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It pains me to say this, but I have to agree with the conclusions reached by an internal inquiry conducted by the Church of England. The Church is institutionally racist, which is to say mired in what will soon be added to the list of deadly sins.

According to the Archbishops’ Anti-Racism Taskforce: “A failure to act now will be seen as another indication, potentially a last straw for many, that the Church is not serious about racial sin.”

True to its word, the taskforce proposed 47 concrete steps towards ending a “rut of inaction” and ushering in a rut of action instead. The taskforce’s findings are consonant with Archbishop Welby’s 2020 pronouncement that the Church is still “deeply institutionally racist”.

Some of the 47 steps mirror the initiatives that have proved staggeringly successful in the lay world: appointment of full-time racial justice officers, compiling annual reports on recruitment and mandatory training to embed anti-racism instincts.

Hear, hear! Every Anglican church in the land must have on its staff a diversity deacon, empowered to overrule the vicar on, well, anything he feels the vicar must be overruled on. That goes without saying.

However, I’d still propose to extend this welcome initiative into matters doctrinal and liturgical. To begin with, the list of seven cardinal sins should be expanded to include an eighth: racism. In general, the list ought to be seen as open-ended: new deadly sins, such as misogyny, homophobia and xenophobia, should also be added as required, but perhaps not all at once.

The Penitential Rite must also be slightly amended to begin as: “Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against thee in racist thought, word, and deed…”

In the good tradition of Anglican liberalism, Lambeth Palace should eschew dictatorial practices and empower the ministers to express their innermost personal convictions. Thus, if a vicar demands that his/her/its congregation worship Jesus Christ as a black woman, he/she/it should be free to do so.

But perhaps I’m barking up the wrong tree. More than 160 recommendations along these lines have been made to the taskforce, and I’m sure my amateurish efforts must have been superseded already.

So perhaps I’d better focus on the core of the problem and preempt all those naysayers who will doubtless insist that the C of E isn’t institutionally racist. To shut them up once and for all, I’d like to submit some incontrovertible evidence.

If we define institutional racism as discrimination against or in favour of an employee solely on account of his/her/its race, irrespective of any other qualifications, then I submit the Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell as my Exhibit A.

In 2020 His Grace (irredeemably white) replaced in his current post, second most senior in the Church, John Tucker Mugabi Sentamu (impeccably black). Since anyone would be hard-pressed to identify Archbishop Stephen’s qualifications to be a priest, never mind a prelate, it had to be his pigmentation that acted as an institutional hoist.

If His Grace is as committed to eradicating racism as he professes, he must tender his resignation and apply for a job as diversity officer. Mugabi Sentamu should then reclaim his diocese or, if reluctant to do so, put forth a candidate of proper racial credentials.

Here we dig our teeth into the meat of the argument. As progressive people, we accept that racism is anything anyone says it is. Yet pedantic sticklers may feel that this criterion is insufficiently precise. They insist on some objective measure of institutional racism.

Thank God one such exists: Proportional Ethnographic Representation, PER for short. By applying PER to an institution’s staff, we can determine if a particular race is over- or underrepresented in relation to its share in the ethnographic makeup of the nation at large.

Any sizeable deviation from the statistical requirement spells institutional racism. It’s as simple – and as fool-proof! – as that.

Hence we programme the total number of C of E bishops (42) into the PER tool and then add the number of black bishops (5). Hence 12 per cent of the bishops are black, meaning that the total proportion of blacks in the population must be similar.

But – and I can’t even begin to describe my shock – it turns out blacks make up only three per cent of the UK’s population. There you go then, the Taskforce’s findings stand vindicated. The Church of England is institutionally racist because whites are grossly underrepresented in its episcopate. QED.

BLM has scored its triumph: Derek Chauvin will spend years, possibly decades, in prison.

Was the verdict just? Since I haven’t seen any trial transcripts, and newspaper reports tend to be biased one way or the other (usually the other), I can’t answer that question purely on legal grounds.

Instead I can ask another one: What would have happened had the jury found Chauvin not guilty? You don’t need me to tell you.

The riots that came in the slipstream of George Floyd’s death would have looked like a quiet picnic in the park by comparison. Every state in the Union, along with all other Western countries, would have seen mayhem as bad as anything that happened in the ‘60s or perhaps even worse.

Cities would have been paralysed; bars, restaurants and shops would have been torched and looted; white people would have been randomly assaulted, possibly killed en masse; civil order would have disintegrated and, at best, would have taken weeks to restore.

You know this, I know this, and everyone taking part in the trial knew it. Prosecutors, defence attorneys, judge, jury – they all knew that any other than a guilty verdict would have turned the country into a bloody, fiery mess. Even closer to home, their own safety would have been severely compromised in eternity.

They wouldn’t be human if such considerations hadn’t entered their minds during the trial. It’s on this basis that I regard the guilty verdict in the Chauvin trial as unsafe.

That doesn’t mean it’s undeserved – only that the impartiality of judge and jury was under such undue pressure that it couldn’t be taken for granted. This failed to satisfy a conditio sine qua non of jury trial, rendering the proceedings suspect.

Conservative, which is these days to say marginal, papers point out that George Floyd’s death is no great loss to mankind. A life-long criminal, he once held a gun to the stomach of a pregnant woman hostage, which my conservative brethren don’t think is a nice thing to do. Floyd was also a drug pusher and taker, and in fact was under the influence during the fatal incident. Police were called to the scene because he tried to pass a counterfeit banknote at a shop, and Floyd fought the arrest with all the gusto of a muscular drugged-up man accustomed to violence.

All that is true. It’s also irrelevant. The law doesn’t just protect Sunday school teachers. It must protect all people, good or bad. If no one is above the law, then no one is beneath it. A human life must not be taken arbitrarily even if, by all secular criteria, it’s a worthless life. If Chauvin had indeed treated Floyd with excessive, murderous cruelty, he deserves all he gets.

Yet the use of the conditional mood in the previous sentence is justified, for reasons I’ve outlined earlier. This raises another question: Why would a failure to convict Chauvin have resulted in a Walpurgisnacht, or Kristallnacht if you’d rather?

This brings us to BLM, an openly Marxist, which is to say subversive, organisation. All these modifiers leave no doubt that Floyd’s death and Chauvin’s hypothetical acquittal would only have served as a pretext, not the reason, for riots.

BLM was founded in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, who describe themselves as “trained Marxists”. The adjective makes one wonder who trained them, but it’s the noun that’s even more telling.

Trained, professional Marxists have only one cause in their lives: replacing traditional Western governments with communist dictatorships. The slogans they hoist on their flagpoles are as varied as they are irrelevant. Whatever they are, they are but a means to the end.

The desired end is always the same whatever the current slogan. It could be redistribution of wealth, global warming, feminism, LGBT rights, racial equality, nuclear disarmament or any combination thereof – any such slogan is a tissue of lies trying to conceal the underlying subversive intent.

The source of BLM financing is as opaque as the identity of the Marxist instructors who trained its founders. Its money is known to be handled by a shadowy organisation called Thousand Currents, fronted by Susan Rosenberg.

Miss Rosenberg boasts a colourful CV. As a member of the terrorist ‘May 19 Communist Organisation’, she was in the mid-80s sentenced to 58 years in prison on a weapons and explosives charge. Thanks to Bill Clinton’s pardon, she only served 16 years of that term, which brings into question the very notion of presidential pardons.

She now handles BLM financing, thereby continuing a fine Bolshevik tradition. In the olden days, whoever was in charge of the Bolsheviks’ money was also involved in hands-on terrorism. (You can Google names like Krasin, Litvinov, Semashko and, for that matter, Stalin for details.) However, before money is handled, it has to be there.

So where do BLM’s millions, almost 100 of them last year, come from? I don’t know, but I could venture a guess.

The size of BLM funding suggests a state, rather than a consortium of private individuals. As a rule, rich people don’t like bankrolling organisations that are committed to dispossessing rich people, or worse. Though that rule has been broken at times (some Russian millionaires, such as Savva Morozov, gave money to Lenin), this isn’t the way to bet.

Much more likely is that BLM is supported by a state with a vested interest in unsettling and destabilising Western countries, especially the US. Off the top I can think of only two countries with an established record of funding, training and arming extremist groups, mostly though not exclusively communist: Russia and China.

Russia is the more probable suspect, considering her recent, and not so recent, behavioural patterns. But either way, while I’m not sure I regret Chauvin’s conviction, I definitely regret the use to which enemies of the West will put it.

BLM will become stronger and the West weaker. This is a zero sum game – whatever one side loses, the other side gains. And make no mistake about it: we and BLM are on opposite sides.  

Footie is now front-page news because 12 clubs, six from England, the others from Italy and Spain, have announced the founding of a breakaway Super League. If allowed to go ahead, this would trivialise, possibly destroy, traditional competitions, both domestic and European.

The entire football community – players, managers, pundits, fans – are understandably up in arms. And, since the big 12 will each receive signing-on fees in hundreds of millions, with billions more to come, the owners are rightly accused of greed.

Interestingly, the accusers, most of them rank atheists, are liberally quoting biblical injunctions against avarice, which is good to see. What’s less good to see is that they make no allowances for the dialectical subtlety of both Testaments, especially the New one.

The impression the critics try to convey is that Christ was opposed to wealth as such, not just particularly rapacious ways of acquiring it. That contravenes Christian dialectics, derived not only from Christ’s teaching but, above all, his person.

This tripartite dialectic can be represented by the formula of yes – no – yes or, in Hegel’s terminology, thesis – antithesis – synthesis. As applied to the person of Christ, it can work in this manner: Yes, Christ is fully God (thesis). No, Christ is fully a man (antithesis). Yes, Christ is God-man (synthesis).

Christians have always applied this dialectic to economic behaviour – come to think of it, they’ve applied it to everything, though not always consciously. There are many comments on wealth in the Scripture, but I’ll focus on just two.

In a well-known incident, Jesus stunned his apostles by a bold thesis: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” The disciples “were astonished out of measure”, and understandably so. After all, at the onset of their religion Abraham’s righteousness was rewarded with riches, as was Solomon’s wisdom.

But then came the antithesis: “…With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible.” The synthesis couldn’t be clearer: as long as we put God first, we are justified in pursuing riches. Granted, the Christian attitude to wealth never rose above toleration. But tolerated it was. It was never proscribed. 

In another incident, Jesus spoke of “mammon”, which is the Aramaic for wealth: “No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”

The yes – no – yes dialectic is implicit there, and in several ways. For Jesus, serving God meant putting God before all else  (metaphysical thesis). It didn’t, however, mean elimination of everything else, for life had to be lived (physical antithesis). Therefore, though we cannot serve mammon, which is to say put it first, we may still wish to live comfortably as long as we serve God (“…seek ye first the kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you”), put him first (synthesis).

The message is clear: God is everything, but this doesn’t mean that man has to be nothing.

This dialectic was understood by all theologians who talked about riches. Thus St Thomas Aquinas: “The perfection of the Christian life does not consist essentially in voluntary poverty, though that is a tool of perfection in life. There is not necessarily greater perfection where there is greater poverty; and indeed the highest perfection is sometimes wedded to great wealth…”

Note the qualifiers: “essentially”, “not necessarily”, “sometimes”. Rather than issuing a licence to acquisitiveness, St Thomas was expressing the fundamental Christian view on pursuing wealth: Go on then, if you must. But do remember what comes first. Jesus, after all, only said man shall not live by bread alone, not that man shall live by no bread at all.

Addressing seven centuries after Aquinas a world that no longer could be automatically presumed to put God first, Pope John Paul II said essentially the same thing: “It is necessary to create lifestyles in which the quest for truth, beauty, goodness and communion with others for the sake of common growth are the factors which determine consumer choices, savings and investments.”

The language is modern; the message is two thousand years old. It’s based on the Christian balance between the two planes, physical and metaphysical, reflecting the two natures of Christ: God and man.

When our civilisation was being formed, seeking wealth for those who didn’t inherit large tracts of land was tantamount to selling the fruits of their labour. The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker bartered their products for other people’s. Since money was sometimes involved as a means of exchange, it was natural to expect that more of it would eventually end up in some hands than in others.

Thus labour indirectly presupposed the possibility of enrichment. Yet in spite of that the New Testament contains direct endorsements of work. These come across in the Lord’s Prayer (“give us this day our daily bread”), in Jesus the carpenter talking about “the labourer worthy of his hire” and in St Paul the tent maker stating categorically that “if any would not work, neither shall he eat.”

The upshot of this is that our football pundits should stop their Bible-thumping even if they can’t help screaming “Damn them to hell!” (Martin Samuels, our best football writer). Dismount your high moral horse, chaps, take a deep breath and try to discuss the issue of the Super League on its merits, such as they are.

When all is said and done, it’s only footie, not some heretical religious schism threatening our whole civilisation. A bit of dialectical perspective would come in handy, don’t you think?

“It appears as if all schools have been turned into training grounds for depravity, and everyone leaving them instantly shows that he has been led astray, with his head holding nothing but emptiness and his heart nothing but self-esteem, that first enemy of reason.”

Take a stab at it, you can’t miss. Any conservative could have thus commented, accurately, on our system of education.

Yet no British conservative has said that, not verbatim at any rate. This ringing denunciation was uttered by a Russian conservative, Admiral Alexander Shishkov (1754-1841), Minister of Public Education.

He was talking about Russia, but I wonder what Shishkov would say if he were miraculously transported to Britain, circa 2021. How would he view our schools, with their shift of emphasis from basic literacy to condom studies, homosexual practices, transgender delights, and racism as the principal dynamic of world history?

Such subjects weren’t taught in the Russian schools Shishkov knew. However, his pronouncement was as locally valid as it was universally prophetic. He was a conservative after all.

Even under the tsars, the good admiral got bad press in Russia for being reactionary, archaist, obscurantist – choose your own term of abuse. He got off lightly. Any minister holding his views in today’s Britain would get more than just bad press. He’d get the sack.

However, a conservative mind isn’t just the best tool for understanding life, but I dare say the only useful one. Alexander Shishkov proves this yet again by using the term self-esteem pejoratively.

That’s not how most people understand self-esteem today. It’s treated as a synonym of self-respect, although in reality they are closer to being antonyms.

Self-respect is a moral concept; self-esteem, a psychological one. Or, if you’d rather, self-respect is ontological while self-esteem is existential.

The former has to do with honour and dignity, something to which every human being is entitled simply because he is indeed human. The latter is a feeling, usually inflated, of possessing a high self-worth.

Self-respect doesn’t have to be earned, it only has to be asserted and upheld. Self-esteem, on the other hand, should presuppose no automatic entitlement: it has to reflect actual achievement, and even then it’s too close to smugness for comfort.

Thus it’s indeed the “first enemy of reason”, in Shishkov’s phrase. Reason needs a sense of under-achievement to stay active. It has to seek new discoveries, which ipso facto means reason must be dissatisfied with the discoveries it has made so far.

Looking at most people in the public eye, politicians, stars, celebrities and so forth, one detects an abundance of self-esteem and a distinct lack of self-respect. Moreover, one sees very few people who are alert to that nuance.

Perhaps we too should entrust our public education to retired naval commanders. May the search for a British Admiral Shishkov commence.  

No? You don’t believe me? Then read Peter Hitchens’s latest piece of pro-Putin propaganda. You’ll find out that “a frantic lobby in this country and in the USA wants to get us into… war against Russia.”

And what do you know, “A war on European territory could be a truly terrible thing.” You could see me wipe my brow in relief even as we speak.

For ‘could be’ means there has been no war yet. Those 14,000 people killed since Russia’s 2014 aggression against the Ukraine must have committed suicide. And those two million displaced Ukrainians must have fled their homes just for the hell of it. Thank God for peace.

I sometimes wonder why Hitchens regularly repeats word for word the effluvia of Putin’s Goebbelses, acting in effect as an agent of influence. In the past, I explored various possibilities, but by now they’ve crystallised into two: a) he is paid to do Putin’s bidding or b) he is unhinged. I hope it’s the latter: a medical problem rates sympathy; treason, only contempt.

In either case, one has to regret that The Mail on Sunday continues to provide a forum for enemy propaganda. Surely its editors can’t possibly think that Hitchens’s outpourings on this subject are sound?

Today he follows his usual pattern. First he establishes his bona fides as a Russian expert: “As I know a bit about Russia, and once lived there…”

Take my word for it: Hitchens never lived in Russia. He was posted there as a foreign correspondent, which means that for a couple of years he shared the same bubble with the upper echelons of the Soviet chieftains. Truly living in the Soviet Union meant feeling every second that one’s life was in the hands of Yahoos who had already murdered 60 million of one’s countrymen.

Then Hitchens issues his customary disclaimer clumsily designed to defang any accusation of bias: “Yes, Russia is ruled by nasty, sinister despots. But…” The disclaimer out of the way, that little conjunction at the end is the key opening the door to the most blatant pro-Kremlin propaganda this side of RT.

We have nothing to fear from Russia because “it is a defeated, poor country with an economy about the same size as Italy’s”. This doesn’t pass muster as a valid argument even at Hitchens’s primitive level. Surely he must know enough history to realise that poor nations with lean and hungry looks can not only threaten their wealthier enemies but actually defeat them?

Two great empires of the past, Rome and Byzantium, were brought to their knees by relative paupers. Too far back?

Fine, then look at Nazi Germany whose GDP was but a fraction of the combined wealth of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Benelux and France. Hitler still managed to overrun all those countries in about 10 months, driving the British Expeditionary Corps into the sea while he was at it.

Or consider the Soviet Union in the 1930s, when its people were actually starving. That didn’t prevent the Soviets from creating the biggest and best-equipped army in the world, which managed to regroup after being practically wiped out in June-December, 1941, and win a war against a formidable adversary.

Still too far in the past? Then cast your eye back to the 1970s, when the USSR’s economy was much smaller than it is today. That still didn’t prevent the Soviets from amassing a force of 50,000 tanks aiming their cannon at the West, and threatening the world with nuclear annihilation (a legacy lovingly maintained by Putin’s Russia).

Comparing the economies of civilised countries and Russia is a fruitless task. What matters there is not what’s in the shops, but what’s in the silos.

Authoritarian regimes have the luxury democracies can never enjoy at peacetime: they can concentrate all their resources in the military area. Both Stalin’s economy in the 1930s and Brezhnev’s in the 1970s did just that. Hence they managed to put together formidable armies – to the accompaniment of fellow travellers’ bleating about the country being poor and therefore unthreatening.

According to Hitchens, another factor of our safety is that Britain has no common border with Russia. Citing that as a serious consideration betokens an antediluvian concept of warfare that certainly predates even Napoleon.

Britain didn’t have a common border with France either, and yet she suffered a suffocating continental blockade and a sanguinary war. Neither did Britain have a common border with Nazi Germany, which didn’t stop those Luftwaffe bombs (many of them Soviet-made, by the way) falling on London.

Talking about war strategies from the standpoint of territorial proximity is especially inane now, in an age of Russia’s ICBMs and Mach-2 Tu-160 bombers. Yet this is Hitchens’s pet argument he lets loose in practically every article.

In that spirit, he echoes not just Putin’s propaganda, but also Stalin’s, circa 1939. Then Stalin cited Finland’s proximity to Leningrad as a justification for pouncing on that tiny country. Now Hitchens implicitly justifies any future aggression by Russia by saying almost exactly the same thing.

“Nato troops,” he writes, are now often to be seen in Narva, Estonia, and “Russia’s second city St Petersburg [is but] 99 miles from the Estonian frontier.” So what?

Estonia is a Nato member, in case Hitchens hasn’t noticed. Nato is a defensive alliance put together to thwart any Russian aggression against Europe. Hence some exchanges of military personnel among member countries is a normal practice.

At present, a formidable force of 1,112 Nato soldiers are deployed in Estonia, serving as potential sacrificial pawns in a tripwire mode should Russian hordes strike. Kremlin propagandists – echoed by Hitchens – scream their heads off about Nato’s eastward expansion, moaning about the threat this presents to Russia’s security.

The underlying assumption is that those 1,112 Estonia-based soldiers may one day drive across the border the way Napoleon’s 500,000 soldiers did in 1812 and Hitler’s 3,000,000 in 1941.

If he and Putin are genuinely worried about that, they should ponder the likelihood of any Western country launching an unprovoked attack on Russia. If they think, or pretend to think, that this probability is greater than zero, one has to doubt either their honesty or their sanity.

The rest of the piece is an exercise in the old Soviet stratagem of moral equivalence. Yes, we have the KGB, but you have the CIA. We murder people abroad, you poison Castro’s cigars. You put rockets into Turkey, we put them into Cuba.

Hitchens’s version of that trick is comparing the 2014 Soviet thrust into the Ukraine with America’s 1845-1847 conquest of Texas and California. Using that as his canvas, he paints a dystopic picture of sick fantasy:

“Imagine that the USA had lost the Cold War and the USSR had won it.” Then “instead of Ukraine being detached from Moscow rule, and slowly reeled into Nato and the EU, imagine that an equally huge, fertile, productive and strategic chunk of the USA, including Texas and California, was encouraged to declare independence and form a new Spanish-speaking nation hostile to the USA?”

This is a variation on the old Soviet theme: don’t accuse us of murdering millions of our own people when you have Jim Crow. Moral equivalence all around.

America’s theft of Mexico’s territory was indeed illegal and immoral. So were Sweden’s attacks on Russia in the 17^th century, Napoleon’s continental blockade, Hannibal’s forays into Rome and Alexander’s conquest of Persia. If we look back far enough, we can uncover any number of beastly acts committed by most of today’s countries and their precursors.

However, using such findings as an excuse for today’s aggression is cloud cuckoo land. Yes, America sinned against Mexico and international law. But she has partly redeemed her sins by helping to defeat Hitler and then, as the lynchpin of Nato, protecting Europe against the Soviets, now Russians, ever since.

Contrary to Hitchens’s animadversions, Putin’s Russia presents an existential threat to Europe’s security. She has already started two aggressive wars in Europe, against Georgia in 2008 and the Ukraine in 2014. Any further aggression eliciting nothing but a token response from the West will put paid to the post-war system of collective security, leaving Europe at the mercy of Russia’s blackmail.

Both Putin and Hitchens detest the Ukraine’s popular uprising, which Hitchens invariably describes as a “putsch”, against the Kremlin’s puppet regime. How dare those marginal people rise against what to Hitchens is “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe [albeit run by “nasty and sinister despots”]?

Hitchens is another illustration to my yesterday’s piece on ex-communists. His loins ache for the kind of strong Russian leader he worshipped in his youth. We never forget our first love, although sometimes we pretend to. As Hitchens does each time he spins his faux-conservative yarns.  

Vlad Putin once denied being ex-KGB. “There’s no such thing,” he said. “This is for life.” Truer words have never been spoken, at least not by Vlad.

He and I are the same generation, and I remember my university classmates who chose a KGB career. They were, not to cut too fine a point, scum to a man – amoral careerists who would have happily denounced their parents to get ahead in life and who were already snitching on their classmates, such as me.

Let’s get the causality right: they didn’t get to be that way because they worked for the KGB; they worked for the KGB because they were that way. Later many such precocious youngsters (Putin and most of his government, to name a few) changed their jobs, but they didn’t – couldn’t – change their personalities. Barring a religious epiphany, one’s character is immutable.

In the same vein, many prominent Westerners describe themselves as ex-communists. They then get upset when I quote Vlad and say there’s no such thing.

I’m specifically talking about Westerners because people who grew up in Eastern Europe and Russia can be forgiven for having succumbed to an unceasing onslaught of propaganda not counterbalanced with opposing views. After all, not everyone is capable of critical thought, especially when possessing this faculty may be life-threatening.

Even there perhaps ‘forgiven’ is a wrong word. ‘Understood’ would be closer to the mark.

However, as far as I’m concerned, Western ‘ex-communists’ merit neither understanding nor forgiveness (in any other than the Christian sense of the word). And I refuse to accept their explanations, such as “I was young and stupid until my 20s [sometimes 30’s or even older], but then I grew up and changed my views”.

Views are indeed changeable – why, even I have changed quite a few of mine, and I’m not known for excessive flexibility. What’s not changeable is a person’s nature, and my contention is that communist beliefs are a function of emotional, intuitive predisposition, not intellect.

They reflect not what a man thinks, but what he is.

I’m not talking here about idiots and ignoramuses who simply have no way of knowing better. The human type I have in my crosshairs is the Western intellectual who went from being a communist in his younger days to becoming a chap who pontificates on conservative values in his dotage. (Names available on request.)

Since these days people seldom take the trouble of delving beneath the surface of a statement, such turncoats are taken at their word. Few listeners stop to ponder what those exes are actually saying. Well, allow me to translate.

This is what they really mean: “Until I was 20 [30, 40 or older] I believed in creating the kind of state that murders millions of its own citizens, tortures and imprisons many more, creates artificial famines killing millions, eliminates every known liberty, reduces the population to a brain-dead herd, surrounds itself with an impregnable fence, uses lies and shrieks in lieu of normal speech, militarises the whole society, pursues an incessant aggressive policy designed to spread its own evil to the whole world, ignores all legal and moral norms of civilised behaviour.”

Books on the true nature of communism have been available in their thousands since the early 1920s. Hence a sentient, which is to say adult and educated, human being who believes such things isn’t misguided or mistaken. He’s evil. And that aspect of one’s character can only ever be concealed, not suppressed.

When my son was a teenager, he read Whittaker Chambers’s book Witness and was extremely impressed. The author was an American communist who spied for the Soviet Union and later acted as a witness in the trial of Alger Hiss, another communist spy.

Chambers later saw the light and became a senior editor of National Review, a conservative journal. (When still a communist spy, he had the same job at Time magazine, a more remunerative position, and one more consonant with his nature.)

My son was upset when I doused his enthusiasm by saying something along the lines of once a communist, always a communist. I tried to explain to him what I meant, but failed miserably. I wonder if I’ve done any better now. Perhaps not.   

Idris Elba, the star of the BBC’s popular series Luther, is black. How do I know? Well, he looks black. (Is one allowed to say that? Is one supposed to? Things can get frightfully confusing nowadays.)

So black, in fact, that one doesn’t even have to Google his background to see that. I did so anyway, just in case. Sure enough, appearances aren’t always deceptive. There it is: father, from Sierra Leone; mother, from Ghana.

Black credentials don’t get any blacker than that. Or do they? Damn right they do, says Miranda Wayland, a BBC diversity chief. (Note the indefinite article: the BBC has a whole staff of diversity chiefs.)

Though Miss Wayland didn’t use the slang expression, Elba’s character, DCI Luther, is a coconut: black on the outside, white on the inside. Thus he doesn’t pass muster within Miss Wayland’s remit.

But do let her speak for herself, in that refined style for which BBC executives are so justly famous these days: “We all fell in love with him. Who didn’t, right? But after you got into about the second series you got kind of like, OK, he doesn’t have any black friends, he doesn’t eat any Caribbean food, this doesn’t feel authentic.”

Neither does Luther freebase cocaine, push drugs, mug pensioners, do rap, run hookers (sorry, sex workers), wear gold chains and/or a full-length fur coat topped with a wide-brimmed hat, live in Brixton, speak in gangsta slang, shoot hoops, walk around in a rolling gait with a ghetto-blaster pressed into his ear, drive an old BMW with extra speakers fitted into the boot.

In other words, I’m kind of, like, OK, he doesn’t conform to the racist stereotypes Miss Wayland and her ilk are committed to promoting. And you know what’s the most amazing thing about it? She doesn’t even realise how condescendingly racist her remarks are.

As a black woman herself, she must be aware that not all blacks come from Jamaica or Trinidad. Some actually come directly from Africa, as Mr Elba’s parents did. Those atypical, inauthentic, unrepresentative souls are about as likely to eat Caribbean food as I am – perhaps even less so because I do love it and some of them don’t.

She may not know such trivia, but she does know that the series would be very different if it were created today. Luther finished its run in 2015, that antediluvian period before Miss Wayland’s appointment to her post, and that’s a lot of Caribbean water under the bridge.

The BBC, guided by Miss Wayland’s hand, has since learned that just casting a perfunctory black falls far short of authenticity requirements. “It’s about making sure that everything around them – their environment, their culture, the set – is absolutely reflective,” she explains.

Now, I’ve worked with quite a few blacks, and none of them would be accepted as genuinely reflective by BBC diversity chiefs. They walked the same walk and talked the same talk as everybody else. So much so that nobody thought of them as blacks, nor expected them to act out the racist caricature Miss Wayland has been hired to draw.

Granted, they were middle-class, but then so was DCI Luther. Detective Chief Inspector is a fairly high rank in the Met, equivalent to a US police captain. Luther would have had a university degree, possibly a post-graduate one, and his salary would have been about £60,000 a year – less than what BBC diversity chiefs make, but enough to be as middle-class as my former friends and colleagues.

On this evidence, I’d be happy to redistribute the income of every diversity chief in the country to all the cops. Our society would be safer, happier – and even less racist than it’s supposed to be.

The fact is that diversity chiefs don’t want to eradicate racism. Like all holders of meaningless sinecures, they are mostly concerned with self-perpetuation, which makes Britain’s putative racism their bread and butter.

That’s why they were up in arms when a recent landmark study by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities described Britain as a “post-racist” society. How dare they say any such thing?!?

Of course Britain is still a country of slave-keepers who treat blacks as simians. If that weren’t the case, Miss Wayland would have to get a real job, and we can’t have that, can we?

Meghan Markle has issued a statement saying she is prepared “to forgive” the Royal family for its beastly racism towards her son Archie. “Ego te absolvo,” as she put it in her impeccable Latin (no Hollywood bimbo, she).

Yet a source close to the Palace says it was all a terrible misunderstanding. Apparently, on hearing that Harry and Meghan were expecting their first child, Prince Philip exclaimed: “Golly!”

Alas, the Sussexes mistook that expression of pleasant surprise for a question and were deeply offended. However, now that Prince Philip has died, Meghan is ready to exercise the Christian virtue of forgiveness.

That’s big of her. (I almost wrote “white of her”, but then got so ashamed of the incipient racism of that idiom that I almost denounced myself to the authorities.) Anyway, if Alexander Pope is to be believed, to err is human; to forgive, divine.

However, someone who forgives is by implication the wronged party. If the forgiver is more sinning than sinned against (I can’t stop quoting, or rather misquoting, English classics today), then that act stops being divine and becomes not only human but also irritatingly frivolous.

However, Meghan’s magnanimity has set off a chain of imitations. In parallel developments:

1. The surviving Nazis have forgiven the Jews for being sore losers.
2. Every rapist has forgiven his victims for wearing revealing clothes.
3. Bob Welsh, the only surviving Great Train Robber, has forgiven the train driver Jack Mills for putting his head in the way of that cosh.
4. Bernie Madoff has forgiven all subscribers to his pyramid schemes for their credulity.
5. Jeremy Corbyn has forgiven all Yids for being oversensitive. (See Item 1 above).
6. Mike Tyson has forgiven Frank Bruno for having a glass jaw.
7. Vlad Putin has forgiven the Skripals for their strong resistance to Novichok.
8. He has also forgiven Alexander Litvinenko for his weak resistance to polonium.

I’ll keep you posted on any new absolutions as they become known. Meanwhile, I’m sorry about my levity in this little vignette. I hope you can forgive me.

Sixty years ago, on 12 April, 1961, I felt jubilation, not doubt. As a normal 13-year-old, I took that opportunity to skip school, claiming it was my patriotic duty to follow the Soviet triumph on television. We didn’t own a TV set, but the teachers had no way of knowing that.

These days the anniversary of Gagarin’s flight is a major event in Russia, used as a spur to nostalgia for the Soviet Union. ‘We beat Americans into space!’ is a typical headline, while the lunar landings are ignored.

Things do change over time, as do assessments of past events when new facts come to light. The Soviet space programme is no exception. To begin with, contrary to what the Soviets claimed, it didn’t exist at the time.

Sergei Korolev, the anonymous pioneer of Soviet rocketry known to the public only as the Chief Designer, got an order from Khrushchev. The Soviet supremo wanted to have in his arsenal an ICBM capable of reaching America. Space exploration was the last thing on his mind, and no dedicated programme of that nature was started until years later.

Korolev, who had spent years in a Kolyma labour camp and survived only miraculously, took such orders seriously. Compliance was a matter of life or death, literally.

Many other Soviet rocket designers weren’t so lucky. For example, Georgy Langemak, the inventor of the celebrated Katyusha rocket launcher, was summarily shot on a trumped-up charge, as were many of his colleagues.

Others, such as Tupolev of the TU planes fame, were kept in special prisons (sharashkas) where they plied their trade for an extra bread ration. Korolev was fortunate to have been transferred to one of those, which saved his life and made him acutely sensitive to his bosses’ wishes.

With the help of captured German scientists who brought to the task their experience with the V-rockets, Korolev delivered the missile Khrushchev wanted. But he mentioned casually that the same rocket could put a satellite into space. Khrushchev’s eyes lit up: he knew a propaganda coup when he saw it.

Thus the first Sputnik was launched on 4 October, 1957, to the accompaniment of triumphant – and mendacious – din. The Soviets claimed the satellite had scientific equipment onboard, which was a lie. They also referred to the Cosmodrome’s location as Baikonur, a town in Kazakhstan, whereas in fact it was at Tyuratam, some 140 miles away.

Bizarrely, just to keep the record straight, Tyuratam was later renamed Baikonur, though the original possessor of that name also kept it. Monty Python could have had a field day with that.  

On 3 November, 1957, the dog Laika (husky, in Russian) went up, and new lies were spun. In those days, there was no technology for bringing a spacecraft back to earth safely. Hence Laika received only a seven-day oxygen supply, after which she was supposed to die quickly and painlessly.

Alas, the dog died almost immediately due to overheating, which didn’t prevent the Soviet press from issuing upbeat health bulletins for several days thereafter. The pattern was set, and it was followed with Gagarin.

First, he was almost certainly not the first man in space – just the first to come back alive and not particularly shop-worn. Rumours of prior disasters spread instantly, and they were eminently believable.

In those days, Soviet space launches enjoyed only a 50-50 success rate, and just a couple of months earlier a booster rocket had exploded on the launch pad, killing 126 people on the ground. That flight was unmanned, but by some accounts there had been three fatal attempts to launch a man into space before Gagarin.

Amateur radio operators in Italy and elsewhere had intercepted several exchanges between ‘Baikonur’ and cosmonauts in distress. One of them was a woman, whose last words were: “It’s getting too hot!”

In 2001, Mikhail Rudenko, a former Soviet senior engineer and experimenter, confirmed that  cosmonauts had been sent into space in 1957, 1958 and 1959. “All three pilots died during the flights and their names were never officially published.” According to him, the pilots who took part in the fatal sub-orbital flights were named  Ledovskikh, Shaborin and Mitkov.

A year after the Gagarin flight, the British communist newspaper The Daily Worker published a story saying that one man had indeed come back alive before Gagarin. He was Vladimir Ilyushin, an experienced test pilot and the son of the famous designer of many IL planes.

According to the article, Ilyushin’s re-entry was botched. The capsule didn’t separate from the rocket, he couldn’t eject and was badly banged up in a hard landing – in China. He spent months there and was finally sent home in a condition that simply couldn’t be presented to the world. Hence Ilyushin’s flight got hushed up.

Lately doubts have even been voiced about Gagarin’s flight itself. Some reports claim that the Vostok rocket suffered several malfunctions on the launch pad, including one with the hatch that wouldn’t shut properly. Hence the rocket was launched without Gagarin, who was later parachuted from a plane in full space gear.

What gave rise to such speculations is some of the comments made by the hero himself. For example, he said he had admired the beauty of South America when overflying it. In fact, he flew over that continent at night, and the only thing he could admire was pitch darkness.

Then Gagarin said he had seen beautiful, freshly ploughed Russian fields, which was a sheer impossibility from a height of 150 miles. He also claimed he had been singing a patriotic Soviet song throughout the re-entry. In fact, his capsule was then rapidly spinning around its axis, rendering any vocal self-expression impossible.

The Soviets also lied about Gagarin’s landing because they wanted to register his flight as a record with the FAI. To qualify, that international federation demanded that the pilot take off, fly and land in the same craft.

However, such a landing was deemed a recipe for disaster, possibly in view of what had happened to Ilyushin. Hence Gagarin ejected at four kilometres and came down to earth on two parachutes.

Such was the combination of tragedies and comedies surrounding the flight. A telling example of the latter was later provided by Mongolia, at that time effectively a Soviet colony. To please their Soviet masters, the Mongols issued a series of postage stamps commemorating the heroic feat.

Unfortunately Gagarin was portrayed against the backdrop of the American Mercury rocket flown into space by Alan Shepard three weeks after the Soviet triumph. Neither the Mongols nor the Hungarian artists they had employed were to blame.

It’s just that the Americans published photographs of their space rockets all over the newspapers, while the Soviets indulged their secrecy mania by never showing Gagarin’s Vostok rocket. The artists assumed that the two rockets looked more or less the same, which they really didn’t.

Thus Gagarin flashed his celebrated smile at a US rocket, not the one he had actually flown. If he had flown at all.  

History is a good teacher, but unfortunately it has indolent and inept pupils: us, Westerners.

That’s why I only have a glimmer of a hope that, this once, the Chamberlain lesson will be heeded. He taught it on 27 September, 1938, in a radio broadcast on Hitler’s plans to annex the Sudetenland.

Describing the impending aggression as “a quarrel in a far-away country, between people of whom we know nothing”, Chamberlain sent a go-ahead signal to Hitler. We know what happened next.

Read the Ukraine for Czechoslovakia, Putin for Hitler, current Western leaders for Chamberlain, Daladier et al., and here endeth the lesson. Are we paying attention? Or are we playing truant? Have we finally learned that aggression against far-away countries about which we know nothing can trigger a worldwide cataclysm?

The Russians are amassing on Ukrainian borders a formidable force of several divisions (up to 85,000 men by some reports) armed with tanks, missile launchers and long-range artillery. The official explanation is some sort of exercise, but no one takes that seriously.

Some sort of military action against the Ukraine must be in the works, and there are many signs of that. For example, hospitals and morgues are being mobilised in various parts of Russia, suggesting that Putin doesn’t expect a bloodless cakewalk, similar to Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia.

Also, a planeload of Russian war correspondents has landed in the Russian-occupied Donetsk and Lugansk provinces of the Ukraine. The hacks went into action immediately, concocting stories of little boys crucified by the dastardly Ukies and a genocide of all Russian-speakers being planned by Zelensky’s ‘fascist’ government.

Such genocide would have to have an element of suicide to it, since Zelensky himself is a native Russian-speaker, as are most members of his government. But such petty details are unlikely to douse the hacks’ fervour.

All the signs point at an imminent outbreak of hostilities, making commentators wonder what it is that Putin wants. His desires are doubtless two-fold, involving both strategic and tactical objectives.

The strategy is crystal-clear: if Ivan III went down in history as “the gatherer of the Russian lands”, Putin wants to be known as the re-gatherer. He has never concealed his aspiration to bring the whole post-Soviet space back into Russia’s fold, and the Ukraine was the jewel in the Soviet crown.

Putin’s long-term strategy is to reassemble the Soviet Union, thereby correcting what he calls “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century”. That is the demise of an ogre that had devoured at least 60 million of its own children.

Hence Russia doesn’t recognise the independence of her former colonies and satellites, especially the Ukraine. Statements to the effect of Ukrainians and Russians being the same people are bulging the papers, most of them controlled by the Kremlin. This touching sentiment is strictly unilateral since Ukrainians jealously asserted their national identity even when they did belong to the Soviet Union, never mind now.

The immediate tactical objectives are harder to surmise. Putin may want to enlarge the occupied territory of the Donetsk and Lugansk provinces. He may also wish to have those enclaves of terrorism and banditry reincorporated into the Ukraine proper, thereby putting paid to Ukrainian independence.

Another possible plan may be to expand the occupied territory southwards to incorporate the Black Sea areas of Odessa and Mariupol. This may include the capture of the Northern Crimean Canal through which the Ukraine used to supply the Crimea. Now that lifeline has been blocked, the population of the occupied Crimea is fleeing in droves, to escape the growing shortages of basic necessities, including water.

Whatever such tactical objectives may be, they’ll always only be stepping stones on the way to conquering all of the Ukraine and stamping out her independence. How will the Ukraine react? How will the West?

The Ukraine will fight to the last man, the way Ukrainian partisans continued to fight the Soviets for at least 10 years after the war. That was a heroically hopeless struggle of several thousand barely armed men against the formidable might of the Soviet Union.

Ukrainians are no longer barely armed – thanks to Western supplies, they’ve been steadily increasing their battle-worthiness. Their army is approaching modern standards of armaments and, though it may not be able to defeat Russia, it’s certainly capable of inflicting the kind of casualties the Russians haven’t suffered since Afghanistan.

Somehow I’m not sure that the warmongering hysteria whipped up by the Russian media will survive tens (hundreds?) of thousands of death notices reaching their towns and villages. It’s doubtful that Putin’s regime itself will survive.

But suppose Russia does have a go. How will the West respond? How should it respond?

According to the press release issued by US Secretary of Defence Lloyd J. Austin III, he “spoke by phone today with Ukrainian Minister of Defence Andrii Taran to discuss the regional security situation. Secretary Austin reaffirmed unwavering U.S. support for Ukraine’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and Euro-Atlantic aspirations. He condemned recent escalations of Russian aggressive and provocative actions in eastern Ukraine and offered condolences to Minister Taran on the deaths of four Ukrainian soldiers on March 26.”

Unwavering US support means unwavering Nato support, and Britain is its second-ranking member. But what does that statement mean?

The West responded to Russia’s aggression against Georgia in 2008 and the Ukraine in 2014 with token sanctions and expressions of concern. Will we this time ratchet our response up to expressing grave concern and tightening up the sanctions?

It’s reasonably clear what the West will not do: send troops to fight in the Ukraine. The US Navy has moved two frigates into the Black Sea, but this is merely a symbolic gesture.

And here’s what the West can’t afford to do: nothing. Should Russian armour roll, neither statements of grave concern nor mere token sanctions will do.

We must continue to supply the Ukrainians with everything they need to fight for their freedom and inflict the heaviest possible casualties on the Russians. At the same time, Russia’s status must be downgraded from somewhat naughty to a pariah.

The West has the means to collapse Russia’s economy, and this is what must be done. Russia should be cut off from the international trading system SWIFT, with an embargo imposed on both Russians imports and exports. Let them eat their gas and drink their oil.

At the same time, the ‘Russian trillions’, the ill-gotten assets Russian gangsters keep in Western banks and other financial institutions, must be impounded or, better still, confiscated. That will deliver a blow where it hurts: the ostentatious luxury in which the kleptofascist junta lives.

Vetting such assets to decide which are ill-gotten and which aren’t is like shooting fish in a barrel: you can’t miss. All Russian holdings numbering in many millions are proceeds of crime – such wealth can’t be acquired there by any other means.  

Putin’s junta can’t be allowed to get away with a full-blown offensive against the Ukraine. If it is, the whole system of European security, including Nato, will collapse.

If we go back to those history classes, bold aggressors always stagger their forays by gradual escalation. Thus the Rhineland came first, then Austria, then Czechoslovakia, then the Benelux, then France and then those bombs rained on London.

If the West displays limp-wristed impotence again, Putin’s next targets will be the Baltics, which are Nato members. Having allowed today’s answer to Hitler to swallow up the Ukraine, it would be illogical for us to resist the occupation of, say, Estonia.

And then we may be reminded of the etymology of the word ‘escalation’: it’s a cognate of the Latin for stairs. We’ll climb up one step at a time, and a nuclear holocaust may well await on the top floor.

Sorry about coming across as a doomsayer, but someone has to be. The situation is dire, and it can quickly become cataclysmic.