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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.

The term ‘totalitarian’, as distinct from merely authoritarian, was coined in the 1930s.

But the underlying concept goes back to a much earlier source: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

There it is, the difference in a nutshell. An authoritarian doesn’t care about his subjects’ souls as long as their bodies dance to his music. Totalitarians are different: they aren’t happy with merely physical tyranny. They want the metaphysical kind as well.

Typically, they seek to kill sanity by smudging the borderline between virtual and actual realities, with the fake one always taking precedence. Eventually, most people will accept falsehood as truth, and those who don’t will pretend to do so.

Totalitarians love the second type as much as the first. Orwell pointed this out in one of his essays, when talking about the sadistic joy totalitarians feel when watching those who know better and still spout insane gibberish, not even daring to crack a smile.

This brings us to an unmistakably totalitarian establishment: St Andrews University, the alma mater of both the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. This year for the first time, it ranked above Oxbridge in the Good University Guide.

As befits our best university, St Andrews blazes the path for all others to follow. And the path leads straight to hell.

St Andrews students are forced, on pain of expulsion, to take compulsory diversity modules. There they are expected to give the ‘right’ answers to questions about racism, homophobia, climate and some such.

A typical agree-or-disagree question: “Acknowledging your personal guilt is a useful start point in overcoming unconscious bias.”

Or another example: “It is important to think about and understand our own prejudices and stereotypes so we don’t treat someone else unfairly or inappropriately.”

Someone forgot to teach those Scottish teachers the difference between education and brainwashing. Perhaps they didn’t have to learn: totalitarians sense in their bone marrow what they have to do.

A note to any sane freshers at St Andrews: I feel your pain. I too had to go through university in a totalitarian country, the Soviet Union. I too was forced to fake insanity while remaining sane. I wasn’t good at it though, and I’m sure you aren’t either.

Luckily, I was only threatened with expulsion and was allowed to matriculate. However, my secret personal file had enough black marks in it to consign me to a life of misery. Since the file was indeed secret, I never saw it. But I knew what it said: watch him, he’s anti-Soviet scum.

You must feel as Cincinnatus C. felt in Nabokov’s novel Invitation to a Beheading. Living in a land where everyone was transparent, Cincinnatus alone was opaque. That’s why he was to be beheaded: totalitarians can forgive any crime except being different.

You might object that we still have no concentration camps, public trials and mass executions. I can only reply by sending you back to the quotation from St Matthew above. Jesus establishes a clear pecking order there: those who merely wish to kill the body aren’t to be feared. It’s those who are after your soul who are really scary.

Totalitarians don’t use violence for its own sake. It merely serves to attain their goal, total control. If such a goal can be attained non-violently, so much the better. If mass murder is after all required, that’s fine too. Whatever works.

That’s why the force-feeding of woke dung isn’t just ridiculous – it’s sinister. It’s an attempt to take dominion of the soul, and fair enough: most people’s souls are indeed up for grabs.

They have been primed by decades of incessant propaganda that starts at the cradle and ends at the grave. Resistance takes an epic fortitude of mind and spirit, but where can such strength come from? It certainly can’t be produced by craving for material goods, which seems to be the only impelling force of modernity.

Ticking the expected answer in a questionnaire seems like a tiny concession to make. It never is though. “One claw gets stuck,” goes the old saying, “the whole bird will perish.”

Totalitarians can smell a soul cast adrift, and when they do they pounce. Another tick, please kind sir. And another, if you don’t mind. Just one more, and we’re done. Before you know it, there goes your soul, ticking away bit by cowardly bit.

I wish I could advise St Andrews students to throw those module papers back into the totalitarians’ mugs, but I can’t. No mere mortal has the right to demand heroism from others; this has to be a personal free choice.

The only advice I can offer comes straight from Thomas Cranmer: “Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; grant us that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.”

Yes, I know this is archaic, unfashionable and generally uncool. But I can’t think of any other viable source of strength to resist totalitarianism. Be it the Soviet kind, the Nazi kind – or the St Andrews kind.

P.S. Is the University named after several different St Andrews? Or was the First-Called named St Andrews? If the answer to both questions is no, how about an apostrophe there, chaps? You being the best university and all.

Just a month after being demoted to the lowly post of Justice Secretary, Dominic Raab has come up with a ground-breaking idea.

Showing a talent for going beyond his immediate remit, he espied that the economy is suffering from staff shortages. That leaves a gaping hole of at least a million vacancies crying out to be filled.

Having thus identified the problem, Mr Raab returned to the domain of law enforcement and experienced an Archimedes-sized eureka moment. A flash of mental lightning made him realise he is sitting on an untapped labour reserve of murderers, thieves, burglars, robbers, rapists and other criminals doing unpaid work (or none) at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

Why not let them out on day release so they could plug the staffing holes in the British economy? Just think how many birds could be killed with that one stone.

The immediate personnel problem will be at least partly solved – that much is obvious. Then of course we must never lose sight of the real purpose of prisons. They are there not to punish wrongdoers but to rehabilitate them, isn’t that so?

Now, what can achieve this purpose better than the joy and pride of honest labour, something, if I’m being totally honest, most inmates have never experienced? For example, by filling some of the 55,000 care vacancies, prisoners could learn to look after old people, rather than robbing them of their pensions.

There is of course the danger that released inmates might help themselves to their charges’ possessions rather than just emptying their bedpans. And here we come to another side benefit of the Raab scheme.

On the off chance that some of the chaps haven’t yet found God, innocent bystanders must be protected from possible relapses. That means hiring more prison guards and policemen, thereby drawing even more people into the workforce.

Or else – I’m thinking as I go along, so bear with me – violent criminals could be used to keep the nonviolent ones in check. That way not only could a pickpocket obtain a day release to wash dishes in a pub, but so could a murderer turned guard. The state wouldn’t even have to arm those men – they already know how to turn toothbrushes into shivs or battery-filled socks into deadly weapons.

Think also of another side benefit: tax revenue for the Exchequer. Since the prisoners would be under constant watch, they wouldn’t be able to insist on cash in hand. That means their earnings would be taxable – verily I say unto you, this whole idea is a never-stopping fount of benefits.

I hope Mr Raab will thank me for developing his bright insight to its logical extension. Meanwhile, I have to wonder if our leaders played truant when arithmetic was taught.

We have in Britain today just over 80,000 prisoners, most of whom haven’t done a day’s work in their lives. How many could be of genuine use on day release, with little time to train even the trainable ones? A couple of thousand at best, would be my guess. Fine, I’ll give you 10,000, what with my generosity knowing no bounds. Still, we are talking about an empty gesture, not a solution to a problem.

However, we do have a real, as opposed to fanciful, reservoir of labour waiting to be tapped: 9.5 million welfare recipients of working age. The simple trick of withholding their benefits cheque would enable the government to find the 28,220 cleaners we need, and 55,019 carers, and 6,557 bar staff, and 2,251 postal workers, and 32,615 shop assistants – and so forth, practically ad infinitum.

Suddenly real benefits begin to pile up, including instant savings in the social budget. There is a slight problem though: our ministers may come up with a palpably inane idea of integrating prisoners on day release into the economy, but not with the sound one of doing the same with able-bodied youngsters on benefits.

You see, the social and the NHS are two sacred cows of Britain. As such, they can be milked, but never slaughtered. If Mr Raab or any other minister even hinted at the possibility I’ve outlined, he could plant two good-bye kisses on his government career. First, because he’d be deselected; second, because his party wouldn’t stay in government for long.

As Jean-Claude ‘Junk’ Junker said in a rare moment of sobriety, “We all know what to do. We just don’t know how to get re-elected once we’ve done it.”

Virtue signalling wouldn’t be so bad if it were real virtue. But signalling fake virtue is worse than not having any at all. Yet this is what our politicians, journalists, writers, all public figures in fact, have to do to stay in business.

Unless they constantly mouth the whole approved list of shibboleths, they’ll find themselves on the receiving end of God knows how many slings and swarms of arrows. The breed of sacred cows may change from time to time but, while they are sacred, they are untouchable.

The belief that every criminal is a useful member of society waiting to happen doesn’t quite qualify as a sacred cow, but it’s definitely a calf suckled by our deracinated society.

Not only our virtues but also our sins are fake. Thus a man who tells a crude ethnic joke is a worse transgressor than a burglar, and someone who feels up a strange woman is much, much worse than someone who mugs her.

For a man falling short of woke standards of goodness has only himself to blame, whereas a criminal is a victim of society – so goes the mock-virtuous superstition. Hence Mr Raab ought to be congratulated on scoring a double whammy:

He signalled his virtue by stating his belief in rehabilitation, and he avoided the pitfall of signalling vice by offering a real solution to a real problem. Isn’t our Conservative government wonderful?

Whoever ultimately wins the German election, we lose. By ‘we’ I mean the West facing up to its enemies.

Putin’s kleptofascist regime is one such enemy, implacable and self-proclaimed. And consecutive German governments have been its collaborators. Political analysts have even come up with the term ‘schroederisation’, in honour (dishonour?) of the ex-chancellor now making millions on the board of Gazprom and other Russian cash cows.

It’s from that angle that I invite you to look at the German election. The dead heat between the Christian Democrat Armin Laschet and the socialist Olaf Scholz brought up a photo finish in favour of the latter. However, his victory doesn’t necessarily mean Scholz will be able to form a coalition.

As with all countries practising proportional representation, it’s the marginal parties that often decide the outcome (which explains why our dear LibDems pine for this inherently ineffectual system). At the moment, the Greens and the Free Democrats are playing hard to get, hoping to drive up the price of their participation.

Yet whoever forms a coalition, Putin wins. For both candidates are his stooges, unwitting or otherwise.

Using his professional skills, the KGB colonel started out by buying European politicians retail. He later switched to wholesale purchases, doubtless trying to lower the unit price.

Britain is no exception, always open for Russian business. Our illustrious PM has even cooked up a KGB peer of the realm by elevating Evgeny Lebedev to the Lords.

Lebedev’s father is a career KGB officer turned tycoon, whose ill-gotten loot bought two British newspapers and hundreds of lavish shindigs, at which his son wooed British politicians, including Johnson. A life peerage followed, leaving me surprised that it wasn’t a hereditary one. Something to look forward to, I suppose.

For details of Russia’s recruitment of the City of London and the relevant politicians, I do recommend the recent bestseller Putin’s People by Catherine Belton. Since she wrote that book, our former chancellor, George Osborne (whose recent job was editing Lebedev’s Evening Standard), has become advisor to Oleg Deripaska’s aluminium concern.

That consummated a courtship conducted by Osborne since at least 2008, when he was shadow chancellor. Osborne visited Deripaska’s yacht in the cross-party company of Peter Mandelson, with great and profitable fun doubtless had by all. Deripaska, incidentally, is under personal sanctions in the US, whose authorities cited his links with organised crime as the reason for that exclusion.

Actually, any Russian billionaire or government official (the two categories often overlap) could be found guilty of the same indiscretion. After all, Putin’s government is history’s unique fusion of secret police and organised crime – unique, that is, in a sizeable country with lofty pretensions.

Such a combined background stands Putin in good stead when it comes to seducing Western politicians, especially German ones. His bias towards Germany is easy to understand.

First, the country is the most influential EU member; second, Col. Putin served at the KGB Dresden station, where he developed a particular expertise in recruiting and running German agents. Since he became national leader (nationaler Führer in German), that activity has, if anything, intensified.

Merkel, while occasionally making critical statements about Putin for public consumption, toed an unswerving pro-Russian path in everything that mattered. The two leaders are on a first-name basis, and they happily indulge in public foreplay each time they meet. That cordial friendship extended to business, with Merkel happily increasing Germany’s dependence on Russian gas.

In particular, she lobbied to overturn US sanctions against Nord Stream 2, the Russian pipeline using gas as a profit spinner and blackmail weapon. Biden obliged, and when the pipeline starts pumping, just about all of Germany’s gas will be at Putin’s mercy. So much for German Christian Democracy.

But the good colonel doesn’t discriminate: he is happy to woo any European parties, right, left or centre. The so-called right-wing (in effect fascisoid) parties, like Germany’s AfD or France’s National Rally, are the easiest marks, but like a priapic lothario Putin is out to seduce any willing prey.

Hence both deadlocked candidates treat Putin with sympathy and affectionate understanding. Laschet especially has set out to out-Merkel Merkel or even to out-Schröder Schröder.

He responded to Putin’s bandit raid on the Crimea by saying: “Yes, of course Russia is breaking international law. But do let’s look at this through the eyes of our partner in dialogue”. No wonder that Laschet is a welcome and frequent guest at the Germano-Russian forum ‘Petersburg Dialogue’.

By way of conducting such bilateral communications, Laschet doubts Russian spies had anything to do with the Skripal poisoning, he didn’t demand sanctions after the poisoning of Navalny or his imprisonment on trumped-up charges. He applauds the role Russia is playing in Africa and the Middle East. And of course he adores Nord Stream 2.

The other candidate, Scholz, who won the election by a whisker, is more reserved in his pronouncements about Putin. However, judging by his close links with his Parteigenosse Schröder, his policies will be softer than his rhetoric.

While rebuking Putin for the theft of the Crimea and eastern Ukraine, Scholz believes that: “If we want to guarantee collective security in Europe, then it’s up to the EU and Russia to do so.” Herr Scholz refuses to see that this is the same as using burglars to secure one’s house from burglaries.

Who does he think is threatening European security? Britain? US? New Zealand? Clearly not Putin’s Russia, which pounces on its neighbours like a rabid dog and whose rattling sabres are deafening the world.

One has to congratulate Col. Putin for this operational success. These days he can watch any European elections with the detachment of a neutral observer. Whoever wins, he wins.

I sometimes laugh at Joe Biden, but I’m actually sorry for this confused old man. There’s an element of self-pity there as well, felt most acutely every time the president publicly takes another meandering trip away from sanity.

Since I’m only a few years younger than him, what if I end up like that too? My only hope is that I’ll be strong enough to stick by my staunch opposition to suicide.

Then again, though one’s cognitive abilities always diminish with age, a lot depends on the starting point of the downward slide. I like to think that mine is quite a bit higher than Joe’s, so perhaps there’s hope for me still.

Such hubristic selfishness apart, I fear for America and the free world she is supposed to lead. The man in command of the US Army isn’t even in command of his own mental faculties – what if he has to make the choice between peace and war?

Not being an expert on US constitutional law, I don’t know if sufficient grounds exist for invoking the 25^th Amendment and putting Joe out to pasture. Yet every time he is forced to veer off script, usually during press conferences, he presents a clinical picture of senile dementia.

If the doctors among you find fault with this diagnosis, by all means pick it full of holes. But please don’t insult my intelligence by insisting that Biden’s mental health is robust. Just watch excerpts from his confrontations with journalists (such as these, among dozens of others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSaTXfeKFvA) and then tell me what you think.

This, though reporters, most of whom work for socialist-leaning media, toss him cream puffs of questions, as opposed to the grenades they hurled at Trump. Yet, rather than eating those cream puffs for breakfast, old Joe smears them all over his face.

This raises the question in the title above. Since Biden is manifestly incapable of leading his country, who in his country is leading him?

One of his numerous gaffes was referring to Kamala as ‘President Harris’ – was it just a senior moment or an accidental reference to the actual state of affairs? And if not Harris, then who? Is there some cabal of left-wing extremists burrowing through the foundations of American politics? Much as one hates conspiracy theories, it’s hard not to think along those lines.

Since Americans pride themselves on their democracy, only those elected to lead are entitled to do so. If, say, some congressmen, elected to wield legislative power only, are acting as the executive behind the scenes, then the US Constitution is for all practical purposes null and void.

To be fair, Biden isn’t the first president to suffer from mental disorders. For example, some presidents of old are believed to have been clinically depressed. Madison, John Quincy Adams, Pierce, Lincoln and Coolidge are the names that tend to come up in that context.

Grant and Nixon were borderline alcoholics, and Pierce actually died of liver cirrhosis. Woodrow Wilson suffered several debilitating strokes, and his wife effectively acted as president in his second term.

Reagan was manifestly senile towards the end of his tenure, and the government was run by James Baker, his chief of staff. However, Reagan didn’t start out that way. The electorate voted in a man who was compos mentis. Reagan’s interviews and press conferences were full of wit and common sense. (To wit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTyZAul60ok)

Biden, however, was already the way he is now during his election campaign. That people voted for him in sufficient numbers is a ringing denunciation of universal franchise if I’ve ever seen one. Yet it’s not just the electorate that’s to blame.

To a great extent this travesty is Trump’s fault. Yes, for all his faults he was ten times the president Biden could have been even at his best. That’s beyond question. But, to paraphrase Buffon ever so slightly, le style c’est le président même.

The average voter goes by style, not by substance. He envisages a certain composite picture of a perfect leader and uses it as a stencil. Any candidate who sticks out too much makes that hypothetical yet all-powerful individual uncomfortable.

Trump’s style didn’t so much stick out as break the stencil into pieces and throw them into the voter’s face. He who lives by incendiary populism may well die by it.

Actually, I’m surprised Trump did as well as he did in 2020. But for the Covid pandemic, he might very well have won.

Yet I’m not surprised that those whose comfort zone Trump had gerrymandered swung to such a catastrophic extreme. One gets the impression they would have voted for anyone who wasn’t Trump – not just for Joe Biden, but even for Joe Stalin.

Make no mistake: the world is in grave danger for as long as Biden remains in the White House. Foreign aggressors are like voters: they too respond not so much to weakness as to its projection. Conversely, an image of strength and resolve may deter even a much stronger enemy. Hitler, for example, didn’t dare invade Switzerland.

Knowing that the US president is senile, Xi may fancy his chances with Taiwan – or Putin with the remaining portion of the Ukraine or, even worse, with the Baltics. And I’m not even talking about assorted economic and social crises that also require a quick and wise response.

That ‘old man in DC’ (with apologies to Hemingway’s spirit) is what Americans call a clear and present danger. I for one am scared.