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Laura Amherst, who often prances about naked for the Extinction Rebellion, has now gone on hunger strike.

That seems to be the only rational response to Boris Johnson’s failure to respond to her letter. My suggestion would be for her not to write but to insist on a face-to-face meeting. Our PM is known to respond to female charms, especially if they can be assessed unclad.

‘Climate Tits’, as she calls herself, states her intentions succinctly, as befits a politics student from Brighton: “Basically I have made the decision to not eat any more food until Boris Johnson actually addresses this letter and XR’s demands… This is going to sound so dramatic but I’m prepared to die for this.”

Such a tragic outcome may be a long time coming. By the looks of her, Miss Amherst has sufficient reserves of subcutaneous fat to last at least a month, perhaps longer.

Meanwhile, our football fans, widely known for their sensitivity, can begin to compose a song starting with the words: “Would you like a chicken supper, Climate Tits? Would you like a chicken supper, you filthy climate…” I’ll leave it for them to supply the noun here replaced with an ellipsis. Traditionally, the tune is borrowed from She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain.

(For those of you who are either too young, too foreign or too highbrow to understand the reference, a similar song was sung by football lovers in 1981, after the IRA terrorist Bobby Sands starved himself to death in prison.)

Far be it from me to accuse Miss Amhurst of lowly motives, but her manner of protest isn’t only impassioned but also lucrative. She has started a web page, which earned her £18,000 last month.

Even if she keeps her promise to donate 75 per cent of it to her beloved cause, she’ll still have a bit left over. That’ll do nicely, especially considering that she doesn’t have to spend much on clothes. (A note to myself: ask Penelope to choose a worthy cause to support.)

One wonders about a cause that can be championed so remuneratively in such a manner. By way of comparison, a few years ago many of my friends went on a Countryside Alliance march to support hunting. All the marchers, however, covered their nudity, mostly with tweeds and Barbours.

That conferred dignity on the procession, which nonetheless failed to overturn the ban on riding to hounds. Perhaps I may suggest that next time they swap dignity for efficacy by dropping their kit… No, scratch that idea. I mean, have you seen my friends?

Britain is in the grip of two epidemics. One, Covid, is abating; the other, casual exhibitionism, is not. That reverses a rather long tradition of decency that goes back to the first trend setters, Adam and Eve, who started a fad for fig leaves.

Since then, civilised people have shunned walking starkers through the streets. Those who didn’t used to be arrested for public indecency, but that’s no longer a possibility. For indecency to exist, there must be decency – and that condition is no longer met.

That’s why public nudity, immortalised in publicity shots, has become a widespread form of political self-expression for causes worthy or, typically, otherwise.

It has been on display in protests against furs, various wars, culling of animals, LGBT+ rights, women’s and prostitutes’ rights and so on. I wonder why they bother.

Naked women no longer have any shock value, what with the abundance of such images in every medium known to man. If in the old days newsagents coyly wrapped girlie mags in cellophane and kept them on the top shelves, today naked female flesh attacks – or perhaps tickles – our senses at every corner.

One has to believe that all those nudists with a political dimension are there to prove that Marshall McLuhan was right: the medium is the message. They disrobe not because they genuinely think that’ll advance their cause, but because they are attention-seeking sluts with a keen commercial sense.

Miss Amherst has a body to die for, but I doubt she will. In fact. I’m willing to bet she won’t. She’ll simply catch the moment when enough capital has been made out of her stunt and move on to other things. Anti-capitalism perhaps?

And Laura: no cheating by smuggling in bacon sarnies in the middle of the night. Just pretend you’re a naked Bobby Sands.

First, draw an imaginary political line from right to left. Now decide where you place yourself on that line, and why.

I’d suggest that, wherever it is, you’ve arrived at your political convictions by an amalgam of reason and feeling, ratiocination and intuition, judgement and prejudice (when I use this word, it’s free of pejorative connotations).

Those who claim their political beliefs are totally rational are deceiving themselves. Ratio is only one ingredient in a complex mix. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that there’s no rationalisation in politics, only post-rationalisation – thinking through something already felt intuitively.

However, the farther left one goes along our imaginary line, the smaller does the rational component become. Feelings, some noble, most despicable, no longer get the benefit of post-rationalisation. By the time we’ve traced the line to the extreme left end, feelings are all that remains.

That’s why I oversimplify when saying that left-wingers aren’t just misguided but actually stupid. They may not be. They may have an IQ breaking through the ceiling of the scale. It’s just that whatever intelligence they possess isn’t involved in their politics.

This brings us to Sally Rooney, the Marxist author of several soft-porn bestsellers with a communist dimension. I’m sure that no one capable of selling books by the million can be stupid, in the IQ sense of the word, but that may be envy talking.

One way or the other, whenever Sally delivers herself of a political statement, it’s clear that her mind took no part in formulating it. Her inspiration in politics, as well as in her art, comes from a different part of herself, one located halfway between her hairline and her toes.

In that spirit, Sally has denied the Israelis the guilty pleasure of enjoying her latest novel in ways that literature isn’t really supposed to be enjoyed. Israel’s hard line on the Palestinians is incompatible with Sally’s soft porn.

“I simply do not feel it would be right for me under the present circumstances to accept a new contract with an Israeli company that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people,” explained Sally, a prominent member of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

Descartes teaches that all knowledge comes from comparing two or more things. Applying that Cartesian wisdom to Sally’s statement, one wonders if she even knows the meaning of the words she uses. She certainly hasn’t arrived at accusations of apartheid by comparing the situation of Arabs in Israel with that of Jews in Arab countries.

Let’s help her out, shall we?

Large numbers of Jews always lived everywhere in the Middle East for many centuries. Yet now Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, the UAE and Qatar have Jewish populations of under 100. Iraq, whose capital was for millennia one of the world’s Jewish centres, now tolerates a mere four Jews. Not four hundred. Not four thousand. Four, as in one small family.

That makes Iraq a Judeophile country compared to Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Jordan. None of them has any Jews at all.

By contrast, Israel is home to 1.9 million Arabs, almost 20 per cent of the population. And they enjoy the kind of civil rights no Arab countries grant even to true-green Muslims.

My point is that it doesn’t even matter whether or not Sally knows these statistics. Her Marxist (which is to say West-hating) viscera demand that Israel be branded as an apartheid state. (I suspect old-fashioned antisemitism also may have a role to play. In politics, this is mostly evinced these days by various socialist, especially Marxist, parties.)

On the other hand, all Arab countries, and especially those wild-eyed Palestinian terrorists, are fighters for universal justice.

Hatred is the main ingredient in the cocktail of Marxist feelings, and in that sense Marxism is no different from Nazism. Hence it’s important to remember that Sally is inspired not by loving Muslims but by hating the West, of which Israel is the sole Middle Eastern bulwark.

For she has no problem with her soft porn being translated into Chinese. She must know that her Chinese comrades are throwing Muslims, the lucky ones, into concentration camps, while killing the unlucky ones out of hand. Not a problem for our Sally.

Nor is she objecting to her books being published in Russia, where more Muslims have been killed in the past 20 years than Israel has managed in the 70 years of defending itself against those who seek its annihilation.

And Marxists, whose faithful comrade Sally is, murdered in one century, the 20^th, more people than had died violently in the previous 5,000 years of recorded history.

I can just hear Sally say that Marxism is a sublime idea unfortunately perverted by the excessive zeal of its practitioners.

I wish I had 10 quid for every time I’ve heard this idiocy, and I always reply the same way: “Read The Communist Manifesto and any writings by the founders of the sublime idea, Marx, Engels, Lenin et al. Then tell me which of their aspirations appeal to you.”

Confiscation of all private property? Taking all children from their parents to raise them as wards of the state? Murdering millions of people by category, either race or class? Concentration camps for those who disagree? Complete state control over people’s lives? Conscripting the whole population into labour armies?

All those ideas, and then some, are to be found in the works of Marx and his co-conspirators. If the Bolsheviks perverted their teaching, it’s only in the direction of softening it.

When I say those things, I too speak from emotions, not thought. I go against my own conviction that Marxists don’t think even if they can. They emote, and no rational argument can ever hold sway over visceral feelings. So why bother? One reason only.

Lefties aren’t individuals; they are case studies. That’s why I only talk to or about them when they are typical cases. And Sally is as typical as they come.

Black scientists insist Britain is “institutionally racist” and, being scientists, they try to support that hypothesis with empirical observation expressed in a mathematical form.

Blacks, they’ve discovered, hold a mere 3.5 per cent of professorships. QED. Case made. What other proof of racism can anyone possibly want?

I could reply that, since blacks make up three per cent of the UK’s population, institutional racism is here expressing itself less than stridently. We are, after all, encouraged to believe that every racial and social group must be proportionately represented in everything: government, universities, theatre. An exception is only ever allowed in sports, but it’s the right kind of exception.

Hence, anything greater than three per cent of blacks in professor posts represents reverse discrimination. That, however, isn’t a problem. It’s the right kind of discrimination.

But I’ll leave the number-crunching to those who do it professionally, such as our scientists. Alas, they are probably not social scientists because, if they were, they wouldn’t make such an elementary conceptual error.

No, take that back. Since most of today’s social scientists see Britain as a branch of the Ku Klux Klan, they’d allege anything to confirm their ideological bias. So let’s just say that real social scientists would know how to analyse and juxtapose demographic data objectively.

For discrimination may not be responsible for the underrepresentation of some groups. Moreover, on general principle, it’s extremely unlikely that British universities, which are all competing for the accolade of Wokier Than Thou, would practise institutional racism. They’d be more inclined to discriminate in favour of blacks.

That aside, the hypothesis of academic racism fails the Popper test: it can be neither proved nor falsified empirically. It can only be stated as an a priori assertion in the form of an unsound syllogism: the UK is institutionally racist. There aren’t enough black professors in UK universities. Ergo, UK universities are institutionally racist.

It’s nothing short of astounding how scientists fail to apply their customary methodology to their ideological biases. If they didn’t, they’d realise that a multitude of factors determine the proportion of blacks (or anyone else) within a professional (or any other) group.

For one thing, proportionate representation in any group has never been achieved anywhere, even when that was an explicit intent. For example, there is no evidence that parents discriminate against their younger children – in fact, the opposite is just as likely.

Nevertheless firstborn children win more academic honours than all their younger siblings combined – even in families with as many as five children. And Asians, who are as likely as blacks to be victims of prejudice, consistently outperform whites in all academic and professional outcomes.

Thomas Sowell (himself black) points out that in the last half of the 20^th century, Jews – who make up less than one per cent of global population – received 22 per cent of the Nobel Prizes in chemistry and 32 per cent in both medicine and physics. This in spite of having found themselves on the receiving end of hatred and abuse in many parts of the world for centuries.

To understand why there aren’t relatively more black professors than blacks in the population, we’d have to look at hundreds of variables, such as: proportions of single-parent families, median incomes, school attendance, drug and alcohol use, areas of residence, numbers of books in households, motivations to succeed academically.

And I’m even willing to risk summary arrest by suggesting that the median IQs of various groups may also play a role. In the US, for example, the descending order of collective median IQs is as follows: Asians, Jews, non-Jewish whites, blacks. This also happens to be the descending order of their economic and professional success.

Sowell doesn’t dispute that blacks have a lower median IQ, although he shows convincingly that, as blacks ascend the social ladder, their IQ improves, to the point where it’s indistinguishable from the whites’. 

In general, he denies that any institutional bias currently exists anywhere in the anglophone West. But then Sowell is an honest scholar and a first-rate thinker. We no longer expect to find such people among our academics of any colour, certainly not when they pronounce on social and cultural issues.

When scientists lose the ability to look at data dispassionately and go anywhere the data take them, you know the end of the world is nigh. And when they don’t even bother to look at the data before spouting off, you know the end has already arrived.

Certainly not on the one he professes to love so much. If he were indeed an earthling, he’d have a firmer grasp on life, people and events.

Prince Charles is a man of infinite compassion and understanding. That’s good, in general. Except that he seems to reserve those laudable feelings for assorted ecofascists, such as Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and Greta Thunberg.

“All these young people feel nothing is ever happening so of course they’re going to get frustrated,” commiserated HRH. “I totally understand because nobody would listen and they see their future being totally destroyed.”

I’ve always had reservations about Charles’s intellect, but now I’m beginning to be worried about his sanity as well. For divorce from reality is the first symptom of schizophrenia.

“Nobody would listen”, Your Royal Highness? Are you joking?

Alas, everyone listens to that evil child with learning difficulties: presidents, prime ministers, parliamentarians, the UN, the EU and even heirs to some worthy thrones. Greta’s illiterate, hysterical harangues are treated with the reverence denied God’s Commandments.

When Trump once appeared mildly dismissive in her saintly presence, he was skewered by public indignation. Whatever next! Is he going to say there are only so many Haitians the US should welcome? Off with his head.

Nor is it just Greta. All those thugs using climate as a pretext for screaming their hatred of our civilisation enjoy as wide an audience as they wish. And it’s not just that grown-ups listen to them – they do as they are told, or rather screamed.

Heads of governments, including ours, have committed their countries to destroying their economies and impoverishing their people for the sake of acting on Greta’s febrile fantasies. Doing otherwise would paint a giant target on their backs, and anyone, from the press to the opposition parties, would be taking pot shots.

As to those poor youngsters who paralyse city centres and block major thoroughfares, their future isn’t threatened by warm weather. It’s threatened by their own thuggish idiocy – and by those who take their obscene propaganda at face value.

“I understand why they go out but it isn’t helpful I don’t think to do it in a way that alienates people,” continued the prince. Right. So blocking the M25 to prevent ambulances from taking people to hospital isn’t “helpful”?

It’s actually quite a bit worse than that. It’s criminal, and the police should disperse those crazed fanatics with maximum force (live rounds would be my preference, but I realise that’s too much to hope for), arrest those who resist and fast-track them to trial and prison.

HRH then started mouthing the sort of nonsense that made one feel he must have been delirious. Apparently, his Aston Martin runs on the by-products of wine- and cheese-making.

There I detected a kindred soul. Wine and cheese figure prominently in my driving too, every time I go home after a dinner out. But I put them inside myself, not my fuel tank, and I do recommend this saner option.

I also feel like trading my 3-litre car for a real guzzler, just to spite HRH and the cretins with whom he feels so much kinship. And I want to upgrade my diet for the same reason.

For HRH boasted that he abstains from meat and fish on two days a week, and dairy on one. “If more people did that it would reduce a lot of the pressure on the environment,” opined the prince.

I eat meat or fish every day, but now I’ll probably switch to twice a day, and cholesterol be damned. On second thoughts, perhaps not. One should avoid childish gestures.

But just imagine how much better off the environment would be if more people starved, which incidentally many have throughout history, every time the Earth – sorry, I mean ‘our planet’ – was going through its glacial periods. Conversely, during the interglacial periods, like the one today and also in Roman and medieval times, crops grew abundant, cattle grew fat, people were well-fed.

And what do you know, when grapes grew in the north of Scotland, and global temperatures were some 10 degrees higher than now, those toga-clad Romans shunned SUVs, aerosol sprays and jet travel. And the Scots, who hadn’t yet invented kilts, walked around wearing next to nothing.

Speaking of the gruesome fate awaiting ‘our planet’, the prince played Cassandra on heavy downers: “It’ll be catastrophic. It is already beginning to be catastrophic because nothing in nature can survive the stress that is created by these extremes of weather.”

He should talk to God about this, telling him to amend His ways. Lord, I can hear HRH say, we beseech thee, please desist from what thou hast been doing ever since thou created our, or rather thy, planet. Please spare us that ever-changing solar activity that produces these extremes in weather.

Then the skies will open, and a booming voice will come from high above: “Charles, don’t worry about things you don’t understand. Go home, stop pouring good claret into your fuel tank – and don’t be a royal pain.”

P.S. Tory MP Dehenna Davison has come out as bisexual, assuring the nation that her sexuality is no big deal. If so, why did she have to declare it publicly? My guess is she knew someone was about to out her and decided to preempt that attack by beating that reprobate to the punch.

Prof. Kathleen Stock seems to have every qualification to lecture on philosophy at a modern university, in her case Sussex.

She focuses her intellectual powers on a branch of philosophy unknown to Plato or Kant: gender and sexual orientation. TICK.

She is left-wing, thereby meeting an ironclad requirement for a professor of the humanities. DOUBLE TICK.

She is a woman. MULTIPLE TICKS, especially since this commendable ‘gender orientation’ is rare among philosophers (and, Elizabeth Anscombe excepted, nonexistent among important ones).

She is a lesbian. Even MORE TICKS, for this ‘sexual orientation’ delivers a slap in the face of traditional morality – and isn’t that what philosophy is all about?

What more could one possibly wish for? Quite a bit, actually. For modernity is nothing if not absolutist. It isn’t enough to tick many, or even most, boxes. If one remains unticked, the offender is cancelled.

In Prof. Stock’s case, that box is one in which she branded herself as an out-and-out transphobe. If your modern is rusty, allow me to translate.

You may be confused by the eclectic derivation of this term: the prefix trans- is Latin, while the root phobia is Greek. Incidentally, the same stylistic misalliance occurs in the word homosexual, suggesting that… well, it must suggest something.

Yet in modern usage phobia has shed its Greek meaning of inordinate morbid fear. It now means reservations about anything for which enthusiasm is mandated to be unreserved.

Hence transphobia, of which Prof. Stock is guilty in the eyes of the student body. No, she doesn’t re-enact the famous Edvard Munch painting every time she espies a former boy walking through the groves as a girl. She only maintains that, appearances notwithstanding, the boy remains biologically a boy: the sex one is cursed with at birth stays with one forever.

ONLY maintains?!? screams the collective student throat. And it’s not just the students – some faculty members are shouting the loudest.

She is a transphobe! Fascist! She must be sacked! If not, we’ll take care of her in other ways! Next thing you know she’ll say that a woman with a penis shouldn’t be allowed into women’s showers!

Actually, that’s exactly what the stubborn philosopher says, that conclusion representing a logical deduction from the a priori statement of immutable innate sex or, if you will, gender. In other words, SHE PERSISTS!

The students’ rage boiled over and burst into action. Prof. Stock has received hundreds of messages ranging from strong rebukes to physical threats. The pedestrian tunnel leading to the campus now bears signs saying she “makes trans students unsafe”, “Stock out!” and “We’re not paying £9,250 a year for transphobia”. They missed out on “Stock in the stocks!” which I’m happy to offer.

Prof. Stock knows where this sort of thing can lead. Though too young to have witnessed the orgy of student violence in the sixties, mainly in the US and France, she must have read about it. Why, she may even know the term soixante-huitard, educated woman that she is.

Hence, while proclaiming as loudly as she can that she isn’t a transphobe – God, who doesn’t exist, forbid! – Prof. Stock is listening to the advice to hire bodyguards, although she hasn’t taken that action just yet.

Perhaps she draws strength from the support she is receiving from the university’s powers-that-be. Speaking to the BBC, Vice Chancellor Tickell said: “It’s absolutely clear that all of our staff have an untrammelled right to say and believe what they think. So we take it very seriously if people try to prevent that right from being exercised.

“I have to say I am really concerned that we have masked protesters, putting up posters, calling for the sacking of somebody for exercising her right to articulate her views…”

A friend of mine welcomed this statement as a sign that sanity may be launching a fightback. That was one of the few instances when he and I disagreed.

My pessimism was encouraged by what Prof. Tickell said next: “I think what we have to do is we have to listen to people. We have very strong policies both on freedom of speech and on inclusion.” There’s an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one.

The moment a university administrator boasts of strong policies on inclusion, sanity has lost. The subject of ‘inclusion’ shouldn’t even come up at an academic institution. If it does, strategic ground is ceded, and it can never be recovered.

Cretinous youngsters shouldn’t be allowed to dictate the terms of debate. The proper response to the accusation “You’re a transphobe” is neither “No, I’m not” nor “We have strong policies against transphobia”. It’s “If you use this word again, you can kiss the university good-bye.”

In the same vein, when a professor is threatened by the British answer to China’s Red Guards, the youngsters shouldn’t be encouraged “to listen to people”. They must be expelled and reported to the police.

Yes, there are a few supposedly encouraging signs that some resistance to the rabid attacks on our civilisation is being put up. But somehow I, unlike my friend, don’t feel encouraged. The overall curve zigzags in one direction only, and its peaks are much greater than its troughs.

Some resistance is indeed observable, but it’s too meek and may well be too late. No institution seems to reject the key presuppositions of modernity, even if some take issue with their more extreme manifestations.

When the metaphysical battle is lost, the physical defeat is bound to follow. That’s how glossocracy works: whoever controls words, controls ideas; whoever controls ideas ends up controlling everything.

Thus speaks the voice of my reason. But the voice of my heart is begging for my reason to be proved wrong.

Following the High Court’s ruling, male criminals identifying as women are now put in women’s prisons. This upholds the sacred principles we are all told to live by.

Those who tell us to live by such principles are prepared to accept any ensuing sacrifice, provided someone else has to make it. In this case, the sacrifices may be dire.

Since female self-identification no longer has to involve penile amputation, the newly converted women, especially those of a violent disposition, often proceed to rape every woman they can get their hands on, sometime even including the female warders.

Never mind. Those well-hung libidinous girls are still classified as women, and prisoners who refuse to address them as such may extend their stay at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

The pronoun war has spilled over into jails. Calling a trans woman ‘he’ or ‘him’ now falls under the rubric of “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour”, similar to, say, brandishing a shiv.

An offender against pronoun rectitude will be assessed by an independent adjudicator who will decide whether the offence was malevolent or accidental. If it’s the former, extra time may be tagged on to the current sentence.

Like any other conflict, the pronoun war must have its casualties, and prisoners are the first line of defence to be cut down. However, wars have a tendency to escalate.

The first shots may be fired in prisons, but the logic of warfare will guarantee a full-blown cannonade on the out as well. Before long, anyone refusing to use the dictated pronouns will have his/her/its/their collar felt.

It stands to reason, doesn’t it? If wrong pronouns are punishable by prison time, it’s only fair that the same law should apply to those who haven’t yet been incarcerated. We are all believers in equality, aren’t we? Of course we are.

‘Equality’ and ‘levelling’ figure so prominently in practically every political speech that it’s hard not to infer that such virtues supersede all others. If so, then prison provides a perfect model for society at large.

Politicians of all hues won’t admit it, but it’s true. Prison is the ultimate ideal they see in their mind’s eye, the only arena in which the battle for equality has been won decisively and irreversibly.

Prison is a microcosm only waiting for a quantum event to expand indefinitely. That big bang won’t be long in coming.

Just think: prisoners are equal in everything. They all have the same housing, food, clothes, schedule of activities, access to sports and entertainment, communications facilities, work duties if any.

True, they are also all equal in their institutional inferiority to the warders, but that in no way violates the sacred principle. Champions of equality, especially those in government and its environs, assume that they themselves will occupy a lofty perch whence they can look down on perfectly equalised hoi-polloi.

This arrangement was prophesied by Dostoyevsky in his novel The Possessed: “Everyone belongs to everybody, and everybody to everyone. All are slaves and equal in their slavery. There may be slander or murder in extreme cases, but equality is the main thing.”

The Soviets banned the novel because it treated such prophesies as a dystopic nightmare rather than a worthy ideal. How long before the same will happen here?

The ultimate equality of all before the omnipotent state presupposes book burning. The match has already been struck, and the kindling is already smouldering.

For example, books where racially pejorative terms are used are being expunged from school curricula, even if the book is as passionately anti-racist as Huckleberry Finn. I’m sure that the turn will soon come of books featuring sinful pronouns.

And then recalcitrant writers may follow such books to the pyre. See you there.

P.S. ‘Conservative’ pundits both here and in France are salivating at the prospect of their French colleague, Eric Zemmour, mounting a serious challenge in the upcoming presidential elections.

I’m sure Col. Putin is ecstatic too – Zemmour is his adulatory admirer. This is what he wrote in Le Figaro: “While France has renounced her former mission, Putin has become the last defender of Eastern Christianity. …He defends national sovereignty, family and the Orthodox religion.”

And there I was, thinking I’d never root for Manny Macron.

Clinton’s boy James Carville got it wrong: it’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the will to live.

For, while separate countries can be killed by outsiders, whole civilisations only ever die by suicide. There are all sorts of bullets they can fire into their own brain, all sorts of stakes they can drive through their own heart.

But it’s not the method but the underlying cause that matters: sooner or later, civilisations lose the will to live. Once that goes, they can self-administer euthanasia in any number of ways, such as destroying their own economy or putting it at the mercy of their enemies.

Yet it’s metaphysical collapse that’s the disease, with economic suicide only its symptom. And in today’s Europe, emphatically including Britain, this symptom is most virulent.

Our civilisation has systematically destroyed its soul, hoping that the body would be so much the stronger for it. Alas, things don’t work out that way.

There’s only so much moral corruption that a civilisation can handle, and we haven’t just crossed that line – we’ve bloody well erased it.

We’ve put our fate in the hands of politicians, knowing in advance that some of them would turn out to be corrupt. What we didn’t bargain for was that the whole system, and everyone in it, would be corrupt in the worst possible way, miles beyond the odd backhander greasing the odd palm.

The current Pandora investigation has shown that 34 Conservative (!) MPs are in Putin’s pocket. Perhaps. But if the remaining 626 MPs of all parties aren’t taking Putin’s ruble, it’s only because they didn’t get the offer.

There are no moral hurdles they’d have to clear, no scruples they’d have to overcome. It’s just that they’d have to be less open in their moral decrepitude than they become once out of office. Just look at the careers of Messrs Blair, Cameron, Osborne et al., and you’ll get the general idea.

While still in office, they put the whole country on suicide watch, with the watchers all blind. If you think this judgement is too extreme, I’ll be happy to entertain other explanations for the present situation.

Which, in broad strokes, is as follows. European (hereinafter also to include British) politicians have accepted on faith the pernicious, ignorant fallacy of man-made global warming.

How could they not, considering how hysterically they were scolded by an evil, retarded child from Sweden? Thus persuaded, they began to dismantle the existing energy industries: oil, gas, coal and nuclear (this last one is still hanging on in Britain). And of course they forswore any further exploration, leaving a vast reservoir of shale gas going untapped underfoot.

They then committed their countries to replacing all engines powered by fossil fuels with electric ones. Hence the demand for electricity, which is already growing exponentially, will shoot through the stratosphere.

This is supposed to be met by wind farms (provided the wind blows) and solar panels (provided the sun shines). If these parenthetic conditions aren’t met, our energy is supposed to come from… well, Russia of course, or perhaps the Muslim countries.

Neither of those is a friend of the West. In fact, both are our self-declared doctrinal enemies. Hence it should have been predictable long in advance that their energy largesse will come with a ganglion of political strings attached.

With Europe heading for a shivering spell this winter, Putin reached for the gas control valve, with his hand stopping an inch away. Do you want the gas to flow?

Well then, in that case: [approve Nord Stream 2, remove all sanctions, recognise Russia’s interests in the post-Soviet space, elect transparent Russian spies to Parliament, stop blocking Russian propaganda, turn a blind eye on Russian money laundering – you name it].

Do you, Mr West, accept these conditions? A roaring chorus came in reply: YOU BET WE DO! ANYTHING YOU WANT!!!

To be fair, some of those hypothetical demands aren’t exactly hypothetical. Most have already been met throughout Europe, and I assure you that the 34 MPs popping out of the Pandora box barely scratch the surface of wholesale corruption.

Against that background, it’s pointless trying to compare the relative military strength of NATO and Putin’s Russia. The Western gun may be bigger, but that doesn’t matter if it never fires – or, worse still, is used for suicide.

A Europe at the end of a string pulled by Putin’s kleptofascist gang will no longer be Europe in any other than the purely geographical sense. Western governments proudly (if not always truthfully) proclaim that they won’t negotiate with terrorists. Clearly, they feel that an abject surrender to energy blackmail is a different matter altogether.

Everything I’ve mentioned so far is of course a simplification of a devilishly complex problem. Yes, our politicians can be bought retail or wholesale. But they don’t exist in a vacuum.

We are all passengers on a giant merry-go-round that’s gathering so much speed that jumping off is impossible. Or, if you prefer a different metaphor, cogs in a civilisational machine that has run out of gas metaphysically, not just physically.

That’s why we shouldn’t wonder if our politicians are stupid. Some are, most aren’t, but it’s irrelevant either way. It’s not that they don’t understand what’s good for the country – it’s that they inhale the zeitgeist and stop caring about anything other than their own careers.

Jean-Claude Juncker, whom I unkindly nicknamed ‘Junk’, put it in a nutshell. “We all know what to do,” he said. “We just don’t know how to get re-elected once we’ve done it.” A tectonic shift had to happen to make that aphorism true to life.

A civilisation in the grip of a death wish is impervious to reason in thought or deed. If someone tried to stay its suicidal hand, he would be brushed aside – we must kill ourselves, and we won’t be stopped.

P.S. Speaking of civilisational suicide, to put younger bums on pews the Bournemouth church of St Michael will henceforth be called St Mike’s. I wonder what St Matt, St Pete, St Jim, St Jack and St Andy would have to say about that.

P.P.S. On the same subject: Dmitry Muratov, editor of the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, has just won a share of the Nobel prize. The paper is owned by the career KGB officer, Alexander Lebedev, who’s also the proxy owner of our own Evening Standard and Independent. The official owner is his son Evgeny, elevated to the House of Lords by his friend Boris Johnson.

Ignorance by any other name smells as foul, as Justice Secretary Dominic Raab proved yesterday at the Tory Conference.

Speaking to the BBC, he said “insults and misogyny is absolutely wrong whether it’s a man against a woman or a woman against a man”. When it’s against a man, Dominic, it’s called misandry – get your lexical ducks in a row.

Still, the underlying sentiment is correct: crimes committed against men are every bit as reprehensible as those targeting women. And if a woman does fall victim to a crime, she is entitled to seek recourse not because she is a woman, but because she is a subject of Her Majesty and, as such, enjoys the state’s protection. (I made a similar argument yesterday, in relation to ‘gay rights’.)

Any day, give me a man who understands the law over one who never commits a solecism when spouting rubbish. Understandably though, Labour mandarins and other fruits took the chance to make an ideological mountain out of a lexical molehill.

Raab’s Labour shadow, David Lammy, said: “No wonder the Conservatives are hopeless at tackling violence against women and girls.” I like the precision of “women and girls”. Otherwise one could have got the impression that women are entitled to protection only post-defloration and only when they reach a certain age.

And Raab’s LibDem shadow, Wera Hobhouse, added: “It’s little wonder the Conservatives are failing to tackle misogyny when their justice secretary doesn’t even seem to know what it is.”

She was referring to the government’s reluctance to designate misogyny as a hate crime, something Mr Raab reiterated in the same interview. He thereby proved that whatever he lacks in vocabulary he makes up for in his grasp of legal realities.

Misogyny is defined in the dictionary as “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.” I find such feelings idiotic and despicable, but how is it possible to criminalise them? How is it possible to criminalise any feeling or, for that matter, idiocy?

I’ve met many Englishmen who prefer the company of men, a preference I emphatically don’t share. I’ve even heard many men impugn women’s intelligence (wrongly), morality (ditto) and driving ability (correctly). I disagree with some such sentiments, agree with others, but I’d neither punish a chap for expressing the former nor extol him for expressing the latter.

Crimes motivated by misogyny (as opposed to crimes committed against women for other reasons) are of course a different matter altogether. These ought to be punished to the full extent of the law – existing law, that is.

For, thank God who, as we know, is an Englishman, we already have plenty of good and ancient laws on the books to punish any conceivable crime against women, men and anything in between. All of them, men, women and anything in between, are entitled to the state’s protection, just as the state is entitled to their allegiance.

Any additional law would be redundant and therefore useless. Actually, even worse than useless, for bad laws tend to reduce whatever respect people have even for the good ones. As to having on the books laws proscribing ill-defined, indeed undefinable, transgressions, they bring the country’s whole legal system into disrepute.

So yes, by all means, do let’s laugh at Mr Raab’s shaky command of woke English derived from ancient Greek. As long as we praise him for his legal nous at the same time.

Yet another disaster movie in the Carrie On saga premiered the other day at the Conservative conference.

Mrs Johnson, whose sole entitlement to addressing the multitudes comes from her ability to bear children for Mr Johnson, delivered herself of a lachrymose comment on LGBT+ rights.

Apparently, the plight of the LGBT+ ‘community’ moves her to tears. Her hubby-wubby and she once hosted a Pride reception at Downing Street, where Carrie’s heart strings were tugged by a victim of a ‘hate’ crime.

It has to be said that Carrie’s heart seems to have more strings than a Steinway grand, each ready to be tugged by any woke cause on offer. So far the strings have vibrated mostly in response to the impending climatic apocalypse, with the plight of trees also getting a tinkle or two.

Yet it would be unrealistic to expect Carrie or any other such intellectually challenged individual to pick up woke fads piecemeal. These usually come as a full package, which saves time for vituperative commentators like me.

If Carrie-like creatures state a staunch commitment to making sure the climate never changes, then we can infer unerringly their position on any rights, whether women’s, animal, trans, gay or whatever. At a slight stretch, we may even assume that, according to them, inanimate objects, such as trees, also have rights – even if not dialectically linked to duties.

Such a polyvalent conscience is, according to Carrie, a specifically Conservative virtue. After all, the Tories are a “party of equality”, and thinking otherwise would be “illogical”.

I wonder what the founders of the party, such as Disraeli, Peel or, for that matter, Queen Victoria, would think of this notion if they miraculously came back. I can just hear them say “Go home, dear, have a glass of hot milk and don’t worry about things you don’t understand.”

‘Pride’ figures prominently in Carrie’s lexicon of misused words. Thus, “we can now say with huge pride that it was a Conservative prime minister who delivered equal marriage in England and Wales.” And “we now have a prime minister who is completely committed to protecting those gains and extending them further.”

A prime minister, Carrie kindly reminded, who wore a pink hat at a Gay Pride parade when he was mayor of London, while she herself plans to go dancing until wee hours at an LGBT+ Conservative club. “I hope to see some of you on the dancefloor,” added Carrie.

I take that as an invitation, which I regretfully have to decline. I do like dancing, but only with women, and I’m sure such binary preferences will be frowned upon at that venerable Tory establishment. Perhaps if Queen Victoria stays resurrected for a while longer, she’ll be happy to let Carrie have the first gavotte.

Someone ought to remind the Johnsons that Britain isn’t like the US in many respects, one of which is that we don’t have a political entity called the First Lady. Unlike a monarch’s spouse, a prime minister’s wife has no constitutional status in Britain, no matter how many babies she pops out in how short a time.

So this barely post-pubescent woman should keep her flaming conscience strictly for home consumption. And, if her logorrhoea is uncontainable, at least the papers should ignore her stream of woke consciousness, rather than giving it space on the front pages.

Untangling Carrie’s jumble of nonsensical bites would evoke the memory of the Augean Stables. Still, I feel duty-bound to do my best for the benefit of my readers – even at the risk of preaching to the choir.

Hence I’ll repeat the title: this side of woke animadversions, there’s no such thing as gay rights. This is to say that homosexuals should enjoy no specific rights as homosexuals. Such particularism has no place among the all-encompassing raft of legal rights enjoyed by every subject of Her Majesty, regardless of sexual or any other deviations.

We have any number of laws protecting us from crimes motivated by ‘hate’, greed, drug and alcohol intake or anything else. A thug attacking a homosexual for his sexuality must be prosecuted side by side with a thug attacking a straight man for his provocative pinstriped suit.

Alas, the word ‘rights’ is routinely misused these days to denote privileges, entitlements and appetites. A genuine right is one that doesn’t presuppose a concomitant obligation on anyone else’s part.

Thus, the right of a homosexual not to be attacked or otherwise abused qualifies. However, his right to being employed without prejudice doesn’t: it means that an employer must have the legal obligation to give the homosexual a job. This clashes with the employer’s genuine right to choose whomever he likes.

I’m talking about companies outside the aegis of the state. The NHS, for example, can be legally forced to introduce any number of perverse hiring practices – that’s par for the course. Yet doing the same to a privately owned firm means sacrificing a genuine right for a bogus one.

We may bemoan the employer’s antediluvian bias, but we all have a God-given right to have some quirks, no matter how disagreeable. In any case, a free market should protect homosexuals all by itself.

Businessmen aren’t likely to spite their faces by cutting off their noses, and turning away a qualified candidate for extraneous reasons would constitute just such a proverbial faux pas. Companies compete not just for markets but also for talent, however packaged. Ignoring a talented prospect would let one’s competitors score free points, thereby threatening to run away with the game.

Free markets do have such self-regulating features, and the more the state meddles, the more it distorts a practice proven to work everywhere it has been allowed to run more or less (if not entirely) unimpeded.

Carrie’s poor husband seems to realise this, which is why he was right to say yesterday that people shouldn’t appeal to him, meaning the state, to cure all economic ills, such as the cracks in the supply chain.

That was a proper conservative statement, and Johnson ought to be complemented. What I find baffling, however, is that Carrie seems to think that her poor henpecked husband can fix problems outside the legitimate remit of the state.

For example, he is expected to do God’s job by ordering climate to stand still, something it has refused to do during the previous billions of years. Carrie also wants him to extend “the gains [of homomarriage] even further”. True enough, the rights to interspecies marriage remain untapped, and this is the only immediately obvious area of possible extension.

Contextually, Carrie also wants her poor husband to prove his Tory credentials by legislating reverse discrimination in the workplace, forcing employers to give special privileges to homosexuals. She also seems to think that killing someone for his sexuality should be punished more severely than killing someone for his money.

The logic escapes me, but then I’m neither a card-carrying member of the Tory party nor a donor to it. I leave that privilege to Russian gangsters.  

You probably think this statement is so paradoxical as to be daft. So it is, in its broad form. So let’s narrow it down a bit by, paradoxically, adding a few words.

To love a person is to forget his face. Does this make more sense now? I’m prepared to argue that it does.

If you disagree, let me ask another question. What did Jesus look like?

We don’t know – this, though over the past two millennia he has arguably been loved by more people than anyone else. And if you doubt this statement, then here’s an unassailable one: his disciples definitely loved him more than anyone else. After all, they were prepared to abandon their families to follow Jesus wherever he led them, all the way to martyrdom.

Then why didn’t they leave a portrait of Jesus for posterity? By that I don’t necessarily mean a painted portrait, although the art of portraiture existed at the time. Egyptian funereal portraits, for example, were painted roughly at the same time, and they were masterly.

Moreover, the Incarnation changed in one fell swoop the Old Testament injunction against creating graven images of divine personages.

There was no doctrinal problem with depicting the image of Jesus, if not that of Christ. For 30-odd years Christ appeared to the multitudes as man Jesus, and men’s likenesses could be painted or sculpted with no fear of divine wrath. Witness the flourishing of iconography from the second century onwards, which was not only allowed but welcomed and supervised by that guardian of doctrine, the Church.

It’s conceivable, likely even, that the apostles had neither any artistic ability nor the means to commission someone so endowed. But what about a verbal portrait?

The Gospels are, among other things, reminiscences of Jesus. They probably weren’t written by any of the apostles, but there’s no doubt whatsoever that only one degree of separation existed between the evangelists and Jesus, two at most.

Mark was essentially writing down Peter’s accounts, Luke those of Paul, John those of his apostolic namesake, Matthew widely used the earlier, undiscovered Aramaic account (Q, in the terminology of biblical scholars) produced by eyewitnesses, and he certainly knew some of the twelve.

Sure enough, the evangelists go into extraordinary detail describing Jesus’s words, acts, thoughts and feelings – including those that show them themselves in a bad light. And yet they are extremely frugal with any details of his appearance, other than the odd throwaway line here and there, with none amounting to a full picture.

Why such disdain for the visual sense? Atheists use it as proof that historical Jesus never existed, but that’s simply vulgar ignorance.

Quite apart from specific references found in the works of Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius and Josephus, not to mention the authors of the New Testament, anyone with any artistic sense will know that the Gospels are eyewitness accounts of physical events. To think otherwise would be to argue that those simple men possessed novelistic talents never again even approached by any writer – not to mention the knowledge of such disciplines as history and astronomy.

Also, immediately after the Resurrection, thousands of people, including those close to Jesus personally, went to their death with his name on their lips. It’s psychologically impossible that they would have done so for the sake of a fictional character.

Then there was the Docetic heresy, unequivocally rejected in the first Nicaean Council of 325. This was perhaps the most pernicious of many pure-spirit heterodoxies that denied the bodily being of Christ. What the multitudes saw, maintained the docetists, was a mirage, a phantasm that God in his omnipotence floated before their eyes.

Yet even assuming that for the sake of argument, it still doesn’t explain the scarcity of physical details in evangelical accounts. After all, writers both before and after the first century, from Homer to Dante to Goethe to Dostoyevsky to Kafka to thousands of lesser talents, were eminently capable of drawing figments of their imagination in palpable detail.

The fact is that, in common with other heresies, Docetism shows ignorance not only of God but also of man. This takes us back to the paradox in the title.

Think of someone you love with all your heart. Your spouse perhaps, or the lover your spouse knows nothing about, or your child. Now I’m sure that, for all the depth of your feelings, you’ve occasionally had to spend time away from your loved one.

Did you notice that on those occasions you found it hard to paint an accurate mental picture of that person? This, though you had no trouble remembering the exact appearance of, say, colleagues or causal acquaintances? I have my own experience in mind, but I’m sure it isn’t unique.

This shows that true love, as distinct from inferior forms of affection, is more metaphysical than physical. We love the soul not – at least not so much – the body. And the more we love, the deeper does our sight penetrate, the more it skips the physical shell to rest on the metaphysical essence. And this is something that can be deeply loved, but not accurately pictured.

That explains the evangelists’ otherwise inexplicable gaps of visual memory. They remembered too little because they loved too much.