about energy, nationalising this or that with the inevitable loss of performance, degrading the language by issuing idiotically tyrannical diktats – if most people gave themselves the trouble of thinking about any of this, they’d take to the streets, driving politicians out of their niche in virtual reality.

But decades of indoctrination have befuddled people’s minds so much that they are prepared to accept make-believe as real and even assign a high moral value to it. Yes, they are treated like a herd of livestock, but they are proud livestock. Things may be a little hard at the moment, but on balance their virtual reality is beautiful and virtuous.

Virtual has become the new virtuous – all the old certitudes have been inverted, all traditions stamped into the dirt, old vices turned into new virtues and vice versa.

Left-wing politicians keep coming up with desemanticised verbal stimuli best suited to tethering the populace inside virtual reality. Modern politics is neither democratic nor autocratic. It’s glossocratic, with the virtuality of meaningless words replacing the actuality of meaningful life.

This is an exact equivalent of advertising with its brand building, except that politicians play games with people’s lives and admen only with people’s money.

Advertising also creates a virtual world, hiding the striking similarity among various products behind their ‘brand personalities’. A product, such as toothpaste, is real life; a brand, virtual reality. This is a game that advertisers play for financial gain and the people agree to take part in it, provided the advertisers play the virtual game by the virtual rules.

Thus a pub crawler selects a brand of lager not because he truly believes that by doing so he appears more intelligent to his friends, but because he is satisfied that the marketers of the brand have activated the correct mechanisms of glossocratic response.

All such mechanisms can be grouped according to which of the seven deadly sins they glamorise. The appeal of modern virtual reality isn’t so much modern in any true sense as downright atavistic.

Lust, for example, has been shown to be particularly effective for the marketers of personal-hygiene products, underwear, cosmetics and cars. This appeal has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is a sine qua non for closing the glossocratic loop.

Thus a belief that some car brands have a strong ‘pulling’ power has been communicated to the men directly, and to the women vicariously. Men expect, and their women accept, that the thrust generated by a powerful engine will reflect or perhaps even enhance the sexual potency of the chap who drives a car thus equipped.

What matters isn’t semantics but semiotics; not substance but form; not reality but make-believe. Similarly, modern politics has practically nothing to do with reality, which is reflected in the nebulousness of the words that convey political concepts.

If even the names of the parties mean nothing in any of the leading democracies, then it’s little wonder that the modern political process almost entirely by-passes reason, in whose name it was devised in the first place.

You can see now why both purveyors of unreality, socialist politicians (which is to say most modern ones) and admen, are kindred spirits, and why both types easily float from one field to the other. They even use the same tools of the trade.

Market research is their shared treasure, invented by politicians, perfected by admen. They put together focus groups to identify the semiotic actuators of the basic, not to say base, response mechanisms.

The electorate is, after all, like a market: short on memory, long on the desire to see the glossocratic game played by the rules. And veracity isn’t one of them. Thus, when a politician promises to look after the least fortunate, only the most backward voters expect him to do so.

Most of the politicians and voters couldn’t care less about the poor. But voters have been trained not to plug themselves into the glossocratic loop until they hear the right words, the eenie-meenie-miny-mo of wokery but without the politically incorrect brutality towards a person of Afro-Caribbean descent.

Similarly, when advertising expertly tweaks the consumers’ naughty bits, the people will agree to be brainwashed in the spirit of this or that brand’s unmatched personality.

Their reason remains anchored in the real world, one in which no brand of deodorant or car will make a user more attractive to the opposite sex. But advertising picks them up by the scruff of the neck and plonks them into the virtual reality they are brainwashed to accept as real.

These are some of the reasons both modern (which is to say predominantly socialist) politics and advertising attract similar human types – and why other types feel increasingly uncomfortable in both fields. They watch real life longingly as it vanishes into the fog of glossocracy.

Sarah Pochin, Reform’s first female MP, has been weighed in the DEI balance and found wanting.

However, she inadvertently provided yet another proof of Newton’s Third Law of Motion, not that any further vindication was needed. The law is neatly encapsulated in the phrase “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”, and Mrs Pochin should have invoked it in her defence.

Defence was sorely needed because she stood accused of the most heinous crime ever, racism. And, if one be allowed to play fast and loose with William Congreve’s line, “Heaven has no rage like woke to virtue turned, nor Hell a fury like a Leftie scorned”.

Since I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Mrs Pochin, I don’t know whether or not the charge against her is justified. I am, however, certain that the evidence presented in support falls far short of a prima facie standard.

Mrs Pochin was responding to a viewer on a Talk TV phone-in. That troglodyte dared complain about the demographics of British ads. The mix featured in them, he said, didn’t “represent what this country looks like”.

And – are you ready for this? – the MP not only agreed with the statement but spelled out its meaning: “It drives me mad,” she said, “when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people”.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, she went on: “It doesn’t reflect our society and I feel that your average white person, average white family, is not represented anymore. How many times do you look at a TV advert and you think that there is not a single white person on it?”

The case for the prosecution is clear enough: such statements could only have been inspired by irrational hatred of other races. Ergo, Mrs Pochin is as guilty as Cain.

However, for old times’ sake, let’s remind ourselves that even an obvious villain is still entitled to adequate defence. Mind you, Health Secretary Wes Streeting doesn’t think so, not when the crime is as awful as Mrs Pochin’s. As far as he is concerned, anyone accused of racism is ipso facto guilty as charged.

“I think what she said was a disgrace,” he said. “I think it was racist and the deafening silence from her party leader says it all.” Prosecution rests, m’lud.

Building a case for the defence, I’d first ask whether advertising visuals are obligated to “represent what this country looks like”. The answer is no. There’s no such duty, either legal or moral. The advertiser pays his money and he makes his choice of the kind of people he’d like to see in his ads.

However, even if the common law is silent on this subject, common sense isn’t. And common sense, along with over a century’s worth of experience amassed by advertising agencies, says that every consumer should feel that the ad is speaking to him personally.

It’s not the cosmos at large that ads should address, but you, Tom, and you, Dick, and you, Harry. You have an urgent need for the product advertised, even though you may not yet be aware of this. So please watch this commercial to the end – it’s talking to you.

To achieve this intimacy, agencies try as hard to establish the correct target audience for an ad as they do to produce it. This is done through extensive market research, as a result of which the clients hope to get a reasonably accurate picture of whom they are talking to, what they have to say to produce the desired response, and which media are best suited to saying it.

For example, an ad showing a burly tattooed chap flogging a power drill would be a waste of money if run during a broadcast of the Royal Ascot races. Conversely, a commercial touting Chanel No 5 would find few takers during a televised darts competition.

Sorry about dwelling on such arcana, but this leads us to the main point: the proper demographic makeup of the models featured in advertising. Ask any adman, and he’ll tell you that these should fall into two categories: either people who closely resemble the target audience or those whom the target audience could aspire to be.

Now, blacks and Asians make up 13.3 per cent of UK population. Hence common sense would suggest that they should be similarly represented in advertising. ‘Similarly’, by the way, doesn’t mean ‘identically’.

Back in New York I was once working on a brand some 80 per cent of whose consumers were black women. We naturally assumed that our ads should feature black models, but market research disagreed. It showed that black women weren’t turned off by images of upmarket white women, quite the opposite – and that was one of the few times in my career that I didn’t bitch about focus groups.

Such exceptions apart, the concept is clear. Adverts should feature mostly the kind of people with whom the target audience can instantly identify. However, blacks and Asians add up to about two-thirds of models appearing in UK advertising. The disparity with the aforementioned 13.3 per cent is so vast that one is stuck for a rational explanation.

There isn’t one. It’s as if British advertisers suddenly decided that some things in life are more important than money. However, such disinterested selflessness is so atypical that one is justified to wonder what it is that they hold in so much esteem, what metaphysical values are more precious to them than filthy lucre.

I’m afraid I have to agree with Mrs Pochin: this demographic imbalance is caused by the advertisers’ commitment to DEI wokery. In its name they enact the worst form of censorship by censoring themselves.

No regulator exists who could tell advertisers they’d be in breach of some code of practice if they didn’t use mostly black or Asian models. They act of their own accord, responding to the clarion call of the DEI zeitgeist.

A company that uses too many white people in its adverts could be accused of being institutionally racist, and this is the kind of brand no brand could survive. Should a stigma of racism be attached to a company, its spokesmen could scream till they are blue in the face that they were simply reflecting the composition of their audience.

This is sheer madness, and sinister madness at that. It’s exactly the kind of action that’s bound to produce an equal and opposite reaction.

Neither the chap who made that provocative comment to Mrs Pochin nor she herself really cares about the models appearing in British ads, not as such. They were reacting to the prevalence of collective madness mandated by the kind of people Mrs Pochin calls the “woke liberati” in the “arty-farty world”.

Speaking through them is vox DEI that’s at present outshouting vox populi. Yet using the same polling techniques that advertising originally borrowed from politics, we find out that the people have had enough. There are signs that the silent majority won’t stay silent for long.

Newton’s law will work, but my concern is that it may work too well. The people’s reaction to tyrannical woke insanity could be not only opposite but also equal. And since the action is extreme, the reaction may be extreme too.

I shan’t cite historical examples of what can happen as a result – you know them as well as I do. Let’s just say that being governed by the Tommy Robinson types or the likes of Wes Streeting would be equally unpleasant – but the latter act and the former react. Sir Isaac Newton shouldn’t let us forget that.

First, let’s agree that Starmer’s Labour government is a huge success. I realise that some of you may be reluctant to proffer such agreement, but bear with me for a minute.

How can you call it a success, I hear you ask, if [the economy is on the verge of a collapse, the flow of illegal immigrants keeps coming at a growing rate, the NHS isn’t working, neither do any other public services, our education doesn’t educate, our defence doesn’t defend, wokery is strangulating free speech, universities are nothing but brainwashing laundries – and so on, ad nauseam]?

However, I insist on my original statement even though I can’t dispute any of the outrages mentioned in the brackets. Instead, I’ll draw support from my trusted dictionary. In fact, I suggest you do the same.

You’ll find this entry: “success: the accomplishment of an aim or purpose”. Implicitly, this is the aim or purpose as defined by the person setting it, not by someone else, not even by you and me.

Thus, one can say “John finally succeeded in killing himself” even though suicide isn’t everyone’s idea of success. But, by jumping off a high bridge, John achieved success on his own terms.

When listing all those bracketed calamities as failures, you thereby assume that the aims and purposes the government set for itself haven’t been accomplished. That’s where you’d be making a mistake. For our Marxist government has been acting on its own inner imperatives and accomplishing its own goals that have nothing to do with anything you and I find desirable. Its successes are our disasters and vice versa.

Churchill defined socialism as “the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy”, and each part of this triad has entered the common parlance. Calling socialism ‘a religion of envy’ in particular has become an overused cliché, but only truisms that are actually true ever achieve that status.

Socialism, especially in its logical, ineluctable Marxist development, emits and hides itself behind a smokescreen of bien pensant verbiage, but then so has every evil doctrine in history. Yet once the smoke has dissipated, the wicked animus of socialism floats into sharp focus. Essentially, its aim isn’t just to expiate the deadly sins, but to make them irrelevant, perhaps even commendable. Vindictive envy is high on that list.

When socialists talk about helping the poor, they actually mean punishing the rich, a category they define as anyone who isn’t indigent and therefore dependent on the state. The idea Marxists see in their mind’s eye is the omnipotent state lording it over the impotent individual.

Some individuals refuse to remain impotent. They stick their heads above the parapet by bettering themselves economically, culturally or intellectually and hence claim a measure of independence. When that happens, the natural instinct of the socialists is to cut that head off – either literally, as happens in totally victorious socialist states, or figuratively, as in states still fighting for total victory.

However, whatever evolutionary stage a particular species of socialism occupies, it depends on the state’s corrupting power even more than on the punitive kind. A socialist state can only survive by brainwashing people to seek, or at least welcome, revenge on anyone more accomplished than they are.

Socialism isn’t so much an economic theory as a form of mandated revanchism elevated to moral virtue. Just look at how the British feel about the NHS and you’ll know what I mean. The socialist lord and master pushes a button, and human sheep baa on cue that they are proud of the NHS, easily the worst health system in Europe.

If one tries to decorticate that statement, they’ll admit they aren’t proud of the three weeks it may take to get a GP appointment, of the months it may take to get the necessary tests, of the more months it may take to get essential operations, of the Third World hospital wards where men and women are dumped together (that is, the lucky ones: the unlucky ones stay in the corridors).    

So what exactly are you proud of, Daisy? Whatever Daisy baas in return, you’ll know what she means: the NHS is socialist, and she has been brainwashed to be proud of that.

The same Daisy may bitch about frozen fish fingers costing more at supermarkets, but she is happy to see the biggest exodus of wealthy people in British history. Good riddance to bad toff rubbish, she’d think – exactly what our Marxist government has house-trained her to think. Daisy won’t see the link between the increasing prices and the exodus — she has been conditioned not to.

Use taxes to get rid of a third of public schools? Brilliant. Now the toffs’ children will have to go to those comprehensive moron-spewing factories, just like Daisy’s own nippers. Slap a tax on private medicine, to force the toffs into the same year-long waiting lists? Excellent. Strangle private businesses with the garrote of red tape? Super. Those bastards can go to work like everyone else.

That epithet isn’t a rhetorical flourish on my part. I’ve heard proles on mid-six-figure salaries plus bonuses thus describe anyone sounding ‘posher’ than Bill Sykes.

Why? I’d ask. You hate people you don’t even know just because they sound different. That’s hatred by category, which is typologically similar to racism. You what, mate? Who are you calling a racist? You see, they’ve been indoctrinated to believe that hatred by race is wrong but hatred by class is virtuous.

And then a political group, a party whose every leader and most members share that pent-up rancour and resentment, campaigns on smoke-screen slogans that do a bad job hiding the hatred behind them. Whatever its politicians say, that hatred comes through, and it overrides reason, decency, even self-interest.

The people who don’t mind dying because of lousy medical care as long as the toffs die too vote those villains in, sometimes with a huge parliamentary majority. And the villains proceed unimpeded to act on their evil instincts, smiling every time they succeed.

Economy taken to the verge of a collapse by extortionist taxes, suffocating red tape, creeping nationalisation, industry-destroying net zero and tyranny masquerading as social care? Success.

Cultural aliens arriving in swarms to overburden the economy and destroy social cohesion? Success.

The bottomless pit of the NHS into which trillions are thrown to see it get worse and worse? Success.

Children leaving school without learning how to read without moving their lips? Success.

Britain leading the West in the number of people arrested for what they write? Success.

Universities teaching, nay indoctrinating, hatred for everything civilised people love? Success.

I’m not going to go over a full list of our Marxist government’s systematic attempts to replace virtue with vice, sound thought with blithering idiocy, morality with contrived despotic rules, goodness with evil.

All I am trying to do is offer a methodology for understanding our state and realising how successful it is on its own vile terms. I maintain that you can’t fail when applying this methodology to everything our governors do.

Today’s news, for example, is that our Marxists are going to slap a 15 per cent tax (coyly called National Insurance) on law firms. Anyone with half a brain – and we must give Keir and Rachael credit for that much if not more – knows that any country ruled by law is shored up by legal services.

Britain still fits that description, although not as much as in the past and not for long if we continue to be ruled by Marxists. Hence pricing already expensive legal services out of reach will make the whole structure of society totter, and it’s rickety already.

Excellent. That’ll be another rip-roaring success for this government. As long as those blood-sucking solicitors lose custom, who cares if every legal transaction in the country will be so expensive that many Britons – the same those Marxists call ‘working people’ – won’t be able to afford them. Good. That’ll learn them a lesson (I assume this is how our Marxists talk – I already know that’s how they think).

Joseph de Maistre had Russia in mind when he said that every people gets the kind of government it deserves. I suppose this applies to Britain too, although I don’t really think we deserve this Marxist cabal. We’ve just been brainwashed to think we do.

Even though I’ve been out of advertising wars for 20 years, the old wounds still ache.

Most of them were caused by clients always wanting to cut their advertising budgets. You see, deep down they weren’t sure advertising works.

I’d join the battles with the abandon of someone watching his pension fund shrink before his very eyes. However, my armour-piercing persuasion powers seldom made a dent.

Yes, some brands, notably cosmetics and soft drinks, live or die by advertising. But chaps running most of the others have primal doubts, and agencies find it hard to make them change their mind. Hence, when a company isn’t doing well, advertising falls first victim to budget cuts.

That’s why my colleagues today should pin Donald Trump’s photo to the notice board and genuflect before it every morning. For the Donald proved in one fell swoop that advertising packs so much punch that a single ad can change the foreign policy of a major country.

The ad in question was sponsored by the government of Ontario, Canada’s biggest province and one that does more trade with the US than any other. Consequently, Ontario was hit hard by Trump’s imposing 35 per cent tariffs on many Canadian imports, as well as additional levies for some industries, such as steel and car manufacturing.

In response, Ontario ran a 60-second commercial showing changing images, including the New York Stock Exchange, cranes flying US and Canadian flags and Americans going about their various jobs. The voiceover was provided by excerpts from Ronald Reagan’s 1987 radio address on foreign trade.

“When someone says ‘let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports’, it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes, for a short while it works, but only for a short time,” says Reagan off-camera.

“But over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American, worker and consumer. High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars… Markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down and millions of people lose their jobs.”

Canada’s PM Mark Carney needed that commercial like the proverbial hole in the head. Ever since Trump introduced the tariffs, Carney has been playing the supplicant, begging the president to reconsider.

Even though he is relatively new to politics, the Canadian found the right tone for dealing with the US president. He spotted the key difference between Trump and the Pope: with the latter you only have to kiss his ring.

Applying osculation to appropriate places, Carney has had some success. Notably, Trump seems to have abandoned his plan to annex Canada and turn her into the 51^st American state. Nowadays he only mentions that possibility for humorous effect, even though his Canadian counterparts fail to laugh.

And just as that advertising bomb exploded, Carney was in the middle of trade negotiations, with the health of Canada’s economy hingeing on the outcome. Alas, the PM and anyone who had ever followed Trump’s career knew exactly how he’d react.

The Donald sees global politics in terms of personal relationships, meaning he responds positively only to those who offer what I call gluteal obeisance. He sees any disagreement or criticism, however mild, as a sign of disrespect, and that’s not something Don Trump can ever countenance. You let one opponent get away with it, and you’re dog meat – he learned that when building Atlantic City casinos for you know whom.

Running that offensive ad was worse than any old disrespect. Implicitly, Trump was being compared unfavourably to another US president, one venerated by American conservatives. This though everyone knows – or SHOULD KNOW!!! – that the Donald is not only the greatest president America has ever been blessed with, but the greatest political leader of any country in history.

That’s why his response on Truth Social was especially abundant in capital letters: “TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A. Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED.”

Personally, I miss exclamation points, another essential feature of Trump’s orthography. But the message is clear enough: no one disses the Donald and gets away with it.

All this is par for the course, but what I found baffling was the reaction of The Ronald Reagan Foundation, an outfit charged with preserving the late president’s legacy. The Foundation rebuked the Ontario government for releasing an ad that uses “selective” material to “misrepresent” Reagan’s address.

Now, the address in question lasted over five minutes, making it impossible to avoid selectivity when using it in a 60-second spot. Yet, having listened to that address, I can assure you that no misrepresentation is in evidence.

Reagan was explaining his decision to impose duties on some Japanese imports. The measure was retaliation for Japan’s doing the same to US imports, which ran contrary to the trade agreement between the two countries.

That step was one Reagan was “loath to take”: relying on protectionism went against the grain of his commitment to free trade. However, as he said in the address, “our commitment to free trade is also a commitment to fair trade”. America expects her trading partners to keep their end of the bargain, and will only consider trade barriers in response to flagrant violations.

Other than that, Reagan reiterated his unwavering belief that trade duties ultimately hurt the nation imposing them, not just the one on the receiving end. This happens to be the ABC of conservative (aka classic liberal) economics, which primer must have escaped Trump’s attention.

As he said recently, “Tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary”. This notion isn’t new to the US president. He first stated his aesthetic appreciation of trade barriers back in the 1980s, when he first began to enlarge on such subjects in public.

The Ontario commercial simply uses Reagan’s words to remind Americans of the long-term damage a trade war can cause to their prosperity. Rather than misrepresenting the former president, the ad encapsulates his core belief based on the works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Milton Friedman, George Gilder and every other liberal-conservative economist on record.

Yet I can see today’s admen rubbing their hands with glee. Next time a client questions the power of advertising, they can cite this incident to great effect. Look, Mr Client, they’ll be saying, how a single 60-second spot can change the foreign policy of a superpower. Just imagine what we could do for your sales with, say, six or seven of those.

QED. Where do I sign, says the client, reaching for his Mont Blanc pen.

Last year, Gavin Stephens, the chairman of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), owned up to it.

He mournfully admitted the police are institutionally racist, although he added graciously that this doesn’t mean every officer is a bigot. Rather, the miasma of racial prejudice pervades every pore of the police body as an institution.

Surely, you have proof of that, Chief Constable? Why, isn’t it self-evident? Fine, if you insist, but brace yourself for some upsetting facts.

The number of black people stopped and arrested by the police is out of proportion to their share of the population. If that doesn’t prove institutional racism, CC Stephens doesn’t know what does.

I for one am satisfied. What other reason can there possibly be for such a gross imbalance? I can think of no other, and neither can you if you know what’s good for you. Vox DEI thundered from the sky, and you’d better sit up and listen.

Institutional racism is indeed an awful thing, holding a whole race, creed or nationality collectively culpable just because of their group identity. And such is the context in which we must evaluate the action of West Midlands Police.

While scouring its ranks clean of institutional racism, that organisation saw fit to bar followers of Maccabi Tel Aviv from attending their Europa League match against the pride of Birmingham, Aston Villa.

The police cited safety fears, and I can understand their concern.

Those Israeli thugs have that sort of reputation: getting wasted on 15 pints of kosher lager, screaming “Ref is a putz!!!” or “You are dreck and you know it!!!”, then engaging all and sundry in riotous post-match brawls. Café furniture flying through the air, broken Manischewitz bottles seeing the light of day, blood and gore everywhere, gevalt all around — Jews are on a rampage again.

Spokesmen for the local police explained that their decision was based on “current intelligence and previous incidents”, which must be the first time ever that the words ‘intelligence’ and ‘West Midland Police’ were used in the same sentence.

The previous incident they had in mind occurred in Amsterdam last year, when Ajax ultras attacked followers of Maccabi Tel Aviv who were wearing provocative yarmulkas. Accusing the Israelis of the resulting fracas is like saying that Jews have only themselves to blame for the Holocaust. The scale is different, but the underlying sentiment isn’t.

I’m not going to follow CC Stephens’s example and accuse West Midlands Police of institutional anti-Semitism, although the temptation to do so is strong. Moreover, their fear of mass violence isn’t groundless.

You see, almost a third of Birmingham’s population are Muslims, a group not widely known for their philo-Semitism. Compared to the national average of 6.5 per cent, that proportion is both impressive and fraught with a potential for anti-Semitic, or certainly anti-Israeli, violence.

I wouldn’t dare suggest that there is anything wrong with that kind of Muslim presence in Britain’s second largest city. It’s that Vox DEI again. But there is something definitely wrong with a police force self-admittedly impotent to contain some of the less commendable instincts of that group.

Even PM Starmer thinks so, in spite of feeling the breath of Corbyn’s anti-Semitic faction on the back of his neck. “This is the wrong decision,” said Sir Keir. “We will not tolerate anti-Semitism on our streets. The role of the police is to ensure all football fans can enjoy the game, without fear of violence or intimidation.”

These true words, however, received a strong rebuttal from Birmingham MP Ayoub Khan, Corbyn’s best friend. Starmer, he said, was “clearly wrong” to intervene in the decision to ban “violent fans”, meaning the Jews, collectively known for football hooliganism.

“With so much hostility and uncertainty around the match,” added Mr Khan, “it was only right to take drastic measures.” Whose hostility to whom exactly?

Muslim preacher Asrar Rashid answered that question today by telling his audience that “mercy has its time and place”, but not when Israelis show their mugs at Villa Park. No wonder Maccabi’s chief fears for the safety of his players.

Still, it’s hard to argue against the need for drastic measures, except that those I have in mind wouldn’t involve a ban on Israelis.

Holding the match behind closed doors has been mooted as one possibility, but it strikes me as a palliative measure (half-arsed, in the language of those uncouth Maccabi fans). I’d propose kicking Aston Villa out of international competition and keeping it out until West Midlands Police learn to put a clamp on the fans’ innermost urges.

As far as I know, Aston Villa’s biggest fan, Prince William, hasn’t spoken out against this clear-cut example of two-tier policing. But his office has stated that prior engagements won’t allow HRH to attend the match.

Quo vadis, Britain? is a question long overdue. Public outbursts of anti-Semitic sentiments are more prevalent now than they’ve been at any time since Mosley’s fascists marched through Cable Street on 4 October, 1936. At that time, the police battled with the fascists. Today, they’d be more likely to attack the Jewish protesters, especially in places like Birmingham.

It’s a matter of arithmetic. While Muslims make up over 30 per cent of Birmingham’s population, Jews account for only 0.1 per cent (compared to a national 0.5 per cent). So whose vote is more vital to Mr Ayoub Khan and other aspiring Brummie politicians?

The local police know which side their Halal bread is buttered and act accordingly, which raises another anguished question: Is this Britain? In any other than the purely geographical sense? Walk through the streets of Birmingham, and you may wonder. See what’s going on all over the country, and you’ll know for sure that Britain isn’t quite British any longer.

Institutional racism and two-tier policing indeed plague British law enforcement. But not in the way CC Stephens meant.

Literary critics often amuse themselves by arguing which first sentence in which great novel is the best of all.

Those arguments strike me as futile because such qualitative judgements as ‘best’ imply the existence of objective criteria to be applied. Since no such criteria exist, ‘good’, ‘better’ and ‘best’ are fated to remain subjective statements of taste.

This isn’t to imply that all tastes are equal, far from it. But any comparative aesthetic judgement ultimately has to boil down to an ad hominem.

Thus you can’t prove to your opponent that Franz Schubert is a greater musician than John Lennon. By insisting that Winterreise is superior to Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, all you are saying – correctly, as it happens – is that your taste is superior to his.

Following this logic, I steadfastly refuse to join the arguments about the relative merits of Austen’s “It is a truth universally acknowledged…”, Dickens’s “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” and any number of other celebrated opening lines.

However, defying that logic, I can identify categorically and in a manner brooking no dissent the greatest last sentence in a work of fiction. None of all those ‘to my taste’, ‘arguably’ or ‘one could suggest’. Down with equivocation: the greatest last sentence ever written concludes Tolstoy’s novelette Hadji Murat.

My relationship with the author is complex. In my book, God and Man According to Tolstoy (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009), I tore to shreds Tolstoy’s philosophical and religious works, which, alas, take up half of his 91-volume legacy.

However, I never concealed my veneration of the other half, his works of fiction whose artistry, in my view, has never been matched by any other novelist in any language.

His longer novels, War and Peace, Anna Karenina and especially Resurrection are overburdened with Tolstoy’s hectoring asides on history, education, agriculture, morality, religion and other subjects close to his heart. Most of those digressions are as silly as his non-fiction. Yet even they can’t damage the works of art shaped by Tolstoy’s masterly hand.

I’ve never read such piercingly moving depictions of new life coming and old life going as the scenes of Andrei Bolkonsky’s dying in War and Peace and Kitty’s giving birth in Anna Karenina. Still, the sheer length of these masterpieces, and the intrusion of Tolstoy’s asides, take something away from the artistry, though mercifully leaving enough left for us to admire.

Tolstoy’s late novelettes, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Hadji Murat, each under 150 pages long, are free from annoying pseudo-philosophical distractions, which makes them arguably the most flawless gems in the treasure trove of prose fiction.

You see, I too can hedge my aesthetic judgement with ‘in my view’ and ‘arguably’. Yet, as I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m not going to do that when identifying the greatest last sentence in world literature. It appears in Hadji Murat, which I recently re-read after a hiatus as long as the average life expectancy in Russia.

The protagonist was a historical figure, a prominent independence fighter in the Caucasian wars Russia started in the early 19^th century and has continued, on and off, ever since. Hadji Murat was a controversial character who intermittently tried to get rid of the Russians by using Imam Shamil and then to get rid of Imam Shamil by using the Russians.

Both men were Avars, one of the Muslim tribes in the Caucasus. However, Shamil was a proponent of Muridism, an ideology that combined Sufi tenets with a call to jihad against Russian imperialism. Hadji Murat saw that ideology as a threat to their common cause, which eventually drove him away from Shamil.

The last straw came crashing down when Shamil named his son as his successor. To Hadji Murat that meant the perpetuation of Muridism, something he couldn’t accept. Shamil knew that and decided to have his rival killed.

Yet one of Shamil’s men warned Hadji Murat and he managed to escape. But his family, including his beloved son, was left behind and held captive.

Hadji Murat surrendered to the Russians who both admired and mistrusted him. Russian generals saw him as one of history’s great cavalry commanders; their wives swooned when that dark romantic hero floated into the room with his exotic entourage.

The Russians effectively kept Hadji Murat under house arrest and remained deaf to his pleas for men and arms he needed to rescue his family from Shamil. When one day Hadji Murat found out that Shamil was about to have his son blinded, he could wait no longer.

He escaped again, this time from the Russians, and rode out with a handful of his trusted comrades to rescue his family or die in the attempt. But the Cossacks and Caucasian tribesmen hostile to Hadji Murat tracked them down. In the ensuing firefight the outnumbered great warrior was killed, and his embalmed head was sent to the Tsar.  

These historical facts provide the bare bones of Tolstoy’s story, which he envelops in the luxuriant flesh of his artistry. The first two pages describe the narrator walking through ploughed meadows and admiring the profusion of wild flowers.

Tolstoy paints the field and its flowers with broad, lurid strokes from his endless palette, and the reader can see the blazing glory of the colours, breathe in the redolent aroma, hear the rustle of the grass. And then the narrator, having let us admire the accuracy of his eye and the sure touch of his brush, makes it clear that what he has shown with so much mastery is only a metaphor.

He comes across a thistle bent by the plough but not crushed by it: “ ‘What energy!’ ” I thought. “Man has conquered everything, destroyed millions of shrubs, but this one still doesn’t surrender!

“And I recalled an old Caucasian story, part of which I saw, other parts I heard from eyewitnesses, still others I imagined. Here is that story, as it came together in my memory and imagination.”

What follows is some 120 pages of the narrative I so crudely summed up above. The narrator recedes into the background never to reappear until the last sentence, simple and sublime, and sublime in its simplicity.

His place is taken by Hadji Murat and his comrades; by Russian soldiers, officers and generals; by Tsar Nicholas I, his ministers, courtiers and viceroys. (One of whom, Mikhail Vorontsov, has a street in London’s St John’s Wood named after him.) The pages are filled with love and hate, lust and betrayal, life and death – all drawn with the artistry so admired by, among many others, Vladimir Nabokov.

In his Lectures on Russian Literature, he calls Tolstoy “philosopher of the flesh” and compares him favourably to Flaubert. The Frenchman, writes Nabokov, takes a whole page to draw the portrait of Monsieur Bovary. By contrast, Tolstoy could have done it by creating with just one telling detail a compelling visual image that would stay with the reader for ever.

Such mastery animates every page of Hadji Murat.

The reader feels almost embarrassed: it’s as if he were a Peeping Tom, spying through the window on other people’s lives. Tolstoy’s is the kind of stark, laconic realism that draws the reader in and forces him to live the life of the protagonist, feel his feelings, die his death.

The narrative is a kaleidoscope of lurid colours, a whirlwind of penetrating insights, a maelstrom of human strengths and weaknesses, of good and evil. The narrator, the ‘I’ of the story, is nowhere to be seen, seemingly leaving the reader to do his own feeling, his own living and his own dying.

And only in that last sentence does he let his presence be known again: “It was that death that I was reminded of by the thistle crushed in the ploughed field.”

The metaphor, by now forgotten, reappears in a few short words, so unassuming that one could be deceived into thinking that anyone else could have written them. But no one else has ever written with so much power packed in so few words.

I gasped and slowly closed the slim volume that’s worth infinitely more than all the 50 volumes of Tolstoy’s ‘philosophy’ put together. Such is human nature, I suppose, never satisfied with God’s gifts, no matter how lavish, always reaching for something God withheld, in Tolstoy’s case the mind of a philosopher.

This is the kind of hubris God invariably punishes by turning the sinner into an easy target for criticism. This, to paraphrase Tolstoy, is the sin I was reminded of by re-reading Hadji Murat and trying to catch my breath taken away by that last sentence.