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International laws say that only the sparkling wines produced in the French province of Champagne are to be called ‘champagne’ – with the marque ‘cognac’ reserved exclusively for the brandies produced in Cognac. All other similar beverages must be called, respectively, ‘sparkling wine’ or ‘brandy’.

The Soviets, however, treated those laws with their customary blithe contempt. Hence I grew up drinking ‘Soviet champagne’ and ‘Armenian cognac’ (sometimes in the same glass).

The memory isn’t altogether pleasant: the lighter beverage was a treacly, gassy concoction that got stuck to one’s gullet and refused to go any further. As for the ‘cognac’, it too was sugary with a smell of bedbugs that stayed in one’s nostrils for weeks after consumption – not that such long intervals were ever customary in my practice.

Since leaving Russia in 1973, I’ve made sure neither beverage would cross my lips ever again. Actually, some 30 years ago a friend gave me a bottle of Soviet ‘champagne’, but it has remained unopened. However, it has proved jolly useful in my cooking: I use it as a mallet to pound chicken or veal escalopes. The possibility of this particular mallet exploding in my hand adds some welcome frisson to the procedure.

The collapse of the Soviet Union has done little to heighten the Russians’ respect for international trade laws. Hence they’ve been stubbornly labelling their sparkling wines as champagne, even though these days the real thing is widely available thanks to French imports.

Yet the other day Putin decided to go the Soviets one better. The Duma passed a federal law confirming that the Russian sparkling wines would continue to be called ‘champagne’, and the French could go boil un oeuf. However, a new twist was added: henceforth it’ll be only Russian champagnes to be so designated, while the imported French products must be labelled ‘sparkling wines’.

In other words, champagnes are no longer champagnes, but Russian sparkling wines are. Orwell’s dystopic fantasies come together with Dali’s paintings and Golding’s Lord of the Flies to create a parallel reality.

The French predictably screamed bloody murder, and at first it looked as if they might bring the identity thieves to account. Last Friday, Moët Hennessy announced it was suspending supplies to Russia, meaning that those Russian ‘oligarchs’ would only be able to bathe their whores in water, rather than in Dom Perignon produced by the obstreperous firm.

But then things went back to normal. It turned out the suspension didn’t come from any principled stance. It’s just that Moët Hennessy needs some time to print new labels for the bottles to be exported to Russia, expurgating the C-word that now belongs to Russia by (her own) law. The reports don’t mention whether the cognacs produced by the same company will now be labelled ‘French brandy’, although this sounds logical.

Other ideas spring to mind that Russian legislators may find attractive, especially if Vlad likes them too. Scotch whisky may now be called ‘Scottish barley vodka’, BMW cars could be renamed ‘Bavarian Lada’, and parmesan could go by ‘Italian cheese-like product’.

If the Russians like such ideas, I’ll be happy to provide many others. Meanwhile, I’d rather draw your attention to the general tendency of which this thievery is indicative.

Putin clearly wishes to establish Russia’s status as a rogue state, mostly defined by its hostility to the West. But more important, he wishes to impose his will on the West by a chain of escalating steps.

The escalation is both implicit and inevitable. If the West accepts the theft of its historic trademarks, it may also, in due course, accept the theft of European territories.

Many techniques are used to that end, including, in this case, one described by Orwell in one of his essays on Nazi Germany (written at a time when he still hadn’t identified the Soviet Union as a parallel evil). As I recall, he wrote that the Nazis indulged in ridiculous pageants and rituals as a way of saying to the people: “We know this is ridiculous, you know it too, and we know that you know. But you’ll still be forced to do as we say, and wipe that sneer off your face.”

In other words, surreal displays like the rebaptising of champagne are important not so much for what they are as for what they communicate. The subtext trumps the text.

And the subtext is exactly the same as, for example, in the on-going ransomware attack on Western businesses around the world, launched by Russian hackers with, as a minimum, their government’s acquiescence.

I just wonder if the thousands of American businesses held to electronic ransom fall into the 16 categories specified by Biden as being off-limits for Russian hacker raids. If they don’t, there doesn’t seem to be much the Americans can do about this: the Russians aren’t overstepping the boundaries set by El Swifto in the White House.

Not that there is any appetite discernible anywhere in the West for stopping Russian banditry in its tracks. The cowardly, supine submission of French champagne producers is only one in the long series of surrenders, accompanied by open mouths, closed eye and raised arms.

The Russians have got away with many other electronic attacks, trade thefts, illegal territory grabs and murders committed with variously sophisticated weapons in the middle of Western cities. Each time the West first threw up its collective arms in horror, only then to do so in surrender.

The cumulative consequences could be dire, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

We are all champions of diversity, aren’t we? We have been taught that the highest moral commandment of all has been left out of the Decalogue only by oversight.

The commandment sounds a bit cumbersome, lacking the pinpoint concision of the old ten. But to make up for its prolixity, it raises morality to a whole new level. To wit: “Any staff of employees shall reflect the ethnic makeup of the population as a whole, but with an extra emphasis on employees representing groups perceived to suffer, or ever to have suffered, discrimination.”

Complying with this commandment supersedes any other considerations, such as competence. Hence, if the number of the formerly or currently oppressed employees falls below the mandated quota, this gap must be filled regardless of the new hirees’ ability to do the job.

This is a difficult concept to get one’s head around, especially when people’s lives are at stake, as they are in medicine. But, as far as the NHS is concerned, some concerns are higher than mere physical survival, and diversity is prime among them.

To that noble end the NHS procured the services of Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba, putting her on a collision course with the superseded commandment of “thou shalt not kill”. Then a six-year-old boy was delivered to her care at a Leicester hospital.

The good doctor diagnosed the child with gastroenteritis, failing to spot the markers of impending sepsis, such as a kidney infection that showed clearly on the blood test. As a result, Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba found herself in trouble, which wasn’t, however, as bad as the boy’s. He died.

That spectacle of negligence and incompetence was so egregious that both the NHS and the courts had to act. In 2015, Dr Bawa-Garba was convicted of manslaughter and given a two-year suspended sentence. She was also struck off.

Such a cluster of punishments is rare in the medical profession, but Dr Bawa-Garba qualified with room to spare, which is more than can be said for her ability to practise medicine.

However, the NHS is known for its generosity, which may at times be biased but never understated. Hence Dr Bawa-Garba was invited back into the fold, and the other day the medical tribunal ruled that she even no longer had to work under supervision.

She, decided the tribunal, was now “performing above the expectations for her trainee level”. That may be, but I for one would be suspicious of a doctor who is still a trainee in her mid-forties – this even regardless of prior convictions for manslaughter.

Understandably, the dead boy’s parents feel less magnanimous than the NHS, but then they can’t see the forest of a higher morality for the trees of their private, and therefore immaterial, grief.  

The victim’s mother proved her narrow-minded focus by saying: “I think it’s absolutely disgusting that she’s been able to go back to work like nothing ever happened. She killed my son. We have to live with this until the day we die.”

To be fair, the NHS’s commitment to diversity may not be the only reason for its reinstating Dr Bawa-Garba, or hiring her in the first place. The NHS is finding it increasingly hard to find doctors, which leads to some laxity in its demand for proper qualifications.

For example, even foreign doctors who don’t know enough English to communicate with patients are welcomed with open arms. For the same reason, existing doctors are overworked, which was cited as the reason for Dr Bawa-Garba’s little mistake. Apparently, she killed that poor boy at the end of a 12-hour shift.

The downside of such long hours is clear, but then so is the medical upside. Continuity of care is an important concept in medicine, and it’s not always a good idea for two doctors, not one, to look after the same patient on the same day.

This insight comes courtesy of the doctors among my friends. They also explain why the NHS is so short-handed.

This gets us back on the track of the diversity commandment and other such perversions, as part of the reason so many doctors are leaving the NHS in the prime of their lives. It all boils down to why young people choose this vocation to begin with.

Some are doubtless attracted mainly by the possible pecuniary rewards, but most simply want to treat, possibly save, patients. What they don’t want is to spend half their time filling up endless forms, attending sensitivity courses, reading illiterate memos issued by diversity directors and assorted optimisers of facilitation and facilitators of optimisation. Nor are they happy to see the number of hospital beds cut for lack of funding, while those parasites come in at six-figure salaries.

Yet this is what the NHS forces them to do, proving yet again that any giant public structure serves mainly the state, not the ostensible end users of its services. After a couple of decades of getting swamped in that fashion, good, conscientious doctors become cynical first, jaded second and prematurely retired third.

The NHS then has to search high and wide, looking for some, any, new doctors to take up the slack. In come the Bawa-Garbas of this world, who tick all the important boxes except one. The box of their ability to keep patients alive remains blank.  

The Frenchman taught that all knowledge came out of comparing two or more things. That may be, generally speaking, said the Russian. But there are two things that shan’t be compared on pain of imprisonment: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

The paper-trained Duma obediently rubberstamped Vlad’s new take on epistemology, turning it into the law of the land. However, to be fair to Vlad, he hasn’t banned any old comparison between the two. What he made illegal is showing that they had something in common.

No one would get in too much trouble by saying that, unlike the despotic Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia was a paragon of freedom and democracy. It’s only when some kind of similarity is suggested that comparisons become outlawed.

This new decree effectively proscribes any study of the period between 1933 and 1945. For any scholarly examination will show that the two regimes had enough in common to be considered dizygotic, though not identical, twins.

Both were dictatorships, with one man making every decision that mattered. Both hated the West, in particular its Anglo-Saxon part. Both had the distinction of being the only countries in Europe that boasted a wide network of concentration camps.

This last commonality wasn’t exactly coincidental. For the Soviets had begun to develop their GULAG system before Stalin took over, and certainly long before anyone outside the Nazi inner circle ever heard of Hitler.

Since the two regimes felt visceral kinship, partly coming from their shared status of post-Versailles pariahs, they pooled their expertise. Thus the NKVD-SS Friendship Society was formed in early 1940, which provided a framework for a fruitful exchange of ideas.

The NKVD taught the SS how to industrialise what Engels called “special guarded places”, linking them into a wide and efficient system. And the SS kindly shared with the NKVD their sophisticated torture instruments, which achieved the same results as the rubber truncheons favoured by the Russians, but without being as labour-intensive.

Both regimes practiced mass murder, but, if anything, the Germans compared favourably with the Russians in that respect. In Germany, it all came down to the accident of birth. Citizens who had the bad luck of being born to an ethnic group that had no right to live were exterminated. Yet anyone outside those groups was left unmolested, provided he kept his head down and didn’t indulge in objectionable politics.

In Russia, state violence was more comprehensive and largely arbitrary. Even after the upper (or just educated) classes and the industrious peasants were wiped out, no one could heave a sigh of relief.

Anybody, regardless of rank, could be picked up and tortured to death for the flimsiest of reasons or none. Crowds of people were often rounded up in the streets and thrown into torture cellars simply because the local NKVD branch had fallen short of its monthly quota.

That way the Soviets ran up a gruesome score higher by an order of magnitude than anything the Nazis managed. Hence the two regimes, while equally evil qualitatively, still had a hierarchy of quantitative evil, with the Soviets coming on top.

The economies of both countries were socialist, though not identical. The German National Socialist Workers’ Party (NSDAP) and the Soviet Communist Party enjoyed both a political and economic monopoly in their countries. Even the flags of the two countries were the same socialist red, although with different superimposed symbols.

But there were differences, again in favour of Germany. There the economy was corporatist, meaning that the state effectively controlled all the major industries, but without nationalising them.

The previous owners remained in place (unless they were Jewish), but they were turned into de facto managers. They were told what to produce and how much to charge, but they remained in their old offices and even generated some profits for themselves. Small businesses, such as shops, cooperatives, restaurants and so on, carried on as before.

The Soviet version of socialism was total, not to say totalitarian. Something like 85 per cent of all enterprises, and all the sizeable ones, belonged to the state, with the rest barely tolerated, or sometimes not. (You’ll notice that most of today’s Western countries are reaching tropistically for the Stalinist size of the public sector.)

Most important, on 23 August, 1939, the two countries became allies. The alliance, known as the Soviet-Nazi Pact, was a sine qua non of the Second World War. Without guaranteed security of their eastern borders, and the millions of tonnes of Soviet supplies of strategic materials (from rare metals to grain), the Nazis wouldn’t have been able to conquer even Poland, let alone Western Europe.

The Secret Protocol to the Pact divided Europe between Nazi Germany and the USSR. Germany started claiming her part of the loot on 1 September, the Soviets entered the war on Germany’s side on the 17^th. Once the two predators devoured Poland, they declared an eternal “friendship annealed by blood.”

Which country was more barbaric in treating their conquered populations is debatable. If anything, if Jews are taken out of the equation, the Soviets were even more cannibalistic.

For example, the Nazis didn’t shoot out of hand tens of thousands of Polish prisoners in their part of occupied Poland, which the Soviets did in theirs. Both countries practised mass deportations, but the Nazis sent their captives to work at factories and farms, whereas the Soviets sent theirs to the death camps.

Obviously no two countries are, or ever have been, identical. The Latin qualification of mutatis, mutandis always applies whenever parallels are drawn. Yet to ban drawing any parallels, especially those as obvious as between the two most evil regimes in history, is tantamount to banning critical thought, free speech and history as a science.

Interestingly, various subversive groups, such as Antifa, BLM or any extreme left factions in Western parliaments, happily compare their countries to Nazi Germany, even though the similarities are small to non-existent. Whereas in Russia anyone who dares to compare the two dizygotic twins as I’ve just done could be prosecuted.

That’s the difference between countries that are still residually free and Putin’s Russia, the darling of the fascisoid European fringes. Then again, since Putin finances most of their parties (and, one suspects, sympathetic pundits), their affection may not be entirely disinterested.    

Such is my considered and suitably moderate response to Angie’s attempt to ban Britons from the continent.

There’s also an element of schadenfreude involved in my reaction: we managed to sneak into France through the window that opened a crack a fortnight ago.

Sitting pretty in the midst of our Burgundian woods, I can now cock a snook at Angie and, more important, comment on this nonsense in a detached and disinterested manner.

Angie Merkel and her adopted son Manny Macron are genuinely concerned about the spread of a deadly contagion Brexititis simplex, of which Britons are prime carriers.

Hence they are trying to designate Britain as a ‘country of concern’. The concern is real: if unchecked, Brexititis can spread so rapidly that it’ll infect many EU members before Angie and Manny can do anything about it.

However, several Mediterranean countries oppose the suggested cordon sanitaire. They see Brexititis as the lesser evil compared to a likely ensuing pandemic of an even deadlier blight, Conditio paupertas, afflicting economies dependent on tourism.

Conditio paupertas may destroy immunity to Brexititis in any body politic. Greece, Malta, Spain, Cyprus and Portugal are particularly susceptible to the virus, and they are fighting tooth and nail to thwart what they see as Angie’s attack on everything they hold sacred, mainly money.

They are increasingly leaning towards relying on the new vaccine, Independentia instans, leaving the population exposed to Brexititis, but offering wide protection against Conditio paupertas.

It has to be said that Angie and Brigitte, who have shared custody of Manny, lately have been neglecting their ward. As a result, Manny was trounced in last week’s regional elections, where he was universally seen as an enfant grossly terrible.

That has evidently strengthened his resolve to keep Brexititis at bay, even at the risk of exposing his own country to Conditio paupertas. To that end, he is pushing all Europeans to submit to the cosmetic surgical procedure colloquially known as ‘cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face’.

You notice that I’m expressing the situation in medical terms, which is proof of my thoroughly modern outlook on life. Every condition must be medicalised to be taken seriously, which is a requirement I accept wholeheartedly.

However, Manny rejects the diktats of modernity and insists on musical metaphors instead. Thus he refers to the self-mutilation that Angie proposes and he supports as ‘harmonised response’, whereas in fact it appears to be widely discordant.

He then mixes his musical and medical metaphors by saying: “We are in concert and perfectly aligned with Angela Merkel. Vigilance with the emergence of this new variant, and of an absolutely indispensable European co-ordination.”

Manny is so much in concert with Angie that he has picked up from her the annoying German custom of treating verbs as dispensable afterthoughts. Yet his eagerness to play second fiddle to Angie in her attempt to keep Britons out is unmistakable.

That’s why I am so happy that we’ve managed to get in before the proposed measures are in place. Unless Manny decides to eject Britons already on the continent, we are in for a most congenial summer.

But hold on for a moment, someone is banging on the door. Let me see who it is…

P.S. Peter ‘Haw Haw’ Hitchens thinks the Royal Navy is stupid to have sailed past the Crimea, but Putin is clever to have annexed it, along with a good chunk of Eastern Ukraine. I fear for Peter should a war break out between Russia and Nato: wartime laws can have a strangulating effect.

Having got bad puns out of my system, I can now concentrate on serious matters. Specifically, on the EU gauleiters who have ganged up on Hungary’s PM Viktor Orbán.

Every time those ‘leaders’ try to put forth a serious argument, the only thing they ever demonstrate is that unfortunate combination of low intelligence and high temper.

The occasion that gave them the chance to prove this point is Hungary’s new law, banning the depiction or promotion of homosexuality to children under 18.

They all insist that this law makes a mockery of democracy and the values the EU holds sacred. The EU, they say, isn’t just about economic prosperity. (Considering the state of most of the member economies, that goes without saying.)

The EU, they explain, is really about a shared commitment to noble values. Among them, one infers, is the mandate to indoctrinate children in the delights of homo- and transsexuality.

I don’t recall statements to that effect in any of the EU founding documents, nor indeed in the writings of the founders. But who said new values can’t be added as we go along, every week if necessary?

The attack was led by the Dutch PM Mark Rutte. “For me,” he said, “Hungary has no place in the EU anymore.”

Rutte should be careful what he wishes for. The awful contrivance commanding his unwavering loyalty may not be able to withstand any more departures.

Hungary, along with Poland and Slovenia, are on the brink already, and, by Macron’s own admission, even France would vote for Frexit, given the choice. In general, one gets the impression that the EU’s love of democracy is selective. It’s mainly used as a cudgel to bust any majority opinion deemed undesirable.

Luxemburg, that European powerhouse, spoke next, through its openly homosexual PM, Xavier Bettel. “To be nationally blamed, to be considered as not normal, to be considered as a danger for young people – it’s not realising that being gay is not a choice,” he said.

It’s amazing how many falsehoods and rhetorical solecisms this lot can squeeze into one sentence. First, I don’t see how a ban on teaching children certain practices is tantamount to laying blame.

For example, not many people this side of the Islamic world blame people who drink moderate amounts of alcohol. That doesn’t mean that schoolchildren should be taught how to mix mojitos, dry martinis and tequila sunrises. They can acquire this knowledge on their own when they grow up, and the same goes for learning about sexual variants.

As to being abnormal, that’s precisely what homosexuality had been considered throughout history until the past couple of decades. Now that modernity has found an extra gear in its drive to expunge history’s greatest civilisation, propaganda of homosexuality provides a useful boost.

But how can it conceivably be regarded as normal? Since we are such staunch democrats, and democracy is after all a triumph of the majority, homosexuality certainly isn’t normal numerically. The biggest study (over 20,000 subjects) I’ve ever seen found that just over one per cent of us are that way inclined. Homosexual activists insist it’s 10 per cent.

Whether we accept either calculation or their average, it’s clear that most people’s concept of normality doesn’t include anal intercourse between two men, to name one practice found in the rich panoply of life.

As to homosexuality not being a choice, it’s a non sequitur. Being a kleptomaniac or a congenitally violent person is often not a choice either. What is a choice is whether or not to act on the congenital predisposition – by stealing, killing or committing unnatural sex acts.

Speaking of the latter, people who are inclined towards necrophilia, bestiality and coprophilia didn’t choose to be that way either. Does it mean they are normal? Should those perversions be taught at school too?

Before any objections are raised, I hasten to reassure you that I don’t fully equate other sexual perversions, kleptomania or propensity for violence with homosexuality. I’m only pointing out that ‘pro-choice’ arguments are full of gaping logical holes.

This cuts no ice with the Belgian PM Alexander De Croo. He repeats Bettel’s animadversions, adding a few embellishments of his own: “Being homosexual is not a choice,” he said to Orbán. “Being homophobic is a choice. We cannot accept a legislation that is legitimising such a behaviour.”

By De Croo’s standards, I’m not only homophobic, but heterophobic as well – I don’t believe children should learn about any kind of sex at school. That responsibility has for centuries rested with parents, and by and large they’ve managed.

Yet the whole thrust of modern education is to disfranchise parents by putting the onus exclusively on the state’s meaty shoulders. This is in line with Marx’s prescription first put forth in the Communist Manifesto – children should be raised as wards of the state, totally obedient to its diktats.

Note how any parents daring to take exception to the stuff pumped down their children’s throats are shouted down and even threatened with imprisonment. It’s Britain I’m talking about here, not Red China.

Many of the parent’s objections have to do with sex education, whose prime if unspoken aim is to destroy the family, the strongest potential dissident against state tyranny. Instruction in normal or abnormal sex pursues not educational but political objectives, and these have nothing to do with democracy, ostensibly so dear to the EU’s rotten heart.

In that regard, I liked the last sentence in De Croo’s comment: “We cannot accept a legislation that is legitimising such a behaviour.”

‘We’ means the EU, which has been lying for decades that member states retain some autonomy. The lie is exposed by every word coming out of the mouths of EU gauleiters, who make it clear member states can pass any law they wish, but only provided the EU likes it.

This sentiment was reiterated by Angela Merkel, who said: “We all made it very clear here what fundamental values we are pursuing.” The European Commission, she explained, “will now continue to deal with the Hungarian law”.

My guess is that the rubber-stamp European Court for Human Rights will now be told to disavow the new law. That will give Orbán a stark choice: either be a good boy or leave the EU.

I hope he’ll choose the latter, but fear it’ll be the former. For now.

The scientific community (and what isn’t a community these days?) is dancing with joy. The fossilised skull on display in Hebei, China, has been identified as belonging to the hitherto unknown progenitor of man, Homo longi, the ‘Dragon man’.

Actually, I strongly believe that the first word appearing in a whole raft of Homo species, such as Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, is offensively homophobic. The former can easily be construed as describing an excited gay man, while the latter sounds like a particularly clever one.

If we reject historical nomenclatures for woke reasons, why not biological ones? It’s a distinct possibility that someone out there may feel offended by the taxonomic term Homo, which can also function as a slur. And we know that such an offence can produce a lifelong trauma, effectively destroying the person’s happiness, not to say life.

But that’s a subject for another day. What has caught my eye today is the story of the Homo longi skull, found decades ago, but only handed over to researchers in 2017.

According to the overexcited reports, Homo longi “had a brain comparable in size to that of modern humans, but sported big, almost square eye sockets [and] thick brow ridges…”

Scientists believe that this Homo is the closest relation of Homo sapiens, quite possibly the missing link that has been such a bugbear for Darwinists. Those scientists don’t even realise how right they are.

For Homo longi has survived almost unchanged to modern times, and photographs of the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev prove that beyond any doubt. Just compare the photo above with the description of Homo lungi.

“A brain comparable in size to that of modern humans…” – tick. “Big, almost square eye sockets…” – tick. “Thick brow ridges” – ten ticks. Such a striking similarity couldn’t possibly have been coincidental, could it?

Hence it’s Comrade Brezhnev who fills that lamentable gap in Darwin’s theory. He is both the missing link and proof that the earliest examples of our progenitors are still with us.

You might say this is conjecture, and that would be a fair point. Yet Darwin’s theory, which is universally accepted as an ironclad fact, is just as conjectural. The word ‘theory’ is a dead giveaway there: it’s closer to hypothesis than to fact.

And this particular hypothesis has a dearth of facts supporting it, while there exist an abundance of facts that at best bring it into doubt – and at worst contravene it outright.

The existence of hirsute half-apes living in caves and barely able to stay upright, only then to evolve into Bach and Newton, isn’t supported by reliable evidence, only by conjecture. In fact, the earliest signs of human habitation show that those Homos were easily as intelligent as Richard Dawkins, and quite a bit more artistic.

My problem with Darwinism as the sole explanation of man isn’t that it contradicts Genesis – it really doesn’t. God is equally capable of creating species slowly or quickly. He could easily have breathed a particle of himself into an ape and then watched it becoming human over thousands or millions of years.

What’s deplorable about Darwinism is that it’s allowed to remain merely a theory a century and a half after the publication of On the Origin of Species. Such a leeway is hardly ever granted to any other scientific theory.

The best they get is some 40-50 years. After that they become either a proven fact or a matter of strictly antiquarian interest.

The reason Darwinism still survives and is even accepted as irrefutable orthodoxy lies not in science but in its political appeal. It’s the biological answer to Marxist determinism, with both providing a simplistic explanation of life.

And modernity, the triumph of mediocrity that it is, loves a simplistic explanation – especially one seen as a knife stuck in the back of our moribund civilisation. Hence it eagerly accepts that a bone fragment found in a cave draws a realistic picture of evolution, one found in museums of natural history around the world.

It’s confidently assumed that the possessor of that bone fragment lived in caves because that’s where the fragment was found. One wonders if a thousand years from now scientists will find the skeleton of a miner killed in a coalmine and infer that Homo sapiens circa 2021 lived in collieries.

None of this in any way diminishes my admiration of the scientists who have now forged an unbreakable chain tying together the dragonfly, the ‘Dragon Man’ and Leonid Brezhnev. We all like the odd bit of sci-fi.

No one can change history, although many are trying. And the history of English royalty is truly shameful.

If you look at all our kings and queens, you’ll find they’ve all been offensively white. Judging by the fact that she is portrayed by a black actress in a recent TV series, Anne Boleyn might have been the sole exception – and some die-hard racists deny even that.

Prince Harry is doing his level best to improve this calamitous situation, but his effort may be described as too little, too late. In any case, he is so far down the line of succession that even if his children grow up to marry appropriately coloured spouses, our monarchs will remain white. Perhaps if Meghan could dump Harry and a have a child with Will… but let’s not go there.

If we could start from scratch, we’d doubtless make sure that the royal family reflected the demographic makeup of the population at large. But we can’t backtrack to the beginning, so there.

What we can do, however, is apply our progressive standards to the royal staff, and that’s precisely what the lobbying group Race Equality Matters has done. And what do you know, its findings confirm what we’ve always suspected: the Palace is infested with institutional (or is it unconscious?) racism.

Only a miserly 8.5 per cent of its staff represent various ethnic minorities. This though most of them have been recruited in London, where such groups make up 40 per cent of the population.

When this gross, borderline criminal iniquity was pointed out to the royal retainers, they were suitably contrite. “Could do better,” admitted a senior Palace spokesman. “We recognise we are not where we want to be and we want to improve.”

Where they want to be as a point of departure is at the dizzying height of 10 per cent. No wonder Raj Tulsiani, co-founder of Race Equality Matters, thinks that’s not good enough.

The Palace, he said, doesn’t “deserve a pat on the back” for expressing good intentions. “Amplifying aspirations for future inclusion, it’s nothing. It’s just words,” he added in the inimitable progressive idiom.

What kind of deeds would be deemed satisfactory? I get it. The Queen should summarily sack the Royal Equerry, Maj. Tom White, and appoint a racially appropriate replacement.

He – or better still, she – could then be given the task of dismissing the entire staff and starting a recruitment drive in certain areas of South and East London. For one thing, that would enable Her Majesty to improve her currently strained finances. After all, staffers living in Tower Hamlets are guaranteed to come cheaper than the denizens of, say, Belgravia.

That would keep Mr Tulsani happy, and his happiness is the primary, possibly only, aim of Britain’s domestic policy. However, those of us who have no say in Britain’s domestic policy, and whose happiness is very far down on the country’s list of priorities, may wonder yet again if the world has gone mad.

In a sane world, a campaign for diversity would only make some sense if ethnic minorities could be confidently shown to be underrepresented due to wilful discrimination. However, that’s not the case, quite the opposite.

If any discrimination is at all observable, it’s of the positive kind, with racial minorities receiving preferential treatment. As that great man Thomas Sowell, himself black, has shown, a private firm can’t afford to discriminate against qualified candidates.

Companies compete not just for markets, but also for staff. Good help, as the saying goes, is hard to find, and finding it is a reliable way of gaining a competitive advantage. Hence, when a qualified black or Asian applies for a job, rejecting him on racial grounds would mean cutting the company’s own commercial throat.

Dr Sowell showed that this isn’t the case mainly on American data, and race is a much more sensitive issue there than in Britain. Speaking from personal experience, whenever I was in a position to hire a talented copywriter or art director, I looked at his portfolio, not the colour of his skin. I didn’t care if it was black, brown, yellow or polka dot – and neither I’m sure does any employer these days.

Though the royal family is sometimes colloquially called the Firm, it’s certainly not a private firm. And Dr Sowell shows that discrimination is more likely to occur in the public sector, where the stakes are lower, and competence has little immediate impact on success.

However, only a madman would believe that our royals could indulge racial prejudice even if they were so afflicted. Our ‘liberal’ hacks are predominantly republican, and they constantly roam around the Palace to find a weak spot they can pounce on. If any sign of racism were detected, the clamour would become deafening.

In all such situations, no one asks the only logical question: Why do we think that ‘diversity’ is ipso facto desirable?

Surely our whole society would stand to benefit if every job in the land were filled by the most qualified candidate, irrespective of his race or any other extraneous characteristics? And surely we’d all stand to lose if such characteristics trumped relevant qualifications at hiring time?

I for one wouldn’t like to be operated on by an inept surgeon who got his job only to fill some idiotic quota. Nor would I like to have my plane flown by a bad pilot chosen on similar criteria. Would anybody?

Such questions are never asked because modernity is obsessed with form at the expense of substance. Modern barbarians whip out their calculators and scream bloody murder whenever the numbers don’t add up to some mythical virtue.

Eventually such shrieks bust the eardrums of previously normal people, and they accept madness as sanity. They end up adopting the false premises imposed on them and drawing wrong conclusion on that basis.

All I can do is offer a premise I consider right: Diversity isn’t intrinsically good. If it happens naturally, fine. But shoving it down people’s throats will make the whole society choke on the reflux.

So I wish the Palace could tell the likes of Mr Tulsiani to perform an acrobatic and ballistically improbable act on themselves. Then again, I also wish I could lose a couple of stone without starving myself.

The destroyer HMS Defender sailed from Odessa to Georgia yesterday, passing 10 nautical miles from the Crimean coast.

Since neither Britain nor any other Western country recognises the theft of the Crimea in 2014, the Defender sailed through either international or Ukrainian waters. She was following what Downing Street describes as “the most direct and internationally recognised route”.

Since Putin sees things differently, HMS Defender was harassed throughout her voyage. She was shadowed by Russian warships and buzzed by at least 20 warplanes flying just 500 feet overhead.

When the Defender approached the Crimea, the Russians demanded she change her course. The captain refused, and warning shots were fired. The Russian ministry of defence then advised that next time the shots would be on target.

Our defence spokesmen reiterated Britain’s intent to continue sailing in those waters, if only to uphold the international law of the sea. Yet Putin treats both national and international laws with equal disdain, happily pushing them beyond the breaking point.

Nationally, he gets away with it because no opposition worthy of the name exists. One would hope that such opposition should exist internationally, but that hope is constantly frustrated.

The other day I wrote that Putin’s stance vis-à-vis the West can be summed up in a line straight out of the lexicon of a schoolyard bully: “Oh yeah? So what are you going to do about it?”

That question has been posed many times, if not in so many words, in London and Salisbury, Georgia and the Ukraine, Syria and Germany, Moscow and now the Black Sea. The bully upped the ante each time the West failed to respond decisively, limiting itself to expressing “grave concern” or at best imposing token sanctions.

Anyone who grew up in a crime-infested neighbourhood knows that it’s not a slap on the wrist that can stop a bully, but a punch on the nose. In this context, the punch can be thrown from different angles and, alas, a direct military response isn’t one of them.

Whenever two armed forces come in close contact with each other, they tend to act on Chekhov’s prescription for stage plays: if a shotgun hangs on the wall in Act I, it must fire in Act III. Guns brandished by two hostile parties also obey the intrinsic logic of such confrontations by firing sooner or later.

The discharge may be accidental or deliberate, coming as an emotional outburst of a trigger-happy officer or an extension of policy. One way or another, playing chicken with modern weapons is a dangerous game – especially for the side that’s badly outgunned.

Britain, along with all European countries, fits that description. Decades of refusing to pay the cost of defending the realm have come back to haunt us, as every sensible commentator knew they would.

Britannia no longer rules the waves, not in the Black Sea and not anywhere. We are unable to provide a sufficient escort for our ships to deter the bully, not even if our solitary carrier sails there. Nor is it a valid option to harass Russian ships sailing through the Channel and the North Sea within sight of the British coast – the Russians would simply dare us to fire, and we won’t.

That, however, doesn’t mean we have no valid options whatsoever. It’s just that we should counterattack not in the Black Sea but in the City of London.

The Crown Prosecution Service explains the legalities involved: “Proceeds of crime is the term given to money or assets gained by criminals during the course of their criminal activity. The authorities, including the CPS, have powers to seek to confiscate these assets so that crime doesn’t pay. By taking out the profits that fund crime, we can help disrupt the cycle and prevent further offences.”

‘Proceeds of crime’ is an accurate description of the hundreds of millions in Russian assets held in Britain. It’s a safe, nay irrefutable, assumption that any Russian fortune laundered through British financial institutions or estate firms was acquired and transferred by means regarded as criminal in any civilised country.

Forfeiture of those assets is the only effective means of punishing Russia’s contempt for international laws – much more effective than any military response would be, even in the unlikely event of all of Nato going along.

Russia isn’t governed by institutions customary in the West. It’s ruled by a gang resulting from history’s unique fusion of secret police and organised crime. Over 80 per cent of its members come from a KGB background, but they use their expertise to ends different from those pursued in Soviet times.

Then KGB methods were used to gain a geopolitical advantage over the West, drawing more countries into the Soviet orbit. Ostensibly, Russia pursues similar objectives, but ‘ostensibly’ is the operative word.

Putin’s hybrid war on the West mainly serves the purpose of allowing his coterie to enrich themselves in an unimpeded fashion and enjoy their ill-gotten wealth in the congenial environment of Western resorts.

This worthy goal can only be achieved if the gang stays in power, tightening the screws at home and keeping its finger on the proverbial nuclear button. And its grip on power is contingent on a show of strength, domestically and globally.

Any student of Russian history knows what happens there to rulers perceived as weak – regardless of any other traits or, for that matter, their qualifications and achievements. That’s why Putin uses every trick, subtle or otherwise, to pose as a direct heir to Stalin, one who inherited his muscular DNA.

But Putin’s regime isn’t really a continuation of Stalin’s by other means. It’s a sui generis phenomenon and should be treated as such.

Stalin and his henchmen didn’t launder billions through Western banks, and neither did they buy up Western properties on a massive scale. Funds in those days flowed from the West to Russia – not the other way, as they do now.

And money streams point to the regime’s desiderata. For example, Lenin and his jolly friends feared they wouldn’t be able to hold on to the power they had seized illegally.

That’s why they quickly robbed Russia blind and channelled millions (billions in today’s inflated cash) to European and American banks, hoping to hide behind a pile of money if they had to flee. The money was also used to foment revolutionary unrest in the West, in the hope that the Bolsheviks could continue to lord it over Russia by destabilising the West.

Stalin took over when the fight for domestic power had been won. Consequently, his goals changed: he aimed for world domination, a goal impossible to achieve without Western credits and technology. Hence the flow of money changed its vector: the arrow began to point at Moscow.

Under all post-perestroika governments, but especially under Putin, the vector spun 180 degrees again, although some circular motion came into play too. The West pays for Russian exports of energy and other natural resources, with the proceeds then recycled back to the West.

This is consistent with the aims of the Putin junta, but it also makes it vulnerable. For all of Russia’s natural resources were seized by criminal means, mainly during the roaring nineties, when Mafia wars claiming hundreds of victims raged throughout Russia.

Hence, the CPS would be within its stated legal remit if it were to impound, or better still confiscate, all major Russian assets held in the UK. A quiet word to that effect into Putin’s shell-like would be a stronger deterrent than any flexing of our atrophied military muscle.

Doing nothing is no longer an option, and I hope our powers that be will finally realise this. If next time the Russians sink our ships, rather than warning them, a military response will be the only one possible, and we don’t want that, do we?    

Until now, Marks & Spencer has been unconsciously racist. To atone for that deadly sin, it has gone consciously woke.

The holy spirit of the secular saint George Floyd wafted into the M&S lingerie department and begat a redemptive concept of a new line of neutral or nude-coloured underwear. Suddenly, the designers of knickers and bras saw the light: their products had been racist.

The idea behind nude-coloured underwear is to make a woman wearing knickers and bra appear as if she’s wearing nothing at all. Personally, I think that’s cheating, and I can also anticipate a situation where such a trompe l’oeil may endanger male health.

Just imagine a young, strong and impetuous chap led to believe that no physical barrier separates his passion from the woman’s body. Unable to contain himself, he lunges… Well, you know.

However, I’ve been reassured that the desired illusion isn’t so realistic as to produce penile trauma. Apparently, one can see that a woman is wearing knickers, even though they more or less match the colour of her skin.

Yes, but is it more or less? That’s where the retailer’s vision was enhanced by what its spokesman described as “the global conversation on racial inequality following the horrific death” of the serial criminal George Floyd.

St George II acted as a conversation starter because he was brutally killed by a racist Minneapolis cop for being black. That’s the accepted thrust of the narrative. The less accepted but truer version is that Floyd was a drug-addled recidivist thug who resisted arrest for yet another crime he had committed. His death was unfortunate, but it had nothing to do with his race.

Yet our biggest retailer of underwear chose the accepted version, which inspired a closer look at its nude-coloured underwear. It turned out that the line was designed strictly for the milky skin associated with a typical English rose.

However, the apparition of St George II removed the scales from the M&S people’s eyes. They saw the light and realised that some of Britain’s fair maidens aren’t, well, fair, if you get my meaning.

The female population of our multi-culti land comes in different shades of skin colours, at least five of them. And four of those had until then been ignored.

The knicker designers gasped with horror and went to work, the image of George Floyd never quite leaving their line of vision. So inspired, they produced a new “bold and relevant” line of inclusive, racially sensitive bras and knickers – in five different colours, approximating the racial makeup of our society.

Now, I happen to think that this whole hullabaloo about Floyd is so much hogwash acting as subversive propaganda against our whole civilisation. But I realise that some people may feel differently, for whatever reason.

They swear by the new, fake take on virtue and are serious about signalling it urbi et orbi. They do think that George Floyd is a martyr for the noble cause of racial equality, a deficit of which indicts the West for the greatest infamy in history.

I only wonder if communicating that grandiose message through bras and knickers may just trivialise, nay vulgarise, that great cause. No mockery like self-mockery, and this knickers-and-knockers campaign brings that notion into sharp focus.

One observation is in order, I think. I’m not buying the seductive idea that all wokers of the world are stupid. Some are, some aren’t. 

Even rather intelligent people may feel the emotional need to fall in with what they see as majority opinion. It probably isn’t in the population at large, but it may well dominate within some swathes of British society, which is where wokers wish to belong.

So some of them may have some intelligence. Not an excessive amount, but some. What they absolutely can’t have under any circumstances is taste. Revolutionaries, cultural or otherwise, are always tasteless, simply because they’ve pledged their loyalty to a tasteless cause.

Anyway, I wish M&S every measure of success in their marketing venture. That’s guaranteed because the new line can’t lose even if it flops commercially.

A financial loss won’t prevent it from scoring a moral victory. After all, some things soar above filthy lucre, and I’m sure M&S shareholders will see it that way.   

Phonetics matters, ladies and gentlemen. Mispronounce a word, and you can find yourself in trouble, or even in prison.

Hence, by way of public service, I’ve been warning people for years to watch how they pronounce Niger and Nigeria.

A slip of the tongue can easily cause offence, and anyone feeling offended may – these days almost certainly will – seek restitution. Even if people don’t really feel offended, they’ll be instructed by authorities to re-examine their feelings and manufacture credible outrage.

Yet David Collins, a geography teacher in South London, either never heard my warnings or regrettably failed to heed them. When the subject of West Africa came up in class, he told his 14-year-old pupils not to pronounce Niger like the word than which nothing worse exists in the English language, nor indeed in our whole galaxy.

To clarify his meaning, he then helpfully provided the mispronunciation to be avoided. Predictably, his pupils didn’t feel helped. They felt offended.

The school administration instantly provided a means of expressing their wrath. Pre-printed complaint forms were issued, and the pupils were encouraged to fill them in, pulling no punches.

(Apparently, most schools provide forms for the pupils to rate their teachers. Someone ought to educate our educators that schools are different from supermarkets. Customer satisfaction forms are appropriate in the latter, not in the former. Unlike a supermarket manager, a teacher must be seen as a figure of authority who educates, not serves, his flock. Nor is it a good idea to encourage the young to snitch.)   

Shaken to its foundation, the school has felt compelled to restate its uncompromising position on its website:

“As part of our commitment to British values and spiritual, moral, social and cultural development, each half term sees a focus on a key issue relating to diversity: gender, LGBTI, immigration, race, different needs (including mental health and being differently abled) and religion. Each half term, our students can purchase badges, make pledges to show their commitment to reducing discrimination and donate to relevant causes.”

These 65 words illustrate, in conjunction with this whole episode, the catastrophe of our education, indeed the dying twilight of our whole civilisation.

A general observation first: no school capable of expressing itself in the kind of English that sounds like a bad translation from the German should be accredited to teach our young.

Since those ‘educators’ themselves speak pidgin English, it’s no wonder their pupils have to be told how not to mispronounce Niger. They evidently haven’t been taught that the first syllable in that word is what phoneticians call ‘open’, meaning ending in a vowel.

That vowel is almost always pronounced as a diphthong. At the same time, the g-sound is usually softened in a pre-vocal position. Hence any pupil aged 14 should naturally pronounce Niger like the name Nigel without the final consonant.

That’s how that country’s name always used to be pronounced in English. However, with the recent tendency towards faux authenticity, we’ve been ordered to use the Franglais pronunciation of Nee-ZHER.

That’s ridiculous: we anglicise many French names, such as Paris or Rheims, so why not Niger? But never mind that – my point is that no one with even a rudimentary knowledge of English would mispronounce that word in the criminal way.

Since the pupils of Chestnut Grove Academy in Balham possess no such knowledge, they have to be told. And the school’s administrators themselves should be told that British schoolchildren are called ‘pupils’, not ‘students’, as they are in America.

Most terms in the school’s mission statement are as offensive as the racial slur in question.  For brevity’s sake I’ll only single out “mental health and differently abled”.

The second term denotes those unable to learn much of anything. But we, the newly sensitive we, can’t say that, can we?

Yes, they may not possess the requisite ability to learn how to read, write, add up and pronounce ‘Niger’. Yet that mustn’t be construed as their having no abilities at all.

They do have abilities, but different ones. For example, those pupils could sell you a gram of coke faster than you can say ‘juvenile delinquent’, and the especially abled among them could perhaps hotwire a car in 20 seconds. I may be looking on the negative side here, but that’s only because I haven’t a clue what those different abilities may be.

As to ‘mental health’, I propose that this term be banned on pain of public flogging. Alas, this proposal hasn’t been, nor ever will be, acted upon. In fact, mental health of the young is one of the hottest news topics these days.

The logical antonym of ‘mental health’ would be ‘mental illness’, like clinical depression, paranoid delusions or schizophrenia. Hence this term belongs in psychiatric literature, not general usage. But ‘mental health’ persists in general usage, designating the opposite of a lousy mood, sadness – or outrage one is mandated to feel whenever Niger is mispronounced.

According to current data, 55 per cent of British youngsters have sought professional help for a deficit of ‘mental health’. Nevertheless, one has to discount, after momentary hesitation, the possibility that over half of our young people are, clinically speaking, nutters.

It’s just that they are drowning in the sewage of psychobabble flooding the classrooms of schools like Chestnut Grove Academy, which is to say most schools. Psychobabble and aggressive, fascisoid wokery are portrayed as the right, increasingly only, tools for inculcating “British values”.

These values are of recent vintage. In the past, the British used to be a nation of warriors, explorers, adventurers, inventors, entrepreneurs, risk takers, sturdy individuals able to take the rough with the smooth.

Now they are mass-produced to become effete snowflakes who respond to anything upsetting by running to Mummy or, when slightly older, to a shrink. In between such visits, they are indoctrinated with the tenets of the socially and culturally destructive pseudo-morality guaranteed to turn them into perverse, brain-dead barbarians.

It takes much hatred of Britain to describe the outcome of this subversive effort as ‘British values’. The prefix anti- must have fallen off by accident.