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The danger is real. The military, egged on by right-wingers, is plotting to suspend Parliament, behead Boris Johnson and impose martial law.

So says William Hague, the former leader of the Conservative Party. Or at least that’s what I inferred from the title of his article, The Real Danger Is Insurgency on the Right.

To my relief, the body text explained that Lord Hague didn’t quite mean that the way it sounded. People like me, those cursed with literal minds, didn’t realise he meant it figuratively. Politicians mean everything figuratively.

“Conservatism,” explained Lord Hague, “is being redefined. That is unavoidable.” Like death and taxes, I suppose.

But fair enough. Everything in life, including conservatism, is in flux. Things change and every change is for the better, goes the principal premise of progressivism. Lord Hague seems to swear by it. Hence he welcomes the evolution of British conservatism that “is redefining itself to create a more interventionist state…”.

Creating a state more interventionist than we have already may be desirable to some and deplorable to others. One way or the other, it has nothing to do with conservatism, however redefined.

The overarching political conflict of modernity is one between those who wish a state that’s as small as sensible and those who want one that’s as big as possible. The former are called conservatives, the latter socialists.

Therefore, we can paraphrase Lord Hague’s observation to say that British conservatism is redefining itself as socialist. This is an oxymoron, but not to Lord Hague.

Still, where does “insurgency on the right” come in? You’ll notice that I ended my previous quote with an ellipsis, leaving the tail end out. Here it is: “…and it is feeling the internal tension of doing so.”

It’s clear now. Some members of the party insist on taking its name at face value. Lord Hague doesn’t stigmatise those ‘insurgents’ the way Lenin did. He doesn’t call them ‘scum’, ‘prostitutes’ or ‘noxious insects’. But if he were less civilised, he would.

Lord Hague was a Thatcherite when it suited him, but it no longer does. Hence he writes: “Free market philosophy triumphed in showing how to create prosperity but it struggles with how to make that prosperity more equitable, sustainable or resilient.”

The last two adjectives are disingenuous. For even a cursory glance at world economies will show that free markets are perfectly capable of not only creating wealth, but also of making it sustainable and resilient.

It’s the word “equitable” that’s the crux of Lord Hague’s argument. “Without government intervention,” he explains, “a globalised economy leads to clusters of great wealth while other places decline.”

This is economic thinking at its most ignorant and fatuous. For the implication is that some places, and presumably people, get poorer because others get richer. Tossing aside verbal chicanery, this premise is unvarnished Marxism – as is the proposed curative of an omnipotent state reducing the inequitable gap.

I’m sure Lord Hague could cite reams of statistics showing that the gap between rich and poor regions (and people) is getting wider. Yet such statistics are mostly larcenous.

The larceny starts with the definition of ‘poor’ and ‘rich’. Usually it’s expressed as the top and bottom percentiles, say 10 per cent in each case. Even discounting the fact that today’s British ‘poor’ would be solid middle class not only in most other countries but also in relatively recent British history, such percentages are meaningless.

Since we agree that everything in life is fluid, so is our economic status throughout life. Youngsters just entering the market may well find themselves in the bottom 10 or five per cent. However, as they gain wisdom and experience, their incomes grow.

Within a year or two they may climb out of their percentile and steadily approach the top 10 per cent. (For example, 95 per cent of Americans have been in that group at some age.) Few people are frozen in the same income category, high or low, they find themselves in at the moment economists whip their calculators out.

There’s another problem with overemphasising income gaps. What should matter is that we have enough money for our needs – not that others may have more.

Let’s say we compare two families of four. One earns £20,000 a year; the other, £200,000. The second family is comfortable, while the first struggles to pay even essential bills.

What if both families triple their income? The ‘rich’ family is now on £600,000, and the ‘poor’ one on £60,000. The income gap between them has grown from £180,000 to £540,000. However, the ‘poor’ family is no longer poor by any definition.

I wonder if Lord Hague can name a single period in history when incomes were distributed ‘equitably’ among or within countries. I certainly can’t – too many factors go into income production to be homogenised across the board.

However, I could name countless examples of governments trying to ‘level up’, to use Johnson’s phrase, and only managing to level down. Yet they never learn, and neither does Lord Hague.

There was a flaw in my calculations above: I was talking about people who act in the market. Yet some don’t, and their number is growing exponentially.

About 30 per cent of British families derive more than half of their income from welfare, and 64 per cent receive some kind of benefit. That’s 20.3 million families, of whom only 8.7 million are pensioners.

That’s why, writes Lord Hague with palpable approval, “Ministers are reported to be discussing a new tax to pay for the estimated £10 billion a year cost of social care.” Actually, social benefits currently cost the Exchequer £212 billion, so I assume he only means some subset.

Shining through the article is Lord Hague’s conviction that a Leviathan of a welfare state is as inevitable as death, taxes and the Conservative Party converging with Labour – and that it’s self-evidently a Good Thing.

Well, that had better be self-evident, for it’s not borne out by any empirical data. These show that, both in Britain and the US, the welfare state has done incalculable harm both to the target group and to society at large.

Before the advent of the welfare state, the poor lived in modest but dignified housing. Today they live in the hellholes of ghetto estates, hotbeds of crime covered with graffiti and full of drunk, drug-addled single mothers, each with several feral, illiterate children by several absentee fathers.

This has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the entitlement culture churning out several generations of families in which no one has ever had a job, nor sought one. By way of illustration, a recent study compared the school test performance of low-income whites with that of African and Bangladeshi immigrants in the same bracket.

The latter groups met the required standards 60 per cent of the time; the former, a mere 30 per cent. That same group used to score close to 80 per cent before the state got to look after the less fortunate by dispossessing the more fortunate.

This systematic creation of a lumpen underclass has equally disastrous consequences for the whole society. For example, the welfare state is directly responsible for the uncontrollable growth in crime rates.

In both Britain and the US, crime rates had been going down steadily for years, only to rise stratospherically in the second half of the 20^th century – when the welfare state got going in earnest. In 1954, when firearms were readily available, there were 12 armed robberies in London. In 1991, when strict gun controls were in place, there were 1,600.

The cost of the welfare state goes way beyond the public funding it requires. We are all paying it not just through our taxes, but also through the misery visited on our cities by crowds of alienated youths taught no respect for decency and indeed humanity. “We are showing the rich people we can do what we want,” said a young rioter interviewed by the BBC in 2011.

The culture of share-care-be-aware is driven not by facts, and certainly not by genuine compassion, but by ideological biases fostered in the past only by the left and bearing no relation to reality, morality or common sense.

But left and right have now converged, and Lord Hague is living proof. So, if there is indeed an insurgency under way, count me in.    

P.S. Government intervention so beloved of Lord Hague is about to deliver a lethal blow to the construction industry by criminalising wolf whistling and catcalling. Those building sites are guaranteed to run out of staff in short order.

You know why scholars are still arguing about the identity of William Shakespeare? Because they are trying to cover up the fact first revealed in the title above.

Misogyny, racism and transphobia had to come together to create a fake Bard, a white male. And his marriage to the Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway is pure fabrication: same-sex interracial marriage wasn’t yet allowed in those backward times.

You may think I’m rewriting history to kowtow to woke fads. Perhaps I am. So what? Why should Shakespeare’s biography be off limits if people take liberties with his plays?

One case in point is Ian McKellen’s production of Hamlet at the Theatre Royal Windsor, which has gone sour because Polonius fell out with Laertes. As a result of that generational conflict, both quit the show with much rancour.

As stand-ins are being rehearsed (with a woman playing Polonius this time), one has to marvel at the play’s imaginative original casting. It starts with Sir Ian himself in the eponymous role.

Sir Ian is a great actor, and the Hamlet he played 50 years ago was by all accounts a tour de force. But, at the risk of sounding ageist, he is now eighty-two – a vigorous eighty-two, but, well, eighty-two. And numerous references to Hamlet’s life strewn throughout the play pinpoint his age at about thirty.

I’m sure Sir Ian can still do seventy, sixty or, with award-winning makeup, perhaps even fifty, although that would be a stretch. However, his time of playing young men is long since gone. Yet, comparatively speaking, this bit of casting is as traditional as they come.

This gets us back to the tiff between Polonius and Laertes, or rather the actors playing those roles. Actually, calling them both actors is a concession in itself.

Steven Berkoff, playing Polonius, is indeed an actor. But the thespian playing his son would be miscast even as his daughter. For, as the photo above shows, Emmanuella Cole’s profession must be properly described as an actress, and she is black.

Miscegenation could theoretically have happened in the sixteenth century. Though it’s highly unlikely for Polonius to have produced a half-caste son, it’s not beyond the realm of the possible. But I still can’t for the life of me imagine Laertes identifying as a woman, getting the requisite hormone treatments and then competing in the Tokyo Olympics.

The reports I’ve read fail to mention who plays Ophelia but, if Sir Ian failed to cast Sidney Poitier in that role, he missed a trick. Mr Poitier, a sprightly 94, could upstage everybody as Hamlet’s love interest with suicidal tendencies. Moreover, such casting would cater to Sir Ian’s natural proclivities, if not Mr Poitier’s.

What’s the artistic intent behind casting an octogenarian as Hamlet, and a black actress as his textually white male nemesis? Is it to communicate that art transcends such incidentals as sex and age? That Shakespeare’s line “And I a maid at your window, to be your Valentine” would lose none of its poignancy if delivered by, say, Sidney Poitier?

An intent does exist, but it’s not artistic. It’s political. Artistically, there’s only so much suspension of disbelief that an audience can take. We are already asked to accept that a room has one wall removed for us to follow the action on stage. Or to forget that just the other day we saw a Lady Macbeth as a TV policewoman pointing her gun and screaming “Freeze!”

Now we aren’t supposed to notice that Hamlet is well past the pensionable age, Laertes is a black woman, or, hypothetically, Ophelia is a nonagenarian black man. Or rather first we must notice all that for the sake of multi-culti diversity – only then to stop noticing it for the sake of artistic integrity.

As a result, what starts as a Shakespeare tragedy ends up as a farce, and a schizophrenic one at that. His head spinning like a top, the spectator leaves the theatre yearning for the good old days, when the immortality of Shakespeare’s lines was conveyed by properly cast actors delivering them with good diction and sound understanding.

Perhaps it was that insanity that caused the clash between Miss Cole and her superannuated co-stars, or else it was mainly their superciliousness and her irascibility. One way or the other, she accused them, especially Mr Berkoff, of “belittling and disrespecting” her.

Apparently, the old actor continued to ignore Miss Coles’s deep insights into Shakespeare, leaving her feeling rejected, dejected and, presumably, ejected. Dissed, in other words.

Consequently, she stormed out of the production and lodged an official complaint. Reports omit to mention whether she also contacted the police, but such an action would seem natural. Jumping off the stage before he was pushed, Mr Berkoff quit too.

This unfortunate incident denied lovers of freak shows the perverse pleasure of watching Sir Ian cross swords with Mis Cole. In that scuffle, my money would be on Miss Cole – in the interest of racial and gender equality, she’d skewer Hamlet and walk away unscathed.

Yes, that would be playing fast and loose with Shakespeare, but what else is new?

P.S. Staying topical, do you think, if Oscar Wilde lived today, he’d describe Covid as “a triumph of whoop over expectoration”? 

No, not his own. His Holiness has neither jumped off his balcony nor put a soaped noose around his neck.

The suicide the Pope has attempted is that of his Church, known in some quarters as the Bride of Christ. If so, then Jesus is coming precious close to being jilted at the altar.

On the surface of it, the step Pope Francis has taken is almost trivial. He has espied with his eagle eye that some Catholics still don’t share his enthusiasm for kowtowing to modernity, in all its variously perverse manifestations.

And wouldn’t you know, some dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries still whinge about the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965, which was only marginally less subversive than Luther’s little escapade in 1517.

Vatican II introduced many liturgical reforms that made the Church look and sound uncannily similar to some Protestant denominations. In fact, the Council was blessed with the presence of several Protestant observers, although I’m not sure they had veto powers.

The most visible reform concerned the liturgical language, which until then had tended to be Latin. Completing the work started by Luther, Vatican II effectively mandated a switch to the vernacular. Celebration of the Latin Mass wasn’t banned but only discouraged, but in such strong terms that it was as near as damn.

As a result, finding a London church celebrating the Latin Mass has become as difficult as finding an Anglican one still using the Book of Common Prayer. The reasons for this are the same in both cases. The church hierarchies of both denominations are infected with the modernising virus – and give me Covid any day.

Yet difficult doesn’t mean impossible. Searching high and wide, one can still find Catholic and Anglican churches retaining respect for tradition. This though such respect must be presupposed by definition, for the Church is inherently a conservative institution.

Yet the hierarchs, including the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury, evidently believe that their churches must swing with the times. And, defying physics, the swing is monodirectional: always towards the cheapest and most condescending populism those gentlemen can muster.

Acting in that spirit, Pope Francis reversed his predecessor’s decision to ease restrictions on the use of the Latin Mass, and introduced draconian measures enforcing compliance. Henceforth, any groups defying Vatican II and clinging on to the Latin Mass may be kicked out of their churches.

You want to say Ave Maria, gratia plena instead of Hail Mary, full of grace, do it someplace else. A garage perhaps. Or else the reception room at the social services. Anywhere, as long as you keep your retrograde mugs out of the churches.

As objectionable as this move is, the explanation proffered for it is even worse. The Latin Mass, says the Vatican, is divisive. It’s a tool in the hands of liturgical terrorists conducting guerrilla warfare against Vatican II.

The Vatican here follows its beloved modernity by choosing words denoting the exact opposite of truth. In this case, what they call ‘divisive’ is actually unifying.

For that’s exactly what the Latin Mass is, bringing together as it does parishioners from all over the world. A Pole can go to a church in Argentina and worship in the same language he has heard from childhood.

The argument that most people don’t know Latin is nonsensical. Anyone used to the Latin liturgy from an early age will know exactly what every word means. In any case, it’s easy to provide bilingual prayer sheets. Give them to even a slow learner for a couple of years, and he won’t be looking at the vernacular translation any longer.

Many Russians don’t know Church Slavonic either, many Muslims aren’t fluent in Arabic, and many Jews don’t know much Hebrew outside Shema, Israel. However, they somehow manage to get their heads around the difference between a liturgical and a spoken language.

Exactly the same arguments as Catholic modernisers use against Latin are used by Anglican subversives to banish the KJB and the Book of Common Prayer. All those ‘thee’, ‘thou’ and ‘betwixt’, no one talks that way.

That’s right. But then nobody talked in the language of poetic Biblical imagery in 1617, when the King James Bible came out. Few even talked that way in 1526, when William Tyndale produced his translation. But then even the fire-eating reformers and popularisers knew the difference between the sacral and the profane.

The switch to the vernacular was a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of the Reformation, the anteroom of atheism. It was also the anteroom of the Enlightenment, with its similar quest to empower every individual, no matter how unqualified, all the way to complete self-sufficiency.

The principal idea of the Reformation was to remove, at least partially but ideally altogether, the mediation of the Church from a personal relationship with Christ. The Holy Spirit was all it was supposed to take to enable any believer to understand and interpret the word of God.

Alas, an average untrained parishioner can interpret Christian theology no better than he can sit down at the organ and interpret a Bach chorale. He’ll end up producing gibberish in the first case and cacophony in the second.

Guided by Luther, and especially Calvin who reformed the Reformation, every man became his own priest, the first step on the path towards becoming his own God. Wanton voluntarism replaced humble obedience, and Protestantism predictably began to fracture into hundreds of sects almost immediately.

Many became closely intertwined with, and dependent on, secular politics. In fact, Luther’s animadversions succeeded, and he himself escaped punishment, only because the local lords desperately wanted their bailiwicks to gain independence from the Holy Roman Emperor. Abandoning the Emperor’s religion could be a useful political step, and Luther did nicely. However, intimacy with secular authorities usually leads to dependence on them.

The Catholic Church has always been organised on the basis of doctrinal centralism but organisational localism, called subsidiarity. Its episcopates are autonomous, both structurally and politically. Conversely, like Icarus flying too close to the sun, most Protestant denominations get too close to secular politics to remain independent of them. Secularism was built into Protestantism from the start.  

Then again, many people found the demands of the Catholic Church too onerous. Any real religion asks for a proof of humility through service (other than of the lip variety), and humility became a rare commodity in a world increasingly inhabited by self-deifying ignoramuses.

Calvinism in particular encouraged a focus of remunerative toil, for it treated wealth as a sign of divine benevolence and a hint that the person was predestined for salvation. And Catholicism, with its plethora of days put aside for devotions every year, wasn’t conducive to a lifelong pursuit of riches. (Even today, Protestant countries are 30 per cent more prosperous than Catholic ones.)

Initially happy to receive the Scripture and the liturgy in their everyday language, Protestants gradually reduced the time devoted to reading the former and attending the latter. And then mass atheism was just around the corner.

It may be my pride talking, and I may well burn in hell for it, but I find it hard to see many Protestants as brothers in Christ. Even the less insane sects smack of paganism too much for my liking. Many more smack of atheism.

For it’s largely thanks to the Reformation that many baptised Christians put their denomination down when required to fill a questionnaire, and then attend services only at Easter and Christmas, if then.

The closer the Catholic Church gets to Protestantism, the more it’ll promote atheism – the more it’ll betray its remit. The vernacular Catholic Mass is already barely distinguishable from its High Anglican counterpart, but at least conservative Catholics can seek refuge in the few churches that still celebrate Mass the old way.

The Pope’s decree is bound to shut the few doors still open – opening instead the doors to Protestantism. Ecumenism is all fine and well, but any proximity between Catholicism and Protestantism can only spell the triumph of the latter and the gradual demise of the former.

I wonder if His Holiness understands this.

It took a kiss to wake up the Sleeping Beauty. It took public unrest in Cuba to wake up Sleeping Joe, making him sit up and notice that there’s something wrong about communism.

Speaking at a press conference he shared with Angela Merkel after their meeting, Joe stated his position in no certain terms: “Communism is a failed system, universally failed system. And I don’t see socialism as a very useful substitute.”

I don’t know what exactly aroused Biden from his slumber. Until the press conference he hadn’t referred to the Cuban regime as ‘communist’, choosing the misnomer ‘authoritative’ instead.

Now, some will take exception to the notion that in the beginning was the word. Few, however, would deny that the word is at the beginning of speech.

If so, the word must have the same meaning for both the speaker and his audience. Let’s agree on the terms first, as an ancient philosopher said.

Alas, when it comes to semantics, a newly awakened Joe leaves terra firma and finds himself all at sea. To begin with, he confuses authoritative with authoritarian.

The former is desirable; the latter, less so. Authoritative means having authority, and surely no government can survive without it. Authoritarian, on the other hand, describes a government that not only has political authority, but monopolises it.

A government that monopolises not just political authority but also all others is called totalitarian, and that word would be a useful addition to Biden’s vocabulary.

If even such simple words defy the president’s grasp of political realities, it’s no wonder that he seems uncertain about the meaning of socialism and communism.

To be fair, he isn’t the only one, for the way these terms are used nowadays, they have a Marxist provenance. In other words, they were laid down in the works of history’s most muddled and disingenuous thinker.

Marx attached ironclad inevitability to political and economic history. Capitalism was bound to be ousted by socialism, and socialism by communism.

To Marx, capitalism was private ownership of the means of production (which is to say the economy), socialism was public ownership, and communism was abolition of property altogether.

Starting from the end, no government called ‘communist’ has ever claimed it was indeed communist, in the real sense of the word. Communism was to them not current reality but a shining light somewhere beyond the horizon. Hence most communist leaders refrain from pinpointing a definite timeline for communism to arrive.

Khrushchev was an exception. He declared in 1961 that “The current generation of the Soviet people will live under communism.” Since a generation is normally believed to comprise 20 years, eternal bliss was to arrive by 1981, but Khrushchev didn’t live to see the day that never arrived.

But what does public ownership of the economy actually mean? That everybody in the country owns a share in everything: industry, agriculture, utilities and so on? If so, we’re looking at a pie in the sky as indigestible as communism.

For ownership implies control and management. However, I may technically own some of the NHS, but I’m manifestly incapable of running it, and nor do I decide how it’s run. Only the state can do that, if only badly.

So in reality public ownership means state ownership. And the state must be sufficiently big and powerful to appropriate everything in the country.

Therefore, peeking through the fog of bien pensant phraseology enveloping socialism, we realise that it’s not about such beautiful things as universal equality and charity. It’s about a big and powerful central state.

Hence all modern governments are socialist, albeit to various degrees. And all of them seek to increase their power, thereby becoming more socialist.

They differ mostly in their methods, not their inner imperative. Extreme socialist regimes can rely on violence more widely than the moderate ones, which can’t easily nationalise the whole economy at gunpoint.

They have to act surreptitiously, mainly by gaining gradual control over more and more of the nation’s money. Biden’s signature under an annual budget of $6.5 trillion is tantamount to a pledge to do just that, as is his commitment to an increasingly nationalised healthcare.

At its extreme end, socialism becomes totalitarian, with the state concentrating all power in its hands, and some such regimes are loosely described as communist. The only ones springing to mind today are China and Cuba, although there must be others.

According to Biden, they’ve failed, but we must define failure. To me, the word means missing the desired target. If so, then neither regime has failed.

Just as the real purpose of mass murder is to murder masses, so is total power the real of purpose of totalitarianism. On these terms, Cuba’s regime is a qualified success, and China’s a spectacular one.

But that’s not what Awake Joe means. He means Cuba has failed to achieve American objectives, defined by another Democratic president as “two chickens in every garage” or some such.

That’s illogical. Cuba has her own goals, not Biden’s. Has it ever occurred to him that the American yardstick may not work in the metric system of totalitarian states?

And China is no longer failing even by American standards. If in the mid-1990s the 75 million diaspora Chinese produced more wealth than the billion people in the home country, today’s China boasts a per capita GDP of $10,500, 20 per cent higher than in Cuba. And in absolute terms, considering the number of Chinese capita, the country is an economic and geopolitical giant.

Something is terribly wrong with Biden’s platitudinous taxonomy, as it would be with any other that defines the world by purely or mostly economic criteria. Ronald Reagan emphasised this by describing the Soviet Union in moral, not economic terms. He called it an evil empire, not a failing one. It’s not just the economy, stupid.

But can you imagine Awake Joe saying that the Cuban regime is evil, which is why the United States is committed to helping those protesters? I can’t, even though he doesn’t want the Republicans to carry Florida again, as Trump did in two elections.

More than 1.5 million anti-Castro Cubans living in Florida are a powerful electoral force, and these people know totalitarianism not by hearsay. Those chaps won’t be won over by vaguely anti-communist noises, especially those that miss the mark.

They want deeds, not words, and Awake Joe doesn’t seem to know the difference. Then again, he’s a professional politician, isn’t he?

Home Secretary Pritti Patel was asked to comment on England fans who booed the England footballers ‘taking the knee’. The interviewer was clearly expecting Miss Patel to express a heartfelt wish that those racist troglodytes be lined up against the wall and machinegunned.

That expectation was quickly frustrated. “That’s a choice for them quite frankly,” she said.

What?!? People may choose to scream racism?!?!? To do or say anything that our opinion formers regard as heretical?!?!?! (I’m sorry about the excessive punctuation, but it was necessary to convey the pitch of the ensuing public outcry.)

It fell upon the England defender Tyrone Mings to put the blame for racism squarely at Miss Patel’s doorstep: “You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ and then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against happens.”

The non sequiturs of that statement outnumber the caps Mings won during the tournament, but then we don’t expect rhetorical rigour from a ball-kicker. We do expect something along those lines from our columnists, especially those who are peers of the realm.

There goes another expectation right out of the window, if Lord Finkelstein of The Times is anything to go by. He thinks Mings was right and Patel’s reply was imprudent: “I’m never in favour of jeering anyone, is, I think, a pretty safe answer for a home secretary.”

Really? What about the England players giving the Heil Hitler salute, as they did at the 1936 Berlin Olympics? Imagining for the sake of argument that they felt like repeating the gesture today, would we be allowed a teensy-weensy jeer then?

Yes, says Lord Finkelstein, Miss Patel was right – ‘taking the knee’ is indeed gesture politics. But there’s nothing wrong with that in se. “The question is what the gesture is meant to represent.”

He continues: “Some of my friends on the right seem to have got it into their heads that taking the knee is an endorsement of the programme of a small group of Black Lives Matter activists. That taking the knee is a call for the abolition of capitalism and the advancement of the theories of Marx.”

Lord Finkelstein, who despite his protestations is a woke leftie, referring to his ‘friends on the right’ is a bit like an anti-Semite prefacing a hateful diatribe by saying, “Some of my best friends are Jewish.” But do let’s get back to what he thinks about the views supposedly voiced by his friends on the right.

Those are simply ridiculous. Neither Harry Kane nor Raheem Sterling, explains Lord Finklestein, wants to overthrow capitalism. Why, none of the England players has even read Das Kapital. Their gesture is merely “a protest against the racism they encounter”.

Well, I have news for Lord Finkelstein, and I’m appalled that this may indeed come as news to him.

Those millions of Russians screaming “Death! Death!” when the show trials were under way hadn’t read Das Kapital either.

The same people sobbing uncontrollably as they joined the stampede of mourners at Stalin’s funeral might not even have read the much shorter Communist Manifesto.

And I bet most were unfamiliar with Kritik des Gothaer Programms and Anti-Dühring, which didn’t prevent them from roaring their collective demand that ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ be exterminated.

In the same vein, it’s a safe bet that most Germans screaming “Heil!!!” at Nuremberg Rallies hadn’t perused the works of Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Yet such lacunae in their erudition in no way diminished their vigour in running gas chambers to purify the racial makeup of Europe.

The facts of the current confrontation are there for all to see. Black Lives Matter is indeed a self-proclaimed Marxist group proudly calling for the abolition of capitalism.

The genuflecting gesture originates from the unfortunate death of a drug-addled criminal who was killed by a Minneapolis cop kneeling on his throat after a scuffle. Mobs of BLM supporters then went on a rampage, burning and looting their way through the country.

They’d assail passers-by and diners in outdoor cafés, demanding they ‘take the knee’, a gesture BLM had adopted as their signature. Those who refused were killed, beaten up or otherwise abused.

So yes, woke genuflection is indeed gesture politics. And yes, this gesture is a clear-cut sign of support for BLM. And yes, BLM is a subversive Marxist gang trying to use race as a battering ram bringing down the walls of capitalism – they say so themselves.

Lord Finkelstein will never learn to think soundly – such an ability has to be acquired at an earlier age. But at least he could plug the most gaping holes in his education, specifically on crowd psychology and the proven methods of manipulating it. I’d recommend starting with Gustave Le Bon’s book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.

Then he’ll learn that vox populi isn’t so much vox dei as a dummy to variously evil ventriloquists, or else a puppet to their wirepullers. It’s they who decide what the dummy will say or do – and the throng acts no more rationally or even consciously than my metaphorical figurines.

Those wild-eyed Russians might indeed have thought they were striking a blow for universal justice and equality. Those fanatical Germans might indeed have felt that only Hitler could lead them to happiness and prosperity. And England footballers may indeed believe they are registering their “protest against the racism they encounter”.

But all of them were doing someone else’s bidding, however inadvertently or incidentally. For turning the mindless masses (and the masses are always mindless collectively, even if some individuals within them aren’t) any which way isn’t just possible but dead easy.

Someone like Lenin (who, incidentally, swore by Le Bon’s book) or Hitler had such techniques down to a fine art, and so do today’s propagandists. A few well-chosen incendiary platitudes, and the dummy throng gets its marching orders – either directly from the expert manipulators or indirectly, through the mysterious workings of the zeitgeist.

And what do you know, the same – exactly the same! – peasants who yesterday prayed for their beloved tsar, today sing and dance on hearing the news that he has been butchered together with his whole family. And the same bürgers who yesterday shared a friendly schnapps with their Jewish neighbours today denounce them to the Gestapo.

The two groups were equally certain they were doing the right thing both before and after. But they didn’t act as free agents; mobs never do. Le Bon’s disciples, all those ventriloquists and wirepullers, guided them then – as they are guiding our knee-takers now.

The intellectual paucity of our hacks never ceases to amaze me, and you would have thought I’d get used to it by now. I am, usually. But then Finkelstein et al. deliver themselves of another idiocy…  

It’s noon here in our corner of Burgundy, and the temperature is 14C (that’s 57F to les anglo-saxons). It’s raining non-stop, as it has been for the past three weeks, with the thermometer never venturing out of the teens.

That’s colder and wetter than I’ve ever seen in this neck of the woods – colder and wetter than anyone has ever seen. Now if that’s not the evidence of global cooling, I don’t know what is.

A new Ice Age is upon us, and we’re all going the way of the dinosaurs. And need I remind you that it’s not global warming but global cooling that has caused the worst ecological disasters in history.

Unless we manage to escape to Africa, we’ll all freeze to death. Except me, that is. My wife has family in Kenya, and I’m going to ask her relations to investigate the property market in Nairobi…

What? What are you calling me? Well, you too, sunshine. What’s your problem, anyway?

That I’m confusing weather with climate? That these two concepts involve different timelines? That weather is what happens over days, weeks or seasons, while climate is measured over millennia? That the cold snap in Burgundy, France, no more testifies to global cooling than the heat wave in Palm Springs, California, testifies to global warming?

Fine, I stand corrected. Suitably cowed, I retreat into my shell, tail between my legs. Or maybe it’s not the tail – I’m no better at anatomy than at climatology.

But I’m reasonably good at logic. Hence I agree that, if cold weather in Burgundy is no proof of global cooling, then indeed hot weather in California is no proof of global warming. If A equals B, then B equals A – the logic seems unassailable.

Moreover, it doesn’t take an intellectual giant to wield this mental weapon. Back in the old country, that simple equation was taught to seven-year-olds – and I don’t recall anyone unable to grasp the concept. Yet it’s evidently beyond the meagre intellectual capacity of the university-educated grownups working for our media.

This morning, Sky News did a feature on the heat wave in California, where the temperature had hit 120F in Palm Springs and 130F in Death Valley (which is actually four degrees lower than the record set in 1913, when not many people used aerosols).

I watched the programme for about two minutes, which was as long as I could feel my sanity threatened only mildly. During that time the grateful public was regaled with two human-interest interviews, involving a housewife outside her bungalow and a hard-hatted chap on a building site.

They both acknowledged that it was worryingly hot, and the resultant fires nothing short of terrifying. “If it goes on like this,” said the hard hat, “nobody will be able to work”.

That wasn’t an unreasonable conclusion for someone engaged in manual work outdoors. An accountant crunching numbers in an airconditioned office may feel differently, but no such person was asked.

The interviewer then decided to give millions of viewers the benefit of his interviewees’ expertise in climatology. Was this calamity caused by global warming? But of course, what else, said the hard hat. The housewife just smiled ruefully. It went without saying.

If pressed, I’m sure these experts would have explained that, just as the heat was caused by global warming, global warming was caused by our rapacious use of hydrocarbons. As a result, copious amounts of CO₂ are released and hey, presto, Al Gore is your uncle and also your aunt. We’re all going to burn.

The interviewer then explained helpfully that before long the residents of Palm Springs would have to move somewhere cooler. He then made a feeble attempt at humour by recommending Greenland as a desirable destination.

I know that the hatching of new pernicious orthodoxies is my recurrent theme. But it recurs precisely because each day brings new evidence of this orgy of fire-eating anomie.

No one seems to seek facts. It’s enough for the knee to jerk vigorously enough and in the right direction. And in this case the only right direction is towards scaremongering about climate change, accompanied by entreaties to impoverish all Western economies for the noble cause of saving ‘our planet’.

Never mind the facts, feel the passion. True enough, it’s hard to argue against passion. But it’s still possible to invoke the facts.

And these say that CO₂ is a trace gas, contributing only one in 85,000 molecules to the atmosphere. And only three per cent of our CO₂ is anthropogenic, making it a small trace of an infinitesimally tiny one.

Moreover, thanks to the belated industrialisation of China, anthropogenic CO₂ emissions have grown 10 per cent in the past 25 years. However, world temperature practically hasn’t increased over the same period.    

No evidence suggests that we are going through an unprecedented global warming. In fact, ‘our planet’ has been warmer than it is now for about 80 per cent of its existence. Serious scientists – as opposed to assorted shills of man-made apocalypse – identify numerous factors affecting climate, with CO₂ playing a walk-on role, if indeed any at all.

Analysing climate properly is impossible without a thorough knowledge of every contributing factor. Solar activity, for example, accounts for some 95 per cent of such factors. Other disciplines essential to proper understanding are astronomy, geology, solar physics, astrophysics, palaeontology, tectonics, oceanography, geochemistry and volcanology – just tell me where to stop.

If that burly Californian builder isn’t, as one suspects, an expert in those subjects, then his opinion is no more valuable than that of an averagely intelligent cat. But our media don’t seek such outdated things as knowledge and truth.

They are slaves to this new piety, as they are to any other that reaches the status of an orthodoxy within five minutes of being hatched. Happy in their bondage, they are desperately trying to enslave us all too – and they must be congratulated on doing a good job.

P.S. Speaking of congratulations, today is 14 July, the national day of France. Now, I love both France and my French friends, but I’m not going to wish them a happy Bastille Day.

On this day in 1789, 300 thugs stormed France’s most celebrated prison, pushing the button for a revolution. The Bastille was the centrepiece of what they saw as the cruellest tyranny. Yet they found only seven prisoners held there, most of them doing time for murder.

That’s pretty thin for a cruel tyranny. In fact, the prison in our regional centre, Auxerre (p. 30,000), is currently holding 715 prisoners, and no one thinks that’s especially despotic.

So, with apologies to my French friends, I’m withholding my congratulations. It’s nothing personal – I don’t recognise any revolutionary holidays, including 4 July in the US, 7 November in Russia or 1 October in China. Turkeys don’t wish a happy Christmas to one another, do they?

Admit it, you do, as do most people, though few will ever admit it. Well, now is your chance.

This morning I wrote a reply to a friend’s letter, whose key points can be easily inferred from my response. However, having pushed the SEND button, I realised that the missive may be of general interest. That, coupled with my congenital laziness, settled the issue of today’s piece.

So here it is. I’ve withheld my correspondent’s name, along with the personal references that might reveal his identity, familiar to some readers.

[SALUTATION],

I’m so sorry you fell out with the Catholic Church, but those things happen. I do, however, have a few disagreements with your treatment of it – and not just because I am a Catholic and you no longer are. For facts are facts, and they should be impervious to personal beliefs or absence thereof.

First, if you write down everything Jesus said in the Gospels, you’ll get 1.5 hours’ worth of text. Yet his ministry lasted about three years. All that time he was teaching – his apostles, his adversaries, the priests, the multitudes. Surely he said a lot more than 1.5 hours’ worth?

Also, decades passed between Jesus’ death and the appearance of the first Gospel (probably Mark’s, although the conventional sequence puts Matthew’s first). Yet the Church survived during that hiatus and expanded exponentially. Clearly, it subsisted on oral tradition, things the 12 vouchsafed to their disciples, and they to theirs.

Most of them were seeking converts in the Hellenic world, and people raised in the rational Greek tradition were bound to raise many questions and express many doubts. We know this from Paul’s epistles to various congregations.

That’s why oral tradition, exegesis and interpretation are essential parts of Christianity. Reducing it strictly to the Gospels smacks of Protestant sectarianism torn to shreds by even great Protestant thinkers.

Christians believe in a living God, which makes Christianity a dynamic, evolving religion. We don’t think revelation was (or rather had to be) given all at once, and some of history’s most sublime minds created a body of work to that effect.

The upshot of it is that Christianity isn’t only the teaching by Christ, but also, some will say mostly, the teaching about Christ. It’s that teaching that created a world religion, which in turn created the greatest civilisation in history.

Even a cursory look at the history of Europe after the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire will show that the Church was the only institution that survived more or less intact. And it was the Church that bridged the 500-year gap between the Classical and Western civilisations.

Europe overcame the barbarian onslaught thanks to the monastic orders: the Benedictines, Dominicans, Franciscans, Cistercians, Jesuits, Carmelites etc. For something close to a millennium, they carried the burden of building a new civilisation on the ruins of the old one.

They founded hospitals, shelters, charities, schools, universities and laboratories. They made immeasurable contributions to science, technology, education, medicine, agriculture, art, music, architecture – not just philosophy and theology. (The first foundry in Europe, for example, was built in an abbey not far from us here in Burgundy.)

European politics at its best also owes much to the ideas and practices of the Church, specifically its principle of subsidiarity, devolving power to the lowest sensible level.

I’d define the key political conflict of modernity as a struggle between proponents of the big or small central state. The conservative idea of localism over centralism owes much to Catholic thought. That’s why I always argue with my French friends that the EU, which pushes the notion of a giant central state to grotesque limits, is as aggressively anti-Christian – and consequently anti-European – as any socialist country.

Depicting the Church as so many obscurantist fanatics hellbent on burning people alive is good knockabout fun, but it doesn’t agree with the facts. And they, as John Adams said, are stubborn things. This tendency goes back to the first Protestants, and it was further developed by the Left, atheist fringe of European politics. The names of Copernicus, Galileo and Bruno you take in vain are invariably mentioned in support.

To begin with, these men weren’t opponents of the Church but its products. All three were educated at Catholic universities. Copernicus was a Catholic canon, Bruno a Dominican friar, Galileo a pious Catholic.

Pope Urban VIII was Galileo’s friend and patron, and he always took Galileo’s side in his disputes with the local church. The disputes were mainly caused by Galileo’s rudeness and combativeness, not so much his theories. No solid agreement on heliocentricity existed within the Church, although the majority opinion ran against it.

In the end, Galileo ungratefully and rudely turned against his friend the Pope. His punishment was to live out his days in a comfortable villa, which is risible by the standards of the atheist 20th century.

Bruno was active at the time when the Reformation threatened the survival of the Church, and a survival mechanism is built into any human organisation. Compared to his vicious attacks on the Church and its key figures, Galileo comes across as a charity worker. That’s why the Church reacted violently to Bruno’s heretical animadversions, which attacked Christian doctrine wantonly and stupidly.

Desperate times, dangerous measures and all that. The times were as desperate as they get, and the little pyre in Rome’s Campo di Fiori was the 16th century equivalent of the more recent executions for wartime treason, such as that of William Joyce in 1946.

The Church isn’t only a divine institution, but also a human one. And all human institutions make mistakes, sometimes commit crimes – we are all sinners. However, it takes a wilful deception not to see that the Church’s balance sheet of rights and wrongs is more positive than that of any other human institution I can think of, emphatically including modern democracy.

You are right that most voters can’t grasp nuanced arguments – hence politicians’ tendency to reduce the entire complexity of life to simplistic sound bites. However, between us boys, life doesn’t lend itself to such reduction, and neither does its political aspect.

A simplistic (as opposed to simple) idea is always wrong simply becuase it’s indeed simplistic. That’s why the people who win the masses with unsound and usually dishonest clichés are themselves powerful arguments against unchecked democracy run riot, the kind that’s not counterbalanced by other forms of power – and not the kind that Churchill knew.

He was a man of Edwardian, not to say Victorian, time, when the word ‘democracy’ meant something different from what it means today. In fact, in the 19th century it had no currency whatsoever. For example, American founding fathers never used it, and neither did Lincoln. (The word isn’t one of the almost 300 in his Gettisburg Address.)

That’s why Churchill’s much-quoted adage about democracy being better than anything else ever tried must be taken with a pinch of salt and, ideally, a shot of tequila. The man lived a long life, talking and writing throughout. He said many things, and many of them were mutually exclusive.

On the subject of democracy, I prefer another Churchillism: “The greatest argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with an average voter.”

This is roughly what you are saying too, isn’t it? That an average voter can’t grasp the complexity of the issues on which every election hinges? If that’s so, then it should be possible to subject democracy to critical analysis (I wrote one such in my book Democracy as a Neocon Trick) and go wherever it’ll take us, possibly all the way to finding our modern democracy systemically flawed.

All that explains why I could never seek a political office, and would reject one if it were miraculously offered. As another American politician put it, “If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve.”

That in no way diminishes my admiration for the noble role UKIP played in getting Britain out of that abomination. But UKIP wasn’t so much a political party as a pressure group, thankfully an effective one. Its single issue was indeed beautifully binary: Yes or No, In or Out.

Alas, most problems of life aren’t like that, and popular appeal hardly ever coincides with truth. In fact, I’d say the Catholic Church between 500 and 1500 AD is one of the few examples of such an overlap.

As ever,

Alex

The initials of our Football Association can also stand for a colloquial expression meaning ‘nothing’. That’s exactly what England got last night. That’s exactly what England deserved.

The other day I wrote that winning a football match shouldn’t be a cause for a jingoistic orgy of triumphalism. Neither is losing a match a national tragedy.

However, football is a microcosm of life in many ways, especially since the game is run by a giant public corporation, the FA. Hence football isn’t impervious to problems besetting life outside its grass pitch, and some of those problems doomed our team to defeat.

In the good tradition of Aristotelian induction, let’s start from observable facts. One of them is that England is currently blessed with the greatest pool of talented players I’ve ever seen in the 50 years of following English football.

Many a ‘golden generation’ came and went, but none has glittered as bright as today’s lot. Yet the FA and its faithful stooge Southgate, the England manager, never learned something any child would know.

A country may boast a regiment of Beckenbauers, Maradonas and Messis, but they aren’t going to win a football game unless they are on the pitch. Now, we have several young players who are the match of anyone in the world tactically, creatively and technically.

Yet of these, only two, Foden and Grealish, made the squad, even one enlarged to 26 players due to Covid. Foden started just two matches; Grealish, none – this though he changed the game every time he came on as a late substitute. He did that in the semi-final too, only for the substitute to be instantly substituted.

Our commentators ascribed that boycott to Southgate’s deep strategic insights. In fact, it’s corporate CYA (Cover-Your-Arse) thinking at its most blatant.

Big corporations, especially public ones, distrust idiosyncratic flair. Safety first is their motto, and brilliant talents tend to be unsafe or, in the corporate lingo, high maintenance. They try the unconventional, they take risks. And risks sometimes don’t pay off. Also, their lifestyle may fall short of the monastic standards fulsomely proclaimed by the FA.

Someone like Grealish may hit a pass no one else in the team would even see but, every time such a pass goes awry, the corporation man sees a redundancy notice flashing before his mind’s eye. When the pass connects, the team scores, but that’s not much of a consolation for the functionary.

It’s that type of thinking that shaped Southgate’s team selections throughout the tournament. The idea was to get the odd goal and then hang on for dear life.

Anyone who has ever followed football would have known that such a strategy wouldn’t work against top teams on form. There were several top teams in the tournament but, other than England, only two were on form: Spain and Italy.

England lost the final to Italy and would have lost to Spain too if the luck of the draw hadn’t pitted those two teams against each other in the semis. Other than Italy, England had to play only two top teams, Croatia and Germany, but they are both aging and in transition.

Southgate did his corporate best at the press conferences, which is part of his appeal to the FA. Any England manager must have the panache of a PR flack and the CV of a monastic novice. In relatively recent years, two managers, Venables and Hoddle, each miles better than Southgate, were dismissed for failing to meet such exalted criteria.

Unlike them, Southgate willingly toes the FA line. Unlike Venables, he wasn’t touched by a shadow of fiscal impropriety in an earlier job. Unlike Hoddle, he didn’t impose esoteric faith-healing practices on the team, nor make public statements out of tune with our woke times.

Also unlike them, he doesn’t emit a single spark of creativity, but that doesn’t matter to the FA. Like any giant public corporation, it has higher concerns than its core business.

What matters more than attacking, entertaining football is conformity to the woke diktats of modernity. That’s why the FA demanded that the players ‘take the knee’ to signal their solidarity with a subversive Marxist group. And that’s why they are encouraged to take active part in all sorts of social initiatives, some worthy, some otherwise.

The players are supposed to be the models our youngsters will follow, and, under Southgate’s tutelage, they try their best. Yet I’d suggest that illiterate chaps covered head to toe with horrendous tattoos set a bad example even before they open their mouths.

I’d also suggest that both they individually and the England team collectively would do better if they devoted more effort to their craft and less to ‘issues’. Thus Rashford, according to one admiring hack, is “a force for such good in English football and society”. Well, he should have spent more time practising penalties than being a force for good. As it was, his miss contributed to England’s defeat.

When England began to scrape through the early stages, Southgate was hailed as a genius. This decent but boring man did his best to respond. England was playing a game shaped in their manager’s image, decent and boring. But, Southgate explained to the uninitiated, “we are here to win, not to entertain”. Yes, Gareth, but, with a few exceptions here and there, the two go hand in hand at the top level.

Southgate’s selections for the final reflected his disdain for entertainment. Eight of England’s 11 were defenders by trade, one was a goal-to-goal midfielder, and only two did attacking for a living. Every team needs a balance, as Southgate never tired of repeating. It was hard to detect one there.

Amazingly, that idea worked initially. The Italians gasped with disbelief when seeing a team made up almost exclusively of defenders and, before they got their breath back, England scored in the third minute. Italy was shaken, and a dedicated surge could have easily produced another goal or two, putting the game to bed.

But that’s not how corporation men think. Venables or Hoddle would have thrown men forward; Southgate pulled them back.

England began to put 10 men behind the ball, especially in the second half. Players who could keep hold of the ball weren’t on the pitch, and Italy enjoyed over 70 per cent possession (68 per cent for the whole game). Another lesson for the corporation: it’s hard to put the ball in the net, if the other team has the ball most of the time.

Predictably, the Italians eventually equalised, and England managed to hang on by the skin of their teeth long enough to take the game into a penalty shootout. When their defenders got the ball, they were ordered to punt it upfield, Hail Mary style. Those world class players were displaying a style usually seen only in the lower divisions of English football.

Then Southgate tried a trick that, had it worked, would have earned him a peerage, not just the knighthood he’ll probably receive.

He put three substitutes on late in extra time specifically with the penalties in mind. One of them came on some 10 minutes before the end and barely had a touch of the ball. The other two came in the last couple of minutes and only caught sight of the ball from a safe distance.

No wonder all three missed – it’s hard to keep your nerve when you aren’t in the swing of the game. Scoring just two out of five penalties is Sunday pub league, not world class football.

Afterwards Southgate magnanimously allowed it was all his fault. You don’t say, Gareth.

Under the FA’s darling Southgate, England players may yet learn the much-praised art of losing gracefully. Had, say, Venables or Hoddle been in charge last night, they would have walked away with the trophy. But in the process they could have left a certain portion of the FA’s anatomy uncovered. That was out of the question.

I recall the story of the American admiral Ernest King, who was pushed into semi-retirement in the 1930s, mainly for his recalcitrant and insubordinate nature. Yet immediately after Pearl Harbour he was brought back as Chief of Naval Operations. “When the shooting starts,” commented the admiral, “they send out for the mean sons of bitches.”

I wonder if the FA has heard this story.  

Post-revolutionary Russia is a cautionary tale, a lesson for all of us. But we never learn it.

Some people, whose number is dwindling, do appreciate how much the history of Russia in the last century teaches about politics and revolutions. Few realise that it teaches as much about human nature.

That’s why, whenever I write about Russia, I’m not writing just about Russia. For I always treat it as a concave mirror into which the West can look to see its own vices and misconceptions grotesquely exaggerated and so much more visible for it.

One such misconception is produced by pure evil. Whenever Westerners encounter it, they are so baffled that they refuse to recognise it for what it is. Proud of being empiricists, they nevertheless allow their emotions and biases to throw a dense fog over the evidence before their eyes – even when they are familiar with the evidence.

Most aren’t though, and we have our education to thank for it. If in the past, teachers, especially at university level, saw their task in overriding their charges’ prejudices, today they feel duty-bound to cater to those prejudices. All are laid down together on a flat table, and all enjoy the same space.

It’s as if our moral compass was put next to an iron bar and is now going haywire. Discrimination has become a dirty word, and people have been brainwashed not to discriminate against anything: fallacies in favour of truths, ignorance in favour of learning, ugliness in favour of beauty – against anything at all.

The greatest crime committed by modernity is the fostering, and increasingly enforcement, of the presumption of equality between everyone and everything. And, alas, this egalitarianism works most of the time when it comes to judging human character.

For most people, some 90 per cent from personal observation, fall into the broad mid-range of human qualities. They are neither too good nor too bad; neither too bright nor too dim; neither too strong nor too weak. A few personal idiosyncrasies apart, they are much of a muchness. They seek equality so much, they indeed end up being equal to one another.

When such people evaluate others in the same 90 per cent bracket, they may achieve insights by projecting themselves onto them. That leads to reasonable understanding, for in most cases this epistemological method is justified.

Yet there exist two five per cent margins on either side of our mid-range. Finding themselves there are saintly and evil individuals, geniuses and imbeciles, giants and weaklings, along with close approximations of those extremes.

Those people are outside the ken of those in the mid-range, who find themselves unable and reluctant even to acknowledge that such extremes can possibly exist. They have been house-trained to believe that everyone is like them, give or take.

So they perform their trusted trick of self-projection on the outsiders only to find, to their consternation, that it doesn’t quite work. The top five per cent stubbornly refuse to be dragged down, the bottom five per cent are as resistant to being pulled up.

Those in the majority abandon their efforts. As far as they are concerned, the extremes might as well not exist. It’s best not to think about them for fear of upsetting the applecart of presumptive equality.

This gets my train of thought back on the track of Russia, specifically the man I consider history’s clearest embodiment of pure evil. Lenin, in my judgement, beats to that distinction everyone’s favourites, Hitler and Stalin.

Those two villains run Lenin close, but they don’t quite manage to catch up. For both tried to achieve something they saw as positive. Yes, they were criminal in their aims and evil in their methods, but their evil may be perceived by some as a dry martini: almost neat gin but not quite.

That’s why they both still have their champions, especially Stalin, whom many Russians still identify as their greatest compatriot. Yes, he murdered millions, but he left his country as a superpower bristling with nuclear weapons, goes the popular refrain. Above all, there was order under Stalin and, say the German loonies, ordnung under Hitler too, which is so much preferable to today’s chaos.

In Britain, outside the two lunatic fringes, those two personages, especially Hitler, are seen as the distillate of evil. Our mid-range 90 per cent have been told that in these two cases such an uncompromising judgement is justified.

Lenin, however, gets off. Most Westerners are simply too ignorant to assess him properly, which is fair enough. Not everyone has to be an expert on Russian history – there exist many more interesting subjects to study, and a plethora of more useful ones.

Yet even those who know the facts, and such people are understandably more numerous in Russia than in the West, still detect a romantic halo over Lenin’s head, gleaming so bright that the contents of his head are outshone. He was a revolutionary, and there’s always a warm spot in the mid-range heart for such heroes.

That’s an interesting psychological phenomenon. A middle-of-the-road person is generally satisfied with his life. In fact, self-satisfaction is a marker identifying that group. However, even though he himself is perfect, not everything in his life and surroundings is ideal.

He has to wait three months for a doctor’s appointment, money is tight for him while the fat cats are rolling in it, the bloody taxes are going up, politicians are useless, the missus is doing the dirty with her boss – whatever.

Out of despondency arises hope, just a glimmer of it. One day, a secular saviour will pop up like a genie out of the bottle, and suddenly all the chap’s troubles will melt away. Doctors will be queuing up to see him, his bank account will be bursting at the seams, his taxes will go down, the missus will recognise the error of her ways.

Yes, he knows that most, perhaps all, past attempts to wave such a magic wand have failed. Still, those who wielded that stick deserve to be marked up for trying. And who knows, perhaps one day another genie will succeed in granting the poor chap his every wish.

Such people refuse to admit that most revolutionaries in history have been driven by mostly evil, destructive impulses – and Lenin exclusively by those. I shan’t repeat myself by presenting the prima facie evidence of this. Those who are interested may want to look up my earlier piece on this subject (http://www.alexanderboot.com/how-could-i-forget-his-birthday/).  

What’s interesting here is watching the presumption of equality kicking in. Everyone knows that his overall goodness is offset by some bad traits. The balance differs from one person to the next, but there is always a balance.

Yet in Lenin there was none. From his barely postpubescent days he was driven by pure evil, the desire to destroy so strong that there was no room left in his heart for wishing to create something as well. When it came to positive desiderata, Lenin spoke in generalities that appealed to the masses without being able to withstand 10 seconds of rational scrutiny.

It’s only when Lenin lay down his evil designs that he spoke in concrete terms: “I don’t care if 90 per cent of all Russians perish, as long as the remaining 10 per cent live under socialism”. His much-vaunted modesty prevented him from acknowledging that he’d accept even a higher proportion of jetsam, leaving only himself and his accomplices to enjoy the fruits of their labour.

Given a few more years, Lenin could have reached the allowable limit. As it was, only some 10 million Russians were dispatched by various methods on his watch. That was a higher murderous efficiency than Stalin’s, considering that Lenin was in power for barely five years.

And, unlike Stalin, he couldn’t have had even a tenuous claim to leaving Russia stronger than he had found it. The country was thoroughly devastated, its industry, agriculture, social and cultural life lay in ruins. Millions of desperate, hungry, disease-ridden skeletons roamed about, stumbling on the smoking fragments of the world they used to know.

I mentioned that even some people who know all the facts still have to issue Lenin a more or less free pass. One such is Edvard Radzinsky, popular as both playwright and historian whose works in both genres have been translated into English.

A Russian friend of mine has directed me towards Radzinsky’s YouTube channel, where his talking head shares his thoughts and recollections. My friend said Radzinsky was an excellent raconteur, and sure enough he is. Now in his eighties, he has seen and written about most Russians of interest, and he talks about them in a lucid and entertaining, if slightly histrionic, manner.

In fact, Radzinsky has inspired this piece because Lenin is his recurrent subject. He treats him mainly as the precursor of Stalin, and here Radzinsky promulgates the usual misconceptions that are more prevalent in the West than in Russia.

Speaking with his usual bonhomie oozing humour and the milk of human kindness, he describes Lenin with unmerited gentleness. The diabolical ghoul emerges as an idealist who genuinely wanted to create paradise on earth, but unwittingly laid the groundwork for Stalin to create hell on earth.

Radzinsky movingly talks about Lenin’s heart-rending misery at watching his beloved revolution turning into something he had never envisaged: the rule of bureaucracy. The nice man refuses to acknowledge that Lenin had envisaged nothing other than extermination and destruction.

Those were the only things for which his evil loins ached. Everything else was just window-dressing for mass consumption.

Radzinsky’s talent and erudition ought to be sufficient for pulling him out of the morass of middle-of-the-road mediocrity. Yet his inability, or perhaps reluctance, to recognise pure evil drags him back in. Such a stumbling block evidently can’t be bypassed by intellect and erudition alone – pure evil is shrouded in mystique, impenetrable to secular knowledge.

It’s customary these days to preface an unpopular or controversial statement with a disclaimer, followed by a ‘but…’.

For example, “Some of my best friends are Jewish, but…” or “I have nothing against women, but…” or “I passionately believe in diversity, but…”

I feel compelled to follow this fine tradition by saying that I like football as much as the next man. I played it to a reasonable standard in my youth and have followed it ever since, much to the disapproval of my high-flying friends.

The team I’ve always supported even before moving to London is England, and I’ll be rooting for it tomorrow. I hope it’s a good game but, as long as England wins, it won’t matter.

Is that a convincing enough disclaimer for you? Good. Because here comes my ‘but’.

Football is lovely, but do let’s put it in perspective. What we’ll witness tomorrow is a spectacle of 22 heavily tattooed men with learning difficulties (I hope we all realise that an ‘intelligent player’ isn’t the same as an ‘intelligent man’) kicking an inflated leather balloon.

What emphatically won’t unfold before us is a nation coming together to display the Blitz spirit, show multi-cultural solidarity transcending race and class, vindicate any of the fashionable pieties, strike a blow for any cause other than kicking an inflated leather balloon, give hope to the disadvantaged and terminally ill, expunge the havoc of Covid – nor do anything at all other than watching a game of football and hoping the right team wins.

Such is the sane view. Yet, as I never miss an opportunity to point out, sanity has gone the way of all flesh. We live in a parallel universe of virtual reality, and in that universe tomorrow’s game has at least the significance of the Battle of Britain, with an added dimension of wokish probity.

You can find proof of this madness or idiocy (take your pick) in any newspaper or TV account of the forthcoming event. They all say more or less the same things, so the article perpetrated by Henry Winter, chief footie writer for The Times, can be used as the blueprint.

“This final matters,” he writes, “because it is even more than a game, even more than England’s most important sporting moment in 55 years. This final also matters because it offers a chance for all ages and communities in this country to reacquaint themselves with hope.”

Hope of what exactly? Clearly of something that soars above just winning a football tournament. Earthly riches? Eternal salvation? Everlasting love? Sometimes, Henry, a cigar is just a cigar, and a game is just a bleeding game, innit?

Not to him though, and not to any of the hacks writing on this subject. Our national team isn’t just a group of good ball kickers, far from it:

“England are also a model of diversity, a timely lesson to a society that too often seems divided. It’s why they are right to take a knee. And it also mattered that Kane wore a rainbow armband against Germany, and that Jordan Henderson wears rainbow laces. The less enlightened in England’s fanbase or society may look and learn from their footballing idols’ stance.”

Since I’m one of those who fall short of Mr Winter’s stratospheric standards of enlightenment, his cretinous musings have a distinctly emetic effect on me… Sorry, they make me wanna puke, in the less enlightened idiom.

According to Mr Winter, the transcendent value of tomorrow’s footie lies in the propaganda of Marxist or otherwise seditious causes held in fulsomely reverential esteem by our faux… sorry, I mean half-arsed, liberals.

That nauseating (puke-making) genuflection acts as a pledge of allegiance to the self-admittedly Marxist, which is to say subversive, group, BLM. And the rainbow colour scheme is the flag of the Gay Pride movement, seeking to elevate sexual perversion to a civic virtue.

Pride in general isn’t always a commendable emotion, especially when it’s expressed by shoving various parts of one’s body into the various orifices of one’s fellow man. I don’t think Messrs Kane and Henderson are themselves that way inclined, so they are merely expressing solidarity with identity politics at its most revolting.

What Mr Winter et al. don’t realise, or rather don’t care about, is that they lie when claiming that identity politics can unite a society divided upon itself. Anyone with a modicum of honesty and common sense will know that this insanity has exactly the opposite effect.

A hodgepodge of faddish issues, taken either singly or collectively, can never have the effect claimed by the wokers of the world. Only a shared belief in a transcendent entity infinitely higher than our transitory concerns can do that, and that no longer exists as a social dynamic.

Severing, systematically and wantonly, the ties holding society together within a single edifice of spirituality, morality and civic solidarity is a crime. And everyone who bends the knee to black racial extremism or displays the colours of aberrant sexuality is an accomplice.

However, even if I were the champion of diversity I sometimes claim to be in jest, I certainly wouldn’t want my noble cause vulgarised by propaganda via footie. I’d seek the dignity and the high moral plateau that’s alien to ball-kickers.

For the same pundits who ascribe a higher purpose to the game also praise our players for their ‘pragmatism’.

In that spirit, when an opponent’s hand barely brushes a player’s cheek, he falls on the ground as if poleaxed by Mike Tyson in his prime. Any slight contact in the penalty area makes the player roll on the grass like tumbleweed on a windy day. Any foul, no matter how mild, and the player fakes a life-threatening injury in the hope of getting the other chap carded.

That sort of thing used to be called cheating. If that’s pragmatism, give me idealism any day. Our players would do more good by conducting themselves with dignity during the game than by spouting wokish rubbish.

Having said all that, I hope England wipes the pitch with the Italians tomorrow. Go, lads – even though the survival of our commonwealth doesn’t really hinge on tomorrow’s result. Ingerland!