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Evil, as personified by 150,000 anti-Western, anti-Semitic zealots, attacked decency yesterday. One of London’s best neighbourhoods was overrun, paying for its sin of housing the Israeli embassy.

Pro-Hamas fanatics led by Jeremy Corbyn staged an obscene show organised by various Muslim groups and our own Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, that KGB front of long standing.

Since Russia has been the only country to use radioactive weapons since 1945, when Putin’s agents poisoned Litvinenko with polonium in 2006, it wasn’t immediately obvious exactly what was the CND’s dog in the on-going fight. But all subversive causes and organisations are united.

For example, as the footballers ‘took the knee’ before a match the other day, the commentator said that was a gesture of protest against “inequality and social injustice”. I thought it was only racism that called for genuflection, but never mind the cause – feel the animus against the West.

As the Met tried in vain to disperse the largely Muslim crowd, missiles were thrown, and nine police officers were injured.

According to Jeremy Corbyn, under whose inspiring leadership the Labour Party no longer bothered to conceal its anti-Semitism, that was a way of showing “succour, comfort and support” for Hamas. Israel, which is being attacked with thousands of rockets aimed at the residential areas of its cities clearly doesn’t qualify for any such sympathy.

Boris Johnson called for both sides to “step back from the brink” and “show restraint”. That leaves me, for one, happy that his idol Churchill didn’t display the same even-handedness when Luftwaffe bombs rained on London the way Hamas rockets are raining on Tel Aviv.

The Met arrested 13 people in all, four of them for breaching the Health Protection Regulations. If the cops felt the kaffiyeh offered insufficient defence against Covid, they should have arrested Corbyn too who wasn’t wearing even such a flimsy barrier to the contagion.

As to the scaling of buildings, climbing on traffic lights and the gates of Kensington Palace, setting off fireworks and smoke bombs, and trying to smash the gate leading to Kensington Garden Road (aka Embassy Row), those peccadilloes were no grounds for arrest. They didn’t kill anyone, did they? So the demonstration was wholesomely peaceful.

Identical actions paralysed other cities in Britain and elsewhere. Since competence is laudable wherever it’s found, one must compliment the organisers for their skill at coordinating international mayhem. If only those Palestinian darlings displayed similar proficiency at creating a decent life for themselves, perhaps they wouldn’t stay so downtrodden for three generations.

As it is, while the Israelis have turned an arid desert into a blossoming garden, those eternal refugees are doing exactly the opposite on their side of the fence. Hatred of Jews is a time-honoured emotion, but it’s useless when it comes to any productive activity.

Meanwhile, Israeli bombardment brought down the office tower in Gaza that houses Al Jazeera and the AP news agency, among other media outlets.

According to a spokesman for the Israeli Defence Forces, “The building contained civilian media offices, which the Hamas terror organization hides behind and uses as human shields. The Hamas terror organisation deliberately places military targets at the heart of densely populated civilian areas in the Gaza Strip.”

The agencies affected outrage, saying that only sheer luck prevented fatalities among journalists. They neglected to mention that luck was augmented by the warning the IDF had issued an hour before the strike.

No such warnings come from Hamas whose rockets, fired from behind schools, hospitals, residential and office buildings, are killing, as they are supposed to, Israeli civilians.

Yet no international protests are heard, no one tries to storm the missions of Arab countries or the Palestinian representatives. And only an American veto has prevented the UN (as in UNwestern) from passing another anti-Israel resolution.

Still, I sympathise with our protesters, including Jeremy Corbyn. That’s why I think we should do everything we can to ease their passage to Gaza, where they can put their flaming conscience in the way of Israel’s fire.

P.S. At the end of yesterday’s FA Cup final, the victorious Leicester players unfurled a Palestinian flag. Take the cup away from them, I suggest, and tell them next time to stick to kicking footballs and, if they must, their opponents.

The football commentator wanted to say “the importance of this goal couldn’t be overestimated”. What came out of his mouth was “the enormity of this goal couldn’t be underestimated”.

In other words, the goal was so revolting and inconsequential that the team ought to have been penalised for scoring it.

Yes, fine, I could make allowances for our comprehensive education and guess what he was trying to say. In that context, I would probably have guessed right.

But there are many other contexts in which guesswork could lead to a misunderstanding or even danger. For example, a man may hurt himself and others if he thinks inflammable means in no risk of conflagration. Or he could be embarrassed if he asks his colleague to apprise (rather than appraise) him and, instead of getting the progress report he expects, he hears that his management skills aren’t up to scratch.

The other day a chap at my club used the word meretricious when he meant meritorious. Had he said, for example, all show, no substance, the communication would have been complete. As it was, his attempt to sound ‘posh’ left me guessing which of the antonymous derivatives of the Latin merere he meant. Either one could have fit the context.

Now, if we accept that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, then we can extrapolate ever so slightly and agree that it isn’t just weapons but also words that must be licensed. After all, the good book says a word came before everything else, including weapons.

Anyone who disagrees must insist, illogically, that a handyman who fixes a leaky tap must be legally accredited to provide that service, whereas, say, a paramedic is free to say acute when he means chronic (a widespread error). Surely a little drip in the plumbing isn’t as fraught with danger as a confusion between medical antonyms?

For a communication to take place, words must have the same meaning for everybody. That’s why we have dictionaries, those thick books telling us what words mean. If the meaning one wishes to attach to a word diverges from the dictionary definition, a game of Chinese whispers is likely to arise.

Someone who says he is bemused when he means amused vandalises communication, thereby disconnecting people from one another – with potentially disastrous social consequences. Rather than forming a society, people run the risk of becoming deracinated, asocial individuals punished by God.

After all, in God’s eyes erecting “a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven” with the subsequent disintegration of language was severe punishment: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

But don’t despair: help is on the way, and Babel will not prevail. All you have to do is petition your MP (or congressman, if you are American) to put forth a bill based on my modest proposal. Here it is: Every adult, especially if his speech often finds itself in the public domain, must be licensed to use a specific level of vocabulary.

The levels would depend on the frequency of usage. According to the Oxford Dictionary, there are 171,146 words commonly used in English. Yet some of them are used more commonly than others. For example, soon is comfortably within the first 1,000 most frequently used words, while saliency is just outside the top 45,000.

Hence I propose four frequency bands, with each requiring its own licence. The first band should include words ranked within the top 2,000; the second, those in the top 10,000; the third, those in the top 30,000; and the fourth, unlimited.

Misusing words one isn’t licensed to utter should be punishable by incrementally escalating fines. These may or may not be means-tested – I haven’t really worked out every detail yet. Actually, since I dislike the very notion of means-tested fines, perhaps making the punishment commensurate with the size of the audience would be fairer.

I readily admit that this proposal is somewhat radical. But radical is better than impossible, which is the only other option: getting a system of education that doesn’t churn out generation after generation of ignoramuses. You know, the kind Britain used to have before the arrival of progress in the 1960s.

Israel, the only civilised country in the Middle East, has since Monday been hit by 1,600 rockets fired by Hamas savages.

You see, when you express this situation in such simple terms, it sheds all its superfluous baggage. Granted, simple runs the risk of being simplistic, and one may argue that Islamic civilisation has a rich heritage too.

It has, but it’s a very distant heritage. Over the past 500 years (I’m being generous here), Islam has created nothing but mayhem. The whole Muslim world has produced 10 Nobel Prizes, of which six are of the meaningless peace variety. By contrast, Trinity, Cambridge, just one college in one Western university, boasts 34, all of them for science.

As to other aspects of civilisation, the less said about them, the better. All in all, if we limit ourselves to the present and not-so-distant past, Israel is indeed the only civilised oasis in a region dominated by various stages of barbarism.

Yet even within the vast desert of Muslim ignorance and backwardness, the so-called Palestinians take the pita (‘so-called’ because the way the term is used, one might think Israelis aren’t Palestinians). Those eternal refugees are consumed with malice, hatred and fanaticism, neglecting more useful and productive emotions.

Anyway, how many generations does it take for refugees to stop being refugees? I’ve got news for the ‘Palestinians’: millions of people (including yours truly) don’t live in the countries of their birth. Search a few generations back, and that number will grow to hundreds of millions of those who can trace their roots to foreign lands.

And yet we all, including those who were driven out of their countries against their will, somehow manage to make a life for ourselves. Some shed most of their heritage, some keep more of it – some even retain ethnic rancour whose origin goes back centuries. But no one stays a refugee for three generations, the way the ‘Palestinians’ have.

Some Arab states, notably Jordan and Lebanon, did the charitable thing and allowed ‘Palestinians’ to settle in their countries. By way of gratitude, those wild-eyed maniacs started civil wars, reducing Jordan and especially Lebanon to a charnel house.

Nothing but their own savagery prevents the ‘Palestinians’ from acquiring their own state. All they have to do is acknowledge Israel’s right to exist and abandon their murderous urge to kill every Jew in the region (and preferably beyond). But they’ve always refused to make even such elementary concessions. And now that Gaza and the West Bank have been taken over by Hamas terrorists, violence is all the ‘Palestinians’ are committed to.

Violence is what they are perpetrating now, with those rockets whose provenance isn’t hard to trace. Both Putin and his foreign minister Lavrov are regularly photographed canoodling with Hamas chieftains, and Russia is one of the few countries that have refused to recognise that Hamas is an extremist and terrorist organisation. The ruling junta has a soft spot for terrorists, doubtless sensing spiritual kinship.

If Russia provides tangible support for Hamas, Western ‘liberals’ keep it afloat by proliferating pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli propaganda, with moral equivalence as its leitmotif. Thus both parties are being asked to exercise restraint during the current exchange of fire.

At the same time, the ‘liberal’ media never tire of pointing out that the ‘Palestinian’ civilian population is suffering the greater casualties. There you go then, goes the refrain. Those Israelis are bullying their ‘Palestinian’ victims.

The difference between the Israelis and the other lot is that the former are civilised and the latter are savages – and ideologised savages at that. To Israel, the people are the end; to any ideology, including Hamas, they are the means.

Every Israeli killed is the country’s tragedy. Every ‘Palestinian’ killed is Hamas’s propaganda tool. That’s why those rocket sites are placed close to hospitals, schools and tower blocks – sometimes even on the roofs of those buildings.

The Israelis are doing their best trying to avoid inflicting civilian casualties by delivering precision strikes against rocket sites and terrorist leaders. Unfortunately, some civilian casualties can’t be avoided because Hamas does nothing to protect its non-combatants. Its own strategy is to target residential areas indiscriminately, and only the extensive defensive measures taken by the Israelis are keeping the body count down.

What Hamas is doing is an extension of Islam’s mission pursued over the past 1,400 years. Muslims see their conflict with the West as a clash of civilisations, a mortal struggle in which only one side can be left standing. Yet Western ‘liberals’ refuse to accept the situation on those terms.

They too hate Western civilisation, with its Judaeo-Christian origin and hence emphasis on individual freedom. Proceeding from the old adage of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”, they see any Third World demagogues and terrorists as their spiritual brethren, whose desiderata (if not necessarily their methods) they share and whose enemies they loathe.

Hamas and the ‘Palestinians’ qualify as spiritual brethren, while Israel, with its Western civilisation, amply qualifies as the enemy. Add to this a healthy dose of run-of-the-mill anti-Semitism, and it’s clear whose side the ‘liberals’ are on.

This animus is camouflaged with appeals to even-handedness and mutual restraint. Moral equivalence all around.

Yet as the founder, president and so far the only member of the Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism, I maintain that there is no equivalence, moral or otherwise, between civilisation and barbarism. The former must triumph in Israel if it’s to survive anywhere.

It’s not often that school chaplains are accused of terrorism.

Although, contrary to Jesus’s entreaty, some little children are well-nigh insufferable, chaplains still typically try to appeal to their good nature, if any. Mowing youngsters down with an assault rifle, poisoning their water supply or blowing up their bus isn’t normally associated with pastoral care of sinners.

That’s why I was quite taken aback when reading that the Rev Dr Bernard Randall of Trent College near Nottingham had been accused of a terrorist offence.

His case was secretly referred to the anti-terrorism Prevent programme, but the villain got off lightly. Having reviewed the case, police decided that Dr Randall posed “no counter terrorism risk, or risk of radicalisation”. However, better safe than sorry, said the school administrators. So they sacked him, just in case.

On balance, Dr Randall should count himself lucky. The way we are going, a few years down the road he might indeed have been charged with, rather than merely accused of, terrorism. For his crime is heinous: he delivered a sermon in which he told his pupils they have the right to question LGBT indoctrination (I’m omitting many initials of this acronym).

Dr Randall planted that seditious idea into the young minds by way of a counterbalance to the noble effort being undertaken by an outfit called Educate & Celebrate, engaged to “embed gender, gender identity and sexual orientation into the fabric” of the school. 

Dr Randall’s terroristic sermon preached that we all “need to treat each other with respect”. This is consonant with the Christian imperative of loving the sinner, whatever we think of the sin.

However, that doesn’t mean we should meekly submit our brains to be scoured by any faddish dogma, especially one that contravenes Christian morality. “You should no more be told you have to accept LGBT ideology,” continued Dr Randall, “than you should be told you must be in favour of Brexit, or must be Muslim.”

Considering that Trent is a Christian school, one would think its chaplain wouldn’t overstep his brief simply by stating the basics of Christian teaching not only on homosexuality and other sexual aberrations but also, more important, on free will – as aided by the secular notion of free speech.

Yet the school explained to Dr Randall that his sermon was “inflammatory, divisive and harmful to LGBT pupils”. Worse than that – according to what that Christian establishment then told police, the sermon was tantamount to an act of terrorism.

To the school’s credit, it wasn’t only the pupils but also the teachers that were being indoctrinated. The educators were ordered to spare the brittle sensibilities of transsexual pupils by abandoning offensive terms like ‘boys’ and ‘girls’.

Also, in an eerie reminder of Red China’s re-education sessions, the teachers had to attend training sessions, during which they were to chant “Smash heteronormativity!”. At least, they weren’t ordered to smash the dog’s heads of binary holdouts, which was a welcome improvement over the shrieks of the Red Guards. This provided a useful reminder that it’s not just decency and sanity that fall victim to woke fascism, but also the much-suffering English language.

Dr Randall’s defenders point out that his sermon was moderate and balanced. All he did was remind the pupils that they had the right – nay obligation – to think for themselves.

In fact, my own quibble is that the sermon was too moderate and balanced. I would have couched the same message in much stronger terms, in which case the terrorism charge would have probably stuck.

But judge for yourself – here is what Dr Randall preached:

“There are some aspects of the Educate and Celebrate programme which are simply factual – there are same-sex attracted people in our society, there are people who experience gender dysphoria, and so on.

“There are some areas where the two sets of values overlap – no one should be discriminated against simply for who he or she is: That’s a Christian value, based in loving our neighbours as ourselves.

“All these things should be accepted straightforwardly by all of us, and it’s right that equalities law reflects that.

“But there are areas where the two sets of ideas are in conflict, and in these areas you do not have to accept the ideas and ideologies of LGBT activists. Indeed, since Trent exists ‘to educate boys and girls according to the Protestant and Evangelical principles of the Church of England’, anyone who tells you that you must accept contrary principles is jeopardizing the school’s charitable status, and therefore its very existence.”

And so on, all in the same, seemingly moderate, vein. Dr Randall clearly knows his Christianity better than he understands modernity.

During his ill-fated 1964 presidential campaign, Barry Goldwater uttered a statement put into his mouth by his speechwriter, the philosopher Harry Jaffa: “Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Our brain-washers could adopt a slight paraphrase of that spiffy adage: extremism in the defence of wokery is no vice, but even moderation in the pursuit of sanity definitely is.

Dr Randall’s incendiary sermon indeed constitutes terrorism to today’s ‘liberals’, and it’s worse than simply blowing up a train or driving an HGV through a crowd of bystanders. To a totalitarian ideology, dissent, no matter how soft-spoken, is much worse than any common-or-garden mass murder.

People don’t matter; only the ideology does. And Dr Randall’s life and career, which he says are “in tatters”, are simply fodder providing Leviathan’s daily sustenance.

A society where something like that could happen is beyond decadent and even degenerate. It’s deeply, and one fears irreversibly, evil… sorry, slip of the tongue. I meant ‘progressive’.

I try not to write about Russia too often, and certainly not two days on the trot. In keeping with this commitment, I’m here acting only as a translator, not a writer.

Vlad Putin, addressing the military parade on Victory Day (VD for short), 9 May, 2021:

“During the most critical time of the war, in the decisive battles determining the outcome of the struggle against fascism, our people stood alone, alone on the arduous, heroic, sacrificial road to Victory…”

Stalin replies, 29 March, 1943 [the emphasis is mine]:

“Personal and secret message from Premier I.V. Stalin to Premier Mr W. Churchill, 29 March, 1943

“I have received your message of 28 March.

“I congratulate the British Air Force on its latest successful raid on Berlin.

“I hope the British armour will use the improved situation in Tunisia to deny the enemy any breathing space.

“Yesterday I and my colleagues viewed the film you have sent, Victory in the Desert, that made a great impression. The film expertly depicts England’s war effort, while giving the lie to the blackguards – and they exist even in our country – who claim that, rather than fighting, England is only watching the war from the sidelines. I eagerly look forward to your similar film about the victory in Tunisia.

“The film Victory in the Desert will be widely shown to all our armies in the frontline and also to the country’s civil population.”

Stalin, speaking at the Tehran Conference, 28 November – 1 December, 1943:

“Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war.”

Nikita Khrushchev in his Memoirs, 1974:

“If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. One-on-one against Hitler’s Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me.”

Victory Day is 9 May in Russia, a day later than in the West because the Germans capitulated on their Western front more hastily.

This day wasn’t a public holiday until 1965, and no Red Square parades were held. Stalin, and Khrushchev after him, didn’t want to make too big a deal of the occasion, possibly because they were reluctant to have to answer – or rather refuse to answer – all sorts of uncomfortable questions.

Such as, “Why did the Soviet Union start the Second World War as Hitler’s ally?” Or, “If the purpose of the Soviet-Nazi Pact was to prepare for war, how come we lost practically the whole regular army in the first few months, with the Germans taking over 4,000,000 POWs between late June and early December?” Or, “Why did we continue to suffer much higher casualties throughout the war?”

Under Brezhnev, Victory Day became more prominent, but still military parades were held in Red Square only every five years. Now it’s every year, with Putin regaling the troops and TV audiences with rousing speeches about the rise of Russophobia necessitating vigilance and battle readiness. (Russophobia is defined in those quarters as less than enthusiastic support for Russia’s crimes.)

Now that the real veterans have mostly died out, the aspiring faux-veterans respond to Putin’s sabre-rattling with posters and bumper stickers screaming “On to Berlin!” and “We can do it again!” So propaganda does work, as if we needed any more proof.

The war, in which the Soviets lost 28 million people, is being broadcast hysterically at the masses day and night, the way communism used to be under Khrushchev. Like communism then, the war is the ideology now.

Putin’s regime is all about whipping up and exploiting chauvinistic frenzy to cover up its real objectives: robbing the country blind to enrich the Great Leader and his jolly friends. A worthy goal though that may be, it can’t function as the official raison d’être of the state.

Hence the war, sacralised and draped in the new imperial mantle, has to take up the slack. Hence also the recent death warrant to history as an academic discipline: any attempt, no matter how factual, to equate Hitler and Stalin or dispute the noble, liberating mission of the Red Army will be punishable by up to a fiver in prison.

Since any conscientious researcher is bound to uncover similarities galore between the two evil dictators, serious history of the war is in effect banned. Only propaganda and pagan processions are allowed.

The war has been turned into a bull’s head on top of a totem pole, with the poor, brainwashed populace expected to genuflect and worship. Ignorance and bellicosity are being raised to high civic virtue, a piety in all but name.

Real veterans wouldn’t have fallen such easy prey to indoctrination. They knew what that war was like, and adulation was the last thing on their minds.

This is what the writer Victor Astafiev (1924-2001) had to say, and he earned the right to tell the truth. Himself a veteran of that war, he was twice wounded, the second time grievously. Astafiev only saw the dawn of the Putin era, with its glorification, and sacralisation, of the war – but he read the signs unerringly:

“Soviet militarists are the most strident, most cowardly, most evil, most stupid of all who have ever existed. It is their kind of ‘victory’, a 1:10 casualty rate! It is they who tossed our people into fire like straw – and Russia is no more, the Russian people are no more. The land that used to be called Russia is now barren, grown over with weeds. And what is left of our people have fled into towns to become rabble, those who left the village without arriving in the city.

“So how many perished in the war? You do know and remember. Yet it is terrifying to cite the real number, isn’t it? If you did so, then, instead of your dress uniforms, you’d have to don hairshirts and beg your people’s forgiveness for the ineptly ‘won’ war, in which the enemy was buried under Russian corpses, drowned in Russian blood.”

Thus spoke a true Russian patriot, for whom the war was a national tragedy, not a pagan pageant. Hear, hear.

Since Putin and his gang control what Lenin described as “the commanding heights of the economy” in Russia, access to them is the only way for foreign companies to secure lucrative contracts there.

It’s only business, nothing personal, goes the line from The Godfather, but any business with organised crime has to be personal. Those operating outside the law have to trust their partners, and those dons (or presidents) don’t dispense trust lightly.

Hence close personal links with them are a precious commodity worth a fortune. Introduce an intrepid entrepreneur to the godfather, vouch for him and you can charge whatever fee the market will bear. And, when it comes to contacts with Russian billionaire gangsters, the market will bear an awful lot.

This explains the sting operation by The Times, publicising that HRH Prince Michael of Kent flogs access to the Kremlin for princely amounts, charging lump sums plus per diems of some £10,000.

I’ve written ‘publicised’ rather than ‘revealed’ because this outrage has been known for a long time. That’s how Prince and Princess Michael of Kent got me in trouble some 10 years ago – and also taught me a lesson about our free press.

Princess Michael was having a public, nay demonstrative, ‘close friendship’ with a young Russian Mafioso Mikhail Kravchenko. The couple shared a hotel suite in Venice and were photographed by a swarm of paparazzi acting lovey-dovey on romantic walks and gondola rides.

Soon thereafter Kravchenko was shot up full of holes in the centre of Moscow, and a scandal broke out. Rumours were making the rounds that the assassination had something to do with Prince Michael’s unpaid debts to the gangsters.

The rumours were never confirmed, but that was the first time the public found out that the prince was hobnobbing with shadowy Russians whose wealth had a dubious provenance.

I wrote about this in The Mail, suggesting that, if our royals wished to hasten the advent of a republic in Britain, that was exactly the way to behave. Little did I know that the prince was Her Majesty’s favourite cousin.

The Palace issued a complaint, and The Mail got rid of me with enviable haste. After all, I was already on a warning after an earlier article advocating equal rights for heterosexuals. (Boris Johnson, then London’s mayor, had allowed a homosexual pressure group to advertise on city buses, while banning a Christian group from responding in the same medium.)

I hope that the same fate won’t befall the intrepid reporters from The Times and Channel 4, who posed as South Koreans in the gold business wishing to pursue Russian contacts. His Royal Highness charged them £200,000, stressing the benefits to be derived from his links with the Kremlin.

The links have been cultivated over a lifetime. To that end, Prince Michael has painstakingly cultivated the Nicholas II look, knowing how soppy today’s Russians can get about their massacred royalty.

He also learned Russian to a reasonable standard, certainly sufficient to communicate simple messages, such as “one hand washes the other”, “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” and “trust this man, he’s one of us.”

Such efforts have been richly rewarded both financially and symbolically. Prince Michael is a proud recipient of one of Russia’s highest decorations, the Order of Friendship of Peoples, an honour he shares with George Blake, whose links with the Kremlin were even closer than HRH’s, and Roman Abramovich, currently banned from entry to the UK.

I don’t know how to describe this situation without laying myself open to the slings and arrows of a lawsuit. Suffice it to say that Russia is currently identified as the highest security threat to the West in general and Britain in particular, although China has a good shout at claiming this distinction.

As a result, Russia has had her economic wrist slapped on several occasions. A new batch of sanctions against Putin’s criminal regime were imposed by all Western powers after an attempt to murder the opposition figure Alexei Navalny with novichok, a battle nerve agent.

These nicely complemented a whole raft of other sanctions incurred by Russia for such criminal acts as the London poisoning of the defector Litvinenko with polonium, the novichok attack on the Skripals and murder of a bystander in Salisbury (both Litvinenko and Skripal were British subjects, by the way), dozens of other murders and of course the invasion of the Ukraine.

The aim of the sanctions is both punitive and didactic. Western powers want to punish the crimes already committed and prevent others by cutting off funding and investments into Russia, thereby trying to teach Putin a thing or two about decent behaviour.

If this is a partial blockade of that regime, then Prince Michael acts as a blockade-runner. He assured the fake Korean businessmen that the sanctions in no way weakened his links with the Kremlin, while his associate described Prince Michael as “Her Majesty’s unofficial ambassador to Russia”.

That’s one way to describe him.

The title is borrowed from Lenin’s brochure, where the last word was ‘communism’, here appropriately replaced with ‘capitalism’.

For the same contagion has been passed on to the West in general and Britain in particular, which is worrying. Especially when the aetiology of the disease is masked by the triumphant shrieks accompanying Labour’s loss of another parliamentary seat.

Serious commentators are opining that the Labour party is finished as a viable political force, and they may well be right. But that’s uninteresting if true.

All that Labour’s troubles signify is that one political machine has perhaps become obsolete. But for as long as its design principles persevere, it’ll simply be traded in for a new model. Former Labour voters will drift towards other left-wing parties, such as the Greens, the LibDems or some new contrivance.

And many of them will happily cast their lot with the Tories, detecting in them a slightly diluted version of the same thing, a glass of socialism with a splash of water. In fact, all our mainstream parties are socialist, and the differences among them are only those of degree.

Divesting socialism of its share-care-be-aware sloganeering, it’s best defined as an accelerating transfer of power from the individual to the state. That’s exactly what’s happening throughout the West and certainly in Britain: the state is getting bigger and stronger, while the individual’s muscles are atrophying at an alarming rate.

As has been the case for the past 100 years or so, the tone is being set by the US, where Biden has announced plans to increase public spending by $4 trillion. Gone are the times olden, when President Eisenhower had to apologise to the nation for running a $3 billion deficit. Today’s American state has developed a socialist appetite and a concomitant knack for thinking big, in trillions, not paltry billions.

Our national debt is also measured in trillions, two of them as of last count, but the count is soaring. That means the government is consistently spending more than it earns, and the curve is climbing steeply. The problem is dire, and it’s not just about money.

For the more the state spends, the more power it acquires – mainly by claiming a greater proportion of the nation’s income and increasing the number of people dependent on it. The form of dependence may differ, but its essence remains the same.

It could be direct handouts responsible for much or all of an individual’s livelihood. It could be giant construction projects, with the state throwing money on what Marx used to call ‘labour armies’. It could be the state employing more bureaucrats, as the need increases to manage, or rather mismanage, the growing pile of public money. It could be burgeoning grants to organisations that loyally do the state’s bidding. It could be any old thing, but whatever it is, state power grows with every pound spent.

Another symptom of the eponymous infantile disease is a sustained attack on the culture, traditions and institutions of Western civility. This follows the blueprint drawn by the crypto-communist Frankfurt School, whose objective was to take over the West gradually, without having to resort to violent, revolutionary upheavals.

One doesn’t detect in our currently triumphant Conservative Party any resolve to roll back the bossy woke onslaught undermining the subsiding foundations of our civilisation: religion, family, morality, decency, tolerance, civil liberties.

All one sees is a slightly less strident effort to do the Labour work without the Labour Party. Less strident is better than more strident, which is why the Tories are to be congratulated on winning the Hartlepool parliamentary constituency and over 600 seats on the local councils.

But it would be a mistake to think that these victories are a sign of the infantile disease receding. It’s not. It’s merely progressing at a slightly slower, but ultimately as deadly, pace.  

Manny Macron has always identified with Napoleon Bonaparte, but until recently he indulged that aspirational self-image only in the privacy of his palace. Lately, however, he has become more open about it, clearly wishing his electorate to see the similarities.

Judging by the ‘Macron out’ demonstrations spreading all over France, the electorate fails to discern any. That’s not fair because similarities do exist, two of them: Boney and Manny share a fondness for older wives (much older, in Manny’s case, so he outdid his role model there) and a hatred of Britain.

C’est, as they say in France, tout. Yet Manny is using every trick of both direct and subliminal communication to help voters see him as today’s Napoleon. If Boney were alive today, he’d be just like Manny, goes the encoded message.

It’s tempting to accuse Macron of megalomania, and perhaps that’s part of it. But most of it is politicking.

The presidential election is coming, and Manny is neck and neck with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, a right-wing (as discrete from conservative) group. Since Manny’s tenure has been rather the opposite of a rip-roaring success, and his handling of Covid downright disastrous, there’s every possibility he may lose.

His core support is more or less secure, if only because they’d as soon vote for Le Pen as they would for syphilis. But the periphery around the core looks shaky. Hence Manny must seduce enough right-wingers to siphon some votes from Marine. This need explains all his recent posturing.

For example, he has done an about-face on Putin – from fierce critic to effusive admirer. Why? Because French right-wingers are Putinistas to a man. The Kremlin is openly financing the National Rally, and no bad word about the KGB colonel is tolerated in those circles.

(I found it out the hard way the summer before last, when I recorded a 90-minute interview with the right-wing radio station Radio Courtoisie – in French too, which taxed my modest linguistic ability no end. Then, 10 minutes before air time, the station manager spiked the broadcast, explaining that it would upset the Russian embassy. No one was left in doubt as to who called the shots in right-wing circles.)

Napoleon is another holy relic with Marine’s voters. Left-wingers tend to be uncomfortable with some of Napoleon’s bellicose peccadillos, especially his attempts to secure new colonies for France at the expense of the kind of people who are now in fashion, and also his tendency to have POWs shot out of hand.

But Napoleon’s muscular patriotism appeals to the Right, as does his commitment to making France great by controlling Europe and keeping la perfide Albion out. Marine’s voters tend to equate goodness with greatness, greatness with size, and they are smarting from the realisation that, in that sense, France is no longer great. (They can’t appreciate the senses in which she still is.)

That’s why Manny felt duty-bound to deliver a rousing oration at the celebration of the bicentenary of Napoleon’s death the other day. “We love Napoleon,” declared Manny, “because his life gives us a taste of what is possible if we accept the invitation to take risks.”

Actually, the taste is quite acrid. When Napoleon accepted “the invitation to take risks”, he twice abandoned his army to its fate, first in Egypt, then in Russia; led over a million young Frenchmen to their deaths; had his navy routed by Nelson at Trafalgar; lost every battle his troops fought against Wellington, including the ultimate one at Waterloo; ended his life as a British captive on a godforsaken island.

True, in between those debacles he did conquer most of Europe, and the Right are still dining on that legacy. Napoleon’s hatred of the British also appeals to them, which is why Manny has to demonstrate that little predilection too.

Alas, he falls short of his hero’s scope, quite pathetically. If Napoleon managed to blockade all of Britain, Manny merely tried to do that to the Channel island of Jersey, a British dependency. And even in that modest undertaking he failed, when his flotilla of fishing boats escorted by a warship was chased away by the Royal Navy.

But Manny didn’t really want to blockade Jersey. He just wanted to take a bow to Marine’s voters, and especially those Gaullists who can’t decide whom they despise more, Manny or Marine.

Macron has also sharpened his anti-Muslim and anti-immigration rhetoric, without giving any tangible indication of what, if anything, he is going to do about it. But Manny isn’t about doing. He is about sending appropriate signals to appropriate groups.

If his most serious opposition came from the communist party, he’d be quoting Marx, Lenin and Gramsci in every speech. He’d also be photographed having a meaningful dialogue with a bust of Maurice Thorez, as he was snapped talking to a marble Napoleon the other day.

P.S. I’m happy to report that it’s not just oral but also written commentary on football matches that refines my knowledge of English. Thus The Telegraph: “Sergio Ramos… is, of course, not adverse to the dark arts himself.” One can only hope that those on the receiving end didn’t suffer any averse consequences. In the same paper: “Tuchel… scored any talk about… a goalless draw.” Good job then that his team scorned two goals.

The Law Commission feels that hate crimes are, well, hateful. Hence they have no place in the socially engineered machine that’s stubbornly clinging to its old name, Britain.

The problem, according to the Commission, is that the current laws don’t provide a broad enough coverage. Fair enough, a delinquent who as much as jokes about a victim’s race, religion, disability or sexual/transsexual proclivity is covered by existing legislation, with not so much as a toe sticking out.

Thus Bernard Manning, to name just one late comedian, would be looking at serious prison time for one of his stock jokes. I have to overcome my own revulsion over Bernie’s blatant, criminal racism to repeat it here: “A black chap with a parrot sitting on his shoulder walks into a pub. ‘Where the hell did you get this?’ asks the landlord. ‘In Africa,’ replies the parrot. ‘There’s fucking loads of them’.”

Since race is classified as a ‘protected characteristic’, the wages of Bernie’s sin would today be a custodial sentence and a hefty fine, though I happen to think it would be an excellent idea to reintroduce the death penalty for just such transgressions. Well, give them time.

Meanwhile, the Commission is debating how to stretch the hate crime laws – and God knows they do have enviable elasticity built in – to cover misogyny, age, sex workers (aka prostitutes), homelessness, alternative subcultures and philosophical beliefs.

So make sure you refrain from cracking silly jokes about old, homeless whores deeply immersed in punk deconstructionism. None of the wisecracks starting with: “This old bitch is turning tricks by day and reading Derrida by night on a park bench to the accompaniment of Cybergoth music…”

I am specifically talking about jokes here because assault and physical threats are already criminalised under existing, ancient laws. But what’s even a grievous physical injury compared to the lifelong psychological trauma suffered by, say, an LGBTQ+ person when clobbered with a joke? Just imagine: “Q: How do you know you’re in a gay bar? A. The stools are upside down.”

If you were an LGBTQ+ person, you’d dial 999 faster than you could say hate crime. I know I would.

I’m proud of Britain. Nowhere else are people so protected from life-destroying insults and silly jokes whose sole purpose is to traumatise.

You may ask how Britain can devote so much time and attention to hate crimes. After all, isn’t our legal system already creaking at the seams under the load of other, more traditional crimes, such as burglary?

Funny you should say that. You seem to be unaware that burglary, to name one such crime, puts no pressure on our law enforcement because we’ve made it legal.

Well, perhaps not exactly legal in the de jure sense, but certainly unprosecuted and even uninvestigated de facto. That way our cops are free to hunt down criminals spouting inappropriate statements and wags telling injurious jokes (such as the ones I reproduced above over my own inner objections).

Quite right too. After all, burglary is only a crime against property, the sort of thing old, reactionary laws were devised to protect. But hate crimes, while doubtless traumatising their victims, also assail the whole progressive ethos, the mainstay of liberal ideology.

And every progressive country in history, such as the Soviet Union or Cuba, has always punished crimes against the ideology more severely than those against property. Property, after all, is theft, according to such progressive thinkers as Marx and Proudhon.

Hence a burglar merely robs the robbers, assisting the state in its noble mission of redistributing wealth. An offensive joker, on the other hand, hurts the state by kicking dents in its ideological body.

So is it any wonder that the Law Commission has nothing better to do than pondering hate crimes? Social engineering is a serious matter, and no effort dedicated to it is ever wasted. I just hope that new laws will also protect white, heterosexual, Thomist freeholders.

P.S. Another lesson in the English course taught by football commentators. They all adore the word ‘amount’ and loathe the word ‘number’, although that doesn’t qualify as a hate crime. And when they do utter the despicable word, they have to augment it with their preferred one.

Thus, a commentator praised a team the other day for “throwing a great amount of numbers in the box”. I would have just said “great numbers”, but then I wasn’t born to the language.