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Mea maxima culpa, I had my doubts on that score. Can you blame me?

Pope Francis has frequently championed new-fangled secular causes that not only have nothing to do with Christianity, but are inimical to it. Thereby he stayed on the right side of modernity but – in my respectful but firm view – on the wrong side of his remit.

An institution rooted in eternity has to be conservative by definition, if only because modernity is chiefly animated by hostility to religion. When the Vicar of Christ (or, for that matter, any priest) starts mouthing faddish leftie shibboleths, he lets his side down – theologically, philosophically, historically and politically.

Such a man fails to realise that the culture of share-care-be-aware represents a ghastly caricature, indeed denial, of Christian virtues. Nor does he grasp the derivative aspects of Christian doctrine that could serve even our daily lives better than any ‘liberal’ profanation. The Church dogma trumps dogmatic wokery every time.

For example, conservatives who abhor the uncontrollable expansion of the central state should invoke the principle behind the Church structure: subsidiarity, devolving power to the lowest sensible level. This works well for the Church, and, whenever a secular state applies this principle, it works a treat there as well.

Pope Francis has been assiduously trying to adapt the Church dogma to that of the modern liberal (actually, anti-liberal) ethos, which has provoked my occasional criticism. So much happier I am today to see that His Holiness has finally pitted the Church against the tyranny of modernity.

He decreed the other day that the Church cannot bless homosexual unions because “God cannot bless sin”. By blessing such unions, the Church would “approve and encourage a choice and a way of life that cannot be recognised as objectively ordered to the revealed plans of God”.

Stoutly spoken, and this isn’t just a restatement of the Catholic moral teaching. This is a reminder of the thin lines separating licence from decadence and decadence from degeneracy. Firmly lodged in history, the Church is aware of the gruesome fate suffered by societies that crossed those lines, or indeed even approached them.

It’s also a reminder of the transcendent value of absolute morality impervious to current appetites. Morality can’t zigzag in the wake of kaleidoscopically changing fads. If it does, it eventually becomes first immoral and then amoral.

As Pope Benedict XVI put it, “’A century ago, anyone would have thought it absurd to talk about homosexual marriage.” And his predecessor, John Paul II, found even stronger words in 2003: “The Church teaches that respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behaviour or to legal recognition of homosexual unions… [because that would mean] the approval of deviant behaviour”. 

That Pope Francis now toes the same line is quite a radical departure from his earlier statements on the same subject. For example, in 2019 he advocated a “civil union law”, and last year he added that: “Homosexual people have the right to be in a family… they are children of God”. 

The contrast is stark between the feelings underlying those statements and his current position, with His Holiness suggesting that any law equating same-sex relationships with marriages would be “an anthropological regression”.

The conservative in me rejoices, while the cynic wonders what prompted such a sharp about-face within such a short time. Usually, people of the Pope’s venerable age don’t change their views drastically, or at least take much longer to do so. Could it be that he succumbed to the pressure exerted by conservative cardinals?

However, the conservative is telling the cynic to shut up. Let’s just savour the moment and stop asking frivolous questions, along the lines of “Is the Pope Catholic?”. Of course, he is. Well done, Your Holiness – long may this continue.   

One would think that the armed forces are there to fight battles other than those of gender equality.

After all, an army is the least egalitarian institution one could imagine. An extra star on the collar entitles a man to issue peremptory orders that must be obeyed on pain of severe punishment.

And the US army is even less egalitarian than its British counterpart. Since the US officer corps has no tradition of class, the army accentuates privileges of rank. Thus, if British officers often address their superiors by Christian name off-duty and sometimes even on, their American colleagues stick to the formal ‘sir’ in most situations.

Yet these days no institution can blow away the smokescreen of the zeitgeist. And the zeitgeist issues its orders with Pauline authority: there is neither male nor female, neither gay nor straight, neither original nor trans, for ye are all one in wokery.

The US army fought a rearguard action against such frontal attacks, but it was outgunned. It has merely managed to win a skirmish against transsexuals by allowing them to serve only in their original, aka real, sex.

But all other battles have been lost. In 2011 President O’Bummer pushed through a law allowing open homosexuals to serve. And in 2016 the first women donned the uniform of the US infantry.

Women now make up 14 per cent of US personnel on active duty – and more power to them, says the feminist in me. Alas, when it comes to physical fitness, women tend to have less power.

Nevertheless, logic demands that all soldiers irrespective of sex meet the same minimum requirements of fitness. Hence the US army introduced the gender-neutral Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT).

Again, the egalitarian in me applauds. If we have gender-neutral public lavatories, surely everything should go gender-neutral – including, and I can’t stress this enough, the women’s dressing room at my tennis club.

But here’s the snag: God still makes men stronger and faster than women. That’s why 65 per cent of female soldiers fail ACFT, against a mere 10 per cent of men. This affects promotion prospects, putting women at a distinct disadvantage.

Given the current climate, such blatant discrimination simply won’t do. Hence the army is considering scrapping the same ACFT for all, replacing it with separate tests for men and women. This sort of thing works in sports, where men and women don’t compete together (unless the men claim to be women). But in the army?

To begin with, it’s not immediately obvious why the US army needs women in the first place. Unlike, say, Israel, America has plenty of able-bodied men to staff her 200,000-strong army.

Many experts believe that women can slow down a unit because their presence activates men’s chivalry, dormant though it nowadays may be. Thus a male soldier is more likely to come back for a wounded woman than for a man. Under some circumstances, such noble instincts may endanger the mission or even the unit.

Also, a woman taken prisoner may well be raped, which fate is less likely to befall a male GI. Thus a frontline female soldier faces greater risks, which offends my sense of fairness.  

However, accepting that the US military can’t survive without going unisex, surely all soldiers have to be able to satisfy the minimum requirements of fitness, both physical and mental? Unlike with sex, here the choice is strictly binary: either such minimum standards are essential or they aren’t.

Fair enough, with modern warfare increasingly resembling computer games, not all army jobs have to be physically arduous. A woman is as capable as a man to operate a PlayStation console even if she can’t run as fast.

It would be fine to lower the required physical standards strictly for such jobs. Yet that would still make many other branches of service off limits for many women, which runs against the grain of modern sensibilities.

Hence the planned ACFT streaming, regardless of the branch of service. Woke worthiness trumps combat readiness, which is cloud cuckoo land.

I wonder if female soldiers will in due course be allowed to wear stiletto heels on duty, as Italian policewomen already are. We can’t force female persons to wear men’s clothes, can we now?

American Vogue has correctly castigated the word niggling, as in ***gling worry, for being racist in general and towards Meghan Markle in particular.

As a lifelong champion of propriety, I agree wholeheartedly: underprivileged people like Meghan have suffered enough discrimination over the past several millennia to be exposed to such verbal abuse. Even when the affront is only phonetic and not semantic, it wounds just as grievously.

That’s why I’m amazed that this campaign against unconscious bias expressed through phonetic bigotry has taken so long to gather speed. After all, it was 22 years ago that an American official got in trouble for using the word niggardly. One would think that’s enough time for all those beastly words to have been expurgated from public discourse. Oh well, better late than never.

As Her Majesty’s subject, I’m proud that Hamish Bowles, the man who renewed this crusade for phonetic decency, is himself British, even though he chose an American magazine as his forum. After all, the language is called English, not American. Hence it behoves Britons to steer it into the harbour of moral goodness.

I wish I had initiated this noble effort. As it is, all I can do is jump on the bandwagon, even at the risk of breaking a leg.

To begin with, no campaign can succeed without a slogan. In this case, I propose ‘Down with Homonyms, Homophones and Other Homos…’ Oops, you know how it is. You put something down on paper and then realise how dreadful it sounds. Took me a second to recognise that my proposed motto is blatantly (if inadvertently!) homophobic.

But here’s the silver lining to that cloud: it has dawned on me that it’s not just words containing nig or neg that can cause lacerating offence, but also those starting with homo- and paedo- (or ped-).

It’ll take weeks of painstaking effort to compile an exhaustive, and exhausting, list of taboo words. The best I can hope to do in a short piece is signpost the path to the ultimate verbal virtue. In this spirit, here’s my modest contribution.

The N-words, in addition to ***gling and ***gardly: ***ate, ***ative, de***grate, ab***ate, ***ht (and its derivatives such as ***htgown), ***ligible, ***otiate, e***ma. In parallel with compiling this glossary, I’m contacting African officials about new geographical designations for ***eria and ***er, those guaranteed not to upset Meghan.

The H-words, in addition to those mentioned: ****geneous, ****logy, and so forth. The original word ****sexual, now being laudably replaced with the newly correct queer, should also be banished for stylistic incongruity. Combining Greek and Latin in the same word is grating on an ear as sensitive as mine.

The P-words to be proscribed: ***iatrician, ***estal, ***al, ex***ition, ***estrian, ex***ience, ***icure – well, you get the gist.

I could, probably should, have compiled a much longer list, but time is running short. I must go and toss into the bonfire my copies of Gone with the Wind, Huckleberry Finn and Collected Works of William Shakespeare (I haven’t got a separate copy of Othello).

Anyway, by now you know enough to carry on without me. If you get stuck, contact Hamish Bowles, Anna Wintour or Meghan Markle.

PS: The Times describes pop ‘multi-instrumentalist’ Jacob Collier as a “Londoner, who has been compared to Mozart and Prince”. No doubt Mozart would have felt honoured to be mentioned side by side with Messrs Collier and Prince. I’m only sorry for another multi-instrumentalist, JS Bach, who would have felt left out. 

A fortnight ago, a young woman, Sarah Everard, spent an evening at a friend’s house in Clapham, South London.

Late at night she walked home to Brixton, further south. Anyone familiar with London could have warned her that making that journey on foot was all her life was worth.

Alas, no one did, and Sarah was abducted and killed. The suspect, a police officer with a history of flashing women in public, was arrested.

Now imagine you’re a member of the House of Lords, up on your feet to respond to that tragic event. You realise that merely expressing outrage and delivering the requisite litany of “our thoughts and prayers go to…” won’t be enough.

You must come up with a bill outlining measures that would make even iffy parts of town safer. What would you propose? What would any sane person propose?

You’d probably say we need more cops on the beat. Then perhaps you might suggest that policemen be vetted more carefully, to make sure they prevent crimes rather than committing them. Nor would it be a bad idea to increase both conviction rates and prison sentences, making the law more feared and respected. It would also be advisable to remind people, men as well as women, that they should take extra care when walking through certain neighbourhoods at night.

Is that all you can come up with? This only goes to show you are a misogynist global-warming denier, and probably also a homophobe, sexist, transphobe, crypto-rapist and fascist.

The Green peer Baroness Jones is none of those things, but then neither is she sane. That’s why, instead of the aforementioned measures, she proposed a blanket curfew keeping all men off the streets after 6 pm. “I feel,” she said, “this would make women a lot safer, and discrimination of all kinds would be lessened.” 

All men, Lady Jones? Even tweedy sixtyish gentlemen going home after dinner at a Pall Mall club? And all kinds of discrimination? How about discrimination between sanity and lunacy? That too, by the sound of it.

A mere couple of decades ago such daring proposals were seldom heard outside lunatic asylums. However, now those institutions are under new management, and their boundaries have expanded over the whole country.

Hence crazy subversive ideas, solely designed to sever all ties of tradition, decency and sanity holding society together, are in the mainstream of ‘progressive’ thought. As such, they can be seriously – often solely – discussed in the Mother of All Parliaments, most media and at smart parties in the parts of London considerably better than Brixton or even Clapham.

Some such ideas make it into laws, some don’t, but they all have a steadily erosive effect. Yesterday’s lunacy becomes today’s eccentricity and tomorrow’s norm. All certitudes get inverted, all ties snipped one by one. Society is cast adrift, whirled around uncontrollably in the maelstrom of hot air.

This job is done by most people with a public voice, though their number is hard to assess. I’d be surprised if there were more than a few hundred, perhaps a thousand or two, but they are all good at wielding the knife. A nick here, a notch there, a chop elsewhere, and suddenly there’s no way back. Our civilisation dies by a thousand… well, cuts.

This strategy was tersely worded in ancient times: divide et impera – divide and conquer. Facing solid opposition, turn its members against one another, making sure friends and allies become implacable enemies. That scheme is clearly discernible in the workings of our vociferous minority.

Its members systematically sow discord between the sexes, rending families asunder and destroying the very concept of a family.

They radicalise racial rancour, fomenting unrest and violence.

They cut society off its history by portraying it as nothing but a series of heinous crimes.

They hack away at education, producing generations of youngsters well-versed in the delights of transsexuality and the use of condoms, but incapable of thinking soundly or even reading fluently.

They cut language to pieces. Thus ‘liberal’ gets to mean tyrannical; ‘liberty’, cultural and intellectual bondage; ‘social justice’, social injustice; ‘progressive’, subversive. I call this semantic vandalism glossocracy, controlling thought by controlling language.

Underpinning all these efforts is the slogan of equality for all – except of course for the vociferous minority lording it over everybody.

Baroness Jones’s diatribe is part of an important prong of this multifarious offensive: alienating the sexes. Arguing against her specific proposal is pointless – it’s like arguing against one of the weapons brandished to kill you.

If one were so inclined, one could mention that two thirds of the people murdered in London are men, not women. Moreover, three-quarters of the female victims are killed not by stray rapists, but by members of the same household.

But, as I say, there’s no point. Baroness Jones didn’t really mean that the entire male population of London should go into a lockdown. She was simply screaming hatred for everything that makes Britain British, Western, civilised or indeed sane.

Some people find it tempting to ascribe such outbursts to a dastardly cabal staffed with members of whatever group one finds objectionable: the Illuminati, Jews, Masons, Judaeo-Masons, the Rothschilds, social media billionaires, the Bilderberg Society, the Trilateral Commission, you name it.

But such temptations ought to be resisted. Conspiracies, real like communism or imaginary like so many others, only slake the natural human thirst for simple explanations.

Alas, those seeking such simplicity end up slitting their intellectual throats with Occam’s razor. The real problem lies much deeper than a smoky cellar in which evildoers concoct their knavish tricks.

Every civilisation in history has always had its share of professional malcontents, which isn’t always a bad thing. Even as competition makes an economy stronger, malcontents and their rants may add focus to society, helping it reassess itself, its values and priorities, making it better and stronger as a result.

However, a funny thing happened on the way to modernity: some three centuries ago the malcontents began to gain power at the expense of the whole Western civilisation. Their eyes got wider, their voices louder, their aims loftier.

They began to smell not just political victory, but an existential one. They realised they could destroy not only old politics, but also the old religion, old philosophies, old morality – old just about everything. These could be replaced with… what exactly?

The newly empowered malcontents weren’t unduly bothered by such details. They were electrons, not positrons. Their charge was negative, not positive. Destruction was their primary objective, with creation strictly secondary or even tertiary.

Sometimes they wielded an axe, sometimes a knife, sometimes a chisel, but each tool was handled with consummate expertise. Step by step, farfetched hypotheses became lapidary facts, appetites became rights, truths became lies and vice versa.

And then the snowball effect kicked in. More and more people began to listen and nod. Upholding the old certitudes was becoming mildly embarrassing, infra dig, not quite the done thing. Mocking those who did so anyway became a matter of kneejerk reflex, not serious, sound or even sane argument.

Hence Baroness Jones received support from all the customary quarters.

Such as the Scottish independence fanatic Nicola Sturgeon, who said: “there will be few – if any – women who don’t completely understand and identify with this”. If that’s true, I count myself lucky being married to one of the few. (Parenthetically, for the benefit of the uninitiated, what Scottish independence means to Nicola is leaving the UK and joining the EU.)

Or MP Diane Abbott, who wrote: “Even after all these years if I am out late at night on an isolated street & I hear a man’s footsteps behind me I automatically cross the road.” If it’s my steps, Diane, you should run, not just cross the road. 

Or Kelechi Okafor, some kind of actress (see photograph above), who more or less claimed it was Piers Morgan what done it, by whipping up “socially encouraged misogyny” through his “incessant rants about Meghan Markle.”

It’s easy to dismiss such people as stupid, woke ideologues. But it’s much easier for them to dismiss the few remaining holdouts. It’s Jones and her ilk who have real, and growing, power. They are the ones who wield the knife, administering death by a thousand… well, cuts.

A disclaimer is in order: I’m not Piers Morgan’s greatest fan. This though he lives in my general neighbourhood.

But today I celebrate Piers as a martyr to a noble cause. Responding to the Sussexes’ emetic TV stunt, he called Meghan a liar, almost in as many words. Specifically, he called her the “Pinocchio Princess”, making me have another look at recent photos to make sure Meghan’s nose isn’t growing pari passu with her stomach.

Piers refused to believe any of Meghan’s claims, including the tearjerker about her getting a cold shoulder from a senior royal whom she had asked for help with her “mental problems.”

A tip to Meghan: next time you have a medical problem, consult a doctor, not a royal. Horses for courses and all that.

Then I suspect Meghan’s problem wasn’t medical but existential, of the kind that keeps almost 150,000 American shrinks in business. Encouraged by the deafening din of psychobabble, modern people, especially Americans, delve deep into their own psyche.

Everything they find there has to be medicalised or, to be more exact, psychobabbled. Hence Americans, especially those in big cities, fluently pepper their speech with terms borrowed from the Fraud & Junk jargon. Everybody is supposed to have at least one complex (Oedipal for preference), sublimate his libido, and wonder how his id relates to his ego and super-ego.

Meghan didn’t divulge the name of the insensitive royal, but I can just hear how, say, Prince Philip would have reacted to such nonsense: “Nothing a stiff whisky won’t fix, dear, what?”

Then of course Piers may be right in refusing to believe such a conflict even took place. “I’m sorry, I don’t believe a word she said, Meghan Markle,” he fumed. “I wouldn’t believe it if she read me a weather report.”

This brings to mind what the writer Mary McCarthy said of another writer, Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” This was obviously a hyperbole if taken literally. But the point was valid nonetheless: Hellman was a communist and therefore a liar.

Meghan is a woke round peg who found herself in a square conservative hole and set out to file away its angles by hook or, preferably, by crook. In addition, being a leftie B-actress rising like scum to the top of the Hollywood mire, I’m sure Meghan’s concept of truth is anything that fits her immediate purpose.

I agree with Piers, for once in my life: Meghan lied in everything she said about the royals – even in things that may be factually correct. One can lie in all sorts of ways: by omission, deception, spin, intonation, gesture, even facial expression.

For example, I could say that John washed his three-year-old daughter in the bathtub. Then I could wink and add: “Know what I mean?” That way I’ve just lied about John being a paedophile without uttering a single word that wasn’t factually true.

Naturally, our woke majority couldn’t let the offensive hack get away with such an affront to one of its heroines. ITV received 41,000 indignant complaints, and Piers Morgan lost his lucrative job as host of the chat show Good Morning Britain.

If such unimpeachable remarks caused a wave of vitriol in a generally royalist Britain, you can imagine the pukestorm stirred up in America where a republic cum democracy run riot is an article of fervent faith – especially among those who are unaware of the difference between a democracy and a republic.

Thus Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, praised Meghan unreservedly: “For anyone to come forward and speak about their own struggles with mental health and tell their own personal story, that takes courage,” she said. “That’s certainly something the president believes.”

Of course he does, dear girl, of course he does. As he doubtless believes in following a singular antecedent with a plural pronoun. Why, he even believes that Neil Kinnock is an orator worth plagiarising.

And Hilary Clinton found the interview “heart-rending to watch”, adding that “every institution has got to make more space and acceptance for young people coming up, particularly young women, who should not be forced into a mould that is no longer relevant, not only for them, but for our society.”

You understand that people like Hilary speak not semantically, but semiotically. They don’t say things that must somehow add up – they send signals of woke virtue. Hence it doesn’t matter to Hilary that what she said is utter gibberish.

For example, if by “our society” she means the US, then yes, the British monarchy is indeed “no longer relevant”. But Meghan married not a corrupt Arkansas governor, but a silly British prince, a member of the institution not only relevant in his country, but vital to it.

Hilary’s heart wasn’t only rent, but also broken. She found it “heart-breaking” that Meghan wasn’t “fully embraced” by “the permanent bureaucracy that surrounds the royal family…”. Takes two to tango, I’d say. Surely even Hilary can’t possibly think that Meghan “fully embraced” the royal family?

My sympathies to Piers Morgan. I hope he’ll find another job soon – certainly sooner than whoever accused him will find another brain.

If I were to single out the most soul-destroying offshoot of post-Enlightenment modernity, universal egotism would spring to mind first.

Remove faith in the absolute authority infinitely higher than oneself, and one’s own feelings and thoughts assume an inordinate importance. Eventually they’ll become all that remains. The baser the feelings, and the punier the thoughts, the likelier such a spiritual death.

This brings me to Harry, his mother and his wife.

Diana had little intelligence, but plenty of cunning; no morality, but a talent for faking eyelash-flapping innocence; no talents, but boundless ambition; no ability to influence but an endless capacity to manipulate.

In short, she was the quintessential modern woman with her head lodged deep in her own shapely rump. As such, she was the worst person to be admitted into a family whose raison d’être is to serve public good.

Yet Meghan has matched Diana in the harm she has done to the royal family. British monarchy, the country’s constitutional linchpin, has shown enough sturdiness to resist assorted emperors, führers and kaisers. But it seems weak in the face of two self-serving nonentities with a knack for sanctimonious demagoguery.

(I shan’t bore you with the details of the revolting TV stunt perpetrated by the Sussexes. Over the past couple of days, the papers and airwaves have been filled to bursting with luridly detailed accounts, making any more reminders redundant.)

In a way, Diana’s transgressions were worse than Meghan’s. After all, she was raised in an aristocratic English family that had served the Crown for centuries. Hence she had no excuse of ignorance – she couldn’t possibly have been unaware of the singular significance of the institution she tried to hurt.

Meghan has such an excuse, but it’s a lame one. Grasping the constitutional aspects of British monarchy, along with its rituals and protocols, isn’t astrophysics. Even a Hollywood airhead should be able to do so, with a little application.

But application was never forthcoming. Meghan saw her role in England as a grander equivalent of her role in Suits: as one of the stars of the show.

Once she got there, her Hollywood instincts told her she now could do as she pleased. She was a star with proven box-office appeal, and the show was to propel her to an even greater stardom. No one could stop her now – not directors, co-stars or, in this case, senior royals.

Meghan’s personal qualities apart, her American background also worked against her. Since British monarchy is no longer a threat, Americans don’t hate it now as they used to. They just don’t get it (like all generalisations, this one allows for exceptions).

I’ve heard many Americans expand on our monarchy with benign condescension. They see it as a Ye Olde England theme park, a sort of Disneyland London to match Disneyland Paris.

Americans find it hard to understand the monarch’s significance to the constitution – in fact, they find it hard to realise that Britain has one. After all, a few dozen revolutionaries never got together to write down what the country is supposed to be all about.

Much less are they capable of understanding the intricate ganglion of love, veneration and historical memories activating the synapses of the British psyche whenever the subject of the monarchy comes up (again, notable exceptions aside). It’s no coincidence that, Diana apart, the greatest damage to the House of Windsor has been done by two American women of dubious past who married into the family.

Americans prize the rugged individualism of a self-made man more than the British do. That’s fine, provided it’s mitigated by the community spirit that used to come from faith. In its absence, a self-made man’s job is never quite finished.

He lays a foundation of self-importance, tops it with a floor of ambition, another of energy and leaves it at that. The edifice of his ego is complete. All else is mere furniture, to be put in or, if necessary, removed.

If that type is widespread in the country at large, it’s predominant in Hollywood. Every year thousands of young girls descend on Los Angeles with dreams of stardom and a readiness to claw their way to the top, through human flesh if necessary.

Some have genuine talent, but they are few. Most of the others end up as waitresses, call girls or pole dancers. In between those groups are girls like Meghan, who manage to compensate for their modest thespian talents with hypertrophied ambition.

They end up as B-actresses, a type as unsuited as call girls or pole dancers to the selfless service demanded of the British royals. Yet Meghan is proud of having achieved much in a dog-eat-dog Hollywood by her own efforts (I shan’t speculate about their nature).

That added another layer to her sense of solipsistic self-importance. She simply couldn’t get her head around the fact that she no longer mattered as an individual. A British princess isn’t one first and foremost. She is the personification of her institutional status, a loyal servant to the family and through it to the country.

If Diana couldn’t understand that despite her background, Meghan can’t understand it because of hers. Both women felt slighted, their whole concept of the world and their place in it was turned upside down. Spiteful as they were, they set out to take revenge, and both chose a similar path.

They went on TV to tug on the heartstrings of the silly public, the only kind susceptible to such puppetry. Those poor people were regaled with stories of coldblooded royals crushing the newcomer’s ego with grotesque demands and refusal to heed their hysterical shrieks of I WANT TO BE ME!.

Both women talked about suicidal tendencies, with Diana adding emetic allusions to bulimia and self-harm. Meghan complained about having to learn how to curtsy, which must have taxed her acting skills no end.

She was crushed by her title and, self-refutingly, by her son Archie being denied one. If royal titles weigh so heavy on one’s shoulders, she should be happy that her son will be spared such crushing pressures. (Actually, Archie is already an earl, set to become a duke in due course, although not an HRH.)

And then Meghan hit the royal family with the most damning accusation known to modernity, that of racism. When she was pregnant, one unspecified royal wondered what colour Meghan’s child would be.

This question doesn’t strike me as ipso facto racist. Actually, it’s quite interesting, involving as it does the old wives’ tales of throwbacks. In fact, the chances of a child to be darker than the darker one of his parents are one in millions. It’s conceivable that the offending royal didn’t know that and was genuinely curious.

What’s not conceivable is that anyone in that family could be openly racist. As head of the Commonwealth, the Queen has many black-skinned subjects. Hence, even assuming for the sake of argument that a senior royal harbours racist sentiments, expressing them would be a political faux pas the likes of which none of them has ever made.

Yet Meghan knows how to appeal to woke sensibilities. Hence her teary complaints about her and Archie being discriminated against on racial grounds.

Now, our royals aren’t first-rate intellectuals, nor are they expected to be. Some of them are intelligent, some less so. But Harry stands out among them by being downright dumb – sufficiently so to give credence to the rumours of his questionable birth.

But whoever his real father was, Diana was definitely his mother. She was the tree and Harry is the apple that didn’t fall far from it. Now it’s being gobbled up by his wife who combines all of Diana’s awful qualities with quite a few of her own.

What people celebrate says at least something about what they are. Compare, for example, a Briton who observes Yom Kippur to one who commemorates Hitler’s birthday.

Two extreme a juxtaposition? Fine. Let’s tone it down a notch. May Day and Pentecost? The Queen’s Birthday and the Fourth of July?

Anyway, you get the point. Our true selves reveal themselves in thousands of ways, not least in the dates we deem worthy of commemoration. A social anthropologist could have a field day just looking at the calendar.

March is the best time to conduct such a forensic investigation. For this month has three different holidays celebrating one part of mankind: women. I maintain that much can be said about a man on the basis of which of them he celebrates.

They are: International Women’s Day (IWD) celebrated on 8 March; Mother’s Day, falling on 14 March this year; Mothering Sunday, on the same day.

The first is communist, the second is secular, the third is Western Christian. Each is honoured by different groups, separated not so much by demarcation lines as fissures.

The esoteric origin of IWD can be traced back to the US, specifically the American Socialist Party (communist, as near as damn) that arbitrarily chose it to express solidarity with women on strike. But its real origin is in Russia, where the Bolsheviks declared it a national holiday directly they seized power.

Until recently this hallowed date was left uncommemorated and generally unknown in the West. It was only recognised by radical left-wingers, who found themselves on the margins of Western, especially Anglophone, societies.

However, their ideology has since moved from the margins into the mainstream, dragging this communist holiday with it. So what can our social anthropologist say about those who celebrate this day? He’d probably divide them into three sub-groups.

The smallest one are extreme lefties who celebrate all communist holidays. For example, I know a wealthy financier whose late wife, a Labour activist, used to organise annual parties on 22 April, Lenin’s birthday.

The second sub-group are feminists who too tend to lean to the left practically by definition. They react with kneejerk Pavlovian alacrity to any event celebrating any kind of women. If parliament voted to introduce Universal Prostitutes Day or Global Lesbians Day, these people would march in support. They might draw the line on International Ilse Koch Day, but not before that.

The third sub-group is much larger. It’s made up of ignoramuses who are unaware of the provenance of IWD and celebrate it simply because it’s there – or rather because the media make a big deal of it. This sub-group is more or less unobjectionable, although it too could be put forth as an argument for highly selective democracy.

Then comes Mother’s Day, a secular holiday that has supplanted Mothering Sunday and usurped its date. Like IWD, it also originated in America, a distinction it shares with many other modern perversions, though not with the downright evil ones, such as communism and Nazism. Being the first country constituted along modern, Enlightenment lines, the US was also the first to build an impassable barrier between state and religion.

The First Amendment to the US Constitution ostensibly protects freedom of religion. However, Thomas Jefferson and other Founders made it clear that their true goal was freedom not of religion, but from it. Thus, when the First Amendment was passed, Jefferson gloated that it built “a wall of separation between Church and State.”

Hence Christian holidays, other than Christmas Shopping, have been gradually squeezed out of public life, or else replaced with their secular, materialist equivalents – such as Mother’s Day.

It incongruously celebrates not just women who have given birth, but all women as such, defined in strictly biological terms. Even those terms are these days open to debate, what with even biology no longer seen as the sine qua non of womanhood. So it would be more consonant with the zeitgeist to say that Mother’s Day honours people born with a womb, those who’ve had it implanted and those who simply wish they had one.

Being secular, materialist, originally American and generally modern, Mother’s Day appeals to most Britons, thoroughly brainwashed as they are to salute anything meriting such modifiers. Since that group is vast, it’s easier to identify a much smaller one, those who refuse to acknowledge Mother’s Day.

Instead they observe Mothering Sunday, a day honouring not so much biological women as the sacred motherhood of the Virgin Mary and of the Church, the Bride of Christ.

This day is celebrated on the fourth Sunday of Lent by all Christians and especially conservative Christians. Actually, Mothering Sunday ought to be celebrated by all conservatives, even secular ones.

Conservatives, a term I sometimes use interchangeably with ‘intelligent people’, are sufficiently educated to recognise the Christian roots of Western civilisation. Hence they are sufficiently respectful of tradition to celebrate Christian festivals even if they themselves aren’t Christians. Christmas, Easter – and Mothering Sunday – are their holidays as well.

Mothering Sunday can never be free of such political connotations. It was slowly going out of fashion as the world became ever more secular, and only came back strongly in 1913, when the US Congress first ordained Mother’s Day.

Mothering Sunday immediately came back as a conservative reaction to modern cultural vandalism, and has been hanging on ever since. This restores the true, historical name of this sacred day, and conservatives ignore the secular impostor as staunchly as they defy IWD.

The upshot of this taxonomic narrative is self-evident: I wish no one a happy 8 March.

The Berlin Wall went up when I was 14, and it’s responsible for the first black mark in my political file. (In case you’re wondering, every Soviet citizen had one of those, and it followed him over a lifetime wherever he went.)

Our history teacher, who never missed an opportunity to interpret every historical event, no matter how remote, in line with the current policy of the Party, explained why that barrier had to be erected: too many West Germans were fleeing to the GDR.

“And vice versa,” I blurted out with youthful impetuosity. The teacher’s features hardened. “Where did you get that information?” he asked in the tone of a KGB interrogator weighing a rubber truncheon in his hand. “I got mine from our Soviet papers,” he added by way of establishing the only possible interpreter of current events.

“Just a figure of speech,” went my reply, as cowardly as it was useless. The damage had already been done, an indelible black mark in my file guaranteed. Eleven years later I left the country, and that piebald dossier is doubtless still there somewhere, gathering dust in the dark cellars of an FSB computer.

But there was a bright side to that incident: I acquired a simple, fail-free criterion for comparing different countries. It’s partly informed by another school experience: my struggles with those bloody swimming pools and their two pipes, one pumping water in, the other letting it out.

I substitute a country for the swimming pool and ask whether the incoming throng is greater than the outgoing one and, if so, how different. If a country has to erect walls to keep people out, it can’t be all bad. If the wall is built to keep people in, it’s definitely all bad. And if people are prepared to risk their lives trying to get out, the country is outright rotten.

In the original example above, at least 140 East Germans were killed trying to scale the Wall, against, in round numbers, zero climbing the opposite way. There’s the Wall Museum in Berlin, showing the creative, death-defying stratagems East Germans devised for leaving the communist paradise. Trampolines, hot-air balloons, homemade aircraft, shipment crates into which they packed themselves at the risk of suffocation – human ingenuity at its best is on display there.

The same stories could be told about North and South Korea, North and South Vietnam – before the South was overrun, that is. Afterwards came the boat people, risking a likely, if not almost certain, death. Cuba had her fair share of those as well, many of whom drowned at sea on the way to Florida or were machinegunned by Castro’s patrol boats.

The USSR had its land borders protected by a million heavily armed guards falling under the aegis of the KGB internal troops. In addition to their AKs and attack dogs, they had at their disposal minefields, electronic sensors activating unmanned machineguns, floodlights, miles and miles of electrified razor wire.

And still desperate people tried to run away. Their drama features many tragedies and at least one comedy.

When I left the USSR, it had 15 constituent republics, but when I was little there were 16. One, the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic had to be disbanded because almost its entire population fled to Finland across the border that was notoriously hard to patrol.

This brings me closer to home both geographically and temporally. For Europe too has its own boat people, thousands of them, who risk life and limb braving the Channel on the way to Britain.

They are prepared to spend years in hellish French and Belgian refugee camps, waiting for a chance to enter the UK legally. And when that’s not on the cards, they scrape together their last pennies to put themselves into the hands of the present-day answer to slavers (boats or lorries), knowing in advance that many will drown or suffocate.

Applying my trusted yardstick to the situation in hand, I have to ask why they are prepared to risk their lives to flee the powerful and prosperous European Union for a feeble Britain, which, as we’re told, is going to starve as a result of Brexit.

Since my criterion has withstood the test of time, I have to believe that, in the eyes of desperate outside observers, the EU relates to the UK as North Vietnam related to South, North Korea to South, East Germany to West, Cuba to Florida and the USSR to anywhere-will-do.

The urge to survive, or at least to improve one’s lot, against all odds focuses the mind almost like an impending execution. So could it be that those poor people understand something about the EU its own denizens (and some of ours) don’t?

Surely not? However…

However, the EU treats it as such, which defies superficial logic. Yet if we delve beneath the surface, such hostility makes sense. Just consider the difference between a religion and an ideology.

As history shows, both can be intolerant. But only ideologies have to be.

Tolerance is a sign of self-confidence, and this is a rare commodity for ideologies. They are by definition contrivances rooted in fanciful mental callisthenics, rather than reality. Deep down their proponents know this, and the louder their lofty protestations, the less self-confident they are.

By way of compensation, ideologies respond to apostates with the kind of hostility that neither Judaism nor Christianity has displayed for centuries. The third Abrahamic religion, Islam, is fanatically intolerant, but that only proves yet again that it has become more of an ideology than a religion.

The kind of ideology doesn’t matter. Whether it’s as evil as communism and Nazism or as benign as American federalism, the same observation pertains. If a political dispensation is based on an ideology, it’ll treat apostates as its mortal enemies.

Thus the bloodiest conflict in American history, the Civil War, was fought over an ideological clash between centralism and localism. The North, which championed the former, had to punish the Southern secession cataclysmically. If it hadn’t, it would have delegitimised itself in its own eyes, and no ideology can survive such damage.

This explains the EU’s predictable response to Brexit. The European Union is an ideological contrivance with no links to any tangible reality, political, historical, economic, religious or – these days – even cultural.

Christianity could be the only possible adhesive for European unity. And indeed it acted in that capacity for centuries, up until the end of the Middle Ages. Yet God has since died, in the Nietzschean sense. Christianity can no longer bind Europeans together because most of them, especially the educated people, are atheists.

The EU represents an attempt to unite Europe on the basis of a hybrid ideology, with elements borrowed from Napoleon’s Continental System, Marx’s socialism and Hitler’s Third Reich. All these elements are either French or German, which partly explains the EU’s undeniable Franco-German bias.

Britain has always been alien to any such pan-European arrangements, and every effort to shoehorn her into them has come a cropper. The British are congenitally suspicious of all ideologies, especially those that threaten their national uniqueness. There might as well be a No Ideologies sign posted at Dover.

Britons sometimes try to practise ideologies, but they don’t do it well because their heart isn’t in it. Though pro-Napoleon, pro-Hitler, pro-Stalin and pro-EU ideologies established a foothold on the British Isles at different times, it was only with limited and short-lived success.

Each time the No Ideologies sign went up, they all reacted to Britain with hostility. The EU is no exception, which belies its claim to being a primarily economic, rather than ideological, arrangement.

If that were the case, it would have reacted to Brexit in a more benign fashion. The EU’s economic interests would be better served by burgeoning cooperation with Britain than by any kind of trade war. Even geopolitically the EU would be made stronger by a new version of the Entente Cordiale with Britain, rather than by seething hostility to her.

But the EU is mainly driven by ideological, not economic or geopolitical, interests. And an independent Britain threatens the survival of its ideology the same way she threatened the survival of the Continental System, the Third Reich and – less directly but still significantly – the Soviet Union.

The more successful Britain proves outside the European Union, the worse it will be for the ideology lying (in both senses of the word) at the foundation of the EU. Hence its reaction to Brexit.

Everything the EU has done in response jeopardises its own economic, geopolitical and even medical health. Economically, the EU’s exports to the UK have slumped, which is especially bad news for German car manufacturers, with Britain traditionally providing 10 per cent of their market. British tourism to Europe has hit rock bottom due to Covid, but the restrictions put into effect by the EU, especially France, suggest it won’t recover completely. And the EU’s incessant attempts to sabotage the City of London have hit EU members hard, especially the smaller countries.

Geopolitically, the European weathervane has turned away from Britain towards Russia and China. Merkel’s Germany has always been pro-Putin, and now Macron’s France has swung that way too. With Macron, this is distinctly a post-Brexit phenomenon – until then he had staunchly opposed Merkel’s playing footsies with Putin.

Nowhere is this ideological reflux more malodorous than in the vaccination fiasco that exposed the EU’s incompetence for what it is. Faced with appalling death rates, the EU has nonetheless done all it could to undermine the Astra-Zeneca vaccine, with both Macron and Merkel making false statements about its efficacy.

A few more dead Europeans don’t matter to them nearly as much as trying to cut off the EU’s nose to spite Britain’s face. Such actions are only consistent with ideological fervour, not reason or even decency.

Yet if history teaches anything about ideologies, it’s that they always lose in the end. Britain can’t compete with the size of the EU economy, but hers is much more flexible and fleetfooted. This can serve her in good stead.

We could and should become exactly what Macron, when still Finance Minister, predicted we would: a larger version of the Channel Islands. Britain can do what the EU can’t: make all, not just eight, of our ports free, cut taxes and regulations, offer irresistible incentives to foreign capital and manufacturing – and make mockery of the EU’s competition-stifling ‘level playing field’.

At the same time, we should welcome EU citizens who possess skills and expertise our growing economy will need. As it is, London has become the world’s fifth-largest Francophone city, with highly qualified Frenchmen fleeing to our shores from extortionate taxes at home. With the kind of policies I have in mind, it could become the second-largest.

That’s why it’s so upsetting to see the Chancellor spiking our economic guns by raising the corporate tax from 19 to 25 per cent. This is exactly the opposite of the measures badly needed to fight back against the pernicious EU ideology.

Yes, ideologies do lose in the end. But they won’t lose if not resisted properly. Alas, such resistance requires courage, wisdom and resolve – none of which is the core strength of our ruling elite.

Or will be, if the Church listens to its prelates, specifically the Most Reverend Stephen Cottrell, Archbishop of York, second in the hierarchy of the Anglican confession.

According to him, the Church should be more involved in politics because, says His Grace, “I simply don’t accept a separation between the Church and politics, faith and politics or, for that matter, anything and politics.”

Jesus was much more pliant. He did accept such a separation, making conciliatory statements like “My kingdom is not of this world” and “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”.

But the Anglican Church has moved on from such meekness. It’s now more Christian than Christ or, depending on your point of view, less so. It now claims things that are Caesar’s by boldly stepping into politics.

Flashing through my mind is an image of His Grace, his shield decorated with a red cross, leading Knights Templar on a cavalry charge. Bedouins must be quaking in their sandals all over Arabia.

No? Wrong image? Then how about that of Richelieu and Mazarin, cardinals both, who ran French politics throughout most of the 17^th century? Richelieu was also willing to don armour and lead troops in battle against the Protestants…

Oops, sorry. Archbishop Stephen is a Protestant, so that image doesn’t work either. Actually, a closer examination of his political views shows that the kind of politics His Grace preaches have little to do with Christianity at all. In some quarters his views may even be regarded as heretical.

For example, he teaches that Jesus Christ was black. Since no biblical, ecclesiastical or historical source supports this chromatic vision, one has to assume that His Grace denies Jesus’s Jewishness and, by implication, also the Judaic aspect of Christianity.

Instead, processed by His Grace’s religiosity, Jesus emerges as a precursor of the Black Lives Matter movement, and in fact the Archbishop is on record as wishing to celebrate it in church. One wonders what a Black Lives Matter mass will sound like. I can only hope it won’t be the same as Black Mass, and no sacrifice of a virgin will be involved.

“Politics,” laments His Grace, “has shrunk. There is a loss of vision about what the world could be like”. To provide such vision, and to redeem its sins accumulated over centuries, the Anglican Church has set up an anti-racism task force.

In fact, its clerical head, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has equated the Church’s treatment of blacks with the Nazi holocaust of Jews. This shows that the prelates’ knowledge of history is as deep as their understanding of theology.

As a mere layman, I’m not aware of the C of E ever having called for the extermination of all black people without distinction, much less trying to put a mass annihilation programme into practice. But I’m sure Anglican prelates are much more erudite in such matters.

And not only those of race: both archbishops and most bishops take time away from their duties to pronounce on housing policy, climate change, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ issues (I bet they all know what this acronym stands for, including the plus sign) and everything else that’s dear to the hearts of woke activists.

Archbishop Stephen even advocates nuclear disarmament, at a pinch of the unilateral type. One has to admire such dedication even if one finds this political posturing despicable.

For the fact that Anglican prelates are so actively involved in left-wing politics suggests that church affairs proper are in such good order that they leave little for Their Graces to occupy themselves. Even those of us who aren’t Anglicans must rejoice in the ongoing triumph of our state church.

Having succeeded in their mission of carrying Christ to the uninitiated, the prelates can now concentrate on worldlier matters. I may regret that the Christ they preach is a woke black activist and Greta Thunberg’s best friend, but if that’s what it takes to put bums on pews, who am I to argue?

If only that were the case. Alas, it isn’t. Over the past 20 years the C of E has suffered a catastrophic decline in attendance, some 40 per cent on average, up to 85 per cent in some areas. Parishes thriving in the past are nearing disappearance, young people especially are fleeing like demons from the cross or, if you’d rather, like Bedouins from the Templars during the First Crusade.

In other words, as the Anglican hierarchs are getting more and more involved in woke causes, their churches are emptying at a rate that suggests extinction within a couple of decades. I can’t help detecting causation here: the pews stand empty partly because the prelates have turned into political activists of the worst kind.

But I agree with Archbishop Stephen on one thing: everything in this world and, apparently, the next, has become thoroughly politicised. Unlike him, however, I think that’s precisely the problem.