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City firms, such as State Street (headquartered in the US), are introducing minority quotas, explaining to demurring managers in crystal clear terms that failure to comply will reduce their own bonuses.

Since these seven-digit afterthoughts are the bedrock on which our whole financial system rests, those troglodyte executives are offered the choice between life and suicide. I can see only one winner there.

But what’s a minority? Is it defined as percentiles or absolute numbers? Neither, is the answer to that naïve question.

In compliance with the current carte blanche to self-identification, minority is defined as any group perceiving itself as such, with no other qualifications necessary. Thus women, who are actually in the majority, qualify – and Russian-born holders of dual American-British nationality don’t.

But enough about me. Let’s talk instead about my constant bugbear: equality.

Let’s then narrow the problem by ignoring equality of outcome, only ever demanded by the primitive fringe of a primitively evil doctrine: communism. Let’s further put aside the more civilised but similarly unrealistic demand for equal opportunity, which, as I’ve often argued, is fully achievable only in prison.

At issue today is one type of equality seen as virtuous and desirable by the whole political spectrum: equality before the law. Fans of Enlightenment slogans insist that this is the sense in which the word or its cognates was used in variously subversive American and French documents of the 18^th century.

The founding document of the US treats this type of equality as an inalienable right. This interpretation isn’t restricted to the New World. Every decent person anywhere in the West nods his agreement, and every Western government enshrines this right legally.

Equality before the law is then an indisputable legal right. Derivatively indisputable is the inference that violating this right is illegal.

The law, in the West at any rate, is like God. It looks down on people from such a lofty perch that all of them look the same. You have the same rights as I, we have the same rights as they, they have the same rights as anybody else. Are you with me so far?

Thus a member of any group possesses certain inalienable rights, the same for all because the law is the same for all. I know I’m banging on about the same thing, but hell, repetition is the mother of all learning (repetitio mater studiorum in the original).

Hence a woman, homosexual, black, Asian, transsexual and whatnot have all the same rights as all of us. We are all equal before the law.

Yet then it transpires that, in addition to the rights shared by all, members of the groups perceived as minorities have other rights, those the rest of us are denied. In other words, they enjoy privileges.

Thus I have no protection under the law from being publicly described as a colloquial word for pudendum, which I don’t resemble in any other than the metaphorical sense. I have no right to that protection.

By contrast, the law protects a black person from epithets specifically based on his race, or a homosexual from any epithets relevant to his sexuality. The other day, for example, a friend’s sister, a dainty woman of about 5’2’’ and seven stone, had a spat with a neighbour, as one does.

In the heat of the argument she called him a “poof”, rudely but, as it happens, justifiably. The man, who tops her by more than a foot, immediately filed a complaint, claiming he felt physically threatened.

That evening three burly coppers came to the woman’s house, arrested her and threw her in the cage at the nick, where she spent the next 24 hours before appearing in court.

If I were insulted by a reference to any of my characteristics, or even other people’s (it’s that pudendum again), I’d have no recourse. Should I file a complaint, I’d be the laughingstock of the policeman and all his friends. And no cop would turn up at my offender’s door.

Thus members of some groups have all the same legal rights I have – plus others that don’t apply to me. You may or may not consider this fair, but it’s certainly not just. Equality before the law is, after all, a universal principle of Western jurisprudence.

This explains the title above: privilege is indeed the new equality – in the same sense in which oppression is the new liberalism, uniformity is the new diversity and socialism is the new conservatism.

Modernity is one contiguous paradox and one ongoing spree of vandalism – cultural, social and linguistic. In pursuit of their wicked ends, the vandals are willing to stamp into the dirt even their cherished inaugurating principles. Such as equality before the law.

Disadvantaged is the new advantaged, as Prof. Carrie Bourassa, of Saskatchewan University knows only too well.

And advantages are worth fighting for. That’s why she first claimed to be a Métis (mixed Red Indian and European) and then fought a rearguard action when found out.

Prof. Bourassa accessorised her claim with an eye for authentic detail. She called herself ‘Morning Star Bear’ and sported the usual paraphernalia of her supposed tribe: beads, feathers, embroidered shawls.

She wisely refrained from reinforcing her claim by scalping her academic colleagues, for which reticence they should be grateful. Instead those ingrates circled their wagons and vengefully set up a genealogical test, which showed that Prof. Bourassa is a pure paleface of Eastern European stock.

The impostor was suspended, but she didn’t take punishment lying down. Instead she whipped out her trusted woke tomahawk and began laying about her with nothing short of Apache abandon.

Those palefaces, she cried, are conducting a “smear campaign” because they still operate in the antediluvian world. The postdiluvian world inhabited by Prof. Bourassa doesn’t rely on “blood quantums” to establish identity. You are what you say you are, what you identify as.

And identifying as an ‘indigenous’ inhabitant of Canada isn’t just a matter of a deeply felt imperative. For Canada is busily trying to atone for her colonial past, which she acquired vicariously courtesy of the British Empire.

For Canadian academic institutions, this atonement isn’t limited to a steady chorus of mea culpas. They also seek to compensate materially the poor souls whose ancestors were colonised 500 years ago. The pain of displacement knows no statutes of limitations. It never abates without the analgesic of prizes, grants and various other emoluments.

Morning Star Bear knows the game inside out and she plays it with virtuoso dexterity. Actually, she has a strong case, logically if not morally.

After all, if a man can identify as a woman, a woman as a man, and either one as any of the 72 sexes currently on offer, why can’t Morning Star Bear choose any racial identity she likes? No reason whatsoever.

The profusion of sexes springs from the rejection of the obsolete binary distinction. There are men at one end, women at the other, and then there are 70 intermediate sexes based on the degree of proximity to either end. Thus, for example, there are names for people who are 80 per cent men and 20 women or vice versa, although don’t ask me what those names are.

And the beauty of it is that anyone who talks the chromosome talk and walks the genetic walk instantly acquires the stigma of a stick-in-the-mud at best or a fascist at worst. Never mind the chromosomes, feel the identity.

If this approach is so productive with sex, why not with race? Most people have some sort of admixtures to their gene pool. Go back far enough and any Englishman can claim to be Celtic, Saxon, Danish or perhaps ancient Roman.

And don’t get me going on the Russians. Should they wish to do so, most of them could claim to be Mongols, Swedes, Germans – or even Jews. Actually, the last two claims became popular in the 1970s, when some members of those groups were allowed to emigrate.

I knew a snub-nosed Russian chap of pure peasant heritage who told the Interior Ministry that his grandfather confessed on his deathbed that he was a quarter-Jew. Even if true (which it wasn’t), that only made him one-sixteenth Jewish, but who’s to decide which part of one’s blood speaks in the loudest voice?

Another Russian friend of mine claimed to be a Volksdeutsche, a person born outside Germany, but whose culture and language has German origins. When queried, he proved to be familiar with Bach, Beethoven and Goethe, but the only German he knew came from Soviet war films. All he could say was Halt, Hände hoch and Ve have vays to make you talk.

My intrepid friend nevertheless claimed that all his dreams were in German, the language of his blood. The German consular officials were satisfied, and he got his travel documents (the Russians wanted to get rid of him anyway).

A more recent and relevant example dates back to my tenure at NASA, 1974-1975. As a government institution, NASA was in the vanguard of all the perverse trends, planting saplings that have by now blossomed into luxuriant trees.

Hence a young woman got a job in the documentation department on the strength of her claim of being half-Indian, half-black. In fact, she was neither, but the personnel department already functioned as a harbinger of things to come. Not only did Carol (not her real name) get the job, but she even got to keep it after doubts of her ethnicity began to creep in.

Morning Star Bear has to be on a winner there. Her detractors may throw the genetic kitchen sink at her, but she’ll crush them under a woke bathtub. Zeitgeist is her tailwind and she won’t be stopped.  

A friend of mine took this picture at Freemantle railway station in Western Australia.

As you can see, the loo roll is securely padlocked. One has to assume that, in the absence of this precaution, the roll would be nicked, thereby creating a problem with which every Russian of my generation is familiar.

In the old days loo paper didn’t exist in public lavatories, and it was a rarity even in private ones. Hence, if you’ll pardon a malodorous detail, most of such facilities were tastefully decorated with brown streaks on the walls.

Some 25 years ago, in post-Soviet times, the problem had been only partly eradicated. At that time Penelope and I visited the seat of Russian Christianity, St Sergius Trinity monastery some 40 miles from Moscow.

Since the high spiritual value of that institution didn’t quite obviate some basic physical needs, we had the chance to sample the facility in question.

Sitting at the entrance was an unsmiling Cerberus-like woman holding a loo roll. She’d size up the entrants and dole out exactly three squares each, which gave Penelope the kind of ethnographic insights that guide books didn’t provide.

I’ve never been to Australia, though I have a few Australian acquaintances and quite a few Australian readers. This sample is too small to reach any sweeping conclusions about something as complex as national character. Thus I can’t speculate on the Aussies’ frugality or lack thereof.

Moreover, since I’ve never shopped for this product Down Under, I can’t attach any monetary value to it. However, on general principle, I suspect it can’t be any less available or more expensive than here in the metropolis. A cheap roll retails for about 30p in London, and there are no supply problems (apart from the short period at the start of the pandemic).

So an item worth perhaps 20p wholesale in our money is deemed valuable enough to rate a padlock. It also must be desirable enough to bring out the worst in human nature, specifically its larcenous aspect.

Applying the inductive method of investigation that Conan Doyle mistakenly called deductive, let’s see if we can build a hypothesis or two on the basis of this small detail.

First, Freemantle station is operated by Transperth, a state institution. Such institutions are known throughout the West for their inefficiency and promiscuous squandering of public funds.

Publicly owned railway stations also depend on government subsidies, which warms my cockles every time I board a train in France. Knowing that the government subsidises my journey gives me an irrational feeling of revenge exacted, although I’m not quite sure for what.

Assuming that Transperth is also subsidised, the loo roll in question was financed out of the public purse. Hence I doff my hat to Australia’s government for evidently imposing a strict fiscal discipline on its branches.

Another inductive inference is that labour must be cheaper Down Under than Up Over. After all, someone has to open and close the lock when replacing the roll every hour or so. If this practice is followed in all Transperth outlets, it must add a few man hours to the arduous task of loo maintenance.

If the company’s cost-benefit analysis showed that the extra labour cost is offset by the benefit of securing the roll, and if the cost of the roll is negligible, labour must be cheap. This raises unpleasant questions about Australia’s immigration and racial policies, but I’d rather not go there.

On the other hand, it’s conceivable that no cost-benefit analysis was ever carried out. If so, my faith in public institutions remains unshaken: they all seem to act in character everywhere.

Moving right along, one can’t help noticing that at comparable facilities in England loo rolls are at the mercy of petty thieves. This may be construed as saying a lot about the people and public institutions in both countries.

First, Englishmen may be less likely than Australians to want to steal a 30p loo roll. If so, I’m proud of my countrymen. For the temptation must be strong, whereas the likelihood of punishment low to nonexistent.

So, if Englishmen resist nicking loo rolls, they may be made of sturdier moral fibre – especially since the purchasing power of an average Englishman is 16 per cent lower than that of an average Aussie.

It’s also possible that HMG has calculated that the probability of a loo roll being stolen is too low to justify the cost of providing and operating a padlock. Alas, HMG isn’t exactly known for such pernickety attention to detail. It’s better known for referring to, say, a loo roll as a ‘sanitary cleansing system’ and citing its cost at hundreds of pounds.

Also… no, no more. Please stop me before I unroll the object in the photo into a paradigm of general moral and cultural decrepitude. Let’s face it, Sherlock Holmes I’m not.

Lech Walesa has always denied that he used to spy for Poland’s communist regime. Now those denials have led to a perjury charge, with prison a distinct possibility.

The current accounts of this long saga contain no mention of any new evidence unearthed since I wrote about ‘agent Bolek’ almost five years ago (http://www.alexanderboot.com/meet-bolek-the-polish-saint/).

What they do contain is shoddy analysis barely scratching the topsoil and not even trying to delve deeper. Just one short paragraph from The Times illustrates this point exhaustively:

“He has long battled claims that he acted as a paid informer in the 1970s, prior to leading the formation in 1980 of Solidarity, the trade union that went on to play a key role in the fall of the communist regime. The success of Solidarity inspired similar popular revolutions in neighbouring states.”

That’s about it. The rest is simply a rehash of the evidence against Walesa, mainly the graphological analysis of the signature on secret police documents from the 1970s.

Those who pay little attention to affairs in the former Soviet bloc may or may not find such accounts mildly interesting. Others, however, may be tempted to ask some probing questions.

In that forensic spirit, let’s look at the sequence of events one can infer from the cited paragraph:

Point A, 1970s: Walesa is a paid agent of the Służba Bezpieczeństwa, the Polish branch of the KGB. Point B, 1980: Walesa inspires and leads Solidarity. Point C, late 1980s: Solidarity sets the stage for the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

The task before us is as straightforward as it can be rewarding. If we can establish a causative link between Point A on the one hand and Points B and C on the other, then we’ll debunk the established interpretation of the post-Soviet history of Russia and her former satellites.

So, did Walesa still act as an agent of the Służba Bezpieczeństwa (which is to say the KGB) when inspiring and leading Solidarity? If so, was Solidarity a KGB op? If it was, then the whole ‘collapse of the Soviet Union’ and its bloc, which, according to Francis Fukuyama, spelled the end of history, takes on a whole new dimension.

Our press isn’t equipped to answer such questions, nor even to ask them. Such inquiries would challenge the current orthodoxy, and our hacks prefer to play safe, lest they may be accused of spreading conspiracy theories.

Journos suspected of that faux pas would lose credibility at the Groucho, Garrick and every other watering hole for the media powers that be. And that fate is worse than death.

There exists, after all, some hope of coming back from the dead. But there’s no coming back from the proverbial Coventry for the poor sods losing their status in those West End clubs. Suggesting that reality may not agree with the version of it endorsed by duly accredited institutions would be breaking a gentlemen’s code, like ‘brown in town’ (wearing brown shoes in the city).

The assumption to live by is that anyone mentioning a large-scale conspiracy is away with the fairies. From there one is supposed to deduce that no real conspiracies have ever existed – they are all figments of someone’s inflamed imagination.

But that assumption is manifestly untrue. History abounds in conspiracies, including one that England is going to commemorate with fireworks tomorrow. And the whole history of communism, from Marx to Putin, is one contiguous and demonstrable conspiracy.

Communists – or, to be exact, evil forces inscribing communism on their banners – see the world as a continuous war between good (them) and evil (everyone else, but especially the West). Like the Hundred Years’ War, it ebbs and flows, going through acute and chronic periods. But it never stops.

What makes this war a conspiracy is its unilateral character. Only one side is fighting it, with the other being blissfully unaware, at least during the chronic periods. This state of ignorance must be encouraged and maintained for the communists to gain an upper hand.

That’s why they’ve always employed the tactics of the secret police tradecraft: espionage, sabotage, assassination, deception, disinformation (which Russian word of Latin origin has penetrated Western languages like a spy).

And who could use such secret police tactics better than the secret police itself? Hence the KGB, under different names and guises, always fought for supremacy against the Party.

Only the KGB had in its own estimation the subtlety to soften up the West’s resistance the better to dominate it. And presenting an image of liberalisation – what later got to be known as glasnost and perestroika – has been the KGB’s tactic from its very inception.

Practically every item in the programme associated with Gorbachev and Yeltsyn was first outlined by Stalin’s secret police chief, Beria, directly the dictator died. But Beria jumped the gun. Having found him too rash and his proposals too hasty, his Politburo colleagues killed him.

But, as the standard Soviet eulogy used to go, “our comrade is dead, but his cause lives on”. The KGB eventually triumphed when its head, Andropov, settled in the dictator’s chair. He immediately initiated the programme of deceptive liberalisation, which was carried to a logical conclusion by his disciple, Gorbachev.

Hence, rather than the ultimate triumph of liberal democracy, the collapse of the Soviet Union was merely a transfer of power from the Party to the KGB – and to the subtler methods long favoured by that sinister organisation.

That explains the subsequent events more persuasively than the cock and bull story of the Soviets suddenly seeing the light of democracy.

Loosening or even temporarily abandoning the reins in Eastern Europe was a logical aspect of that tectonic shift, and it was easy to do because the populations of those countries never wanted to be bossed by the Russians anyway.

Still, someone had to go ahead and actually do it all against possible resistance on the part of the die-hard communists and perhaps the army, never an institution in love with radical change.

Hence the KGB and its branches in the bloc set up a series of resistance groups, of which Solidarity was the most prominent. People, tired of communism, flowed in. And the communist parties hardly put up any resistance, which is why their chiefs were allowed to retire quietly.

The only exception was Romania, where Ceaușescu proved slow on the uptake. He had to be brutally murdered with his whole family for others to get the point.

The armies also might have demurred. Hence the defence ministers of five Eastern European countries suffered simultaneous cardiac arrests in the same month of 1984. KGB spy schools teach that, if coincidences number more than two, they aren’t coincidences. But Western commentators never learned that lesson.

I’ve been interpreting those events in the same vein since they were still unfolding in the early 90s. Yet too many academic and journalistic careers were being made on the remains of a collapsed Soviet Union for my, admittedly not very loud, voice to be heard.

At some point, the KGB, fronted by Col. Putin, abandoned subterfuge and openly took over the Russian government. At least 80 per cent of its current members are Putin’s hard-working colleagues – but Western commentators still haven’t cottoned on.

This isn’t just a matter of academic, or journalistic, interest. For the West may be in dire danger, made even deadlier by its own insouciance. But still our leaders (and their mouthpieces) treat Putin with sycophantic ‘understanding’ or even unbridled sympathy.

This is the subtext of the story of Lech Walesa, ‘agent Bolek’. Even if it’s mere speculation, which I’m sure it isn’t, the papers owe it to their charter at least to comment on it. Instead they indulge in the insipid reportage along the aforementioned ABC lines.

This isn’t the exact instruction issued to teachers by the regulator Ofqual. But it’s as near as… well, damn.

Exams, says the regulator, shouldn’t “demotivate” and “disadvantage” pupils, especially those who come from the families of migrants or council estate dwellers. And exposure to difficult words could lead to just such undesirable ends.

Difficult words may be complex, uncommon or abstract, such as “bravery” and “sarcasm”. Or else they may confusingly have two meanings, such as “present” (actually, it’s more than two, but who’s counting?). Exam papers containing such devilish traps compromise “equality”, defeating the real purpose of our education.

It’s not just texts but also contexts that may scupper the egalitarian project: “Contexts such as those related to particular types of housing, family arrangements, or social, travel or cultural experiences may advantage or disadvantage particular groups of learners.”

Chief regulator Dr Jo Saxton said exams should “enable every student to demonstrate what they know, understand and can do. It is crucial assessments are as accessible as possible for all students”. 

A singular antecedent followed by a plural pronoun makes me wonder what Jo’s doctorate is in. Equality studies? Dumbing Down? Patronising Techniques? Not English, by the sound of her. And Jo? British schools, unlike American ones, have pupils, not students.

Our educators seem to lose sight of the real purpose of education. Expressed schematically, it’s to guide pupils from Point A (current knowledge) to Point B (desired knowledge). Applying this self-evident truth to language, it’s to move people from the way they speak to the way they should speak, from the words they know to those they should learn.

Many groups of pupils do express themselves in a patois of desemanticised interjections and derivatives of four-letter words. But surely any teacher worth his salt would seek to broaden their lexical horizons? And how else can that be done if not by exposing pupils to the unmatched treasure trove of English vocabulary?

Words aren’t divided into difficult and easy, Dr Jo. They are divided into right or wrong, precise or ambivalent, elegant or crude. And English is perhaps the best language for such distinctions, what with its lexicon being much bigger than in any other European language (three times as big as in Russian, to take one random example).

The wider the vocabulary, the firmer the grasp of nuanced thought. For words designate concepts and their endless nuances. Hence teaching a pupil new words makes his mind more agile and complex, his knowledge broader, his sensibilities more honed.

The same goes for those supposedly demotivating contexts. A pupil whose quotidian reality is underpinned by crushed beer cans, discarded syringes and gratuitous violence can and should be taught to aspire to a better life, one of beauty, intellect, good manners and emotional continence.

Such aspirations won’t always be realised. Yet each time they are, our society becomes better for welcoming another member fit to live in it.

When I was a child, I and my Russian classmates lived in squalor compared to which a British council estate would have seemed a paragon of luxury. Most of us knew our lives were unlikely to change no matter what we did. They wouldn’t become freer, more interesting or less ugly.

But so much greater was the ardour with which we gobbled up books about faraway lands of knights and their fair ladies, cowboys and Indians, musketeers and cardinals, exotic animals and plants, voyages and flights. We’d then pester our nonplussed parents to tell us what all those unfamiliar words meant.

Asparagus? Parliament? Claret? Judiciary? Tuna? Abbot? My poor mother often didn’t know what some of those words meant either, but she always made a point of trying to find out for my benefit.

As a result, I’ve retained to this day a sense of gratitude every time a writer uses a word I don’t know. By either figuring out its meaning from the context or looking it up, I learn not just a new word, but a new concept or perhaps a new nuance.

That’s how pupils should be taught. They should learn to love learning, to rejoice at feeling their minds growing broader and sharper. They should pick up thousands of new words at an age when their memory is at its most grasping and retentive.

Granted, that’s no easy task for any teacher, school or regulating body. But nothing worth having ever comes easily.

Instead our educators find it simpler to turn schools into dumbed-down laboratories of social engineering, battlegrounds of egalitarianism and wokery.

That’s where the zeitgeist is blowing, and resisting it takes moral and intellectual courage, rare commodities these days. Acting as the zeitgeist’s weathercocks is easier and, in today’s climate, more rewarding.

That’s why our education doesn’t educate. It churns out herds of Mowglis unable to use or understand human speech. They communicate not in full, perfectly parsed sentences but in social media acronyms, such as LOL or FML.

The last two letters in the latter stand for My Life. The first one explains what our educators are doing to education.

If schizophrenia is loss of touch with reality, the men in white coats must be working overtime in Glasgow.

The proceedings at and around COP26 evoke late Fellini films at their most morbid. Lunatics aren’t just running the asylum, they are running the whole city – and tomorrow ze world.

Great Thunberg was in town, having insisted she came by train, not walked across the North Sea all the way from Sweden. That disappointed her admirers who are sure she possesses the requisite ability.

Greta, her agued eyes offset by a rather sinister smile, then proved that no formal education is needed to acquire a fluent command of a foreign language. Pointing at the conference building with a thespian sweep, Greta said: “No more exploitation, no more blah blah blah, no more whatever the fuck they are doing inside there.”

She then led her supporters in a rousing chorus of “You can shove your climate crisis up your arse!”

Greta’s impatience is understandable. Rather than wasting time on chewing the cud, all those country leaders should roll up their sleeves and expurgate every molecule of CO₂ from the atmosphere. And they must do so straight away, not in decades, years or even months.

If the rebuked politicians get their collective finger out and obey the command so elegantly expressed, they are facing a tall task.

The task may also be thankless, considering that CO₂ accounts for only one in 85,000 molecules of the atmosphere, with just three per cent of them anthropogenic. Yet by some unidentified magic, eliminating this tiny trace of a trace gas is supposed to save the world from being alternately shallow-fried and flooded.

The aforementioned leaders are bargaining with one another about the earliest date they can put their divine powers into effect. Boris Johnson is in the leading pack, having committed Britain to going carbon-neutral by 2050.

With his verbose flair, the PM spoke metaphorically of a doomsday device ticking away, ready to go off with an almighty bang. The world, he said, has “long since run the clock down on climate change”. The clock now shows “one minute to midnight”, he added, looking at his expensive watch for visual effect.

Mr Johnson thus went those street-corner preachers one better. Those troubled individuals bang their drums, shouting that the end of the world is nigh. But, unlike our PM, they can’t pinpoint that unfortunate demise to any particular timeframe. He can. Not only is the end of the world coming, but Mr Johnson knows exactly when.

But fear not: he also knows that Doomsday can be averted by expurgating three per cent of one molecule in 85,000, thereby selflessly destroying the British economy for the good of the planet. Every country must do her bit, even if her bit amounts to 1.1 per cent of global carbon emissions, as Britain’s does.

India’s bit is much larger, putting her in the bronze medal position, behind only China and the US, in the race towards Doomsday. That’s why Boris was disappointed with his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi.

Mr Modi is aware of the approaching disaster, but his mental clock shows an earlier time than five to midnight. That’s why he’s only ready to commit his country to destroying its economy by 2070, not Britain’s more responsible 2050.

That’s not good enough, complained Boris. Couldn’t they split the difference, with India joining China in pledging 2060 as the cut-off point? No, they couldn’t, objected Mr Modi.

India is still a developing country, he explained not unreasonably. And, before an edifice can be pulled down it has to be built first. Hence India’s economy won’t be ready for destruction until 2070 at the earliest.

Mr Modi, being an infidel, thus proved he is denied direct access to God, which privilege can be institutionally claimed by Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Trained to express himself in the scriptural idiom of parables, metaphors and similes, His Grace warned that the world is facing a “genocide on an infinitely greater scale” than that suffered by the Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

Failure to prevent this Holocaust Mark II would leave world leaders forever cursed, added His Grace, although he refrained from putting himself forth as the one to administer said curse ex cathedra.

Even so, his little simile upset Jewish organisations and others who feel called upon to be upset for any reason whatsoever. The outcry was so loud that the good archbishop immediately grovelled: “I unequivocally apologise for the words I used when trying to emphasise the gravity of the situation facing us at COP26,” he wrote.

He should have stood his ground with the courage and fortitude displayed by Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer, his Anglican precursors who suffered a fiery death for their Protestant beliefs.

If I were His Grace, I would have referred to them rather than the Jews, comparing global warming to the pyre outside Oxford’s Balliol College. But even the comparison with the Holocaust could have been defended on purely numerical grounds.

After all, only six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis. Global warming, on the other hand, could incinerate the entire world population that at the moment stands at 7.9 billion. And it’ll probably double by 2070, the year by which Mr Modi undertook to avert the impending catastrophe.

Messrs Xi and Putin callously saw fit to give COP a miss. They thus denied themselves the chance to hear our PM’s peroration stating that there are “no compelling excuses for our procrastination”.

He agreed with Greta that the actions taken so far amount to “drops in a rapidly warming ocean”, thus proving that the same passionate message could be delivered without resorting to obscenities.

Joe Biden could have heard the soliloquy but didn’t. He dozed off, looking peaceful and untroubled in his slumber.

When political vocabulary becomes ambiguous, meaningless or downright misleading, the problem isn’t with the vocabulary. It’s with the politics.

In fact, such lexical mayhem is a sure sign of a rapidly widening gulf separating politics from reality. It’s also a sign of glossocracy, a tyranny using language as a mechanism for exerting control.

Any tyranny uses words mendaciously for, if used in their real meaning, they lose their sharp edge as weapons of crowd control.

For example, the word ‘Democratic’ prominently figures in the nomenclature of some of the bloodiest tyrannies in history, such as North Korea. Ditto the word ‘People’s’ that tends to designate countries where the people in question are enslaved.

Closer to home, ‘liberal’ means illiberal; ‘diversity’ means conformity or, better still, uniformity; ‘justice’ (variously prefaced) means injustice; ‘progressive’ means regressive; ‘equality’ means inequality, ‘fairness’ means unfairness and so on. But the word that particularly fascinates me is ‘populism’.

Generally speaking, new words are coined when the existing ones prove inadequate to the task of denoting inchoate political concepts. But this dread word, populism, seems to denote nothing of any substance at all.

The word isn’t new, but only recently did it begin to gain wide currency. It probably originated in the 19^th century, when the left-wing People’s, or Populist, Party was active in the US. The term then fell into disuse, only to come back in recent times.

Its etymology suggests seeking popularity by a broad appeal to the masses, in which meaning populism seems indistinguishable from democracy. Populus means the same in Latin as demos in Greek. Hence the two terms borrow their roots from classical languages to signify something so similar as to be the same.

The second part of democracy implies not just appeal to the people but actual self-government by them. Yet we all know that’s just a figure of speech, don’t we? People in democracies don’t govern themselves. They merely elect those who do the governing in their name.

Democracy and populism thus mean the same thing in essence: appeal to the people, called either demos or populus. However, if they are identical in meaning, you’d think one of them would become redundant and fall by the wayside. Yet they both have a job to do.

For words don’t just have a semantic denotation. They also have an emotional connotation, there to convey the user’s feelings, rather than the actual meaning.

Since emotions are boundless, applying them to semantics opens up a whole new glossocratic field. And the bucketful of emotional colouring thrown at the word populism in modern democracies is mostly dark.

Democracy, especially when modified by liberal, is widely accepted as not just a virtuous political system but, according to a particularly inane strain of thought, the only possible one. Populism, however, gets nothing but bad press.

This, though we’ve established that the Latin and the Greek here converge to convey exactly the same meaning, at least in democratic countries. Populism in non-democratic countries usually serves to denote the method by which nasty characters like Hitler, Mussolini or Péron rise to power.

But what does it mean here? What job does it do that democracy can’t do?

First, the word clearly doesn’t attach to any specific set of beliefs. The populist tag has been borne in recent times by such disparate characters as Trump, Farage, Palin, Netanyahu, Zemmour, Le Pen, Zeman, Ocasio-Cortez, Tsipras, Orbàn, Berlusconi, Wilders, Walesa and even, God save us all, Boris Johnson.

If you go down this impromptu incomplete list, you’ll see that it covers the whole political spectrum from right to left and everything in between. So I must repeat the question in the title. What on earth is populism?

Clearly, its domain in Western democracies isn’t denotation but connotation. Or else it has to do with style, not with substance.

The connotation is these days strictly negative. Yes, democratic politicians seem to be saying, we and the populists try to affect the voting pattern of the same electorate in essentially the same way. But somehow the populists’ way is wrong, unfair.

How so? Well, you see, they treat with disdain all the shibboleths of the ruling elite, even if they themselves belong to it, as most do. They court mass support by talking to the masses directly, over the elite’s heads and in a crude language the masses are likely to understand.

Populists adopt for their nefarious purposes the folksy bonhomie of a bloke next door, a pint in one hand, a fag in the other, a four-letter word on his lips. I’m one of you, a populist seems to be saying, even if I went to a fancy school, have billions in the bank and a mile from my gate to the door.

Populists, in other words, are traitors to their class, or rather coterie. Hence the word is strictly pejorative in modern usage, used by the right to put down the left or, more usually, vice versa.

But if it’s merely a term of abuse, it trespasses on the territory already densely populated by thousands of derogatory epithets, differing from most of them by being lazy and unspecific.

What could be lazier than using the same word to lump together, say, Trump, Ocasio-Cortez and Johnson? I’d happily describe all of them in uncomplimentary terms, but not the same ones.

I may, for example, call Trump a loudmouthed vulgarian, Ocasio-Cortez an aspiring Bolshevik and Johnson a chameleonic lightweight, thus focusing on the salient, and unsavoury, characteristic of each one. But I’d give them all the courtesy of keeping them apart.

All things considered, populism is a parasite non-word, at least in any democratic context. Thus it has no right to exist.   

You didn’t think all that brouhaha was really about fishing licences, did you?

If you did, Manny has earned top marks for honesty by explaining what’s what. Fishing licences are merely a pretext. The real reason for his threats is different.

Britain must be punished for the temerity of leaving the EU, pour encourager les autres. The phrase, incidentally, has Anglo-French antecedents. It was used by Voltaire in his Candide to mock the plight of the British admiral Byng, court-marshalled and executed during the Seven Years’ War for ordering an unauthorised retreat.

“It is good,” commented Voltaire, “to kill the odd admiral now and then to encourage the others.”

Manny is no doubt inspired by that bon mot. As applied to the EU, it means he wants to warn other potential absconders that leaving is worse than staying.

His threats are hard to countenance but easy to understand. For only Germany, France and – perhaps – Benelux have any warm feelings about the Franco-German protectorate known as the EU.

Most of the others, and probably all the Eastern European members, have warm feelings only about cold EU cash. They take turns teetering on the brink of departure, only to be bribed back into the fold. At the moment, it’s Poland’s turn, but Greece and Hungary have also had a go, as others will in due course.

The problem is that the EU’s wallet has shrunk somewhat since Brexit. Because its leaders must at least pretend that they are committed to fiscal discipline, they can’t just get the printing press in high gear and shower the doubters with rapidly inflating banknotes.

With the carrot getting smaller and smaller, they have to use a bigger stick. Hence all this talk about punishing Britain and implicitly any other country heading for the way out.

That intention has always been there, but until now top EU politicians have tactfully refrained from expressing it in so many words. However, Manny’s loose talk may sink EU ships, and I don’t just mean those larcenous French trawlers.

Punishing a country isn’t the same as putting a failed admiral up against the wall. Countries have more resources than admirals for fighting back.

Even expressing such a punitive intention has since time immemorial been considered an act of war. And Britain, decadent and woke as she may be, has never willingly bent over to take six of the best.

Gott strafe England was Germany’s slogan in the First World War, but God demonstrably failed to comply, choosing to punish Germany instead. In the next war, RAF Lancasters razed most German cities to the ground, thus responding to another attempt by a major continental power to exact punishment.

More to the point, Napoleon’s earlier attempts to penalise Britain for steering an independent course led him straight to St Helena, with a stopover at Waterloo. If Manny indeed takes his cue from history, he ought to study it from all sides.

The example of Algeria should disabuse him of the notion that France can force other countries into compliance. The ensuing war almost destroyed France, with only de Gaulle’s statecraft preventing a military coup. And Manny is no de Gaulle.

A trade war with Britain would hurt both parties, and it’s not a foregone conclusion that Britain would suffer more. EU politicians may be willing to cut off their economic nose to spite their face, but are EU industries?

EU economies aren’t doing well at the moment, and their growth is more sluggish than Britain’s. Against that background, how, for example, would German car manufacturers react to the British market, 10 per cent of their total exports, slamming the door in their faces?

Britain has been busily and rather successfully cultivating trade relationships outside the EU. Facing overt hostility, she may accelerate that process, for example by making the US an offer it wouldn’t be able to refuse.

But it doesn’t only have to be passive resistance. Hostile action should produce a hostile reaction. Britain could, to name one obvious stratagem, try to exploit the possible fissures in the EU by encouraging vacillators, such as Poland, to break away.

Encouragement could take various forms, from moral support to beneficial trade deals to perhaps even subsidies. NATO could also provide a lever with which to prise some marginal members from the EU, for example by using bilateral defence treaties.

Also, most Britons who either live in France or go there regularly are retirees or what the French call rentiers. Yet most French people who live in Britain work or have business interests here, typically in finance. Faced with the threat of losing their livelihood, they may exert enough pressure on Macron for him to think carefully about his words and deeds.

Manny is talking tough to court the kind of voters who are likely to support Le Pen or perhaps Zemmour. He has already made some belligerent if empty noises about Putin, having previously been one of the poodles in Vlad’s European kennel.

Now he’s flexing his muscles towards Britain, “France’s historical enemy”. Quite. And he should remember how all the previous battles between the two countries went.

The EU has always had something of a mafia family about it. Any normal treaty tying countries together in some sort of alliance has to have a provision for abrogation. Should such a provision be invoked legally, that should be the end of the matter.

Mafia families are different. They live by the rule of ‘once in, never out’. Anyone who disobeys is likely to get whacked, and Manny’s present posturing comes from the same style manual. But it’s misapplied.

For the situation doesn’t involve an all-powerful don and his trembling, cowering victim. It’s a confrontation of equals, and two can play the same game.

A modern nation can’t go all green, but it can die trying.

The forthcoming COP26 love-in will do just that, but we are all urged to chip in. Just follow the steps outlined in The Times, and you’ll acquire divine powers by preventing climate from ever changing.

Any old Tom, Dick or Harry can now go Joshua one better by gaining permanent sway over the elements. That amateur only managed to make the sun stand still for a while – but we can control its activity in perpetuity, thereby eliminating 95 per cent of the factors affecting climate.

To begin with, we must all go vegan. You see, each time a cow, sheep or pig breaks wind, it produces methane, a satanic greenhouse gas. And every attempt to make animals mind their manners has so far failed.

Thus, since we can’t eliminate livestock flatulence, eliminating flatulent livestock is the only logical solution. We should all eat nothing but plant-based food – and grow it ourselves.

A word of caution though. Growing our own pulses, especially beans, is a planet-saving idea, but careful how you consume such food.

There’s a distinct danger that people on such a diet may emit even more methane than the newly culled livestock ever did. Since culling people is an idea whose time hasn’t quite come yet, each vegetable should carry a flatulence rating.

That would educate people to the climatic perils of some produce. A diet heavy in red beans and Jerusalem artichokes, for example, is in no way preferable to tucking into a sirloin, pork chop or lamb stew.

Then we are reminded of a new planet-saving legislation, the Right to Repair Law. It obligates manufacturers of household equipment to make enough spare parts to help your toaster last for ever.

We’ve been too profligate in discarding broken appliances. We forget that, before it makes its way into our kitchen, a new toaster has to be manufactured first. And doing so produces, on average, a hell of a lot of CO₂.

Also, since steel-making involves much physical effort, the likelihood of enhanced methane emissions is also high. Our planet is thus hit with a double whammy so hard it may never again pick itself up from the floor.

The Times solution is ingenious. Instead of dumping your broken toasters, kettles and  dishwashers, learn to fix them. Surely you have enough spare time on your hands to take a few courses in electric repairs if it means saving the planet?

Barring that, we now have 200 repair cafés across the UK, so called because presumably you can enjoy a latte while your toaster gets a new lease on life. Take it easy on that beverage though.

Studies show that the ingredients of a latte, caffeine, milk and sugar, have a strong flatulent effect. Thus, while taking care of one problem, you may be inadvertently creating another. Perhaps you ought to have a nice glass of celery juice instead.

As you’ll doubtless be pleased to know we now have various apps for keeping track of your carbon. A useful innovation would be for the app to zap you each time you exceed your daily allowance, although care must be taken not to reach the electric chair level of 2,200 volts.

However, it shouldn’t take meticulous accounting for you to realise that every time you exhale you destroy the planet with CO₂. Ideally you should stop breathing altogether, but that solution has to stay on hold until all government programmes have gathered momentum.

Meanwhile, avoid activities that make you breathe, and therefore exhale, harder. If you can’t get rid of all exercise, at least stop lifting weights. There, in addition to blowing out CO₂, you also poison the planet by emitting methane (if you have to ask how, you’ve never pumped iron).

We are also encouraged to turn the heating off during cold winters. Ideally, we’d all thereby die from hypothermia and save the planet by ceasing to emit greenhouse gases.

But barring that, we can keep ourselves warm by wearing several layers of clothing indoors. There’s a catch though.

The garments can’t be made of wool or leather because the animals that produce them also produce methane. Nor can it be made of synthetic materials because they are plastics and therefore the work of the devil.

A coat of mail or any other armour is also off limits because of the CO₂ and methane emissions resulting from steel-making. Perhaps we can all equip our houses with tastefully lacquered wooden boxes that can also double as… well, other useful things.

While we are on the subject of plastics, they are made of hydrocarbons. Hence every time you buy food packaged in plastic, you stick another knife into the planet’s back. Tins and glass containers are wrong too because the former are made of metal, and have you seen glassworks with their belching smokestacks?

This gets us back to the allotment in which you can grow your whole diet, from brekkie to supper. Dig up enough potatoes to keep body and soul together, shun pulses (see above for the reason) and you’ll be doing the planet a huge favour.

Yet whatever goes in must come out, which simple truth brings loo rolls into focus. Most of them are made of paper, which in turn is made of wood pulp. Wood pulp comes from trees, and when one is felled the planet dies a little.

The solution, according to The Times, comes from a product elegantly called Who Gives a Crap. It’s made of 100 per cent recycled paper and conveniently comes in batches of 48 rolls.

On second thoughts, this is a false convenience. For a huge pack of 48 Who Gives a Crap rolls has to be carried home by car – and don’t get me going on that devil’s chariot.

The Times says you must drive an electric car, but you shouldn’t buy one. Stealing one wouldn’t solve the problem because that only switches ownership from one planet murderer to another.

However, hiring an electric vehicle each time you plan to buy a pack of 48 Who Gives a Crap rolls will go a long way towards saving the planet from its death throes.

But whatever you do, don’t shop on the net. Deliveries of such purchases produce half of our CO₂ emissions. And quite a bit of methane too, especially if the delivery man has to carry heavy weights up the stairs (to their credit they hardly ever do so any longer, and I thank them on behalf of the planet).

COP26 is our last chance to save ourselves, and I propose a slogan that’ll give it wings. If we all wear T-shirts saying “Fair COP, governors”, we’ll help the conference no end. Just make sure those garments are made of natural fibres.

Two-thirds of recently polled lesbians claim they’ve been pressured or even threatened into having sex with trans ‘women’.

Whenever they exercise their God-given right to say no, they may be forever branded as transphobes or, even worse, terfs.

Now here’s your chance to prove your vocabulary is larger than mine. Do you know what ‘terf’ means? Neither did I. However, having done some lexicographic research, I’ve found out it stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist.

If a lesbian qualifies for the last two words of that designation, as most do, she must forswear the first two or bear the stigma of transphobia and terfdom. That effectively means being drummed out of the woke club, a fate than which nothing is worse.

To prove they belong, lesbians must commit not only their hearts and souls but also their genitals to this worthy political cause. That makes me intensely jealous, not to say resentful.

How come no woman has ever felt compelled to prove her conservative credentials by sleeping with me? Don’t answer that; my self-esteem is threadbare as it is.

Some of the comments made by the poll respondents are heart-rending. One lesbian complained tearfully: “I thought I would be called a transphobe or that it would be wrong of me to turn down a trans woman who wanted to exchange nude pictures.”

A fair exchange is no robbery, I say. And that same resentment is again gnawing at my heart. Why hasn’t any woman ever asked me to exchange nude pictures? Nor even any man? Not even in my younger, leaner days? Hold on a second… I need a long, stiff… drink to settle my nerves.

Another respondent faced a dilemma both moral and physiological: “I was told that homosexuality doesn’t exist and I owed it to my trans sisters to unlearn my ‘genital confusion’ so I can enjoy letting them penetrate me.”

The word ‘penetrate’ suggests that her sister hasn’t yet divested herself of the fixtures more readily associated with a brother. Indeed, the poor woman described her pursuer as a “pre-op trans guy.”

That pre-op trans guy wants to have the best of two worlds, or rather more than two. That’s too greedy for words. The chap strives to outdo Caesar by not only being “a husband to every woman and a wife to every man”, but also a husband to every man and a wife to every woman. How rapacious can one get?

But I too am confused, though more lexically than genitally. What does it mean, “homosexuality doesn’t exist”? It manifestly does, doesn’t it?

If I were that woman, I’d call the police and complain that someone has just committed the hate crime of being dismissive about my sexuality. That action would absolve her of disloyalty to the LGBT+ cause, although that dread word ‘terf’ would still be left wafting through the air.

One woman explained that lesbians’ standards are different from men’s. She, for example, would only have sex with persons who are biologically female, regardless of their self-identification.

My confusion deepened, for my standards are exactly the same as hers. I’ve never had sex with anyone or anything other than biological females, nor have ever been tempted to do so. I hate to keep referring solipsistically to myself, but have I done something wrong?

Another lesbian was told by a rejected trans that, given the choice between killing her or Hitler, he/she/it would choose her every time. Since Hitler was long since dead, that left her as the only available option.

I don’t know if the poor thing succumbed to that not-so-veiled threat but, if she did, that sounds suspiciously like rape. Oh sorry, I forgot. Only straight men can be accused of that heinous crime.

Do you ever get the feeling that life is passing you by? That other people are having all the fun? I do, all the time. But in this case I’m relieved to see that the fun I’m missing comes at a cost.

The woke ‘community’ seems to have much more stringent membership standards than any Pall Mall club. At the Carlton, White’s or the RAC you know exactly what the terms and conditions are, and they are highly unlikely to change radically in any foreseeable future.

By contrast, the Woke Club piles new requirements on every day, almost at the same speed at which it coins and enforces unlikely neologisms. How do those poor souls ever keep up?