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Yesterday I wrote about the pathetic ritual of England footballers ‘taking the knee’ before matches.

Chaps, someone who feels compelled to signal virtue is guaranteed to have none. Virtue is a silent, undemonstrative quality that can only ever be manifested tacitly.

That’s why I despise rich people who insist that the recipients of their largess emblazon the donor’s name on their façades. “But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth,” teaches a recognised, if nowadays ignored, authority on virtue.

Yet tennis beat footie to woke stances, which is par for the course. Being more of a middle-class game, tennis attracts more people susceptible to woke diktats.

A salient trait of the middle classes is fear of causing offence. Those above and below the middle classes tend not to give much of a damn, and they don’t care who knows it.

They are secure in their social standing, whereas the middle classes often aren’t. So they may feel they risk dropping a rung or two on the social ladder should they defy newfangled orthodoxies.

However, whereas football powers that be emphasise the racial end of the woke spectrum, their tennis counterparts are more concerned with feminism. Hence for the past few years men and women have been getting equal prize money at the Grand Slam tournaments.

That flies in the face of both arithmetic (the men spend on average twice as much time on the court) and the sacred egalitarian principle of equal pay for equal work. It also ignores the commercial principle of supply-demand: men’s matches attract much bigger audiences, both live and on TV.

Yet no one has accused wokers of the world of being rational: they live by their visceral instincts, the prime of which is resentment of our civilisation as it is, and especially as it has been. This is expressed by rote, through a series of ironclad mantras spouted whenever someone pushes a relevant button on their inner jukebox.

Come the season of major tournaments, some of those mantras become all-pervasive. One of them is invariably uttered whenever a commentator describes Serena Williams as the best female player of all time.

The show host will contort his facial features into a grimace of sanctimonious opprobrium and say: “Why female player? Isn’t she the best tennis player of all time, full stop?”

Like all woke mantras, this is so meaningless as to be borderline idiotic. Any full-time male player, including those on the veterans’ and US college circuits, would beat any female player, including Serena.

Anyone who has ever swung a racquet in anger knows this. Moreover, Serena herself knows it. When an interviewer asked her a few years ago if she was ready to take on Andy Murray, Serena just laughed. “I’m not going to play Andy,” she said. “He’ll beat me love and love in six minutes flat. The men play a different game.”

Yes, the game is different. It’s just the prize money that isn’t.

The usual, specious, argument is that the men’s total prize pot at the lesser tournaments is bigger. That may be, but comely female players have much greater opportunities to supplement their income with endorsements and model work.

Eugenie Bouchard, for example, made $6.1 million last year even though she has never won a major. And Anna Kournikova, who only won $3.5 million in career prize money, has a net worth of $60 million. It’s not just fun but also money that blondes have more of.

However, I feel I know how to reconcile the two sides, those who claim Serena is the best woman player ever and those who insist she is the best player tout court.

Putting on my Solomon hat, I can offer a solution that ought to satisfy both parties (or not, as the case may be). Serena is neither the best tennis player of all time nor even the best woman player.

She isn’t the former because any male player you’ve ever heard of could beat Serena without working up a sweat. The only criterion by which she could be deemed superior to, say, Federer or Nadal is that she has won more Grand Slams: 23 to their 20 each.

All God’s children love objective comparison criteria, but that’s not comparing like with like. Since we’ve already established that women play a different game, bean counting simply doesn’t apply here.

But I agree that the number of Slams is a useful measuring stick when we compare players leaving their mark within the same game, in this case women’s. Well, by that criterion the best woman player of all time is Margaret Court, not Serena Williams.

Court has 24 majors to her credit, compared to Serena’s 23. One might say that Serena at her best would have beaten Margaret at her best, which is God’s own truth. But that argument doesn’t work any better here than it does when we compare men’s and women’s tennis.

The women’s game is now different from what it was half a century ago, when Margaret Court was active. Thus we can take that hypothetical comparison out of the equation and simply go by the objective numbers, 24 versus 23.

But that’s where politics comes in. Mrs Court just doesn’t cut it as the best of all time.

She is a white woman and a Christian pastor. And she is outspoken in her rejection of woke orthodoxies, such as homomarriage and sex change. She doesn’t believe that Fanny can be your uncle and Bob your aunt – so her name never comes up as a candidate.

Serena, on the other hand, ticks all the appropriate boxes. And the one she doesn’t tick, the number of Slams, can be simply redacted from the ballot.

I wonder if Greta Thunberg plays tennis. If she does, Serena (and Margaret) better watch out: both of them could well be taken out of contention. After all, if politics is a factor in determining who is the best player of all time, why can’t it become the only factor?

Those bloody proles just don’t get wokery, do they?

Twice the England team played its warm-up matches in Middlesbrough. Twice the players took the knee before the whistle. Twice they were booed.

That slap in the face of the woking classes caused much ire in the press. Words like “idiots”, “morons”, “stupid”, “louts” were sprinkled liberally all over the match reports – and that’s just in the ‘conservative’ papers.

The FA and its apparatchik employee, England manager Gareth Southgate, were aghast. Those fans just don’t understand the deep meaning of that gesture, they rued. They think it’s political, whereas in fact it’s anything but.

Having thus explained what the genuflection wasn’t, the FA bigwigs were reticent in elucidating what it was. I get it, not political. What then? Aesthetic? Charitable? Socioeconomic?

TV commentators confuse the issue further. This is a gesture of protest against social and economic injustice, explained one. Social injustice, said another on a different occasion, never mind the economic part. Racial injustice, added a third. Somehow gender injustice never got a mention, which left me feeling short-changed.

Let’s backtrack to the origin of the gesture, shall we? A year ago, George Floyd, a recidivist criminal high on drugs was caught in Minneapolis trying to pass a counterfeit banknote. The police arrived, and Floyd put up a fight resisting arrest.

When he was subdued, an overzealous cop pinned him down with a knee on Floyd’s neck, accidentally killing him. No great loss to mankind, one would think, but the subsequent trial found the cop, Derek Chauvin, guilty.  

He is facing a long stint in prison, which is likely to be cut short. Policemen guilty of killing black criminals don’t enjoy a high life expectancy in American prisons, especially when their crime has been widely publicised.

Once the news of the incident broke, the radical Marxist organisation Black Lives Matter sprang into action. Riots spread all over the US, with white people attacked, cars set on fire, shops looted, restaurants trashed. As its symbol, BLM adopted the genuflecting pose, thereby expressing symbolic solidarity with Floyd (who once held a gun to the belly of a pregnant black hostage).

BLM thugs would approach white people in the street, demanding they “take the knee”. Those who refused would be assaulted, at best verbally, at worst physically. How anybody could have thought that Chauvin would get a fair trial under the circumstances is beyond me. An acquittal would have set the whole country on fire.

While the attendant thuggery achieved only a limited popularity, the genuflecting gesture got internationally adopted in all the usual quarters. Those residing there see the entire history of the West as an uninterrupted string of crimes against non-white races, and hardly anything else but that.

Or alternatively they can see history as a crime against ‘our planet’. Or against women. Or against workers. Or against… doesn’t matter what it’s against. What matters is that it’s a crime, and only destroying this awful civilisation can secure a restitution.

These rebels in search of a cause always lurk in the shadows, waiting for two things. First, a pretext for the mob to go on the rampage. Second, encouragement that can only come from an osmotic feeling that the woke establishment is on their side.

Floyd provided the former; the ‘liberal’ media around the world, the latter. The actual, rather trivial, incident has since been blown up into some sort of existential conflict, a clash of civilisations, having little to do with the face value of Floyd’s demise.

To reach that stage, the woking classes had to go through several implicit extrapolations, each more asinine and false than the other.

First, what happened to Floyd wasn’t an isolated event but yet another link in the millennia-long chain of injustice. Second, since the black population of US prisons is three times their proportion in the overall population, this can only be a result of systematic discrimination – and if you dare to suggest any other reason, you are a fascist, racist, white supremacist and generally a bad egg. Third, what happens in the rest of the West is a mirror image of the situation in the US.

I suppose it takes an advanced degree from a top university to come up with such bilge. But woke idiocies aren’t supposed to stand up to scrutiny. They are supposed to activate the reflexes of the share-care-be-aware crowd, providing a welcome relief from their daily toil of saving the planet. And in this case they succeeded yet again.  

Suddenly, Britons living 4,000 miles from the scene of the incident are certain they are directly affected. It’s as if it was their own air ducts, not just Floyd’s, that got constricted by Chauvin’s knee. And it’s the bloody Tory establishment what done it, runs the ubiquitous, if unspoken, refrain. It’s Jacob Rees-Mogg who is to blame, if only vicariously.

And who better to feel this collective psychosomatic pain than our oppressed footballers desperate to eke out a living on £250,000 a week. It’s they who are ordered to take the knee before every match, expressing their solidarity with recidivist criminals.

Quite apart from anything else, this strikes me as illogical. Why just the ball-kickers? Why not actors and musicians before performances? Why not everybody on entry into a public space? Don’t Catholics genuflect when entering a church? Of course they do. There you go then.

The trouble is that most football fans haven’t got advanced degrees from top universities. Football, once described as working-class ballet, attracts a crowd short on academic credentials but long on common sense.

Some of them, a minority, are out-and-out louts ready to kill anybody wearing an offensive strip. But most are like those working-class Hartlepool voters who refused to vote Labour because they sensed it no longer has anything to do with labourers and everything to do with toffs out of touch.

The woke crowd has a lot to thank Covid for. Until a couple of weeks ago, the lockdown had kept the fans out of stadiums, and the FA could order the footballers to indulge in that obscene rite without any fear of backlash.

The situation has changed, and a few thousand fans are now allowed to attend. Hence they can flip their collective two fingers (or, under the corrupting influence of American movies, one) at the woking classes. Booing is their way to do just that, and it’s not the expression of innate racism the wokers claim it is.

Much has been made of England’s home advantage in the upcoming European Championship – many of its matches will indeed be played in English stadiums. However, if every match starts with a thunderous booing, I wonder how much of an advantage it’ll turn out to be.

Common folk are rather reticent in England, and it takes quite a bit to elicit a violent reaction from them. They aren’t French, you know. But once properly enraged, they can ride roughshod over alien sensibilities.

The woke crowd has made a stylistic error by enforcing woke rituals in a decidedly non-woke environment. Hope they’ll live to regret it.  

When Protestants or the next best thing, atheists, begin to mull over the obscure points of the Catholic canon law, you know time is out of joint.

What piques such interest among our literati is Boris Johnson’s recent wedding officiated – though, as far as I know, not consummated – in Westminster Cathedral, the seat of British Roman Catholicism.

Considering Mr Johnson’s chequered amorous past, which included two prior marriages and an unspecified number of illegitimate children, people who until now have evinced no interest in Catholicism are expressing deep concern masking an even deeper indifference (sort of like Western leaders, after each new crime committed by Putin or Lukashenko).

Partly it’s Johnson’s own fault, for his religious past is quite diversified too. He was baptised as Catholic, confirmed as Anglican and has since studiously neglected the prescriptions of either denomination.

It’s such polyvalence that has made so many hacks dip into the arcane depths of Catholic statutes. The consensus is that, since Johnson’s previous marriages were outside the Church, they may be deemed invalid. If he now professes Catholicism, he is thus allowed to tie the knot the Roman way.

There’s the rub though. For, in addition to being a deliriously happy bridegroom, Johnson also happens to be Her Majesty’s prime minister. If he is indeed a professing Catholic, then certain issues arise that touch upon constitutional, not just merely canon, law.

For, since Tudor times, England has been a Protestant commonwealth constitutionally, politically and geopolitically. Anglicanism is the state religion, and, taking her coronation oath in 1953, the Queen replied in the affirmative to the question “Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law?” (I think that this confluence of church and state is incongruous to both, but no one asked me.)

Whereas other mainstream Protestant denominations are nowadays accepted as unthreatening, Roman Catholicism is a different matter altogether. Ever since Henry VIII defied the pope, supposedly in his quest for a male heir, the confessional issue has been intertwined with the little matter of national sovereignty.

England’s relations with the great Catholic powers, France and Spain, weren’t always cordial. Hence Henry, and many others after him, feared that French and Spanish kings could use the pope as a conduit of their political power in Britain. In that context, Catholics got to be seen not just as infidels but as traitors, a sort of papist fifth column.

I wish both sides had been less intransigent in that dispute, with England remaining Catholic without compromising her sovereignty. But she didn’t, and anti-Catholic sentiments were kept hot for centuries by some invisible Bunsen burner.

Until the 1829 Roman Catholic Relief Act, Catholics hadn’t even been allowed to sit in parliament. While that restriction was removed, others have remained in place.

For example, a Catholic still can’t ascend to the throne, and, more germane to the situation in hand, a Catholic prime minister isn’t allowed to appoint Archbishops of Canterbury, which is his remit. Actually, it’s the monarch who appoints and the PM who merely advises, but that’s strictly pro forma.

One way or another, Mr Johnson is our first Catholic prime minister ever, if he’s indeed a Catholic. By his own admission he doesn’t practise any religion with much piety, but his formal allegiance still may create something of a conundrum. However, I’m sure this technical issue will be settled without a hitch, no problem there.

The real problem is different. For, apart from a few hacks, constitutional scholars and students of the Catholic canon law, no one really cares. Just a couple of generations ago, to say nothing of a couple of centuries, there would have been mass protests not just in the press, but also in the streets.

People in workman’s clothes would have marched in the streets chanting anti-Catholic slogans. Words like ‘papist spies’ and ‘popish traitors’ would have been on everyone’s lips, and Catholics with little taste for martyrdom would have cowered behind closed doors.

I know this sounds odd coming from a Catholic, but I’d prefer such a public outcry to what’s happening now: shoulder-shrugging indifference.

No one really cares whether our PM is an Anglican, Catholic, animist or atheist. Yes, some people like to toy with obscure points of religious and constitutional law, but this preoccupation with form can’t mask uninterest in, and ignorance of, content.

The ignorance cuts deep, all the way down to Ben Macintyre, the Times columnist whose scholarly appearance belies his learning difficulties. I last wrote about him a few years ago, when he extolled the poetic excellence of rap and agitated for Bob Dylan to get the Nobel Prize for literature.

According to Macintyre, “…Dylan is indisputably one of the greatest lyrical poets of the age, a supreme master of language who has reinvented his art with exemplary energy and imagination for more than half a century.”

Having thus established his Van Gogh ear for poetry, Macintyre has now made this comment on Johnson’s religiosity: “He has often voiced equivocal feelings about monotheism, pointing to a mixed ancestry that is Jewish and Muslim as well as Christian.”

Hence this eminent historian and award-winning columnist doesn’t know that Judaism and Islam are monotheistic religions too. He seems to think that the term denotes single-minded commitment to one confession only, and one would think he ought to have been disabused of that misapprehension in primary school. Oh well, hey-ho.

No one notices, no one cares, Britain is in the throes of somewhat oxymoronic fervent apathy. If Boris Johnson declared his commitment to the Black Mass involving human sacrifice, perhaps some sticklers would object. Otherwise, the foxholes remain the only places where atheists can’t be found.

Or perhaps even atheists would be better than what we have now. At least they believe in something, if not God. Today’s predominant state of mind is spiritual lethargy, pandemic materialism, believing in nothing but self and usually with a steadily diminishing justification.

I just hope Johnson’s next wife won’t be Muslim. I’m not sure Britain is as ready for a Muslim prime minister as London is for a Muslim mayor.

Lately the people who gave the world Lavoisier and Ampère, Curie and Lamarck, Pasteur and Poincaré haven’t been getting full credit for their scientific ingenuity.

It’s as if scientific exploits have lost impetus in France. The French must be redirecting their attention to other spheres of life. Such as assisting the Germans in building a pan-European empire in which France would occupy the honourable second place.

However, since I love France, I’m happy to see that things are beginning to move in the right direction. The French have clearly decided that science is too important to be left to scientists. The government has stepped in and immediately scored a big win for French – nay international – Covid research.

Specifically, the French government has isolated a critical contributor in the spread of the contagion. Over the past two years, scientists have racked their brains trying to figure out which factors widen the proliferation of the deadly virus (now that we know its original source).

Large swathes of populations have been investigated to identify such factors. Old people, it has been found, are more likely to contract Covid. Are they also more likely to spread it? The same goes for various ethnic and racial groups, and multiple questions have been asked and answered – or not, as the case might have been.

However, in our era of narrow specialisation, scientists often suffer from a blinkered view of their field. They are either reluctant or unable to venture outside their immediate expertise into the vast multi-disciplined field out there.

Government officials, on the other hand, are blessed with a panoramic vision enabling them to see the whole field at once. Nor are they held back by the narrow confines of their technical knowledge because they have none.

It’s from that lofty perch that the French government looked at Covid and espied with its eagle eye that the virus has a strong political dimension. A group’s propensity for spreading the virus depends not so much on its demographic or racial characteristics as on its political affiliation, especially citizenship.

I haven’t been privy to the details of the study that led to this sensational breakthrough. But the results obtained suggest that some trial subjects, who hitherto presented no risk to others, must have been made to change their citizenship for the sake of experimental purity. As a result, they instantly became Covid carriers.

Luckily, the French government, ably led by my friend Manny, had not only the nous to identify the problem, but also the power to solve it.

Hence it has announced that no British subjects will be allowed to sully la belle France with their offensive presence without a compelling reason. However, French and other EU citizens who have been living in Britain for many years are welcome to travel to France as they please.

In other words, had the British not had the temerity to vote Leave in 2016, Penelope and I would be able to go to our place in Burgundy, see our friends we miss badly and, in Penelope’s case, play her scheduled concert there.

As it is, we present a clear and present danger to the health of the nation, while some of our French friends here, who have been living in London for as long as we have, are immune to even dormant infection.

This establishes beyond a shadow of doubt the aforementioned link between citizenship and Covid, and one has to compliment the French government on its triumphant entry into the field of microbiological research.

Bien joué, mes amis. And oh, by the way, have you visited Waterloo lately?

P.S. I’m desperately trying to adopt the woke mentality, but each time I stumble over some mutually exclusive demands.

A case in point. It’s now fashionable to have black actors play white characters. Currently running on British TV is a historical drama in which Anne Boleyn is unquestionably black.

As an aspiring woke candidate, I applaud that artistic touch. After all, a screenplay isn’t a textbook on history but a work of art. Thus I welcome even the lesbian foreplay in which Anne and her love rival Jane Seymour engage in one episode – this though I don’t think there’s any historical evidence for such a relationship.

However, in a work of art things happen for a reason. Since one can be reasonably certain that Anne was white, why is she played by a black actress? Obviously the underlying statement is that all races are equal not only at present but also retrospectively, and I concur enthusiastically.

But am I or am I not supposed to notice that Anne has changed her known colour? Obviously, if I notice it, I’m a latent racist who has no place in the woke ranks. And if I don’t notice it, doesn’t that defeat the purpose? Since I can’t notice and not notice at the same time, I’m confused.

P.P.S. Speaking of breakthrough discoveries, I’m sorry the Nobel Committee doesn’t have a sociology category. If it did, I’d carry home the fat Nobel cheque. For, after extensive research, I’ve found out why women are so often paid less. In this case, the answer came not from a meticulously designed trial, but from an old English proverb: A woman’s work is never done.

Forget Covid, China’s criminal role in spreading it, Russia’s aggressive stance, Belarusian air piracy, France being vindictive, Biden being gaga, and inflation soon to spin out of control.

The really explosive news is that Naomi Osaka, the world’s highest-paid female athlete, has bowed out of the French Open.

Players usually default out of Grand Slams due to physical injury, but Osaka’s injury is mental. She claims to have suffered bouts of depression over the past few years, which makes it impossible for her to attend mandatory press conferences after matches.

When she refused to do so after winning in the first round, she was fined $15,000 for violating a clause in the players’ contract. Considering that in the past 12 months Osaka made $55 million, the fine couldn’t have hurt very much.

She could even have absorbed similar fines for each of the seven rounds she would have played had she got to the final. However, the tournament officials took a hard stance and threatened to expel her from the tournament. Osaka spared them the trouble by withdrawing of her own accord.

She has since been attacked by some vociferous people, such as Piers Morgan, and defended by some truly objectionable ones, notably Martina Navratilova and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the nearest thing to a communist in US Congress.

Morgan called Osaka “a spoiled brat” and a “narcissist”. She exploits the media to publicise herself and her causes, such as BLM, but then hides behind the smokescreen of psychobabble to shun journalists who are only doing their job (for which they are paid a fraction of Osaka’s income). I’m not sure what reporters’ incomes have to do with anything, but there we have it.

Now it’s my turn to add my penny’s worth to Osaka’s $55 million, and that gigantic piggy bank won’t even notice my modest contribution. Moreover, acting out of character and against my innermost feelings, I’d like to come out in Osaka’s defence.

Proceeding in an ascending order of importance, what’s this brouhaha about press conferences?

I’ve been playing tennis for decades, and I always watch the more important matches, especially those featuring flair players. That makes me a typical tennis fan, for I can’t think offhand of any other televised game where such a high proportion of viewers also play it regularly.

We watch matches in the hope that we may learn something. Perceptive commentary from former players helps. Informed and insightful articles serve the same purpose, and I for one sometimes pick up useful pointers.

But I bet no one has ever learned much from post-match interviews. Most of them are dull, some are only entertaining for a minute or so, after which one yawns and pushes a button on the old remote.

Tournament organisers and sponsors believe that an exhibition of a defeated girl sobbing that she felt OK in the first set, but then lost confidence in the second sells the game to the public. Does it really?

Again speaking for myself, I seldom watch women’s tennis and, when I do, it’s usually for reasons other than te… well, it’s none of your business why I watch it. It’s my TV and I can watch whatever I want for whatever reason.

Lest you accuse me of solipsism, I accept that some people actually like the tennis women play. But does anyone seriously think that Osaka could draw anyone’s attention to tennis not by her strokes, but by her thanking her Haitian father, Japanese mother, Belgian coach or rapper boyfriend?

Or is anyone’s appreciation of a tennis column enhanced by an obligatory quote from a player? “I missed too many first serves”? “My forehand was really working today”? “I couldn’t concentrate properly?” Thanks, Naomi, tell us something we didn’t see for ourselves.

Players should sell the game by hitting good shots, not by mouthing sweet nothings at press conferences. This is especially true now, when Zeitgeist encourages women, and even some men, to go all soppy in front of the camera and try to delve deep into their own psyche.

This brings me to my second, more important, point. It’s possible, likely even, that Morgan and Osaka’s other detractors are absolutely right. She may indeed be a spoiled, narcissist brat who works tirelessly to promote her ‘brand’ in every medium, but then pretends to be too distressed to talk to reporters.

Osaka is a very good player (for a woman, that is), but not an attractive person in any other than the physical sense. Naomi supports woke causes, mostly, one suspects, for commercial reasons. And she does like to spout a bad parody of Freud, who himself was a bad parody of a scientist.

Hence she very well may be using the word ‘depression’ imprecisely, to denote a lousy mood or a bout of petulance. But what if she isn’t? What if facing a critical query may indeed push her over the edge?

Even paranoids have enemies, goes the old line. In the same vein, some people who bandy the word ‘depression’ about may indeed be ill.

Depression is a legitimate and serious psychiatric disorder, possibly caused, and definitely accompanied, by a biochemical imbalance. Except in extremely severe cases, this can usually be treated by drugs but, even so, depression shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

It’s true that the word is grossly overused, and it’s also true that shrinks, especially American ones, dispense antidepressants like Smarties. Yet some patients, perhaps a minority, may be genuinely ill.

I haven’t studied Osaka’s medical records, and neither, I suspect, have Morgan et al. In the absence of such information, I’d refrain from accusing her of being a self-serving cheat – much as I find her a silly girl firmly perched on the woke bandwagon.

Let’s not forget that sometimes freedom from the press is as vital as freedom of it. This may be one such case.

Margaret Thatcher continues to divide opinions both here and abroad, usually along the lines of pro or con. My taxonomy is different: I ignore all opinions, for or against.

Opinions, as discrete from judgements, are useless. Judgements, on the other hand, aren’t, especially when sound. Alas, those emanating from liberals seldom are, regardless of where the liberals come from.

The Russian historian Tamara Eidelman is a case in point. This morning I watched her YouTube lecture on Margaret Thatcher, delivered from a broadly liberal position.

Eidelman exudes the milk of human kindness, and I bet she could even cite the provenance of this phrase. This thoroughly sympathetic woman deftly uses the Internet to carry history to the masses. Her lectures are erudite and cogent, which is laudable.

But neither she nor many within the ranks of the liberal opposition to Putin understand British, and generally Western, politics well enough. This makes it hard to harbour high hopes that Russia would flourish should they come to power and try to implement Western models, as they see them.

You may wonder why an Anglophone writer addressing a predominantly Anglophone audience would choose to comment on a lecture by a Russian historian on a British statesman.

The reason is simple: Russian Westernising intelligentsia have always been a mirror reflecting the West. The mirror is concave, making both the vices and virtues of the West appear enlarged and exaggerated. Looking in that mirror we can perhaps understand ourselves more clearly. After all, only something that’s actually there can ever be enlarged and exaggerated.

Eidelman is better-educated than most other Russian Westernisers, but she seems to form her concept of politics on the basis of general liberal principles and papers like The Guardian. Jumping from that springboard, it’s hard to reach the lofty heights of the complex phenomenon that was Margaret Thatcher, unquestionably our greatest post-war statesman.

Now, to Eidelman and most Russian liberals, the word ‘conservatism’ has negative connotations because they associate it with Putin. Still, being a scholar rather than an ideologue, she tries to put forth a balanced view, by and large succeeding.

Where Eidelman errs is in consistently describing Margaret Thatcher as a conservative. That’s a mistake often made by those who confuse the upper-case Conservative party with lower-case conservatism. The two may overlap here and there (these days, almost nowhere), but they are far from being coextensive.

Mrs Thatcher’s views would have made her conservative in America, but in Britain she really was a Whiggish radical. The difference isn’t so much in the ideas as in the balance among them.

English conservatism predates the Reformation and hence has strong Catholic, later also Anglo-Catholic, roots. American – and Mrs Thatcher’s – conservatism is predominantly Protestant, in her case even Methodist. Both types stress individual responsibility over collective security, self-reliance over dependence, hard work over indolence, a small state over a big one.

But the balance is different, as are the accents. Catholic, which is to say traditional, conservatism is rooted in church doctrine with its concepts of subsidiarity and solidarity. The former translates into the idea of individual responsibility based on the Christian concept of free will making free choices.

But also vital is solidarity: care for the weak, sick, widows, orphans and others who can’t take care of themselves. Conservatives don’t necessarily believe it’s the Exchequer that should provide such care, but then neither do they believe in the primacy of economic prosperity over all other considerations.

None of this is alien to Protestantism either, but there, especially in the Calvinist denomination dominant in Britain, the accent on rugged individuality and success through hard work is more pronounced. The solidarity aspect is downplayed, though not ignored.

Calvin assigned a redemptive value to wealth, seeing it as God’s reward for virtue. Austerity, thrift, self-reliance, unsmiling pursuit of material happiness, contempt for worldly pleasures are fundamentally Protestant virtues, summed up in what Max Weber described as ‘Protestant work ethic’.

This explains why even in our time Protestant countries boast a per capita GDP 1.5 times higher than in Catholic countries, three times higher than in Orthodox ones, and five times higher than in Muslim lands – this despite an ocean of petrodollars sloshing underfoot in the largest Orthodox country and many Muslim ones.

Thus Sweden is richer than Italy, but where would you rather live, given the choice? And Sweden is Lutheran, not even Calvinist, as British (and American) Protestantism tends to be. Italy would be my uncontested choice, but probably not Mrs Thatcher’s. Her worldview was largely formed by her Methodism, as was the balance among her political desiderata.

Eidelman ignores this aspect, as do most Russian (and British) liberals, which leaves her at a disadvantage when it comes to understanding her subject. She constructs a schematic representation of Margaret Thatcher the Iron Lady and then tries to squeeze this complex phenomenon of a woman into the primitive contrast of individualism versus collectivism, Right versus Left, or capitalism versus socialism.

This is a conceptual error, and it begets a whole raft of smaller lapses, some of a factual nature. We’ve all done it, and far be it from me to take anyone to task over a gap in research. It’s just that some of Eidelman’s factual errors spring from her simplistic analysis.

For example, it’s logical to suppose that Mrs Thatcher’s commitment to meritocracy and individual attainment would make her a great champion of grammar schools. True enough, that’s how Eidelman portrays her tenure as Secretary for Education. According to her, Mrs Thatcher, as she then was, fought tooth and nail to preserve grammars against the onslaught of comprehensives.

The reality is rather different – and in general, Mrs Thatcher’s actions didn’t always reflect her rhetoric. She actually closed down more grammar schools than any of her Labour counterparts.

Under her aegis the number of pupils attending comprehensives almost doubled, from 32 to 62 per cent. This shows above all that Mrs Thatcher was a shrewd political operator, who acted on the polls showing that, after three decades of unremitting socialist propaganda, grammar schools were unpopular. But a courageous fighter for selective education Mrs Thatcher certainly wasn’t.

Eidelman successfully contains her problems with the philosophy behind free education streamed to fit the diverse abilities of pupils. She only says that it has both good and bad sides.

As her former colleague in the teaching profession, I fail to see any bad sides. Every teacher knows that in any class about 25 per cent of the pupils are above average, another 25 per cent below average, and the remaining 50 per cent somewhere in between.

A universal curriculum has to target the largest group, meaning that for a quarter of the pupils the curriculum would be too boring and for another quarter, too difficult. Dividing them into three, or at a pinch two, streams would benefit them all.

Conversely, lumping them all together runs the risk of producing whole generations of illiterate, deracinated Mowglis divorced from our civilisation – and this is an empirical observation, not a theoretical construct. However, such stratification runs against the grain of liberal egalitarianism, and Eidelman’s instincts go on strike, in the nicest possible way.

Speaking of strikes, she gives a reasonably accurate account of Mrs Thatcher’s confrontation with the miners, but the nuances again fall by the wayside.

Thus Arthur Scargill, head of the National Union of Mineworkers, emerges out of her account as a gracious loser. He saw that, after almost a year of industrial action, Mrs Thatcher had won. Hence, when met with an anti-strike picket, he said that his principles wouldn’t let him cross a picket line and meekly retreated.

I would have been tempted to mention that Scargill was a rank communist, part of the hard left faction within Labour toiling towards a revolutionary cataclysm. Mrs Thatcher’s stand was based not so much on an abstract belief in free enterprise as on the urgent need to save the country from mayhem. She was the British answer to Franco and Pinochet, but unlike them she acted strictly within parliamentary constraints.

Hence Mrs Thatcher had to work in a hurry. One never knew what the next election might bring, and time was of the essence.

Vindicating the old saw about haste and waste, she let her innate radicalism run riot. For example, she destroyed the traditional civil service that had served Britain well for centuries. Instead she proceeded from an unmitigated faith in meritocracy, not realising that over time it was bound to turn into spivocracy.

Her breakneck drive to sell council houses to the tenants set the stage for the subsequent mortgage crisis and a spate of foreclosures. And her closing down many of the smokestack industries was another sound idea undone by the speed of its realisation.

Had Mrs Thatcher felt she had a clear run of, say, another 10-15 years, she could perhaps have prepared the ground for her sweeping reforms by investing more time and money into retraining and relocation programmes, and other social parachutes. But, familiar with the vagaries of democratic politics, she acted precipitously, which created serious social problems.

Still, Eidelman’s palpable kindness and liberal instincts get the better of her. While admitting that the general standard of living rose greatly under Mrs Thatcher, she bemoans the resulting plight of the poor.

She doesn’t notice the inherent contradiction there. For the best way to help the poor is to reduce their number, and Mrs Thatcher’s reforms eventually achieved that end. Hers were desperate times, and she resorted to dangerous measures – with most, though not all, coming off.

I’m sorry that so many educated Russian liberals don’t understand Britain well. But then the same could be said about their British counterparts, and what’s their excuse?

Mine is acrophobia, irrational fear of heights. That’s what the Greek word phobia means: extreme, irrational fear.

There’s no tangible reason for me to be unable to stay on a top-floor balcony, and yet I am. That’s irrational. Ten seconds, and I have to rush back into the room because otherwise I fear I might jump. That’s extreme.

Acrophobia is a psychiatric disorder, albeit a mild one. Since I’m not particularly bothered by it, I’ve never sought treatment. Stick to tennis, Alex, I say to myself. Hang-gliding isn’t for you.

Now, if you believe our Tory ex-Chancellor Sajid Javid, his party also suffers from a phobia. And theirs is more serious than my mild, mundane disorder.

The disease in question is Islamophobia, and it must be so recondite that it doesn’t seem to appear in any psychiatric manual. Since Mr Javid spoke about the party at large, not just specific individuals, the situation is as dire as can be.

Thousands of Tories must impersonate Edvard Munch’s famous painting every time they espy a Muslim. They wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near Edgware Road, where Muslims roam in large numbers. Pursued by the nightmares of Muslims, they wake up in the middle of the night drenched in cold sweat, hoarse from their screams.

No? That’s not what Islamophobia means? Fine, in that case please explain to me what it does mean. And if you can’t, let’s ask Mr Javid – he’ll sort us out.

On second thoughts, I don’t think anyone who uses the word phobia in any other than its proper meaning can sort us out on anything. The improper meaning in which this word is often used isn’t medical but political.

Tag phobia to the name of any group our woke opinion-formers deem oppressed, and Javid is your uncle, Warsi is your aunt. A neologism is coined. This is three perverse tendencies of modernity for the price of one: desemanticisation of words, medicalisation of conditions and politicisation of everything.

If Islamophobia doesn’t mean irrational fear of Muslims, what on earth does it mean in woke, as opposed to English? Take your pick.

It could mean hatred of Muslims, although I doubt that’s what many Tories feel.

Or it could mean merely a mild dislike of Muslims, probably a somewhat wider affliction, but hardly a pandemic.

Or else it could be just talking – or, worse still, joking –about Mohammed’s marital preferences, and that sin may be quite widespread (mea culpa, in the spirit of openness).

Or it could mean a genuine concern about Islamic terrorism, which is hardly irrational, considering that two-thirds of the people charged with terrorist offences are Muslims.

Or it could denote an equally legitimate worry about many Muslims’ inability or reluctance to accept British culture and laws.  

Or it could mean a propensity to discriminate against Muslims, which is actually the subset that Mr Javid used to illustrate the wider problem. Apparently, he was once blocked from standing in a safe Tory seat because its constituents were unlikely to vote for a Muslim candidate.

If that was a true reflection of the demographic situation there, then the local Tory association was only guilty of a realistic assessment of their man’s electoral chances. Using demographics to political ends is par for the course. If you don’t believe me, explain why the manifestly inept Sadiq Khan has been re-elected as Mayor of London.

And if Mr Javid’s association was indeed driven by a prejudice symptomatic of the whole party, then he must be a statesman of Periclean proportions. After all, he managed to overcome institutional Tory Islamophobia and rise to the second-highest political post in the UK.

On the other hand, he didn’t keep it for long, so maybe he is making a valid point. Then again, two of the three highest offices in the Tory government are at present held by Hindus, so perhaps the Conservative Party is either not racist or racist only selectively.

To be fair, he was going not only by his own ordeals, but also by the findings of the inquiry led by Swaran Singh, a former equality and human rights commissioner, and requested two years ago by Mr Javid himself.

While acknowledging that the Conservative Party isn’t racist institutionally, Mr Singh did detect traces of “anti-Muslim sentiment” at local levels. He also pointed out two instances illustrating said sentiment.

First, when Boris Johnson was still a mere newspaper columnist, he compared burka-clad Muslim women to letterboxes, which gave people the impression that the Tories were “insensitive to Muslim communities”.

I disagree. That flourish of Mr Johnson’s pen only shows his knack for a visually apt simile. He could have, for example, compared those ladies to penguins, but that would have been less accurate because penguins have white chests, and Muslim women don’t – or if they do, they don’t display them in public.

The second example had to do with Lord Goldsmith’s campaign for the mayor of London in 2016. In the heat of electoral jousts, Lord Goldsmith suggested that Sadiq Khan, the eventual victor, was a closet Islamic extremist and therefore dangerous to London.

When a brouhaha ensued, he apologised for his poor judgement, while denying Islamophobia.

Now, if false, Lord Goldsmith’s accusation was libellous, and British laws cover such indiscretions like a blanket. Did Mr Khan not sue because Lord Goldsmith’s statement was true? In that case, the sin committed wasn’t libel but divulging official secrets.

However, even if Lord Goldsmith’s premise was incorrect, his conclusion wasn’t: Sadiq Khan is indeed dangerous, nay downright detrimental, to London even if he isn’t an Islamic extremist.

I wish Mr Javid, and Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, who supported him unequivocally, busied themselves with better things than catering to the brittle sensibilities of their co-religionists. Or at least found real English words to describe their grievances, rather than the woke jargon that’s more destructive to our country than any conceivable phobia.  

P.S. The other day, an Argentinian TV presenter announced the death of William Shakespeare, “one of the most important writers in the English language – for me the master.” Actually, the William Shakespeare who died on that day was an 81-year-old man from Coventry, who was the first Briton to be vaccinated against Covid. An easy mistake to make, I suppose, especially for a TV personality.

Observers of modernity often point out its accelerating divergence from reality, its constant efforts to pass clumsy copies for the originals.

Inspired by zeitgeist, it replaces religion with (at best) religionism, faith with superstition, freedom with liberty, wisdom with cleverness, sentiment with sentimentality, justice with legalism, art with pickled animals, music with amplified noise, statecraft with politicking, love with sex, communication with soundbites, self-confidence with effrontery, equality before God with levelling, respect for others with political correctness, dignity with solipsism, self-respect with self-esteem – in short, everything real with virtual caricatures.

A virtual world is being built in place of the real one, and this construction project has a long pedigree. It didn’t start with today’s mania for wokery, nor even with the twentieth century. It was that misnomer, the Enlightenment, that began to swing the wrecking ball at the edifice of actual reality, while at the same time looting the wreckage.   

For no virtual world can ever be accepted even on its own limited terms unless it bears some resemblance to the real one. It must look like a duck, walk like a duck and quack like a duck – even if it’s not a duck.

Hence, the Enlighteners, in order to be indeed seen by the credulous as a source of light, had no other choice but to shoplift the traditional culture and adapt its terms to the virtual reality that was being created. Otherwise everyone would have realised that theirs was the kind of fire that could only scorch, not illuminate.

This can be best illustrated with the example of the French revolutionary summation of the Enlightenment: liberté, egalité, fraternité. In the early stages this triple lie of a motto didn’t run unopposed: other desiderata, such as unity and justice, were occasionally proposed as replacements for the brotherhood element. The ultimate winner was probably determined by its Christian overtones purloined from the original owner for PR purposes.

To start with, let’s consider its tripartite form. We’ll notice that many revolutionary slogans of post-Christian modernity are made up of three elements, either words or phrases.

Apart from the French one, one could cite the American “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness”, the Russian vsia vlast Sovetam (all power to the Soviets) or the German ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (one people, one nation, one leader). And even a somewhat less significant twentieth-century revolution had to chip in with a vapid Work harder, produce more, build Grenada!

What we are witnessing here is the first stage of larceny: the revolutionaries sensed that the world around them was alive with Trinitarian music. They probably ascribed that phenomenon to church propaganda and control of learning, rather than to the ontological property of man and nature it really is.

But whatever the source of the music, people’s ears were so attuned to it that they were predisposed to respond to similar sounds even if they conveyed a different meaning. But it wasn’t just the music.

Also hidden in the French slogan was another mock-Christian allusion. For, according to the Enlighteners, ‘fraternity’ flowed out of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’. Philosophers of the time argued that no brotherhood was possible without liberty and equality, which is to say that the third part of the triad proceeded from the first two.

One doesn’t have to be a theologian to see how the deep and subtle Christian doctrine of the Trinity was vulgarised for an un-Christian purpose by adding the fake echoes of the Creeds.

Each element of the French triad was stolen property. To the original owner, freedom came from – and led to – the truth, which is to say God; equality was a natural consequence of jointly loving, and being loved by, a supreme being, which is to say God; brotherhood implied a kinship bestowed by a common father, which is to say God.

The intellectual cardsharps of the Enlightenment deftly pulled the ace of God out of the pack, leaving people with a hand of cards that were not only low but also marked.

In a similarly devious way, the linear, teleological nature of Judaeo-Christian eschatology was transformed into the secular doctrine of progress.

Unlike the Eastern mind trained to respond to circular, static philosophies, the Western mind had been conditioned to expect a vertical, upward movement on a straight line. With an enviable sleight of hand, the philosophes replaced the kingdom of God as the destination of linear development with the eudemonic idea of happiness as the ultimate goal of life.

That, courtesy of St Anselm, had been known since the eleventh century as a sure recipe for amorality. And in the United States, the first country constituted along Enlightenment lines, the word ‘happiness’ in the Declaration of Independence was understood in strictly material terms, as some of its signatories helpfully explained. Happiness was comfort, prosperity – ultimately property.

Almost the exact wording as in the Declaration can be found in John Locke, the shining light for both American and French Enlighteners. In an often quoted statement he mentioned “life, liberty and estate” in the context of “natural rights”, a concept of his that can only charitably be described as dubious, especially when used widely and indiscriminately. Again there was an element of larceny involved, with the natural law of church doctrine becoming a mishmash of assorted natural rights.

A natural right in its proper sense is an entitlement that presupposes no ensuing obligation on anyone else’s part, such as the right to life. Estate ownership doesn’t qualify for this lofty designation: my natural right to own an estate would presuppose your natural obligation to provide one, something you may or may not agree to honour.

However, in that particular context Locke’s full statement was unobjectionable. What he talked about was preserving a man’s “life, liberty and estate against the injuries and attempts of other men”. The rule of law, in other words.

But this wasn’t how it came out in the Declaration of Independence. Its statement was snappy, a quality essential to slogans but sometimes detrimental to truth. The Founding Fathers chose a less precise term “happiness”, preceded by “the pursuit of”, a combination they declared to be a natural (inalienable) right.

This was more than just a matter of semantics: the underlying idea was turned around. Pursuit of property, rather than the Lockean legal protection of property already amassed, was a de facto declaration of dependence on money. The teleological nature of wealth, beatified by the Reformation, especially its Calvinist offshoot, was thus canonised by the Enlightenment.

Alas, that larcenous shift from actual to virtual reality has itself been canonised. Even many conservative commentators use Enlightenment tenets as their frame of reference. That not only throws their whole philosophy out of kilter, but also makes one wonder about the usefulness of the very term ‘conservative’.

Since these days it means either too little or too much, it hardly ever means anything real at all. But then modernity isn’t about reality, is it?

Nicholas Brock, 52, was the other day sentenced to four years in prison for being a neo-Nazi.

He decorated his room with SS memorabilia and his body with SS tattoos. He also collected all sorts of material on the Nazi ideology, including a copy of Mein Kampf, along with generally, rather than specifically German, racist brochures.

Yet Mr Brock can’t be legitimately called a monomaniac. In fact, his hobbies reveal a personality in conflict. On the one hand, he has a rich collection of anti-Muslim literature. On the other, he lovingly downloads videos of ISIS beheadings and other gory exploits.

In short, Mr Brock is a nasty bit of work any way you look at it, which Judge Peter Lodder QC pointed out in no uncertain terms when explaining the custodial sentence:

“It is clear that you are a right-wing extremist, your enthusiasm for this repulsive and toxic ideology is demonstrated by the graphic and racist iconography which you have studied and appeared to share with others.

“Your bedroom was decorated with SS memorabilia, a framed Ku Klux Klan recognition certificate in your own name was hanging on your wall.

“You stored documents such as the offensively titled Nigger Owner’s Manual, you had video clips of Ku Klux Klan discussions about race war, of cross-burning, of decapitation, and a propaganda video of Combat 18, a race-hate neo-Nazi group…”

And then came the kicker, which left me, and probably Mr Brock, utterly confused: “I do not sentence you for your political views, but the extremity of those views informs the assessment of dangerousness.”

If I understand His Honour’s point correctly, which I probably don’t, he sentenced Mr Brock to prison not for holding political views as such, but because his views were extreme and therefore deemed unacceptable.

Now, I don’t purport to be a legal expert who can navigate comfortably through every nook and cranny of the English Common Law. Yet, on general principle, there is something disturbing about a man going to prison for his views, however repulsive they might be.

But fine, I’m only going by newspaper reports. I haven’t studied the case in sufficient detail to take serious issue with the verdict. It’s possible, nay likely, that Mr Brock strayed from insanity into criminality, as defined by some laws with which I am unfamiliar.

In any case, our air is cleaner without another Nazi inhaling it for the next four years, and few of us will shed any tears for Mr Brock’s ordeal. After all, dura lex, sed lex – we may have reservations about this or that law, but as long as it’s on the books, it must be obeyed and any infraction punished.

If the law says that collecting the literature and memorabilia of a revolting ideology is a criminal offence, then so be it. Who am I to argue?

But, though it pains me to have to remind our judges of this demonstrable fact, Nazism isn’t the only revolting ideology whose survivals persist on our shores. Communism easily rivals Nazism for inhuman savagery and far outscores it in body count.

War casualties aside, the Nazis murdered about 10 million people. The communists managed 60 million in the USSR alone, plus as many in China, plus God knows how many others in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Moreover, national socialism has a biological limit to its spread by definition. After all, it’s hard for, say, a Cuban to swear by the innate superiority of the Aryan race. But genuflecting before the icons of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro or Che Guevara is easy: worshiping such heroes transcends race. International socialism is just that, international.

Our homegrown neo-Nazis are indeed odious, but it’s hard to claim that their ideology will take over British politics in any foreseeable future. By contrast, the communist ideology, barely camouflaged by woke effluvia, almost triumphed in Britain. Jeremy Corbyn lost the general election by a wide margin, but not so wide as to make sure his evil creed will never vanquish in the future.

On balance, I believe that communism, in its various guises, presents a much greater danger than any form of Nazism, fascism, jingoism or other creeds going by the misnomer ‘right-wing’. But, being a conciliatory person by nature, I am willing to concede that the two ideologies, Nazism and communism, are equally dangerous.

That’s where the goose and the gander fly out of the gaggle in opposite directions. If basing one’s concept of interior decoration and sartorial splendour on Nazi iconography is criminalised, then surely so should be the communist equivalent? For old times’ sake, shouldn’t laws apply to everyone equally?

Yet Soviet, Maoist and other communist livery is seen as kind of cool among large swathes of Westerners, mostly but far from exclusively young ones. Lenin or Mao lapel pins, Soviet uniform coats and hats, CCCP logos, Che Guevara T-shirts and posters can be publicly displayed with impunity, and no one will dare comment.

A friend of mine, for example, was married to a ‘liberal’ journalist, whom I last saw when she was in her 50s. When they were still together, their bedroom was decorated with a huge Che Guevara poster. When I said something unprintable about it, she sighed and said: “Well, I can’t help it. I’m a liberal.” “In that case,” I said, “you shouldn’t worship mass murderers.” I’ve never seen her again.

Nor is it just individuals who rely on communist imagery for their self-identification. Party conferences of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition unfold to the accompaniment of communist songs, including the Internationale that until 1944 was the official anthem of Stalin’s USSR. Red flags fly everywhere, possibly symbolising the blood of the hundreds of millions murdered by those sharing Labour’s taste in colour schemes.

Yet I’ve never heard, nor read, a single word of criticism. If singing the Horst Wessel Lied in public is against the law, then what about Labour’s favourite chorus of Bandiera Rossa, a communist song ending in a blatant oxymoron, Evviva il comunismo e la libertà?

That’s like singing “long live Nazism and racial tolerance.” Communism and liberty are two things incompatible but, given the choice, I’m sure the Corbyn crowd would opt for the former.

The goose and the gander are served with different sauces, which leaves a rancid taste in my mouth. On that note, off to lunch.

Margarita Simonian, head of Putin’s propaganda channel RT, is by her own admission turning green. “I envy Lukashenko,” she said. “Beautifully done!”

Beauty is commonly known to be in the eye of the beholder. What prompted this aesthetic judgement from that particular beholder, Russia’s female answer to Dr Goebbels, was the act of air piracy perpetrated by Belarus on Lukashenko’s direct order.

The EU, the US and Britain all expressed their “deep concern”, doubtless making Lukashenko and Putin tremble with fear. Had the Ryanair plane been shot out of the sky, the response would no doubt have been upgraded to “serious concern” or, pushing the envelope, even “grave concern”. That would have definitely put paid to the two bandit regimes.

The facts of the crime have been filling newspapers since Sunday, but what matters in any reportage isn’t just the what, but also the how. Emphasis and language make a difference, and expert reporters know this. Thus Russia’s role in this crime, though not exactly ignored, has been underplayed, drowned in nonessential details.

Here are the essential ones.

Lukashenko, commonly described as Belarus’s dictator, is in fact Putin’s viceroy. His regime is propped up by Russian oil, gas, subsidies, technology, logistic and intelligence support, propaganda and trolling. It’s only for tactical reasons that Belarus still retains nominal independence.

That’s why Western papers made a significant omission when failing to report that two hours before the attack the Russian media had been told to “stand by for the publication of an important announcement”. This means the Russian government knew about the hijack in advance and in all likelihood helped to set it up. This sort of thing is called ‘aiding and abetting’ in some quarters.

The crime itself was carried out without any wholehearted attempt at subterfuge. Ryanair Flight FR4978 was carrying 126 passengers from Athens to Vilnus. Two of the passengers were the opposition blogger Roman Protasevich and his Russian girlfriend. Three or four others (reports differ) were agents of the Belarusian secret service that, unlike its Russian counterpart, has nostalgically kept its Soviet name, the KGB.

A bomb scare was announced, while a Belarusian jet fighter Mig-29 began to track Flight FR4978. However, the Ryanair pilots acted in a way consistent with neither a bomb threat nor their usual pattern.

In the past, they always slowed down and started their descent some 110 miles from Vilnus. This time, however, the pilots reduced neither the speed nor the altitude. This means they at first tried to get away from the Mig, which was in a pursuit mode. This little detail wasn’t highlighted in any of the newspaper accounts I’ve read.

The pilots’ actions didn’t even remotely resemble a normal reaction to a bomb threat. Common sense would have called for the quickest possible descent and landing – not a high-speed race against a jet fighter.

However, just two minutes’ flight time from the Lithuanian airspace, Flight FR4978 sharply changed course eastwards and flew to Minsk – which was hundreds of miles farther away than Vilnus.

Hence the pilots didn’t think the bomb threat was real. So why did they suddenly change course? The answer is obvious: the Mig pilot told them he was under orders to shoot the airliner down if its pilots didn’t comply. Moreover, the threat was made in a way that left no doubt it would be carried out. The fate of Malaysian Air Flight 17 was still fresh in the pilots’ memory.

In other words, Lukashenko, aided and abetted by Putin, was ready to murder 126 passengers plus the crew for the sheer pleasure of getting rid of one opposition journalist. The youngster has since been paraded on Belarusian TV, confessing his criticism of Lukashenko, a crime for which the maximum penalty is death.

Protasevich’s face bore marks of beating and torture, and the picture reminded me of the old Vietnamese images of captured American pilots, who had been tortured so cruelly they could barely utter the requisite confessions. Russia was complicit in those crimes too.

Putin’s mouthpieces reacted in the way one would expect from members of the same gang. Foreign Minister Lavrov praised Belarus for her “absolutely reasonable approach” to the deadly threat posed by Protasevich. And the Ministry spokesman Zakharova indulged in her usual buffoonery.

She was “shocked that the West calls the incident in Belarusian air space ‘shocking’ ” and then launched Putin’s favourite counterattack of it takes one to know one. It’s neither Belarus nor, God forbid, Russia, she explained, but Western countries that are guilty of “kidnappings, forced landings and illegal arrests”. Zakharova didn’t offer any examples of such beastliness – common knowledge was in no need of reiteration.

Other than scaring Messrs Lukashenko and Putin with their expressions of deep concern, Western leaders have done next to nothing in response to this act of state terrorism.

Lukashenko and his coterie were already under sanctions, banning them from travelling to the West and freezing their assets held there. Now these measures have been augmented by a ban for Western airlines to enter Belarusian airspace and for Belarusian planes to land in some Western countries.

I can confidently predict that these sanctions, new and old, will have no effect – other than emboldening the bandit regimes and increasing their sense of impunity.

Neither Merkel nor Macron has the stomach to face up to Putin and his vassals. No matter how deeply, seriously or gravely they are concerned, they’ll still allow Putin to flood Europe with cheap gas flowing through his new pipeline Nord Stream 2, thereby propping up his regime.

Our Foreign Secretary Raab has uttered some strong words, but words are cheap. However, freezing the purloined billions Russian gangsters keep in London would be jolly expensive indeed, which explains why such a response wasn’t even mooted.

Nor will Biden reinstate the sanctions he waived against Nord Stream 2, while his State Secretary Blinken will continue to chat with Lavrov, and his National Security Adviser Sullivan will go on holding meaningful discussions with head of Russia’s Security Council Patrushev (whose criminal activities have earned him a ban from entry into the USA).

A new Munich seems to be in the works, with the West accepting the general thrust of Russia’s hybrid war against it, while continuing to express deep concern over each new crime and to impose harmless sanctions.

Instead, Russia and her vassalages, such as Belarus, ought to be placed in airtight quarantine, with all economic, cultural and political ties severed. Let them eat their Migs, drink their oil, inhale their gas.

Alas, the West isn’t blessed with any leaders other than typological equivalents of the Chamberlains and Daladiers of yesteryear. That’s why our lot are helpless in the face of today’s typological equivalents of Stalin and Hitler.