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Messe de nuit is the midnight mass at Christmas Eve, which in France is hardly ever celebrated at midnight. That’s why these days it’s simply called ‘night mass’, but even that is a misnomer.

At our local church, night is defined as 6 pm, which was the kick-off time yesterday. The church is quite modest, by French standards.

We used to go to one of the most glorious churches in Christendom, Abbaye de Fleury at St Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire. Since the seventh century, the Abbey has housed the relics of St Benedict, whose name the French perversely gallicise to St Benoît.

The midnight mass there starts closer to midnight, at 11 pm to be exact. The monks sing Gregorian chant, not quite to professional standards, but movingly nonetheless.

That Romanesque church has two drawbacks though. It’s an hour’s drive away from us, and it’s unheated.

Since people come there from all over central France, one has to arrive at least an hour in advance to have any hope of a seat in a pew. The mass itself lasting over two hours, that’s three hours to be spent in a fridge at its maximum setting.

Those factors combined to trump our aesthetic longings, so off to our local church we went. Modest it may be, but it’s nearby and heated, which is nothing to sneeze at when one is no longer in the first flush of youth nor, truth to tell, even the second.

A quarter of an hour before the start, L’Eglise Saint-Ferréol was already filled to the gunwales with the local worthies in their finery. Ten minutes later it was standing room only.

At six on the dot, the amateur choir conducted by its own ever-present worthy went into a rendition of Silent Night. The accompaniment was provided by two guitarists and an electric keyboard player, whose mind was perpetually open to the variety of keys he was using, sometimes within a single phrase.

Still, a mass isn’t a concert. Music is merely a side dish to the meat and potatoes, and we waited for the arrival of the main course: the priest and his retinue.

Half a dozen songs and twenty minutes later, we were still writhing on tenterhooks. There was no priest anywhere to be seen, no one to tell us in whose name we were gathered.

Finally, we examined the order of service only to realise that the mass, though advertised as such, wasn’t a mass. There was no priest, no communion – no anything that makes a mass what it’s supposed to be. We felt cheated.

No one else seemed to mind. The worthies joyously sang along, and they commendably knew all the lyrics by heart. We didn’t, but that wasn’t the real problem.

We were seething, but Penelope, whose delicate nature balks at rocking the boat, was reluctant to leave in mid-song. But then we remembered that there was a mass in another village, some 15 miles down the road.

So we left, walking up the aisle under the weight of the disapproving glances our fellow non-communicants were casting at those two obvious heathens who didn’t even look French.

We hopped in the car, and I went on to break not only the speed limit but also conceivably the speed record on the D956. The other church turned out to be full too, but it was blessed by the presence of not just one priest, but two.

One was its usual curé, a man who has served the parish since before the Catholic Church suffered the indignity of the Second Vatican Council (c. 1962). Now in his nineties and extremely frail, he was assisted by a locum sent over by the diocese.

I shan’t describe the ensuing Christmas mass, lovely as it was. If you’ve ever attended one, you’d be bored. If you haven’t, you’d be uninterested. But in either case, I hope you’ll lament the collapse of Christianity in one of its erstwhile strongholds.

France officially went secular in 1905, when the law on the Separation between the Church and the State ushered in laïcité. That was simply codifying the fait accompli: the Enlightenment had reigned supreme for almost two centuries, and that’s plenty of time to brainwash people in the delights of materialism.

Now church attendance in France is about as low as in the UK. But there is a salient difference: in Britain people who don’t go to church don’t mock church-goers. In France they do.

A couple of years ago I was invited to play doubles on Easter Sunday. I wish I could, I said, but I’ll be at mass. That caused an outburst of mirth among my partners, none of whom was a youngster. “Bonnes cloches”, they laughed (have good bells, literally).

Rural France suffers from a dire dearth of priests. One curé has to cover 20, 30, sometimes even 50 churches. That’s why regular masses are a rarity, though until now high festivals have tended to be celebrated properly.

That leads to situations straight out of Catch 22. A few years ago, a friend of ours, the local châtelain and a devout Catholic, died. Since he was the mainstay not only of the village church but of the whole diocese, the Vicar General himself wanted to officiate at the funeral mass.

But the bishop said non. There are so few priests, he explained, that not everyone can have his last rites. And if everyone can’t have them, no one will. Our friends’ soul must have cried foul.

Isn’t modernity wonderful? Perhaps French Catholics should do what their ancestors did to save their churches during the Revolution. They declared them Temples of Reason, reconsecrating the churches to the new deity. Many churches, including the magnificent Chartres Cathedral, were saved that way.

Now there’s an idea. I don’t know if Richard Dawkins speaks French but, if he does, I can’t think of a better priest to celebrate Reason, as defined by strident atheists. Do you know his phone number?

Anyway, Merry Christmas!   

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting,” wrote Chesterton. “It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

The great man was right in every absolute sense. No society has ever organised itself in complete agreement with Christ’s commandments. But there used to exist palliatives, little relativities that still had some mitigating effect on human nature.

People might not have spent their lives imitating Christ, but a residual fear still gnawed at the back of their minds. What if? What if they’ll really have to pay for their sins in perpetuity? Perhaps it’s better to take Pascal’s wager and assume God exists. If he does, we have a lot to gain; if he doesn’t, we have nothing to lose.

Oh yes, people still killed – they always kill. They kill in the name of Mohammed and Moses, Buddha and Confucius, they kill in the name of every political creed you care to name. And of course they killed in the name of Christ. Give them a killing opportunity and they’ll find a cause.

Yet one has to believe that, but for that fear of God to whom many of them paid only lip service, they would have killed more. In fact, one doesn’t have to believe that. We know. We’ve confirmed that supposition empirically.

For at some point, 300 or so years ago, people decided that God didn’t merit even lip service. The Enlightenment shone its light on them, and they turned their backs on their tenebrous past. They emerged out of the shadows full of self-confidence.

They didn’t need God any longer. They could rely on their own resources to squeeze as much as possible out of this life, for there was no other. Nothing higher than human reason existed, and it could guide people to higher morality than that incomprehensible Sermon on the Mount. It’s not the meek who shall inherit the world, but the strong, clever and enterprising.

Yet Darwin created man in such a way that, no matter how clever he is, or how materialistic, he still needs to believe in something higher or at least grander than himself. Having discarded God, Darwin’s creatures had to look for surrogates.

Those they found in blood and soil nationalism and socialism, ineluctably born out of the original slogan of liberté, égalité, fraternité. No longer united by their faith, people decided to come together on the basis of their politics or their blood.

Both strains have flourished since then, sometimes singly and at odds with each other, sometimes in a happy union. That ultimate experiment on human nature has had three centuries to produce tangible results – and tangible results it has produced.

The first century that was atheist from beginning to end, the 20^th, densely covered the earth with more mangled corpses than all the previous centuries of human history had managed. Without God, wrote Dostoyevsky, everything is permitted – yet even he couldn’t envisage the full scale of that everything.

In hindsight, some people are beginning to think that, though of course God doesn’t exist, perhaps paying some lip service to him wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all. Maybe, just maybe, the church has a useful social function to perform, if no other.

The anticlerical believers of yesterday have given way to the clerical atheists of today (the late Roger Scruton is a good example of the breed). Christianism has replaced Christianity, but it’s a poor substitute.

Since our clerical atheists don’t believe Christ is the truth, they want to build a new society on a lie. But that foundation is always termite-eaten from the very beginning. Any structure built on it will sooner or later start tottering within an increasing amplitude – and then it’ll come tumbling down like the walls of Jericho.

There is no substitute for truth, and there is no substitute for Christ. Here in the West our choice isn’t between a Christian civilisation and some other. It’s between a Christian civilisation and none.

Merry Christmas to all of you – and a Happy New Year, unsullied by Covid, inflation or the gremlin in the Kremlin.

The other day I wondered if there was a single Tory in our Tory cabinet. The profile of Foreign Secretary Liz Truss in The Times answers that question in the affirmative, in so many words. She is, the last one ever.

And Miss Truss is “in pole position” should Boris Johnson’s leadership be challenged by the party. As, believes the author, it’s likely to be, given the PM’s plethora of sins.

Yet I’m still convinced that these days few people, and none writing for The Times, would know a true Tory even if he crawled up behind them and bit them on… well, you know. Not that a true Tory would ever commit such an asinine outrage.

I define this type mostly in terms of temperament, mentality and tastes, not so much any set of ideas or proclaimed beliefs. Unlike one’s personality, these may be transient and sensitive to the needs of the moment.

Miss Truss’s ideas make her an ideal conservative – in the US sense of the word, that is. She is an economic libertarian: “low tax, work not welfare, slash red tape, shrink the public sector, reduce workers’ rights.”

I’m not suggesting that these desiderata would be alien to a British conservative. Not at all. It’s just that, while economic libertarianism more or less circumscribes American conservatism, in Britain it’s strictly secondary. But fair enough: “Truss is heavily influenced by American Republicanism.”

Thanks for telling us; we’ve already figured that out. But is she influenced by Republicanism all the way to republicanism? In her youth, before she awakened to the delights of free markets studying economics at Oxford, Miss Truss was virulently anti-monarchist. Is she still? If so, she is also virulently anti-Tory.

She says that, of the three PMs she has served, her current boss is the one she is “closest to ideologically”, “but with lower tax and spend”. Is that a rat I’m smelling?

Far be it from me to accuse Miss Truss of sycophancy, but if she thought Johnson is ideologically alien to her, would she say it? Somehow I doubt that.

But congratulations to her on being able to pinpoint what Johnson’s ideology is, this side of unquenchable powerlust and contortionist pliability. Others have tried to grasp it, only to find his ideology slipping out of their hands like a live eel on amphetamines.

What else? She never misses an opportunity to be photographed next to the Union Jack, which may be either true patriotism or sensitivity to the feelings of her core electorate.

One way or the other, this demonstrative, obtrusive adulation of the flag is more American than British. Next thing you know, Miss Truss will start putting her right hand on her left breast when God Save the Queen is played, and finish every speech with “God bless Britain” or “Let’s make Britain great again”.

That’s not quite… quite. Quite conservative, is what I mean.

Speaking of God, not one of the article’s 3,000 words mentions Miss Truss’s religion, nor even the absence thereof. Her equally long Wikipedia entry, ditto. The issue simply doesn’t come into her life.

At least she isn’t American in that department: a US conservative wouldn’t be elected proverbial dog catcher if he didn’t affect fervent piety. Even a lifelong lefty like Biden has to scream his Catholicism from the Capitol’s dome – before voting in yet another pro-abortion law.

Before we see whether Miss Truss possesses the sine qua non of a true Tory, let’s mention her record on another salient issue: Brexit. She voted Remain in the 2016 referendum. Not only that, but, in the words of a fellow Remainer, “her pitch for Remain was incredible. It was so believable and passionate.”

Now, that’s a black ball at least three feet in diameter. No true Tory would vote for Britain to be governed by any political body other than her own parliament. Miss Truss had better have a good explanation if she isn’t to be drummed out of the Tory ranks.

She did have an explanation, but not a good one: “Every parent wants their children to grow up in a healthy environment with clean water, fresh air and thriving natural wonders. Being part of the EU helps protect these precious resources and spaces.”

At the risk of sounding unchivalrous, I’d describe this explanation as bilge. The underlying assumption seemed to be that outside the EU we’d all suffocate on polluted air or be killed by cholera-infested water.

Her reason for changing her position in 2017 is less foolhardy, but only marginally. “I believed there would be massive economic problems but those haven’t come to pass and I’ve also seen the opportunities.”

An intelligent person would have figured out that Brexit hinged on sovereignty, not any product of double-entry accounting, and a true Tory would have sensed it viscerally. That unfortunate volte-face suggests Miss Truss is neither.

Finally, by this circuitous route, we get to what really defines a conservative, character. The profile helpfully mentions a long affair Miss Truss had with a fellow MP, although both were married.

Feel free to cast the first stone, but I won’t, especially since the MP in question was male. Few of us meet the original requisite qualifications for heaping opprobrium, and these days no one in Britain really believes that a bit of hanky-panky should keep a person out of office. (In France, such peccadilloes are almost an ironclad requirement.)

Now comes the clincher. “Before Liz Truss [delivers a speech, she’ll] spend a few moments engaged in positive self-talk.” Any true Tory would sneer at such motivational mumbo-jumbo. “Sometimes she’ll plug in ear pods for a blast of upbeat pop.” Any true Tory would run away from such sounds at an Olympic speed.

Then she has “a disarming habit of asking abrupt questions and dismissing the response as ‘bollocks’.” A true Tory would dismiss unsatisfactory responses with more intellectual rigour and better manners.

A colleague also describes Miss Truss as “the least judgmental person I’ve ever met, even though she has incredibly strong opinions”. If I understand correctly, she has strong opinions but no judgement. A bad combo for a conservative, that. It betokens a truculent nature unattached to an intellect searching for the truth.

Then she liked to hold “karaoke parties… These were legendary – a place for MPs to let their hair down. They were where George Osborne could be found rapping, where Jeremy Hunt belted out Elvis’s Suspicious Minds, and where Truss could be found doing her best Madonna, sometimes in a pink wig.”

And “she was necking a Smirnoff Ice [at a party conference] and dancing at midnight at an LGBT+ event at the Cruz 101 club in Manchester.” Was her partner male or female?

A true Tory would neither do karaoke nor attend an LGBT+ event even if he himself belonged to the sponsoring group, which Miss Truss demonstrably doesn’t. And then she went on “a boozy girls’ night out” with “Lubov Chernukhin, wife of a Russian oligarch, who had paid £135,000 for the pleasure of their company in an auction at a Tory fundraiser.”

That means Miss Truss doesn’t mind acting as a conduit for Russian mafia money flowing into the veins of our government. This definitely confirms that she has no judgement, while making one doubt the conservative nature of her strong opinions.

And finally, she “doesn’t like being told what to do, particularly by a man”. Do I detect a touch of strident feminism there? Why particularly by a man?

Miss Truss was converted to ‘conservatism’ by studying free-market economists. Who were they? Smith? Ricardo? Hayak? Mises? Friedman? Does this mean that if one of those objectionable men came back to life, Miss Truss wouldn’t listen to him?

Sorry to have kept you for so long on such a trivial subject. It’s just that I’m desperately searching for a true Tory in our cabinet. By the sound of it, the search will have to continue.

The stakes are going up like a helium balloon.

Just a couple of days ago Putin issued an ultimatum similar to those Stalin delivered to the Baltic republics in 1939, the day before invading them.

There was no give and take in Putin’s ultimatum, which would be an essential part of any sensible treaty proposal.

For Putin it was all take and no give, with the West ordered to destroy its collective security or else. Nonetheless, the jumped-up KGB colonel kept insisting that Russian troops were concentrating on the Ukrainian border strictly for training purposes.

Yesterday he changed his tune. He threatened the West with a “military response” and insisted that Russia is capable of taking “adequate military-technical measures” should NATO reject the banditry going by the name of a proposed draft treaty.

Specifically, Putin threatens to respond militarily to any siting of NATO missiles in former Soviet colonies. He singled out for special injunction hypersonic weapons that only Russia possesses at the moment.

However, should NATO develop such missiles and instal them in the Ukraine, he explained, they could reach Moscow in five minutes. A scary prospect, that, especially considering that, according to Kremlin propaganda, US generals have their fingers twitching just over those red buttons.

Putin’s chief propagandist Dmitry Kisilyov, affectionately known in Russia as ‘Putin’s Goebbels’, yesterday reiterated his favourite promise of turning any potential adversary to “radioactive ash”. He didn’t specify what would merit such a holocaust, but there was no need. The message was contextually clear.

The West simply can’t win here, as Putin announced to his Defence Ministry yesterday. On the one hand, he demands that the West issue “long-term legally binding guarantees”. On the other hand, such guarantees are worthless.

“But you and I know them well,” he said. “They and their legal guarantees can’t be trusted because the US blithely breaks any international treaties it no longer deems useful for whatever reason.”

Damned if we do, damned if we don’t. The West isn’t allowed even to surrender gracefully: acceding to Putin’s blackmail may not prevent that radioactive ash.

Russian kleptofascists conveniently ignore why the West offers military help to the Ukraine, miserly though that help is. What turned the country into a crucible of bubbling international tensions was Russia’s 2014 occupation of the Crimea and east Ukraine.

Even a morally weakened and demob-happy West will still be appalled at banditry committed in the middle of Europe. Even the dimwitted know that bandits and blackmailers are never satisfied; their demands will always escalate.

Hence, even though the West clearly lacks gonadic strength, it still feels called upon to make a show of resistance. It’s either that or eventually delivering all of Europe, and not just its easternmost part, to the kleptofascist gangsters.

It’s useful to remember that words have to become actions at some point. When military threats reach a certain critical mass, Putin will have no option but to march. “If you call yourself a mushroom, get into the basket,” says the Russian proverb (the corresponding English saying has crude lavatorial overtones).

But why is he so bellicose? He has to realise that thousands of KIA notices reaching Russian families may spell the end of his regime. Putin’s Ukraine may well turn into Brezhnev’s Afghanistan, and yet he seems ready to go all out. Why take such risks?

The current economic data provides an answer, or rather a part of it.

In December, the Russian inflation rate, calculated on the price of a typical consumer basket, reached 17.7 per cent. And many Russians believe hyperinflation of 30 per cent or higher is just around the corner.

Overall, Russians are 10 per cent poorer now than they were before the 2014 invasion of the Ukraine. But the situation with food staples is even worse.

According to the Russian Ministry for Economic Development, over the past 12 months chicken has become 29.3 per cent dearer, beef 15.15 per cent, buckwheat 24.8 per cent, eggs 20.9 per cent, carrots 35.6 per cent, potatoes 62.55, cabbage 124.21 per cent.

Considering that there’s no margin built into the budgets of most Russian families (40 per cent of them live on less than £200 a month), the pressure in the cauldron of public resentment is building up. It has to be bled, along with thousands of Russian soldiers if need be.

The Russians often quip that they are in the midst of an ongoing conflict between the fridge and the TV set. The emptier the former, the more militant the latter.

This method of diverting public attention from pauperisation lacks novelty appeal. Many a tyrant has resorted to ratcheting up war hysteria as a way of making people ignore the growling in their stomachs. Actual war may or may not follow, but the tyrant can cling on to power in either case.

And clinging on to power isn’t a goal of Putin’s policies. It’s his only goal, and he will joyously murder millions to achieve it if that appears to be the only way.

His stooges openly snigger that Westerners aren’t prepared to die for the Ukraine. True. But they may find out the hard way that neither are the Russians.

P.S. You may notice that lately I’ve been writing about Russia more often than in the past. For as long as Russia remains the principal existential threat to the West, I’ll continue to do so. I can’t leave my readers at the mercy of Putin’s quislings in our press – even if my readers don’t care one way or the other.  

In recondite technical areas, one has to rely on expert opinion. That’s why I’ve always refused to approach the Covid issue from general principles. Nor do I trust views (including my own) informed by popular publications only.

Too many cracker-barrel epidemiologists have come out of the woodwork touting strong opinions for me to wish to add to their number.

Alas, such reticence has drawn the wrath of some readers, who claim, and quite possibly possess, greater technical knowledge than mine.

One of their laments has to do with my excessive credulity. How dare I believe what the experts are saying? After all, they don’t even agree among themselves.

Mea culpa. Being acutely aware of my own ignorance in most areas (other than those in which I’m not ignorant), I do tend to trust the experts. And if their judgements vary, I rely on my own common sense to take sides.

One minor proviso though: for the experts to be trusted, they have to be trustworthy. When they spout arrant nonsense, my innate credulity gets a blow and I no longer know what or whom to believe.

That’s exactly what happened yesterday, when I was watching Sky News. Those who have followed this space for a while know this means I’m in France.

For it’s only here that I watch any TV news at all, appalled as I am by its invariable shallowness, vulgarity and unconcealed left-wing bias. But those English voices on the tube serve as an umbilical cord 400 miles long, tying me to the womb of London.

So I suppress my usual revulsion and watch, at breakfast. As I did yesterday, having managed to beat by a couple of days the travel ban imposed by France on British travellers, a measure more political than medical.

The hysterical reaction of the French government (as opposed to the French people) to Brexit makes me fear that before long they’ll start putting British holiday makers in refugee camps and hold them to ransom. I can’t even discount the possibility of summary executions.

For the time being they voice a fulsome concern about the spread of Omicron, which gives them a pretext for being bloodyminded towards the British. My response to that is strictly second-hand: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

It’s only one man’s observation, but everyone I talk to in France (and this time around I’ve only so far talked to fellow tennis players) either has had Covid or knows dozens of people who have. I didn’t hear a single such story at my London club, even though infections must be more prevalent there than in my French backwater.

Still, Omicron has appeared in the UK and it is spreading. But how fast and how widely?

Sky News provided an answer to this gnawing question. It emerged out of an interview with a consultant to the SAGE Committee, Prof. Someone-Or-Other (the name didn’t register).

That amiable sixtyish man exuded steely authority leavened with smiley bonhomie. That put me on guard straight away.

“Omicron cases,” he said, “currently number 30,000 and they double every day. And they’ll continue to do so for any foreseeable future.” Normally, when an expert cites precise numbers, I don’t dare question him.

Mercifully, however, I remembered the legend of how chess was invented. When the inventor showed the game to King Shirham of India, the latter was so impressed that he told the man to name his own reward. Gold? Jewels? Palaces?

No, nothing like that, replied the man. Just put one grain of wheat on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third and continue to double all the way to the last of the 64 squares. Then give me the wheat and we’ll call it even.

The king laughed, but then got angry. How dare he ask for such a paltry payment? “Give him his sack of wheat and throw him out,” he ordered.

A week later he asked his retainers if they knew where the inventor was. “He is still here, Your Majesty,” they replied. “We are still counting the grains.”

To cut a long story short, at work there was geometrical progression with common ratio 2. It yielded a total number of 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains. This is the amount of wheat harvested by the whole world in several decades.

Armed with that knowledge, I calculated on my ten fingers that, if the good professor was right, the whole population of Her Majesty’s realm would have been infected by New Year’s Day. Not even the Black Death could have claimed such a score, and it was much more virulent.

Thus the good professor’s projections can only be described in crude terms, either testicular or excremental. He indisputably was talking rubbish. But does that mean all expert opinion should be dismissed out of hand?

I don’t think so. It only means that expert opinion must be taken with a grain of salt. Or a grain of wheat, if you’d rather.

They all remain glued to their seats. Lord Frost, the token Tory among them, would have got up on his feet, but he has resigned in disgust.

This emotion is universally shared by all those who thought, or in my case hoped, that they had elected a Tory government. That means Conservative, if only with a capital initial (the lower case has gone the way of all flesh).

Now that Johnson’s cabinet is succeeding in out-Labouring Labour, such voters feel betrayed, or in my case vindicated. I knew the original hope was forlorn, but something in me demands clinging on to lost causes.

Lord Frost, the Brexit minister, resigned because he didn’t wish to serve in a socialist government. True enough, if you compile a list of policies indigenous to socialism, you’ll find Johnson’s government ticking every box.

Runaway taxation? Tick. Promiscuous welfare spending? Tick. Increasing regulations? Tick. Destructive social policies? Tick. Commitment to uncosted projects, such as net zero carbon emissions, that are likely to beggar the country? Tick. Bossiness? Tick. Burgeoning statism? Tick. A vacillating domestic and foreign policy? Tick. A general aura of irresponsibility? Tick. Making populist noises while looking down on the population? Tick.

Compiling a similar list of Tory traits will yield a different result. Every box will remain blank, with your pen staying suspended in the air, while your other hand reaches for a bottle of Scotch.

Now, every ticked box above deserves its own comments, and duly gets them from all and sundry, including, occasionally, me. And that’s before all and sundry, including, occasionally, me, have even touched on the subject of the government’s response to Covid.

For libertarians, it’s draconian. For autocrats, it’s lackadaisical. But for everyone it’s indecisive and inconsistent, with HMG swinging wildly from one end to the other like that naughty girl in the Fragonard painting. Thus both the libertarians and the autocrats are sometimes right and sometimes wrong.

Life is like that: journalists and bloggers tend to be excited by tactical specifics rather than strategic generalities. British people in particular are bored with far-reaching philosophical ratiocination tinged with doomsday prophesying.

Germany is a perfect breeding ground for thinkers so inclined, chaps like Nietzsche with his Also Sprach Zarathustra or Spengler with his Der Untergang des Abendlandes. So it’s at the risk of sounding un- or perhaps even anti-British that I’d suggest that all those socialist characteristics of Johnson’s government are small beer. Compared, that is, to the heady brew of final civilisational surrender.

Boris Johnson, co-star of the new Carrie On film, has betrayed not only Tory voters in general but also, especially, real conservatives – which is to say the guardians of our civilisation – fighting desperate rear-guard action against the barbarian onslaught.

That battle has been fought on many political and economic fronts, and for every skirmish conservatives have won there have been ten they’ve lost. Yet the embers of our civilisation can still continue to smoulder, just, after such defeats.

What douses them with a downpour of cold water is a defeat in cultural battles, those fought in school classrooms, university halls, newspapers and other media – and even casual conversations among friends.

In any pitched clash, the side that chooses the battlefield affording it a dominant high ground has a winning advantage. Exiting the military metaphor, the side that manages to impose its own terms of debate will win the rhetorical, and therefore cultural, contest every time.

And the Johnson government not only accepts the terms of debate set by those seeking to undermine Western civilisation, but it goes them one better in making those terms grander and more irreversible.

Every core premise of the Left goes unchallenged, and we can argue pointlessly about details till we are blue, or rather red, in the face. If subversive principles are allowed to reign supreme, capitulation has been signed. This can be illustrated by any number of random examples from any walk of life.

One of Lord Frost’s stated objections to government policies had to do with Johnson’s Carrie-inspired commitment to net zero carbon emissions. That goal is to be achieved by 2050, while all internal combustion cars are to be driven into a dump by 2030, and all gas heaters replaced with something or other.

Lord Frost correctly points out that no one has a clue how much this project will cost, with most estimates pointing at ruinous consequences. That’s a legitimate complaint, as far as it goes.

But what if the cost of this programme were to be accurately calculated, and it could be shown that the British economy will still be able to limp on having absorbed it? Would that take care of his objections?

It certainly wouldn’t take care of mine. For the whole climate swindle is but a prong in the aforementioned onslaught. Its target isn’t a diesel car or a gas heater, nor every molecule of atmospheric carbon, but the very essence of Western economies, something we call capitalism courtesy of its proto-hater, Marx.

Economic dynamism is as organic to Western societies as self-contemplative stupor is to Buddhist monks. Hence anyone who detests the West would seek to put brakes on that essential tendency, and climate mongers know that in their viscera, just as all leftists always have done.

Anyone who cedes to them the point that a problem exists has already betrayed the West – regardless of how many concessions he could wrench from the other side.

I don’t know why I singled out that particular illustration. Any other would have done as well, some with even greater clarity.

One could talk about churches mandated shut during the Covid pandemic while they remained open even during the Black Death – this though medieval doctors had no means whatsoever of combatting the disease.

Or about the government doing nothing substantial about the outpouring of black bile on the entire history of the West, routinely portrayed as unremittingly criminal or, at best, regrettable.

Or about a sustained attack on another cornerstone of our civilisation, free expression. People who strain to detect a traumatic effect in every word that somehow deviates from the dictated norm don’t do so because they love potential victims. They ban free speech because they hate the West, and such freedom is its cornerstone.

Johnson’s government does nothing to put an end to this orgy of hatred. At times it makes a feeble attempt to mitigate its savagery at the margins, yet without ever questioning its validity at the core.

That’s what bothers the real conservatives among Tory voters. That’s why they feel betrayed and despondent. That’s why they are running scared.

And now by all means, let’s talk about cabinet members and their families having an unauthorised drink in the garden. You know, the subject that so preoccupies the media at the moment (see the photo above).    

Even Stalin didn’t talk to the West in the language of ultimatums, not in so many words at any rate. That’s why comparisons of the current situation with Yalta are spurious.

Peruse any document issued there, and you won’t find a single word spelling out Soviet control over Eastern Europe, nor about dividing Europe into spheres of influence. No doubt Roosevelt and Stalin privately came to an agreement that amounted to the same thing – but Stalin didn’t threaten to invade had FDR proved recalcitrant.

The Soviet monster had to choose his words carefully: facing his exhausted troops in Europe was a powerful, well-equipped, relatively fresh allied force. One, moreover, that could soon count on a few atom bombs, which the Soviets hadn’t yet managed to produce.

Things are different now. That is, Russia’s inherently aggressive stance towards the West hasn’t changed. But the West’s resolve to resist it has.

That’s why the jumped-up KGB colonel in the Kremlin saw fit to demand that the West for all intents and purposes destroy its NATO-based system of collective security. Such terms have only ever been imposed on, or even proposed to, countries routed in a war.

Specifically, the West, as represented by NATO, is being ordered to withdraw all military personnel and bases to the pre-1997 borders – that is, to the positions they held before seven Eastern European countries joined NATO. To wit:

“Nato and the US must not station any additional military personnel or weapons outside the countries where they were stationed as of May 1997 (prior to the accession to the alliance of Eastern European countries) except in exceptional cases with the consent of Russia.” [My emphasis]

NATO must stop and roll back its eastward expansion, undertaking “not to deploy weapons and forces” where it “would be perceived by the other side as a threat to national security”. And Russia insists on having veto power on all military deployments in Europe.

In other words, NATO must not only refuse to admit the Ukraine, a victim of historical and current Russian brutality, but abandon to Putin’s mercy the seven Eastern European countries that are already members. That would effectively turn them into Russia’s vassals at best, colonies at worst.

Even more important, such betrayal would put paid to NATO as a guarantor of European security – with potentially dire consequences for Western Europe as well. Hence the draft treaties proposed by Russia amount to the dictated terms of surrender.

I could cite any number of Russian goebbelses trying to justify this outrage by ostensibly legitimate concerns, but there’s no need. Their steadfast stooge Peter Hitchens yet again acts as their mouthpiece:

“There is no doubt that Nato’s eastward expansion is an aggressive revival of a century-old German desire to push deeply into the old Russian Empire. There was never any other political or military need for it, though it greatly suited the USA’s military industries, which lost a lot of business when the Cold War ended.”

No doubt, fancy that. The doubtless premise peddled here is that Germany is the key player in NATO, with the alliance faithfully serving her dastardly interests. This is deranged nonsense, or rather a sycophantic troll.

As to the “political or military need for it”, it exists, it’s real, and it’s urgent. The need is to offer protection to countries that had suffered untold misery at the hands of the Soviets. It’s also to contain Russian expansionism aimed at reconstituting the Soviet Union – a goal regularly stated by Russian propagandists and chieftains, including Putin.

The Russian line or rather lie, which Hitchens regurgitates as faithfully as ever, is that NATO harbours aggressive designs on Russian territory and somehow threatens Russia’s security. The only thing threatened here is Putin’s kleptofascist regime that needs to pounce on weaker countries in order to survive.

Not even today’s Western governments, with appeasement and ‘pragmatism’ coursing through their veins, can accept such terms. I know it, you know it, Putin himself knows it. So why the counterproductive ultimatum?

It may represent an opening bid, with some leeway built in for future manoeuvres. This is a well-trodden path, and not just in politics. A businessman who wants to sell his company for £10 million may demand £15 million to give the other party a sense of victory when he finally agrees to accept what he wanted in the first place.

The West has already more or less left the Ukraine to her own devices, and it may well agree not to admit her to NATO now or ever. In return, Putin will graciously allow some NATO presence in Europe and then gobble up the Ukraine.

That may or may not be accomplished by a full-scale military invasion. There will be no need: left without NATO support, the Ukraine will have to do Putin’s bidding anyway.

No doubt another local conflict will happen, just to reassure the Russians that there’s still muscle left in that famously bare torso. But a full-blown war would result in tens of thousands of coffins flying back to Russia.

Putin’s goebbelses scream through every available channel that the Russians and Ukrainians are “the same people”, sort of like the 1939 Germans living in Germany proper and in Sudetenland. However, Ukrainians, even the Russophone ones, don’t share that view widely.

By and large they hate the Russians, and not without reason. Under the Soviets they were oppressed both physically and culturally.

In the early thirties millions of them were deliberately and didactically starved to death by the empire whose demise Putin sees as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century”. And their own language and culture were stamped into the dirt even more than in some other Soviet republics.

Ukrainians will fight – they are already fighting. They know they can’t beat Putin’s troops in pitched battle, but they also know they can kill a lot of Russians in guerrilla warfare.

They did just that throughout the fifties, when UPA partisans, inspired by Stepan Bandera and organised by Roman Shukhevych, took to the forests and killed thousands of Russians and their local quislings. Today they are better equipped to inflict a much heavier damage, and the Russians know this.

However, Russian leaders have never been overburdened with concerns about Russian casualties. It’s conceivable that Putin will use NATO’s predictable refusal to surrender as a pretext for an escalating invasion – even if that means severing all links with the West.

I’d be curious to know what’s happening to the trillions in Russian assets held in the West. If they are staying put, it’s unlikely that the kleptofascists will push all their chips in, risking the impounding of their purloined wealth. However, if the money is being rapidly routed into assorted havens beyond NATO’s reach, the countdown for war is ticking away.

One way or another, now is the time the West must deliver a show of resolve and strength. This should be informed by comparisons not with Yalta, but with Munich, and with “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”.

If we are ever able to learn any lessons from even recent history (which I doubt), then we should know that appeasement only whets the appetite of evil regimes. And Putin’s is as evil as they come.

Sometimes the best thing about a book or an article is the title.

Just look at Thomas Wolfe’s forgettable novels bearing unforgettable titles: Look Homeward, Angel, You Can’t Go Home Again, From Death to Morning – don’t bother reading Page 2.

Today’s Mail serves a similar dichotomy in an article. Its title is so replete with implications that even a long book wouldn’t be able to explore them exhaustively:

‘I’m not a little girl’: 22-year-old who is ‘stuck’ in the body of an eight-year-old struggles to live a normal adult life in new reality series that shows her pole dancing, drinking, and getting a tattoo

The story is about a new reality series I Am Shauna Rae. Its eponymous heroine suffered a rare form of brain cancer when she was six months old. Subsequent chemotherapy damaged her pituitary gland, stunting her growth and leaving her with the body of an eight-year-old for life.

Apparently, the documentary covers Shauna’s epic efforts to “live a normal adult life” while being everywhere taken for a child. Her love life, in particular, suffers greatly.

“My relationship status is single,” she says. “I attract creeps, assholes, and idiots. It is scary to put myself out there, but you have to put some risk in to get happiness.”

A tragic story indeed. However, at the risk of coming across even more insensitive than usual, I’d suggest its implications are more tragic by half.

Shauna’s idea of normal life is evidently shared by The Mail – otherwise its editors would have worded the headline differently. Hence our most conservative paper believes that pole dancing, drunkenness and getting tattooed are perfectly normal activities for a 22-year-old girl.

I know I’m being repetitive, but I have to rephrase to make sure I grasp the idea. A normal young woman is a drunken, tattooed slut performing in strip joints. Yes, that has to be what the headline is saying.

Toto, I’ve a feeling we aren’t in Georgian England anymore. Jane Austen certainly describes very different rituals of coming out for young girls reaching adulthood.

Fine, I understand, tempus bloody well fugit. You can’t go home again, according to Thomas Wolfe, and neither can you step in the same river twice, according to Heraclitus.

We can’t expect today’s young ladies to have either pride or prejudice, nor either sense or sensibility. They are taught the timeless significance of condoms when still in kindergarten and the ballistic advantages of various sexual positions in elementary school.

Thus enlightened, today’s Elinors, Elizabeths and Emmas can’t be expected to resemble their Jane Austen namesakes in appearance, dress and demeanour. Look at any gaggle of young girls in King’s Road and you won’t see any crinolines, blushes or demurely lowered eyelashes.

That’s fair enough. But I believe, nay hope, that there is a vast middle ground between such attributes and the normal young woman The Mail sees in its mind’s eye. And somewhere in that expanse one ought to be able to find untattooed, relatively sober young women who don’t twirl around poles naked.

Yes, I’m sure they exist, and they may even be in the majority. But that majority has to be dwindling under peer pressure and especially under the pressure applied by the mass media and the Internet. Political despotism is easier to resist than the tyranny of the zeitgeist.

Society has a way of communicating and enforcing its ideals, and most people aspire to cutting themselves down to the promoted stencil. If the whole tenor of modern life forced The Mail to say “No, Shauna, normal life isn’t about drinking, pole dancing and getting a tattoo”, then the civilisational ideal would be different, falling somewhere between crinolines and puking on the pavement.

We can talk about politics till the MPs come home or the red rosette turns blue (or, more likely, the other way around). But when all is said and done, the real catastrophe of modernity isn’t political. It’s aesthetic.

When ugliness becomes the new beauty, and deviance the new normality, you know it’s the end of the world. Every telltale sign has been posted.

And Shauna? I’m really sorry about her ordeal. But not only hers.

Actually convicted for the murder of the political émigré Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin was a professional FSB hitman, Col. Vadim Krasikov. But everyone knows who sent him out.

The victim had the audacity of having fought against the Russians in the same Chechen war that brought Putin to power in 2000. He then sought asylum in Germany, which lengthy process was interrupted by Krasikov in 2019.

The good colonel cycled in behind Khangoshvili in the Tiergarten park and shot him three times with a silenced Glock 26. The park sits smack in the centre of Berlin, and it was crowded on that sunny day.

The episode makes one wonder how good our cyclist was at his job. He managed to get the first part right, fulfilling his murderous mission. But the second part, not getting caught, was an abject failure. Many strollers saw the colonel removing his wig and then trying to drown his weapon and bicycle in the pond.

Krasikov was arrested soon thereafter, and the Russians tried to claim he was a lone operator who simply disliked the exile. However, his access to silenced weapons and false documents was a dead giveaway.

The judges had no hesitation putting the blame at the Kremlin’s doorstep. “The crime was meticulously prepared by agents stationed in Berlin,” said the presiding judge, sentencing the murderer to life without parole. Foreign minister Annalena Baerbock agreed, adding that the murder constituted a “grave violation of Germany’s sovereignty.”

She then announced the expulsion of two Russian diplomats, on top of the two expelled for the same reason earlier. Russia described the gesture as “unfriendly”, while Maria Zakharova, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, found Miss Baerbock’s statement “unfeminine”.

Undeterred by that accusation, Miss Baerbock continued to act in a decidedly butch manner. “It’s very clear that actions such as the Tiergarten murder seriously strain our relationship,” she said. “The German government will do everything that is necessary to defend people’s safety in our country and respect for our legal order.”

No seat on the Gazprom board for her then. She should take her cue from Schroeder – even when he was chancellor, he never forgot which side his bread was buttered. And now he is monetising that dairy product to the tune of millions of dollars (or billions of roubles, if you’d rather).

The upshot is that Putin is making it increasingly harder for Western officials to love him, much as they desperately want to do so.

Just when they ‘push the reset button’, ‘understand Russia’s concerns’, ‘seek a meaningful dialogue’ or call for ‘pragmatism’ (all euphemisms for appeasement), he has somebody else whacked in the West.

Give credit to Vlad: he keeps his promises. On his inauguration, he promised to pursue his enemies to the ends of the earth and “whack them” wherever they hide, even “in the shithouse”. Tiergarten is a much less malodorous venue for such fun and games, and I’m sure this memory will warm Col. Krasikov’s cockles in prison.

Western leaders, on the other hand, will continue to bewail Col. Putin’s tendency of throwing an uncooperative monkey wrench into the works of appeasement. Their friend Vlad doesn’t seem to be able to get his head around their problem.

The problem is dire: unlike Vlad and his ministers, Western politicians are actually elected. Since stuffing ballot boxes isn’t a popular option in their countries, they have to be liked by the people. If they aren’t, they won’t be re-elected, and there go their chances for lucrative post-political sinecures.

And people don’t like it when agents of a foreign power sneak into their countries and whack Putin’s enemies or blow up ammunition depots, as the Russians did in the Czech Republic in 2014. Czech president Zeman is Putin’s man root and branch, but even he had to respond with some anti-Kremlin measures.

Whacking people in Britain, the Russians often rely on more exotic weapons than Glocks or dynamite. Just look at Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned in the middle of London with polonium. Tony Blair, PM at the time, was trying to be Putin’s friend – and look what happened. There went some of the publicly expressed empathy (although not for long, it has to be said).

Then a few years later a British court passed a verdict directly inculpating the Kremlin, much to the chagrin of PM Mrs May. She did try to hush up the investigation, but that cat refused to stay in the bag.

And speaking of exotic weapons, another Russian exile, Alexander Perepelichny, was poisoned with gelsemium, an extract of a plant the Chinese have been using to that end for millennia. That happened in 2012, on Dave Cameron’s watch.

Despite his best efforts, and even though some housetrained doctors hastily declared suicide, doubts soon appeared – which was bound to undermine HMG’s efforts to mandate empathy and pragmatism. Subsequently those CIA spoilsports informed MI6 that the businessman was “probably killed on direct orders from Putin or those close to him.”

Suicide was also the hasty verdict when another businessman, Boris Berezovsky, was found garrotted in his Weybridge bathroom in 2013. In 2015, after his former partner Nikolai Glushkov was strangled with a dog lead in New Malden, most experts realised that perhaps Berezovsky too had received similar help along the way.

In 2015 the Russians field-tested a new poison, appropriately called novichok (newcomer), in Sofia. On the receiving end was the arms dealer Emilian Gebrev, who was supplying weapons to the Ukraine. Gebrev survived, but novichok showed promise.

In 2018 it was used to poison the Skripals in Salisbury, who also survived, miraculously. One local resident wasn’t so lucky: Dawn Sturgess became collateral damage. That was another nail in Mrs May’s political coffin, and just to think she was so good to Vlad.

You might say that Western politicians act out of pragmatic considerations, not their love of the KGB colonel in the Kremlin. That line was exposed yesterday by Daria Navalny (photo above), the daughter of Alexei, himself a novichok patient.

Yesterday she accepted the EU’s top human rights prize on his behalf. The prize is named after Andrey Sakharov, and Daria minced no words: “Andrey Sakharov was one of the least pragmatic people,” she said.

“I don’t understand why those who in his name clamour for pragmatic relations with dictators can’t open history books. That would be a most pragmatic step.

“And then they’d find that appeasing dictators and tyrants has never worked even once.

“God knows how many people have tried to convince themselves that a madman hanging on to power with all his might will behave honourably in response to overtures. That will never happen.

“The very nature of authoritarian power demands upping the stakes, aggression and a search for new enemies.”

Hear, hear.

If you found out that someone you know is hatching up a terrorist plot, would you inform the police? Of course you would. Any decent person would consider it his civic duty to do so.

Yet in late 1880 Dostoyevsky asked his publisher Suvorin the same question, only to receive a different reply. Both men were conservative monarchists, and that was the height of People’s Will terrorism.

An open season on government officials had been declared; many had been murdered. The ‘Liberator’ tsar Alexander II had been targeted for several assassination attempts. In a couple of months the last one would succeed.

Nevertheless, two conservative Christians, one of whom had nailed just such criminals to the wall in his prophetic novel The Possessed, said they’d be unable to denounce the evildoers. For one thing, they agreed that the liberal intelligentsia, which was to say intelligentsia, would unleash such a storm of abuse that they wouldn’t be able even to stay in Russia, never mind in their professions.

And then they both felt that denouncing people to the police for any reason was morally wrong. Somehow… Yes, they knew that feeling was irrational, but still… informing wasn’t quite the done thing.

The writing was on the wall. If even people like Dostoyevsky and Suvorin were for all intents and purposes ready to act as passive accomplices to crazed bomb-throwers, society in Russia was thoroughly corrupt and irreversibly doomed. Civic virtues had disintegrated, and society no longer lived according to any traditional morality. Leftie hatred had ousted Christian love.

Some 40 years later the Russians, including the intelligentsia, no longer had any compunctions against denouncing tens of millions of people to the CheKa for any reason or none. It took the Bolsheviks just a couple of years to corrupt society into extinction, and the Russians were busily snitching on one another.

Telling a political joke, not standing up when Stalin’s name was mentioned, praising anything Western – any such indiscretion painted a target on the perpetrator’s back. And even regular everyday squabbles were resolved in a similar fashion.

Comrade Ivanov would find out that his wife was sleeping with Comrade Petrov. Out would come pen and paper, and Comrade Ivanov would write: “As a loyal communist, I consider it my duty to report that Comrade Petrov has said…” Two days after the letter was posted, Comrade Petrov would disappear, never to be seen again. Job done.

This newly found appetite for denunciations was never sated. The other day I saw an interview with a former KGB officer who was asked how he and his colleagues recruited informers.

“Recruited? Are you joking?” He was genuinely surprised. “We’d recruit the few people who regularly travelled abroad. Other than that, people came to us. We didn’t have enough manpower to wade through the millions of voluntary denunciations inundating Lubyanka. Why on earth would we have to recruit?”

He was slightly disingenuous – they did recruit –  but you get the general point. Millions of Soviet citizens were murdering one another with pen and paper.

There we have it: two extremes in the same country half a century apart. At one end is a society with warped morality; at the other, a society with no morality at all.

First, there were good people who wouldn’t denounce even terrorists. Then, they were replaced by scum who would denounce their own families (google Pavlik Morozov when you get the chance).

Now, using Russia as a trampoline, let’s vault into Britain, circa 2021. We’ve already agreed that we’d have no problem reporting potential terrorists, the kind of chaps who blow up buses, shoot up public gatherings or drive SUVs through crowds. In that sense, our society is more morally robust than Russia, circa 1880.

However, it’s my conviction that we are being pushed towards another extreme, with the ‘liberal establishment’, which is to say the powers that be, pushing our society towards the abyss of mass denunciations.

People are encouraged, tacitly or explicitly, to snitch not only on drug dealers, but also on lockdown breakers (in 2020 the police received 195,000 such denunciations), tax evaders (or even avoiders), mask objectors, global warming deniers, anyone uttering what’s coyly called ‘the n-word’ or some such – and so on, ad nauseam.

Students report on their professors, pupils on their teachers, employees on employers, neighbours on neighbours, and they all feel self-righteously vindictive. They pat themselves on the back like contortionists for responding to the clarion call of zeitgeist, so loud that it drowns out all moral sense.

So far the harm done to those denounced isn’t comparable to Russia’s Gulag and mass executions. At worst the victims lose their jobs, not their lives. A judge may give them a stern warning, but not a tenner in prison. But the moral harm done to society is frighteningly similar.

Any good society encourages the good side of human nature; any bad one, the rotten side. And when the rot reaches a certain critical mass, society explodes into a mass of anomic, deracinated individuals whose moral compass has gone haywire.

Take this from someone who has experienced such a society: you won’t like it. But at least I had somewhere to escape to. If the West turns into a Soviet Union, no haven will exist. It’ll be like Lord of the Flies: savage children run the roost, a pig’s head on a totem pole, and there are no moral rules.

Now comes the quintessential British question: What are we going to do about it? In this case, there are things we can do — or die trying.

We must fight modern perversions every step of the way. There are no small things, for many small things can come together to create a huge disaster. For a start, we should all refuse to submit to perverse diktats of modernity, starting with those on woke vocabulary and grammar.

We must join forces to resist any new morality because there is no such thing. New morality is old evil, to be rejected out of hand. And real morality is as unequivocal on denouncing terrorists as on refusing to denounce someone who insists that only two sexes exist.

Active resistance is a must: we should respond to PC hectoring with strong words and even threats of violence. And we should never report, say, a chap trying to keep more of his money out of the state’s sticky palms. Now, reporting a terrorist is a whole different story.