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No, I don’t mean Penny Mordaunt’s physical makeup. As you can see, she is what used to be called ‘a fine figure of a woman’.

Moreover, by all accounts this Tory minister (and a TA officer) is great fun. In my younger days, I could imagine going on a pub crawl with her, to have a few drinks and more laughs, exchange some bawdy stories, sing some ribald songs and see what the immediate future might bring. (In my dotage, I can only fantasise about such things, but this one is a recurrent fantasy.)

The constitution that Penny has problems with is that of the United Kingdom, with the last word giving a transparent clue that Britain still remains a monarchy. And monarchy coexists with aristocracy, there’s no getting around that.

Since time immemorial, hereditary aristocrats have sat in the House of Lords, the upper chamber of Parliament. Yet anything that has existed for centuries presents a sniping target for modern barbarians – they refuse to accept that the world had existed before they were born, and the dial isn’t reset with each new generation.

The Lords is no exception. Thus, during the orgy of constitutional vandalism, otherwise known as Tony Blair’s tenure, the number of hereditary peers sitting in the lords was limited, with most peers to be appointed by the prime minister and rubber-stamped by the Queen. At present, the Lord’s has 791 sitting members, of whom only 92 are hereditary peers.

Now, both Penny and I agree that this arrangement is an abomination. On that pub crawl of my impure dreams, we’d establish that fact between the third and fourth drinks, only to move on to less weighty subjects thereafter.

However, if we persevered with that boring subject, we’d find out that we are dissatisfied with the Lords for different reasons. I think only hereditary aristocrats (moreover, those whose peerage goes back at least a century), should sit in that chamber. Penny thinks the members should be neither hereditary nor appointed, but elected.

She advocates this arrangement in her new book, stopping just short of suggesting a name change. Why such reticence? If the House of Lords is to become like the US Senate, why stick with the outdated nomenclature?

According to Penny, having unelected members makes the Lords, a “relic”, a “mausoleum”, an “anachronism”, “as out of touch with modern democracy as it is possible to be”.

The book has been favourably peer-reviewed by all the usual suspects, Tony Blair, Bill Gates, Elton John, the film director Richard Curtis and such true-blue Tories as Boris Johnson and Ruth Davidson.

Penny castigates not just the undemocratic nature of the Lords, but also its demographics. “As hereditary titles still only pass down the male line,” she complains, “many seats in the upper chamber can only have male bottoms filling them.”

That sentence refocused my thoughts on the part of Penny’s anatomy that can be surmised from the photograph. Having pulled myself together, I had a fright. It sounds as if she wishes to abolish not only hereditary Lords, but also the institution of primogeniture.

Why stop there? If the whole political and social system has to be reduced to a show of hands (most of whom don’t know Penny’s elbow from her… well, you know), then I can point out another part of our constitution that involves unelected officials: the monarchy.

If that’s not an anachronism, a relic and a mausoleum, I don’t know what is. Would this minister of the Crown rather have the Crown abolished? While we’re at it, should we perhaps also chop off the head on which that headgear sits?

Penny is a minister in the government department responsible for constitutional reform, and I’m quaking in my boots. What act of vandalism will this lot perpetrate next?

For Penny’s benefit, the whole point of the House of Lords is that it’s unelected. Unelected means impervious to party pressures, not obligated either to issue or to receive political IOUs. The role of the Lords is to act as a counterbalance to the elected power of the Commons, preventing the lower chamber’s more egregious excesses.

This body traces its provenance back to the ancient councils of elders. Its precursor in England before the Norman conquest was the Witenagemot, the assembly of the kingdom’s leading nobles who would convene after a king’s death to select a successor.

The traditional assumption has always been that hereditary aristocrats have a vested interest not in transient political jousts, but in the constant wellbeing of the whole country to which they are umbilically linked. The monarchy and the aristocracy form an axis around which revolves the country’s history, with her generations past, present and future.

Without these institutions, Britain would be like the US, but without the money and power. We already have some feeble and superfluous pastiches of American bodies, such as the Supreme Court. Would Penny like to add the Senate to that?

Britain’s unique political dispensation is perhaps her greatest contribution to Western civilisation. Even French subversives, such as Voltaire, venerated and envied England’s politics. In the next century, Britain’s balance of various interests, estates and classes became even finer, arguably representing the highest achievement of statecraft in the West.

Moreover, unlike, say, France, the British political system is an essential part of the people’s national identity. It’s a stable system too, having remained fundamentally the same for 350 years, a period during which France has had three different monarchies, five different republics, a revolutionary government, a directory, a military dictatorship and an empire.

Yet throughout all these tribulations, France remained France, and the French remained French, proving that their political system is only tangentially important to their national essence. However, remove – or vandalise – Britain’s political system, and she won’t be Britain any longer.

Penny evidently fails to understand such constitutional basics, which doesn’t do much for the cause of putting more female bottoms into parliamentary seats… but don’t get me going on this.

Here’s an excerpt from the aria of Harry in Oprah, Act 2: “My father used to say to me, when I was younger, he used to say to both William and I, ‘Well, it was like that for me, so it’s going to be like that for you’…”

Aren’t you shocked? I know I am.

It should have been “…he used to say to both William and me”, and Harry doesn’t even have the excuse of having gone to a comprehensive school. Yet he does have the excuse of having gone to Eton, whose standards are evidently slipping. That’s what commitment to an unalloyed woke curriculum can do to a school. Its graduates can’t even talk proper, like, even if brung up in posh families.

However, one suspects Harry’s grammar wouldn’t have advanced past the semi-literate level even had he gone to Gordonstoun, treading the path beaten by just about every male member of his family for three generations.

For, if we agree that Eton has been accelerating on a downward slide, Harry outpaced most of his classmates on that trajectory. He excelled only in such rigorous academic disciplines as polo and rugby, while his performance in more cerebral subjects was marred by accusations of cheating at exams.

The subsequent tribunal refrained from ruling on the cheating claim. Instead that body used Aesopian language, saying it “accepted the prince had received help” in his A-level project. A distinction without a difference, I’d suggest.

Alas, while unable to hoist Harry even to an average level academically, Eton also demonstrably failed in forging his character, which has for centuries been the crux of the school’s mission.

If we believe Wellington’s assertion that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, then today’s playing fields have produced a snivelling, treacherous, lachrymose spouter of psychobabble trying to get in touch with his feminine side.

I blame Mrs Thatcher myself… What, it wasn’t her fault? Sorry, I thought she could be blamed for everything. How about “It’s all society’s fault?” Actually, this works, to an extent.

We may believe in free will and hence personal responsibility. But it takes strength of mind and character for one’s free will to break through the dense fog of zeitgeist. Someone like Harry, who after years of expensive education can’t even use elementary grammar, lacks the mental and moral tools to prevent the fog from blurring his vision.

And zeitgeist includes self-indulgent, touchy-feely, I-want-to-be-me psychobabble as its inalienable constituent. Freud and Jung (Fraud and Junk?) emptied a bag of rubbish on modernity, and the likes of Harry, his wife and most of our semi-educated, half-baked pseuds got buried under the fetid pile.

But not to worry: help is on the way. After all, every time I criticise some social or political phenomenon, there’s always a reader out there, asking the question deeply rooted in the pragmatic English mind: So what are we going to do about it?

Before I went (sort of) native, I used to say, “Let’s start by diagnosing the disease. Once its aetiology is properly understood, then we can think about the treatment.” Alas, that left my audiences dissatisfied, disappointed and sometimes even disdainful.

Paying heed, here’s my solution to the problem that warped Harry’s mind and character, whatever little of those faculties he possessed to begin with:

Only clinical psychiatrists holding valid medical accreditation should be allowed to ply their trade, which is treating people with real mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia.

All psychologists, psychoanalysts, therapists, behavioural coaches and other such parasites must be summarily struck off whatever registers they belong to, with their licences burnt and their practices shut down by court order. They should then be retrained in occupations that are currently shorthanded, such as restaurant dish-washing and fruit picking.

At the same time, a blanket ban must be issued on all people past age 21 mentioning their childhood traumas, those caused by daddy or mummy having wanted a child of the other sex, daddy and mummy displaying not enough affection or too much or the wrong kind, or even daddy or mummy dying prematurely.

The latter misfortune especially may be a legitimate cause for grief. But it mustn’t be used as an excuse for anything – grown people, especially men, should have developed sufficient inner resources to stop moaning about mummy and daddy. Saying a prayer for them or raising a glass to their memory should be sufficient.

This ought to be the focus of the character-building courses I am hereby proposing as compulsory school subjects. In Britain specifically, children should be taught to cultivate the traditional, now unfortunately moribund, virtues of stiff upper lip, modesty, self-restraint, deference and good manners – qualities preventing people from shoving their little quirks down anyone else’s throat.

‘Down with solipsism’ and ‘a problem shared is a problem doubled’ should be the underlying principles. For, if even our best schools fail to instil Britishness in their pupils, the playing fields of Eton will become places where all subsequent battles will be lost. Especially the one against the toxic zeitgeist of modernity.

P.S. It’s not only Harry and football commentators who misuse English. My once co-author, the Archbishop of Westminster, has on this Pentecost Sunday sent a woke letter to parishioners, in which he talks about “the enormity [sic] of the challenges we are facing”, the prime one springing from the use of carbon fuels.

Unless he really (and appropriately) meant that this particular challenge is revolting, the proper word would have been immensity or perhaps magnitude. Never mind speaking in tongues — today’s prelates can’t even speak English properly.

Curiouser and curiouser, or rather crazier and crazier. Globe Theatre seminars on “decolonising” Shakespeare’s plays push modernity even closer to the loony bin.

According to the participating academics, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, among Shakespeare’s other racist works, is beset with “problematic gendered and radicalised dynamics”, perpetuating “the view that white is beautiful, fair is beautiful, dark is unattractive.”

The Bard reveals his racist, colonialist nature in the very first line, “Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour”, and rapidly goes downhill from there. Nor is it just this objectionable play.

Vanessa Corredera, professor of English at St Andrews, nailed the Bard to the racist cross: “In context with other plays and even the Sonnets, this language is all over the place, the language of dark and light… there are these racialising elements.”

Prof. Corredera and other participants generously allowed that Shakespeare’s plays shouldn’t be summarily banned. However, directors must activate their conscience to avoid the numerous pitfalls.

For example, they should cast more actors “of colour” by way of compensation. And they must also make mature decisions on which language is racist, to be expurgated, and which is acceptable, to be left intact, with possibly only a few minor changes.

This seminar is a true eyeopener not just for the participating scholars but also for rank amateurs like me, catching only the echoes of that learned discussion. There I was, thinking that ‘fair’ is what linguists call a ‘polyvalent’ word, one that can convey multiple meanings.

For example, the traditional British virtue of fair play has no racial connotation that I’m aware of. Nor is someone who replies “Fair” to the question “How are you?” ipso facto a Ku Klux Klan member.

A ‘fair deal’ isn’t necessarily struck by two colonialists, a ‘fair crack of the whip’ doesn’t immediately evoke an image of a plantation overseer in Alabama circa 1850, the proverb ‘a fair exchange is no robbery’ doesn’t suggest that any exchange between black people is perforce larcenous, while referring to women as the ‘fair sex’ may be deemed sexist, but not overtly racist.

Also, I can assuage the academics’ fears of racism implicit in any contrast of light and dark or white and black. These go back to the, well, Dark Ages, when Englishmen regrettably had only a limited exposure to other races. Hence the widespread references to black witches, black cats, dark arts, dark moods and so forth. None of these was meant as a racial slur. Most of such expressions had to do with the colour of the night, which tends to be invariably dark this side of the Arctic Circle.

You know all this. However, what you may not know is how to argue effectively against those who insist that Shakespeare was a racist because he used ‘fair’ to mean ‘beautiful’, or because the Moor strangled his white wife to perpetuate a false racial stereotype.

Now, I count myself among the accomplished debaters against the Bard’s detractors. For example, some years ago I attended a dinner at the Carlton Club, where the subject of Shakespeare came up over port.

My host suggested that Hamlet’s relationship with Gertrude had strong Oedipal overtones. As a counterargument, I took advantage of my finely honed polemical techniques and said: “Oedipus, schmedipus, as long as he loves his Mum.”

That won, or at any rate ended, the debate, with Shakespeare thus escaping any association with faddish theories he predated by four centuries. However, no polemical technique is as polyvalent as the adjective ‘fair’. The one I used on that occasion would be too lame if an argument in favour of Shakespeare’s racism arose.

So here’s a step-by-step procedure you should follow when someone claims at a party that Shakespeare was a racist, colonialist or white supremacist.

Step 1: Flash a disarming smile and hold your open palms in front of your chest as a gesture of peace and surrender.

Step 2: Half-turn to the right as if ready to leave and put your weight on your right leg.

Step 3: Keeping your upper body and right arm relaxed, rapidly rotate your hips and shoulders, shifting your weight to the left leg, while throwing your right hand forward.

Step 4: Hit your opponent on the nose or the point of the jaw, clenching your fist at the moment of contact. (If your opponent is female, like Prof. Corredera, and you are a gentleman, like me, don’t make a fist. Instead, deliver an open-palm slap on the side of her head or cheek.)

Step 5: While your opponent writhes on the floor, enunciate slowly and distinctly: “Repeat after me, you [choose your own pejorative epithet]. ‘I will never again spout woke bilge, and certainly not when talking about our greatest playwright and poet. Get that, you [choose a different epithet from the one in the previous sentence]?’”

Step 6: Having elicited the desired response, leave the premises to avoid messing around with the cops.

You may think that this technique, though undoubtedly persuasive, falls short of the acceptable norms of civilised discourse. True.

But you don’t really think polite, rational arguments are possible when one’s opponent is a neo-barbarian out to destroy everything you hold dear, do you?

“Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul…,” quotes St Matthew, and I happily comply.

Covid is a mass killer of bodies, but it can’t slay the soul of our civilisation, what little is left of it. Yet a feebleminded US president with woke instincts functioning in lieu of his brain can go Covid one better.

If a strong America makes enemies of the West run scared, a weak America has the same effect on its friends. And they have every reason to be afraid.

The Internet is abuzz with videos making viewers first laugh and then, after some deliberation, cry. But I’m not going to cite any visible and audible signs of Biden’s incipient dementia, his numerous gaffes and slips. Just look at Biden’s actions, not his incoherent speeches or pathetic pratfalls.

When an intellect is weak to begin with and further impaired by some mental disorder, the man can still function on instincts alone. And Biden’s are all woke and therefore subversive.

On Wednesday, he tried to lean on Netanyahu to “deescalate” Israel’s self-defence against Hamas terrorism by end of play. No similar pressure was applied on the terrorists, and not just because they tend to be rather truculent.

Biden’s woke instincts make him reach out tropistically for any anti-Western cause, especially if championed by those he sees as the downtrodden masses of the Third World. Israel is America’s only reliable ally in the Middle East, but she isn’t Biden’s ally, not emotionally at any rate.

Also, though I haven’t come across any visible signs of anti-Semitism in his pronouncements (other than the odd slip of the tongue, such as referring to bankers as ‘Shylocks’), I wouldn’t be surprised if Biden harboured such sentiments. They are part and parcel of his kind of worldview, certainly among woke gentiles.

One way or the other, Biden has been busily overturning Trump’s pro-Israeli policies. Thus he has reinstated financial aid to the Palestinians (meaning Hamas) that Trump cut off. And, more dangerous, Biden has renewed the nuclear deal with Iran that Trump shelved.

This effectively clears the path for the ayatollahs to acquire nuclear arms, and you get no prizes for guessing which country they’ll first threaten with such weapons. The Israelis, who to a great extent depend on America’s support for their survival, have every reason to be afraid.

And not just the Israelis. America’s allies in Eastern Europe, especially the Ukraine, also feel betrayed. Biden’s administration has announced it will waive sanctions on Nord Stream 2 AG, the German company overseeing the construction of Russia’s gas pipeline bypassing the Ukraine.

The company’s CEO is Matthias Warnig, a career Stasi officer and Putin’s loyal poodle, who sits on the boards of several Russian oil companies. When completed, Nord Stream 2 will further increase Europe’s dependence on Russia’s gas, thereby strengthening Putin’s hold on power and hence his capacity to escalate his hybrid war on the West.

While busily undermining America’s allies strategically, Biden has also pushed the button on the delayed-action inflationary bomb ticking away under their economies.

In his memoirs Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, recalls a lecture by Prof. Arthur Burns of Columbia University: “Burns… went around the room asking, ‘What causes inflation?’ None of us could give him an answer. Prof. Burns… declared, ‘Excess government spending causes inflation!’ ”

Put a different way, governments with socialist leanings cause inflation because they can’t control their rapacious spending instincts. It doesn’t take an economics professor to know that Biden’s plans to spend over $6 trillion are likely to tip inflation over the edge.

Nor is this just a theory either. In April, the US rate of inflation jumped from 2.6 per cent to 4.2 per cent, the highest level since the 2008 crisis. And, partly because world economies are pegged to the dollar, our inflation rate has also doubled.

Since most Western governments haven’t paid their way since God was young, that bomb was already primed when Biden took over. But his socialist instincts may well hasten an explosion.

The blast would be devastating on many different levels. Savers and mortgage holders would be hit hard, with shards of bankruptcies and foreclosures flying in every direction. Companies and entrepreneurs seeking financing may find they can’t afford it. And countries with high sovereign debts, such as the US and Britain, will find it impossible to service them. I don’t want to come across as a doomsayer, but we all know what happens when governments default on their loans.

Every time Biden opens his mouth or announces a new policy, I feel like echoing that 1920s American journalist and shouting: “Say it ain’t so, Joe!”. But it usually is, and I grow more and more scared.

The slogan of the more objectionable groups during the French Revolution was pas d’ennemis à gauche (no enemies on the Left).

One can discern echoes of that left-wing solidarity in today’s West, and you can prove this experimentally. All it takes is a single question posed to your average Westerner (not a Muslim): “Who do you think is the aggressor, Israel or the Palestinians?”

If the reply is “Israel”, one can confidently deduce the person’s position on any other issue, from transsexuality to progressive taxation, from open borders to secularisation, from comprehensive education to nationalised medicine.

Since such solidarity cuts across many parties – Labour, Socialist (Democratic, Christian or neat), Liberal, Green, Communist and so forth — whose manifestos may be quite different, one has to feel disappointed in the existing political taxonomy.

Its nomenclatures are clearly inadequate in conveying political convictions – unless you are willing to argue that, say, our Liberal Democratic Party is indeed liberal and democratic.

Since real conservatives stress the individual over the collective, they only add to the confusion by fracturing concepts even further. Our ‘liberal’ press deepens it by tarring, say, Thatcher and Hitler with the same ‘extreme right-wing’ brush.

That’s why in my book How the West Was Lost I instead proposed dividing Western people into two broad categories. Rather than Left and Right, I suggested ‘Westman’ and ‘Modman’.

A Westman feels profound kinship with our civilisation, its religion, culture, philosophy and traditional political forms. A Modman may enjoy some of the fruits of Western civilisation, but he is alien, or often hostile, to its traditional core.

This classification overlaps with the Right-Left divide only partly. Just about everybody on the Left is a Modman, but far from everybody on the Right is a Westman.

That’s why I can’t feel solidarity with everyone perceived as right-wing, even if we may share some convictions. Nor can I adapt the revolutionary slogan to say pas d’ennemis à droite. Calling those I disagree with my enemies would be too strong, but neither can I see them as allies.

Edwin Poots, the new leader of Ulster’s Democratic Unionist Party, is a case in point. I’d describe him as a man after my own heart. However, this is one of many cases where my heart is somewhat in conflict with my head.

‘Somewhat’ is the operative word here because both my heart and head are in agreement on some of Mr Poots’s cherished beliefs.

He wishes to preserve the United Kingdom intact – so do I. He is a Christian – so am I. He supported the Christian bakers who refused to make a wedding cake for two LGBT activists – so did I. He is opposed to Northern Ireland effectively staying in the European Customs Union – so am I. He has problems with Darwin’s theory – so do I.

However, some of his other beliefs give those good causes a bad name. Most of them spring from his religion, which is sectarian Protestant with an accent on biblical literalism.

Atheists who insist that the Bible must be accepted literally or not at all do so because they hate Christianity. Christians who insist on the same thing do so because they are thick or, at best, ignorant.

They expose themselves and, more important, Christianity to ridicule. Thus Mr Poots argues against Darwin and his cheerleaders, such as Richard Dawkins, from the platform of biblical literalism. That makes their inane statements sound clever by comparison.

Even if Darwin’s theory were a scientific fact, which it isn’t, it wouldn’t invalidate Genesis. Since God is outside time, few biblical references to years, months or days are precise chronology. Hence the six days in which the Earth was created fall into the realm of poetic imagery, the dominant literary idiom in use when the Bible was written.

It might indeed have been six days, or it might have been six billion years: God, being omnipotent, is capable of creating things slowly as well as quickly. In any case, Darwin never got around to explaining how species came into being in the first place.

After all, before things evolve, they have to be. All this talk about primordial soups spinning out a single cell out of which Bach and Einstein popped like chicks out of an egg is nothing but fanciful pseudo-scientific speculation. It has more to do with sci-fi than serious science.

The only reason Darwin’s slapdash theory has become orthodoxy is its subversive political impact, not its scientific rigour. The emerging Modman desperately needed something like that to drive the last nail into Westman’s coffin. To him, everything had to have a materialist explanation, and Darwin’s Descent of Man did nicely as a biological companion to Marxism.

The way to argue against the likes of Dawkins – an unsporting undertaking, actually – is by pointing out the gaping holes in Darwin’s intellectual trousers. The disciplines to be invoked are molecular biology, palaeontology, physics, chemistry, logic, philosophy, history etc.

Mr Poots’s arguments, on the other hand, make even Dawkins sound bright. He denies that the Earth is old enough for evolution to have taken place. “My view on the Earth,” says Mr Poots, “is that it’s a young Earth. My view is [it was created] in 4000 BC.”

That’s akin to insisting that the Earth is a flat plate resting on the backs of three giant whales. Some civilisations pre-date Mr Poots’s chosen date by quite a bit. Mesopotamia, for example, goes back to 6500 BC. But that’s not even the point.

Science is vague on how the Earth came into existence, but not when. Radiometric dating puts its age at about 4.5 billion years, give or take 100 million or so. Arguing against radiometric dating is next to impossible for even an enlightened amateur, which Mr Poots demonstrably isn’t. As to his dating the Earth from 4000 BC, that’s simply bonkers.

When Mr Poots was a culture minister, a Modman interviewer feigned disbelief: “You’re the culture minister and you don’t believe in evolution?”

If you want to know how I’d answer this question, type ‘Darwin’ into the SEARCH rubric on my blog, and you’ll find several pieces I’ve written on the subject over the years. This is how Mr Poots answered it: “Yes, absolutely. And you’re telling me that all of this evolution took place over billions of years, and yet it’s only in the last few thousand years that Man could actually learn to write?”

First, no one says that Homo sapiens appeared billions of years ago. His age in measured in thousands of years, not billions. Second, being able to write isn’t a defining characteristic of man.

There are many people, such as many of our comprehensively educated youngsters, who are undeniably human and yet can’t write. Large ethnic groups existing even today are illiterate. Many peoples in the north of Russia, for example, manage to survive without literacy or their own alphabet, as do some in and around Australia. That the Sumerians first began writing in cuneiform around 3,400 BC in no way proves that neither they nor the Earth had existed before that date.

I know that some of my conservative friends may disagree, but I feel that, with friends like Mr Poots, who needs enemies? A thick ally is more dangerous than an intelligent adversary.

No enemies on the Right? Not on your nelly.

“Wokers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your minds.”

This version of the popular slogan should now adorn Prince Harry’s coat of arms. Gone is the boozing party-goer occasionally donning a Nazi uniform. No more is the dashing officer, Captain Windsor.

Squeezing into the hole they’ve vacated is a woke, emotionally incontinent Californian lad, spouting psychobabble with the fluency of a paid-up member of the Screen Actors Guild.

What I find amazing is that serious people try to come to terms with Harry’s metamorphosis by descending to his level. Taking their cue from his voracious appetite for self-denuding, they delve into the subterranean depositories of psychological complexity, trying to pinpoint the tectonic shift that tipped Harry over the edge.

Take your Occam’s razor out of its sheath, chaps. Look for simple answers first – most questions can be settled that way. Harry may be complicated, but he certainly isn’t complex. There’s nothing about him that’s hard to understand.

This reminds me of a story told in her memoirs by Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the sublime poet murdered by the Soviets. “We were wondering,” she wrote, “why N. says so many stupid things. But then we remembered he is a stupid man and stopped wondering.”

This is the key to the enigma that is Harry. He is an extremely stupid man.

Alas, something about us resists arriving at this conclusion whenever we hear people mouthing nonsense. We look for more involved explanations, usually those of a psychological nature. Or else we ascribe their failings to an educational lapse. If only they had read more books, they’d be as intelligent as anyone.

No, they wouldn’t. They’d only become a worse kind of idiot, a well-read one.

I don’t know what Harry’s IQ is, but I’m willing to bet it doesn’t reach three digits. Approximately half of all people reside in the same band, below the median IQ of about 100.

An interesting datum: the US army accepts no recruits with an IQ of 73 or lower – this even though it badly needs more personnel. The assumption, probably a correct one, is that those cursed with such low intelligence can’t be trained to function in any productive capacity.

That disqualifies about 10 per cent of all people. Just think: one in every 10 people you meet is too stupid to be even an infantry grunt. A harrowing thought, that.

Harry served in the British army, and I don’t know what its minimum IQ requirement is. Whatever it is, Captain Windsor must have shaded it. I doubt though that he overshot it by a wide margin.

Granted, IQ measures not intelligence, but the potential for developing it. Someone with an IQ of 120 may have realised 100 per cent of that potential, which would make him smarter than someone who has only utilised half his IQ of 140. Yet such qualifications only come into play with IQs that are average or above. Someone with an IQ of, say, 90 won’t become intelligent no matter how fully he explores his potential.

IQ measures problem-solving intelligence, which in practical life translates into an ability to think for oneself, to make correct decisions affecting one’s life. Hence it must take a high IQ to become a really good officer.

However, observation suggests that some, perhaps most, soldiers can coast on relatively low intelligence, at least until they are thrust into a situation that calls for instant life-or-death decisions. This stands to reason: much of the discipline that a civilian must find within himself is imposed from without in the army.

Even basic decisions, such as when to go to bed and get up, when and where to get one’s meals, what to do throughout the day and often what to say, are routinely made by one’s superiors. That’s why so many soldiers, even very bright ones, find transition to civilian life so hard: all of a sudden, they have to make every decision by themselves.

And if a soldier isn’t especially clever to begin with, he may look for a surrogate discipline, some other source of ready-made formulas determining his actions and pronouncements. This partly explains the ease with which Harry has adopted wokery – it’s an instant how-to guide, a compendium of simple solutions, glib explanations and made-up pieties.

A conscientious woker needn’t be intelligent – in fact, intelligence would prevent him from woking hard. The entire complexity of life can be instantly explained by invoking some sort of injustice, racial, economic, social or, for that matter, psychological. Childhood traumas are particularly productive: they can justify any dysfunction, with the extra benefit of making one look interesting in the eyes of one’s fellow wokers.

Harry’s wife acts as a sort of superior officer, a conduit for the external discipline to be internalised. When she speaks, Harry snaps to attention and salutes, if only inwardly. He knows authority when he sees it, and authority is what he craves.

One endearing quality of stupid people is that they don’t realise they are stupid. That’s why they blithely say things that an intelligent person wouldn’t utter on pain of disembowelment.

Harry is a case in point. The other day he perplexed even his American fans by admitting he can’t get his head around the First Amendment. “I don’t want to start going down the First Amendment route because that’s a huge subject and one which I don’t understand because I’ve only been here a short time,” Harry said.

Now what part of it doesn’t he understand? “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

This text wouldn’t challenge a person of even average intelligence, a level Harry manifestly can’t reach. The British Constitution, uncodified in a single document, does require some grounding in history and political philosophy to understand properly. The US constitution, on the other hand, can be easily understood by any literate person.

It’s not without its intricacies, and it takes a trained legal mind to work them out. But anyone who can read should be able to understand the Constitution on a basic, everyday level. Well, apparently not anyone.

Whether or not he returns to the royal fold, Harry will never want for anything material. But I fear for his sanity when he realises he is no longer the flavour of the month in America. And that month is drawing to an end.  

P.S. Road sign in West London: “Hammersmith Bridge is closed to traffic. Please choose an alternate route.” Doesn’t London’s government employ anyone who knows the difference between ‘alternate’ and ‘alternative’? Apparently not. But then, considering who heads it…

As founder, president and so far the only member of the Charles Martel Society for Diversity, I’m happy to see that London is making giant strides towards multiculturalism.

Yesterday a convoy of cars tastefully decorated with Palestinian flags drove through the Jewish areas of North London. Defying the naysayers who claim Muslims can’t be properly integrated, the drivers and passengers displayed an impeccable command of colloquial English.

They were yelling: “Fuck Jews… Fuck their mothers, fuck their daughters and show your support for Palestine. Rape their daughters and we send a message like that. Please do it for the poor children in Gaza.”

Given my lifelong commitment to diversity, I see this drive-by as proof that we can’t be locked in our shell of white supremacy. Immigrants, the more the merrier, enrich our lives by adding new sparkling facets to the diamond that is Britain.

Where the immigrants are from, what they believe and how they feel about the ambient civilisation is immaterial. We can all improve as persons by learning more about other cultures, especially those whose religion and philosophy of life may be different from ours.

Looking at the case in point, I’ve learned that raping Jewish girls in St John’s Wood, Finchley and Golders Green will alleviate the problems of the poor children in Gaza. I’m not sure about the exact mechanism of this interaction, but then I did tell you we don’t know enough about other cultures.

That I don’t understand the intricacies of interracial relationships, such as punitive rape, doesn’t mean that the chaps in those cars don’t either. They must have insights beyond the reach of white people, especially Jews and Christians, and that’s exactly why we need diversity.

However, humbled as I am to realise the depth of my ignorance, there is another thing I don’t understand. There I was, thinking that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism were two different things. Being opposed to Israel is one thing, hating Jews is another.

Now, thanks to those Muslim chaps, I’ve learned they are one and the same. Even though half of the world’s Jews live outside Israel, they are directly responsible for the actions of the other half. And even if Israel were to disappear, as the Muslims dearly hope, and all Jews lived in the diaspora, they’d still be held responsible for something or other.

What warms the cockles of my multicultural heart is how all progressive people are united in their hatred of Israel. And the more progressive they are, the more they hate it. This stands to reason. After all, hatred – of the West, Christianity, capitalism, white people, you name it – is the prime mover of progress.

Greta Thunberg, for example, has forayed outside her sphere of abiding interest to say that both sides should desist from violence. Transposing that statement to North London, those Muslim lads should try not to rape Jewish girls but, if they can’t help themselves, the girls shouldn’t scratch and bite the lads. Equity all around.

In a parallel development vindicating diversity, two Muslims attacked a rabbi near his Essex synagogue, putting him into hospital. A soothing message sent by the congregation to its members explains – irrefutably! – that: “From the description of how the incident started, it does not, at this point appear to be an antisemitic attack.”

Of course not, perish the thought. Neither, one has to add for the sake of balance, was it philo-Semitic. It was yet another blow (actually, quite a few blows) struck for diversity, a concept so dear to every progressive heart. 

However, one has to admit with chagrin that Essex police described the incident in less conciliatory terms: “It is believed that two teenagers stepped out in front of the victim’s vehicle whilst he was driving, they shouted at him and spoke in a derogatory way about his religion before going on to damage his car…” … and then the driver.

I’m happy to see that even those capitalist hirings didn’t claim the assault was racially motivated. There is no place for racism in our society, and this incident proves it.

Hostility to religion, on the other hand, is commendable – provided the religion is Judaism or Christianity. Hostility to Islam is racism; hostility to the two offensive creeds is either progress or diversity, take your pick. Actually, you don’t have to choose: progress and diversity are inseparable.

Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian demonstrations are continuing in London and throughout the countries of the erstwhile Christian persuasion. They assert the Allah-given right of those eternal refugees to respond to the eviction of three Arab families in the West Bank by firing thousands of rockets at Israel’s residential quarters.

Since the reaction seems to be out of proportion to the action, one has to believe that the said eviction wasn’t so much the reason as the pretext. After all, those thousands of rockets are like Rome – they weren’t built in a day. They were built and stored over months, with those eternal refugees waiting for yet another affront to multiculturalism to let the missiles fly.

Typically, the demonstrators deny – justly! – the right of Israel to respond in kind in an attempt to defend its people against the march of progress. Raping those Finchley girls would be a natural extension of that noble campaign, as a simulacrum of what the Muslims and other progressives would like to do to Israel and then to the West at large.

Those Muslim lads are right: wholesale rape would indeed send a message, if perhaps different from the one intended. Long live diversity, I say.

Evil, as personified by 150,000 anti-Western, anti-Semitic zealots, attacked decency yesterday. One of London’s best neighbourhoods was overrun, paying for its sin of housing the Israeli embassy.

Pro-Hamas fanatics led by Jeremy Corbyn staged an obscene show organised by various Muslim groups and our own Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, that KGB front of long standing.

Since Russia has been the only country to use radioactive weapons since 1945, when Putin’s agents poisoned Litvinenko with polonium in 2006, it wasn’t immediately obvious exactly what was the CND’s dog in the on-going fight. But all subversive causes and organisations are united.

For example, as the footballers ‘took the knee’ before a match the other day, the commentator said that was a gesture of protest against “inequality and social injustice”. I thought it was only racism that called for genuflection, but never mind the cause – feel the animus against the West.

As the Met tried in vain to disperse the largely Muslim crowd, missiles were thrown, and nine police officers were injured.

According to Jeremy Corbyn, under whose inspiring leadership the Labour Party no longer bothered to conceal its anti-Semitism, that was a way of showing “succour, comfort and support” for Hamas. Israel, which is being attacked with thousands of rockets aimed at the residential areas of its cities clearly doesn’t qualify for any such sympathy.

Boris Johnson called for both sides to “step back from the brink” and “show restraint”. That leaves me, for one, happy that his idol Churchill didn’t display the same even-handedness when Luftwaffe bombs rained on London the way Hamas rockets are raining on Tel Aviv.

The Met arrested 13 people in all, four of them for breaching the Health Protection Regulations. If the cops felt the kaffiyeh offered insufficient defence against Covid, they should have arrested Corbyn too who wasn’t wearing even such a flimsy barrier to the contagion.

As to the scaling of buildings, climbing on traffic lights and the gates of Kensington Palace, setting off fireworks and smoke bombs, and trying to smash the gate leading to Kensington Garden Road (aka Embassy Row), those peccadilloes were no grounds for arrest. They didn’t kill anyone, did they? So the demonstration was wholesomely peaceful.

Identical actions paralysed other cities in Britain and elsewhere. Since competence is laudable wherever it’s found, one must compliment the organisers for their skill at coordinating international mayhem. If only those Palestinian darlings displayed similar proficiency at creating a decent life for themselves, perhaps they wouldn’t stay so downtrodden for three generations.

As it is, while the Israelis have turned an arid desert into a blossoming garden, those eternal refugees are doing exactly the opposite on their side of the fence. Hatred of Jews is a time-honoured emotion, but it’s useless when it comes to any productive activity.

Meanwhile, Israeli bombardment brought down the office tower in Gaza that houses Al Jazeera and the AP news agency, among other media outlets.

According to a spokesman for the Israeli Defence Forces, “The building contained civilian media offices, which the Hamas terror organization hides behind and uses as human shields. The Hamas terror organisation deliberately places military targets at the heart of densely populated civilian areas in the Gaza Strip.”

The agencies affected outrage, saying that only sheer luck prevented fatalities among journalists. They neglected to mention that luck was augmented by the warning the IDF had issued an hour before the strike.

No such warnings come from Hamas whose rockets, fired from behind schools, hospitals, residential and office buildings, are killing, as they are supposed to, Israeli civilians.

Yet no international protests are heard, no one tries to storm the missions of Arab countries or the Palestinian representatives. And only an American veto has prevented the UN (as in UNwestern) from passing another anti-Israel resolution.

Still, I sympathise with our protesters, including Jeremy Corbyn. That’s why I think we should do everything we can to ease their passage to Gaza, where they can put their flaming conscience in the way of Israel’s fire.

P.S. At the end of yesterday’s FA Cup final, the victorious Leicester players unfurled a Palestinian flag. Take the cup away from them, I suggest, and tell them next time to stick to kicking footballs and, if they must, their opponents.

The football commentator wanted to say “the importance of this goal couldn’t be overestimated”. What came out of his mouth was “the enormity of this goal couldn’t be underestimated”.

In other words, the goal was so revolting and inconsequential that the team ought to have been penalised for scoring it.

Yes, fine, I could make allowances for our comprehensive education and guess what he was trying to say. In that context, I would probably have guessed right.

But there are many other contexts in which guesswork could lead to a misunderstanding or even danger. For example, a man may hurt himself and others if he thinks inflammable means in no risk of conflagration. Or he could be embarrassed if he asks his colleague to apprise (rather than appraise) him and, instead of getting the progress report he expects, he hears that his management skills aren’t up to scratch.

The other day a chap at my club used the word meretricious when he meant meritorious. Had he said, for example, all show, no substance, the communication would have been complete. As it was, his attempt to sound ‘posh’ left me guessing which of the antonymous derivatives of the Latin merere he meant. Either one could have fit the context.

Now, if we accept that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, then we can extrapolate ever so slightly and agree that it isn’t just weapons but also words that must be licensed. After all, the good book says a word came before everything else, including weapons.

Anyone who disagrees must insist, illogically, that a handyman who fixes a leaky tap must be legally accredited to provide that service, whereas, say, a paramedic is free to say acute when he means chronic (a widespread error). Surely a little drip in the plumbing isn’t as fraught with danger as a confusion between medical antonyms?

For a communication to take place, words must have the same meaning for everybody. That’s why we have dictionaries, those thick books telling us what words mean. If the meaning one wishes to attach to a word diverges from the dictionary definition, a game of Chinese whispers is likely to arise.

Someone who says he is bemused when he means amused vandalises communication, thereby disconnecting people from one another – with potentially disastrous social consequences. Rather than forming a society, people run the risk of becoming deracinated, asocial individuals punished by God.

After all, in God’s eyes erecting “a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven” with the subsequent disintegration of language was severe punishment: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

But don’t despair: help is on the way, and Babel will not prevail. All you have to do is petition your MP (or congressman, if you are American) to put forth a bill based on my modest proposal. Here it is: Every adult, especially if his speech often finds itself in the public domain, must be licensed to use a specific level of vocabulary.

The levels would depend on the frequency of usage. According to the Oxford Dictionary, there are 171,146 words commonly used in English. Yet some of them are used more commonly than others. For example, soon is comfortably within the first 1,000 most frequently used words, while saliency is just outside the top 45,000.

Hence I propose four frequency bands, with each requiring its own licence. The first band should include words ranked within the top 2,000; the second, those in the top 10,000; the third, those in the top 30,000; and the fourth, unlimited.

Misusing words one isn’t licensed to utter should be punishable by incrementally escalating fines. These may or may not be means-tested – I haven’t really worked out every detail yet. Actually, since I dislike the very notion of means-tested fines, perhaps making the punishment commensurate with the size of the audience would be fairer.

I readily admit that this proposal is somewhat radical. But radical is better than impossible, which is the only other option: getting a system of education that doesn’t churn out generation after generation of ignoramuses. You know, the kind Britain used to have before the arrival of progress in the 1960s.

Israel, the only civilised country in the Middle East, has since Monday been hit by 1,600 rockets fired by Hamas savages.

You see, when you express this situation in such simple terms, it sheds all its superfluous baggage. Granted, simple runs the risk of being simplistic, and one may argue that Islamic civilisation has a rich heritage too.

It has, but it’s a very distant heritage. Over the past 500 years (I’m being generous here), Islam has created nothing but mayhem. The whole Muslim world has produced 10 Nobel Prizes, of which six are of the meaningless peace variety. By contrast, Trinity, Cambridge, just one college in one Western university, boasts 34, all of them for science.

As to other aspects of civilisation, the less said about them, the better. All in all, if we limit ourselves to the present and not-so-distant past, Israel is indeed the only civilised oasis in a region dominated by various stages of barbarism.

Yet even within the vast desert of Muslim ignorance and backwardness, the so-called Palestinians take the pita (‘so-called’ because the way the term is used, one might think Israelis aren’t Palestinians). Those eternal refugees are consumed with malice, hatred and fanaticism, neglecting more useful and productive emotions.

Anyway, how many generations does it take for refugees to stop being refugees? I’ve got news for the ‘Palestinians’: millions of people (including yours truly) don’t live in the countries of their birth. Search a few generations back, and that number will grow to hundreds of millions of those who can trace their roots to foreign lands.

And yet we all, including those who were driven out of their countries against their will, somehow manage to make a life for ourselves. Some shed most of their heritage, some keep more of it – some even retain ethnic rancour whose origin goes back centuries. But no one stays a refugee for three generations, the way the ‘Palestinians’ have.

Some Arab states, notably Jordan and Lebanon, did the charitable thing and allowed ‘Palestinians’ to settle in their countries. By way of gratitude, those wild-eyed maniacs started civil wars, reducing Jordan and especially Lebanon to a charnel house.

Nothing but their own savagery prevents the ‘Palestinians’ from acquiring their own state. All they have to do is acknowledge Israel’s right to exist and abandon their murderous urge to kill every Jew in the region (and preferably beyond). But they’ve always refused to make even such elementary concessions. And now that Gaza and the West Bank have been taken over by Hamas terrorists, violence is all the ‘Palestinians’ are committed to.

Violence is what they are perpetrating now, with those rockets whose provenance isn’t hard to trace. Both Putin and his foreign minister Lavrov are regularly photographed canoodling with Hamas chieftains, and Russia is one of the few countries that have refused to recognise that Hamas is an extremist and terrorist organisation. The ruling junta has a soft spot for terrorists, doubtless sensing spiritual kinship.

If Russia provides tangible support for Hamas, Western ‘liberals’ keep it afloat by proliferating pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli propaganda, with moral equivalence as its leitmotif. Thus both parties are being asked to exercise restraint during the current exchange of fire.

At the same time, the ‘liberal’ media never tire of pointing out that the ‘Palestinian’ civilian population is suffering the greater casualties. There you go then, goes the refrain. Those Israelis are bullying their ‘Palestinian’ victims.

The difference between the Israelis and the other lot is that the former are civilised and the latter are savages – and ideologised savages at that. To Israel, the people are the end; to any ideology, including Hamas, they are the means.

Every Israeli killed is the country’s tragedy. Every ‘Palestinian’ killed is Hamas’s propaganda tool. That’s why those rocket sites are placed close to hospitals, schools and tower blocks – sometimes even on the roofs of those buildings.

The Israelis are doing their best trying to avoid inflicting civilian casualties by delivering precision strikes against rocket sites and terrorist leaders. Unfortunately, some civilian casualties can’t be avoided because Hamas does nothing to protect its non-combatants. Its own strategy is to target residential areas indiscriminately, and only the extensive defensive measures taken by the Israelis are keeping the body count down.

What Hamas is doing is an extension of Islam’s mission pursued over the past 1,400 years. Muslims see their conflict with the West as a clash of civilisations, a mortal struggle in which only one side can be left standing. Yet Western ‘liberals’ refuse to accept the situation on those terms.

They too hate Western civilisation, with its Judaeo-Christian origin and hence emphasis on individual freedom. Proceeding from the old adage of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”, they see any Third World demagogues and terrorists as their spiritual brethren, whose desiderata (if not necessarily their methods) they share and whose enemies they loathe.

Hamas and the ‘Palestinians’ qualify as spiritual brethren, while Israel, with its Western civilisation, amply qualifies as the enemy. Add to this a healthy dose of run-of-the-mill anti-Semitism, and it’s clear whose side the ‘liberals’ are on.

This animus is camouflaged with appeals to even-handedness and mutual restraint. Moral equivalence all around.

Yet as the founder, president and so far the only member of the Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism, I maintain that there is no equivalence, moral or otherwise, between civilisation and barbarism. The former must triumph in Israel if it’s to survive anywhere.