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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.

When Marx wrote that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, he didn’t account for the possibility of the reverse sequence.

Yet the Biden-Putin summit, inaugurating the interplay between Russia and America for the next four years, shows that this possibility is very real. We were served up a farce, and a tragedy may be just around the corner.

Biden has been hailed in the American press for his self-restraint, belying the steely resolve underneath. No one seems to realise that Putin played Biden – and the sycophantic ‘liberal’ media – for a sucker. People in the West don’t seem to grasp the salient difference between the two chaps.

Biden’s words may not be deeds, but they still are words. The nature of Western governance is that politicians may be held to account for things they say. That’s why they so often, practically always, utter vacuous, noncommittal statements, trying not to give their opposition an opening. They can’t just say any old thing and hope to get away with it.

Putin’s words aren’t words. They are KGB ops, solely designed to deceive, provoke, unsettle, trick – whatever works to complete the mission.

The mission is to defeat the West politically, to force it to accept the legitimacy of the Russian regime and Putin personally, giving them a free hand to do as they will. Such a victory must not only be won, but it must also be seen to have been won.

Acting on his childhood experience as a self-described “common Petersburg thug”, later parlayed into a career within history’s most murderous organisation, Putin knows how to declare victory without actually uttering words to that effect.

The technique he uses comes straight from Petersburg’s back alleys, where the bully knows he can say anything he wants without anyone daring to disagree. The message is, “Oh yeah? So what are you going to do about it?”

Just look at the way he handled the issue of Navalny, whose Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) has been a thorn in Vlad’s side for years. To jog your memory, Putin’s Lucretia Borgias poisoned Navalny with novichok.

Yet they didn’t get the dose quite right, which is always a problem. Too high, and the poison will be instantly detectable in postmortem. Too little, and the target may survive.

That’s what happened in this case: Putin’s hitmen only succeeded in putting Navalny in a coma, not in a coffin. Still unconscious, he was taken to Germany for treatment, and his life was saved.

Navalny then returned to Russia, knowing he’d end up in prison. So it proved. He was accused of jumping parole and sentenced to 3.5 years in a penal colony.

When queried about this, Putin delivered his back-alley jive. Navalny, he said, had committed a crime by escaping to Germany. Hold on, Vlad, but surely, being in a coma, he didn’t have much choice in that matter? Oh yeah? So what are you going to do about it?

Then Putin corrected a widespread misapprehension. People treat Navalny and his ACF as legitimate political opposition. In fact, they are nothing but terrorists, teaching their supporters how to make Molotov cocktails.

But Vlad, the ACF was established in 2011, and in the intervening 10 years they haven’t committed a single terrorist act. Nor is there a shred of evidence that they are planning one. Oh yeah? So what are you going to do about it?

Biden tried to answer that implicit question by threatening “devastating consequences” should Navalny die in prison. By the looks of it, the devastating consequences will take the shape of another stern expression of deep concern.

Anyway, why weren’t there any consequences, devastating or otherwise, when the previous opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, was shot dead a few feet from the Kremlin wall? Or when another opposition leader, Anna Politkovskaya, was murdered? Or after dozens of other dissidents (Starovytova, Shchekochihin, Sheremet, Litvinenko et al.)  were ‘whacked’ in Russia and elsewhere?

Where were the consequences of a London restaurant being poisoned with polonium and half of Salisbury with novichok? What about that Chechen émigré shot in Germany? Boris Berezovsky garrotted in London? Alexander Perepelichny poisoned in Surrey?

And why just threaten consequences? Why respond to the Navalny poisoning with merely token sanctions against a few Russian officials? That was supposed to send a signal to Putin, but a much stronger one was sent by Biden’s suspending sanctions against Nord Stream 2 contractors, effectively strengthening Putin’s ability to blackmail Europe with his energy cosh.

Biden did mutter something about human rights in Russia, giving Vlad a chance to embellish on the answer his foreign minister Lavrov once gave to his British then-counterpart David Miliband: “Who are you to fucking lecture me?” (At the time I was shocked by the split infinitive.)

What about those poor souls, said the Petersburg thug, who expressed their peaceful political opposition in Washington on 6 January, 2021? Hundreds of them were arrested, many will go to prison. Where are the human rights in that, eh?

Hold on, Vlad. They weren’t arrested for voicing dissent. They were arrested for storming the US Capitol, with five people dying and 140 injured as a result. So that analogy doesn’t work. Oh yeah? So what are going to do about it?

Then Biden raised the issue of cyberattacks on US political and commercial institutions. We have hackers too, threatened Joe. We can retaliate – will retaliate, especially if you hit one of our 16 vital infrastructure facilities.

Biden apparently named those lucky 16 to Putin, but he kept the public in the dark. Those outside the red line must be on edge, and even those inside can’t relax if they can’t be sure on which side of the line they fall.

Biden also expressed his deep concern (that dread phrase again) about the recent concentration of Russian troops on the Ukraine border. Hey, those were Russian troops moving around Russia, objected Vlad. Our troops, our country, we can do as we please.

And anyway, the Minsk Protocol is still in force, and it’s the only valid basis for even discussing the Ukraine. Putin was referring to the 2014 ceasefire agreement that followed Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine. Actually, Russia has been violating those accords with such metronomic regularity that they can only function as part of the aforementioned ‘Oh yeah?’ stance.

Much more germane to the conversation would have been the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, whereby the US and the UK guaranteed the Ukraine’s security in exchange for her relinquishing nuclear weapons. Yet invoking that document would have added a touch of realism to the unfolding farce, and Biden didn’t want to step out of character.

Until recently, Putin had only talked in that openly mocking way to the paper-trained Russian media and, through them, Russian people. Now he clearly feels strong enough to adopt the same public posture before the West, which doesn’t bode well for any of us.

For Putin seems certain he can now run his op worldwide and succeed, as he did in this case. Biden got nothing out of those talks, whereas Putin got exactly what he needed: an equal place at the international table.

Biden implicitly endorsed that elevation by calling Putin “a worthy adversary” with whom he spoke “the same language”. And he accepted Russia as “a great power”. QED

With a meagre three per cent of world GDP, Russia certainly isn’t a great economic power. But she punches way above her economic weight because she possesses a large number of nuclear warheads. It’s the greatness of a schoolyard bully, not of a bespectacled straight-A pupil.

Now, China, with over 18 per cent of world GDP, is a great economic power, which makes many observers, including some who ought to know better, regard her as the greatest threat to the West.

First, I’m not aware of any rule saying that the West can have only one threat at a time. Second, I see no evidence that China presents an immediate political threat. One doesn’t see Chinese troops in action anywhere in the world, and neither does China try to undermine Western elections and buy up Western politicians and parties wholesale.

Third, and most important, Russia and China are both ruled by disgusting regimes that hate the West. That makes them natural allies who can launch a two-prong offensive against us, economic (China) and political (Russia). I don’t know if any formal agreement has been reached between the two, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were in the near future.

China may eventually accumulate enough wealth to put a python-like squeeze on Western economies and monetary systems. Russia can at the same time keep “probing the West with the bayonet”, in Lenin’s phrase.

China, with her vast industrial capacity, doesn’t need political pinpricks to achieve her goals. Russia does, and one of the goals is to be accepted by the West as a “worthy [meaning equal] adversary”.

That goal was largely achieved in Geneva a week ago, with Biden agreeing to play his role in the farce.

I know this sounds just awful. But it’s one of the possible conclusions to be drawn from this morning’s Sky News report.

Its presenter, Kate Burley, whose politics would place her somewhere between Jeremy Corbyn and Notting Hill, interviewed two government ministers, one in charge of domestic crime, the other of crime in general.

Isn’t it wonderful how finely our government divides responsibilities, each calling for a separate ministry? That’s definitely a step in the right direction. Racing along that road, I’m sure we’ll soon have a Minister for Muggings, one for Racial Slurs, another one for Burglaries… No, scratch that last one. Burglary has been decriminalised in the UK, or as near as damn.

Anyway, Kate nailed both Tories to the wall with her questions about a report showing that fewer rape cases are now being brought to trial. She held both politicians personally responsible for that outrage, and they both expressed the requisite regrets and abject shame, promising to do something about that scandal in short order.

Kate’s assumption – nay certainty – clearly was that misogynist cops, prosecutors and judges refuse to pursue rape cases. Possibly that’s because they think it takes two to tango. Or else they feel that women egg men on by wearing short skirts. Or perhaps those fossils get off on rape stories and see them as nothing but titillating entertainment.

Now if that’s the case, then justice isn’t being served, and things have to change. However, both ministers and their inquisitor didn’t even broach the possibility that the reason there are fewer rape cases being tried is that fewer rapes are being committed.

That would explain their predicament and light up a clear path to corrective measures. They should encourage men to rape more women more often.

That would instantly drive up the number of such cases reaching the Old Bailey, getting the government off the hook and putting a wide smile on Kate’s face and also on the visages of Jeremy Corbyn and every resident of Notting Hill.

Here I have to disappoint them. I’ve given up rape, partly because the pillow talk is too limited. A loquacious chap like me wouldn’t be happy with such foreplay exchanges as “Shut up or I’ll slit your throat!” and “Please don’t!” Then again, now that I’m in my dotage, most women could probably take me in hand-to-hand combat.

But the strong, silent types among my male readers should be able to oblige, which I strongly encourage them to do. We none of us want to upset Kate Burley.

Then there’s another possibility worth mentioning. That there may be fewer cases with enough evidence to bring to court.

Here we hit the nail right on the head. For the belief reaching dominance fast is that the standards of evidential proof in rape cases ought to be much laxer than in any other crime (with the possible exception of racial slurs, which will soon be handled by a specially designated ministry).

Let’s try to get to the bottom of that. In the past, a crime of rape offended two entities: the victim and the law. Hence it was treated like any other crime against person or property, where the offended parties fell into the same two categories. The plank of the evidence sufficient to dispel reasonable doubt was set high in all such cases – and, more important, equally high.

That has changed, as far as rape is concerned. For this crime offends not against two entities, but three: the victim, the law – and, critically, the woke ethos raised to a level of religious orthodoxy.

This adds a metaphysical dimension to the forensic procedure, and metaphysics doesn’t necessarily depend on physical evidence for its vindication. The ideal the likes of Kate Burley see in their mind’s eye is for every man accused of rape to be charged, tried and found guilty, regardless of any proof beyond reasonable doubt.

Even if that particular defendant didn’t rape that particular woman, that’s like shooting fish in a barrel – you can’t miss. There’s a rapist lurking in every man’s breast, isn’t there? Of course, there is. Every feminist worth her salt will tell you so.

Then, if the chap is actually guilty, it’ll be a crime punished. And if he isn’t, it’s a crime prevented. No man can be scrubbed clean of the original sin of being a rapist either in actuality or waiting to happen.

Still, it’s good to see that on a slow news day both our media and government officials have been able to isolate the most critical problem plaguing Her Majesty’s realm. The narrower the focus, the clearer the vision – and Godspeed to all of them.

The words are simply refusing to come together in a sentence. So I’ll have to write them one by one.

Young. French. People. Know. Nothing. About. Food. Any. Longer. I’m sure you can string these words together. But can you understand their full implication?

It’s as if Italians stopped pinching women’s bottoms on public transport. Or Russians, drinking toxic amounts of vodka. Or Britons, chanting “If it wasn’t for England, you’d all be Krauts” at football matches. Or Americans, confusing Austria with Australia, Sweden with Switzerland and not giving a damn. Or the Dutch, producing and consuming mountains of mediocre cheese.

If such calamities occurred, all those people would still be there in body. But their soul would be gone, their idiosyncratic character no longer recognisable.

That’s why I’m worried about the French. For gastronomy is a part of their national character that’s both essential and immutable. Or so I thought.

Then, over the past few years I’ve had many opportunities to observe young French people, and not just uneducated ones, struggling to identify some basic food items.

We have (or rather had before the lockdown season) a small Sunday market across the street from us in London. Many of the tradesmen and half the customers were French, the latter mostly working in finance.

One would expect those young professionals on the rise to continue the fine traditions of French gourmandising. Yet every now and then they displayed woeful ignorance.

Once, for example, I observed a well-dressed couple thoroughly befuddled by the sight of parsnips and swedes. They were looking at that exotica the way Man Friday looked at the salt shaker in Robinson’s hands.

The novelty struck them to the core. They asked each other if they had ever seen such amazing things, and neither of them had. What are they called? Not a clue.

Being by nature an obliging sort, I helpfully provided the French words for parsnip (panais) and swede (rutabaga). They looked at me not so much with gratitude as with awe, the way Venetians must have looked at Marco Polo who, on his return home from his voyage, told his friends that those odd Chinese cut dough into long strips and then boil them. “Delizioso, amici!”

If reasonably educated Frenchmen can have such lacunae in their culinary knowledge, what kind of expectations can one have of youngsters working in French supermarkets? Pretty low, I dare say, and they live down to them.

People working at checkouts routinely fail to identify simple foods, especially vegetables and herbs. Hence they don’t know how to run them through and have to call for help. The help arrives after some five minutes, in the shape of their older manager who looks as if she thinks the holdup is our fault.

This morning, for example, a young man, probably a student doing a summer job, didn’t know what dill was. My supplying the word missing from his lexicon, aneth, didn’t ring a bell, and neither could he locate that mind-boggling item on his computer.

Penelope had to run back to the vegetable section and look up the item code, which took some time, much to the displeasure of the people behind us in the queue. She then told me not to use such language in public, even in English.

A trivial matter, you would think, and so it is. Or rather would be if it weren’t indicative of a general decline in taste.

I’ve been shopping in rural French supermarkets for some twenty years now, never missing an opportunity to peek into other shoppers’ trolleys. And let me tell you, their contents have changed even during this relatively short time.

If a generation ago most trolleys contained fresh vegetables, good bread, fruit and the ingredients for the ubiquitous local staple, boeuf bourguignon, nowadays they squeak under the weight of frozen pizzas, ready-made meals and revolting fizzy drinks.

It’s 20 years ago I’m talking about, not 450 or so, which was when Catherine de’ Medici married the French king Charles IX and brought some Italian chefs over in her trousseau. The Italians then taught the French that there was infinitely more to cooking than just roasting a whole wild boar on a spit.

Credit where it’s due, the French turned out to be able pupils, who have since created a great cuisine of their own. So great, in fact, that it has gone into much of what adds up to their national character.

One wonders, if they are busily abandoning that part, what other parts are also falling by the wayside. Quite a few, I’d suggest.

Inexplicably, French youngsters of the lower classes are beginning to mimic the behavioural patterns of their British counterparts. As in all such cases, the worst aspects find it easier to cross national borders.

For example, on weekends young Frenchmen often present at hospitals in a lager-induced coma – they seem to think that drinking 20 pints of beer is as cool as listening to rap and punk, which they assume all rosbifs do. Then there are tattoos and facial metal, practically unseen in France twenty years ago.

At that time there was not a single tattoo parlour in our regional centre, Auxerre. Now there are half a dozen, and one sees their customers roaming the glorious medieval streets and making me look away in revulsion.

These are small details, but they are the kind in which the devil lives. I could easily extrapolate from there into the general collapse of Western, not just French, civilisation. But that would be superfluous – you don’t need me to observe our universal relapse into barbarism.

Alas, it’s also observable in weightier areas than just fruit and veg.

Politics, global or domestic, is inherently dishonest. Whatever disagreements arise, they hardly ever have much to do with the face value of the argument.

It’s like a woman telling her husband she is dumping him because they are emotionally incompatible, whereas what she means is that he isn’t making enough money. Or a man ostensibly divorcing his wife because she has failed to match his spiritual growth, whereas in fact he wants to marry his plump secretary.

If the jilted spouse takes issue with the enunciated reason for the split, the two will be at cross purposes in the ensuing conversation. They’ll be talking about different things.

Thus it’s pointless to argue with the French about any customs checks on Lancashire sausages travelling to Northern Ireland or furniture going the other way.

Boris Johnson and his Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab are wasting their breath trying to explain to Manny that Northern Ireland and England are two parts of the same country, the UK. Yes, they are separated by some water – but then Corsica and Réunion island are still parts of France even though they aren’t on the mainland.

Manny may not be a particularly educated chap, but his geography stretches this far. He knows all that. He also knows, and so does Boris, and so does Dominic, and Manny knows they know, that this isn’t what the real argument is about.

As far as Boris is concerned, Manny can choke on Lancashire sausages, and Manny wouldn’t mind seeing Boris shove them into the place that’s normally exit only. His beef isn’t with the sausages but with Brexit.

Manny is a fanatic of the EU, correctly sensing that it has been contrived specifically and exclusively for people like him. Hence he takes Brexit personally, knowing that it has put the EU – and hence his own political future – into jeopardy.

As far as Manny is concerned, Britain doing well outside the EU is a catastrophe on several levels. The most obvious problem is that other EU members may decide to follow suit, and that house can survive only so many departures.

The less obvious but more immediate problem is that Manny’s most dangerous domestic opposition comes from nationalist parties that are at best lukewarm on European federalism.

The poster adorning this article was produced by Action française, a political think-tank cum party that’s the nearest France gets to real conservatism. This royalist, Catholic child of Charles Maurras is too small and out of touch with modernity to present a serious threat, but it does state a Frexit position cogently.

Manny realises that Frexit is another way of saying Down with Macron!, which has been said with increasing frequency after his inept handling of the vaccination programme. That failure rankles, especially against the backdrop of Britain’s success, as spectacular as it was unlikely.

The threat comes from Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement national that’s neck and neck with Manny’s lot in the polls. Now, Mlle Le Pen refrains from calling for Frexit in so many words. But she cleverly uses anti-EU rhetoric to stoke up the nationalist feelings of her natural constituency.

Her message is simple and syllogistic. The EU is Manny, and Manny is the EU. The EU, acting through Manny, is killing Frenchmen by its vaccination fiasco. So even if you may not want to get rid of the EU yet, the next best thing is getting rid of Manny by voting for Marine.

If I advised Macron on political matters, I’d recommend that he put some serious distance between himself and the EU. He could easily match Le Pen’s diatribes without committing himself to any action and certainly not Frexit.

But that would be like expecting a candidate for Iran’s presidency to state publicly that there is a god other than Allah, and Mohammed isn’t his prophet. The words would just refuse to cross his lips, partly out of conviction, but mostly for fear of alienating his core support.

Manny will never stop trying to make Britain’s post-EU life as difficult as he can. If we were run by statesmen rather than spivocrats, we could easily pay him back in the same coin – for example, by promoting the anti-EU sentiments that are rife in some member countries, especially those in Eastern Europe. (I’d also suggest supporting Rassemblement national, but Putin is already doing that, and I wouldn’t want him for an ally.)

But that’s not going to happen, is it? Messrs Johnson and Raab will do some shadow boxing with Manny without ever landing a punch. They’ll argue some obscure legal points, go back and forth for a while before finally giving in.

Or they may not give in – ultimately it won’t matter. One way or the other, EU gauleiters, which is what all those national presidents and prime ministers are, will find a way to cut off their nose to spite Britain’s face. Such is the nature of that very beastly beast.

Danish midfielder Christian Eriksen collapsed on the pitch yesterday, having suffered what looked like cardiac arrest.

The medical team acted instantly, administering cardiopulmonary resuscitation within minutes. That saved Eriksen’s life, and he is now stable in hospital. He may never play football again, but it looks like he’ll live.

A distressing event for everyone concerned, no doubt. Yet the weeping and wailing surrounding it is perhaps even more distressing.

The players on both teams were crying like babies. So were many spectators. So were some TV presenters. So, if their accounts are to be believed, were many viewers.

Now, I am capable of empathy as much as the next man, and I’ve never thought of myself as a callous person. Had I been present on the scene, I know I would have been upset at the sight of a young man fighting for his life. But I certainly wouldn’t have sobbed uncontrollably.

To be fair, some of the players did the right thing: before the medics rushed in, they had administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and then formed a live ring, shielding the stricken man from gawkers.

Others, however, just wept, joining the worldwide lachrymose choir. One begins to think that Boris Johnson’s call for a more “gender-neutral”, “feminine” society wasn’t so much a call as a statement of fact.

Here I have to disagree with Sarah Vine, poor Michael Gove’s wife. According to her, the two desiderata are mutually exclusive: it’s either gender-neutral or feminine, not both.

This just goes to show how futile it is to apply semantic standards to semiotic messages. Never mind the seeming oxymoron. What her husband’s boss was trying to communicate was the fashionable contempt for men and especially their traditional traits.

In that sense, gender-neutral, feminine, hermaphroditic, neuter all mean the same thing: not men, at least not men as God made them. Only men recast in the feminine mould are still allowed to get away with keeping their primary sex bits – they have atoned for the deadly sin of manhood by adopting feminine characteristics.

Reacting to unpleasant sights with tears is a visible manifestation of the invisible self-castration. Such a reaction shows that, though a person was unfortunate enough to have been born with a penis, he is doing all he can to get in touch with his feminine side. Full marks for trying, but do let’s go through the communal ritual of shedding tears.

The match in question was between two Scandinavian sides, Denmark and Finland. Their players are thus heirs to the stern Nordic character of the Vikings. Their forebears cut a swathe through half the world, killing, raping, pillaging and only ever crying with joy, at the sight of their enemy’s headless body swimming in a puddle of blood.

Not that I condone such behaviour, but what on earth has happened to them? And what has happened to the grandsons and great-grandsons of the Britons who lived through the Blitz hardly ever losing their nerve and even sense of humour? People who decorated their bombed-out shops with signs saying “Come in, we are even more open than usual” were no cry-babies. Now their descendants weep when a chap they don’t know suffers a cardiac event.

I’m not going all macho, certainly not so much as to say “men don’t cry”. We do, with sufficient provocation. Grief, bereavement, a dreadful disease striking someone we love, losing a child or a beloved woman may all bring tears to our eyes.

We do try to fight them, but sometimes the fight is lost. We still try because self-restraint, the ability to control effusive emoting is what we do, what we have always done. This quality is most commonly associated with men, but women blessed with good taste and a strong backbone may display it too.

Now this laudable stoicism is despised. Everyone is supposed to wear his heart on his sleeve, with the inevitable result of that organ getting caked in grime. ‘Boys will be girls’ seems to be the mandated new version of the old phrase.

Mr Johnson ought to be careful what he wishes for. He should also pray (within his new-found Catholic rite) that Britons will never again find themselves at war, seeing their comrades blown to scarlet bits in front of their eyes, or their houses smashed to rubble. The spineless castrati he sees in his mind’s eye will go to pieces – and so will the country.

Wokery may be an election-winner, but also a country-loser. Feminise enough men, and society will lose its balance, like an acrobat losing his footing on the tightrope.

It’s not only actions but also words and ideas that have consequences, some of them grave, some irreversible. The on-going woke orgy can have just such an effect on society, and then it’ll be like tuberculosis. When the symptoms appear, it’s too late to do anything about it.

Wokery is a popular sport, but a steep entry fee is charged at the arena. All entrants must leave their brains at the door, and these may not be reclaimable on the way out (if anyone ever does leave).

That’s no great hardship for most wokers of the world because they have no brains to begin with, except in the strictly anatomical sense. A few, however, may possess some intelligence, and those overachievers do have something to lose.

Boris Johnson who, I have to remind you and myself, is a Conservative prime minister, is nobody’s fool. But intelligence means little, nor indeed will last long, when not propped up by character. If any proof of this observation is still required, Mr Johnson is happy to provide one.

Speaking at the G7 conference, he urged the world to come out of the Covid pandemic by “building back greener and building back fairer and building back more equal and… in a more gender-neutral and, perhaps a more feminine way.”

I suppose this twaddle means that, having spent much of his adult life practising assorted vices, including some highlighted in the Decalogue, Johnson now feels like signalling virtue.

And he doesn’t care how pathetic that makes him sound. Wokers never do: their communications aren’t semantic but semiotic, bypassing reason altogether.

They don’t take the trouble of trying to understand what they are saying because they know their audience won’t either. As long as the people’s nerve endings are tickled the right way, anything goes.

No one decorticates those semiotic messages to see how they hold up to semantic scrutiny. Doing so is seen as bad manners in woke circles, enough to get one blackballed.

Since I’ve already suffered that fate, I take people’s pronouncements at face value, trying to understand what they actually mean. Allow me to indulge this obsolete habit again by looking at Mr Johnson’s statement from some sort of reasonable vantage point.

“Greener” means a wholehearted commitment to the climate change hoax. Though lacking any scientific justification, it has to be avidly gobbled up by the woking classes on pain of ostracism.

Either Johnson doesn’t know that the climate crusade is merely an extension of the Marxist urge to undermine our civilisation or he knows it, but says such things anyway. You decide which is worse.

“Fairer… more equal” covers a multitude of sins, or rather woke virtues. When such words are uttered by prime ministers, they tend to mean economic levelling through extortionist taxation.

Also implied is kowtowing to Marxist campaigns like BLM, and indeed Mr Johnson has urged England fans to support the obscene Marxist rite of ‘taking the knee’ at the European Championship.

“Gender-neutral” means… well, you tell me. Encouraging more children to decide which of the 72 sexes identified so far better suits their neurosis? Possibly. A call for a legal ban on masculine pronouns? Perhaps. Demand for unisex public lavatories? Maybe. Blanket support for the Marxist subversion of the family? Yes, at least implicitly.

“More feminine” is a clarion call to arms for the share-care-be-aware warriors. Masculine qualities, such as fortitude, courage and combativeness, enable people to resist a war on everything they hold dear, specifically one waged by Marxist subversives.

Castrating men spiritually, morally and ideally surgically is a way of preparing the ground for the implantation of Marxist saplings. Mr Johnson seems to be willing to act as gardener, and he wants us all to give him a helping hand.

In other words, conservatism, as understood and practised by the Tories, is a lighter, still somewhat less virulent, form of Marxism. And if you have any doubts on that score, consider Julie Burchill’s plight.

Though not an especially deep writer, Miss Burchill is a brilliant one. She has an instantly recognisable voice of her own, which is a necessary if not sufficient part of writing talent. Such writers are rare among our columnists, and they ought to be cherished.

Miss Burchill may churn out nonsense at times, but she comes up with funny lines more often, and one of those has landed her in trouble. The Telegraph, historically a Tory mouthpiece, has sacked Miss Burchill from her weekly column for racism.

The evidence for this vice, than which, as we all know, nothing viler exists, came from her comment on the name the Sussexes gave to their new-born daughter, Lilibet. “What an opportunity missed!” rued Miss Burchill. “They could have called her Georgina Floydina.”

Whose febrile brain detected racism in this line? Miss Burchill was clearly mocking not Lilibet’s mixed race but her parents’ unwavering loyalty to woke causes, no matter how cretinous or subversive.

Alas, she failed to grasp that any other than a hagiographic reference to George Floyd in any context is ipso facto racist. “George Floyd was a drug-addled thug”? Racist. “George Floyd is an imperfect role model”? Racist. George Floyd was killed resisting arrest”? Racist. “George Floyd has become an icon for Marxist sedition”? Racist.

And even if it’s not George Floyd who is the object of satire, taking his name in vain must still be seen as sacrilege, while doing so in reference to Harry and Meghan is also lèse–majesté – especially if some lowly staffer at the Palace evinces displeasure.

Boris Johnson is a Conservative prime minister, and The Telegraph is a Conservative newspaper. I feel I must keep reminding you of this, lest you forget. Easily done, that.

Such was my friend’s reaction to the news that a member of the grateful public slapped Manny Macron in the face.

Manny was doing his Tour de France, a meandering road at the end of which he hopes to secure another few years at the helm. A lot of flesh is being pressed, but some of the flesh strikes back.

Neither my friend nor I have much respect for the president of France (nor, truth be told, for any other modern politician). We see him as a typical EU spiv with narcissistic tendencies and an unquenchable thirst for power that he is incapable of using wisely.

Nor does Manny’s maniacal hatred of Britain do much to endear him to either of us. His isn’t that de rigueur Anglophobia that the French political classes often profess but seldom feel.

No, had Britain stayed in the EU, Manny wouldn’t mind us very much. As it is, he sees the British as traitors to that great idea, a denatured pan-European state run into the ground by the likes of Manny for the benefit of, well, the likes of Manny.

Still, neither my friend nor I felt sorry that the attacker had wielded only his open palm, not a knife or a gun. You see, we are both conservatives, a term that denotes not so much a political philosophy as style, manners, tastes and temperament.

That’s where conservatism starts, and the political or any other philosophy is strictly derivative, although of course not nonexistent. And attacking politicians we don’t like with knives, guns or even open hands is too uncivilised for us.

Such is the problem: civilised, conservative opposition to the modern order is limited to elderly gentlemen like us, who are too few and too isolated to constitute a viable political force. Our style, manners, tastes and temperament prevent us from screaming off soap boxes, rabble-rousing, organising riots and revolutions – or even slapping the likes of Manny for the sake of attracting attention to our cause.

The arrested attacker was shouting Montjoie, Saint-Denis! – that battle-cry of the medieval Kingdom of France was first mentioned in the Song of Roland. Also arrested was his friend sporting the fleur-de-lis and filming the incident.

Both the motto and the livery betoken royalist, which is to say impeccably conservative, credentials. But we can’t see those chaps as fellow conservatives. In all likelihood they are fascisoid radicals, a species occupying an altogether different rung in Lamarck’s ladder.

The situation is becoming increasingly reminiscent of Germany circa 1933. There were only two dynamic political forces at the time, the Nazis and the communists. Hence the Germans either had to choose one or the other, or watch from the sidelines with a sardonic smile on their faces – the option taken up by most conservatives.

The battle lines are drawn in different places now, but the similarities are obvious. Political power throughout the West is in the hands of an increasingly detached dirigiste elite, unerringly steering our civilisation to a gruesome end.

Real conservatism is for all intents and purposes extinct, and the only noticeable opposition comes from radical groups painted in various hues of brown or red. The more dirigiste the state contrived by the elite, the more it serves not the country but itself, the more violent the reaction – and France is as dirigiste as they come, in the West at any rate.

Whether the rebels scream “Black lives matter”, “Power to the people”, “Save the planet” or for that matter “Montjoie, Saint-Denis” is just a question of phonetics. They all claim they are offering a substantive alternative, but it’s one between the rock and the hard place.

My friend and I don’t want to be governed by either Manny, his attacker or the British (or American) equivalents. We’d like to see in government sage, prudent, courageous statesmen, and neither the self-serving spivs currently on offer nor their febrile attackers.

And we are dreaming of such statesmen as we watch a herd of pigs gracefully flying through the air. Alas, they are unlikely birds.