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One fine morning Alain Fontanel, the former deputy mayor of Strasbourg, found his electric bicycle stolen. Nothing remarkable about that, such things happen.

Soon thereafter he saw his bike advertised for sale on the Leboncoin website, France’s eBay. Shunning the buy-back option, attractive though it was, Mr Fontanel went to the police.

Sting-minded cops contacted the seller, who agreed to meet them just outside the Russian consulate. The proposed transaction predictably turned into a routine arrest, but then things got interesting.

The culprit turned out to be Russian, the consul’s driver, who clearly didn’t wish to pursue his side line too far from his day job. The thief’s lowly position didn’t entitle him to diplomatic immunity, which is why he was held in custody for 24 hours and thoroughly interrogated.

It turned out that swiping Mr Fontanel’s possession wasn’t a momentary lapse. The chap had stolen about 300 bikes all told, realising a neat €100,000 supplement to his consulate salary.

So far so ordinary, you may think. But here’s the interesting bit: Mr Fontanel’s bike came with a fake receipt of purchase bearing a Russian consulate stamp. Now employees who have access to such stamps occupy a higher rank in the diplomatic hierarchy, and they do boast immunity.

Anyway, when the cops wanted to interrogate the thief again, they were told he had left France “for health reasons”. Not Covid-related, I hope.

However, the consulate denied their man’s guilt. They also disavowed the rumour that a sequel to Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 film Bicycle Thieves was in the works. Sorry, I made this one up, couldn’t resist.

That nice little earner fits into a long dishonourable tradition of Russian diplomatic missions engaging in ‘activities incompatible’. Usually this term is used on orders to expel spies, and Russia isn’t the only country to combine diplomacy with intelligence-gathering.

Yet Russian embassies have been known to perform less common functions as well. For example, during the 1918-1919 communist revolt in Germany, Soviet diplomats led by Ambassador Ioffe were doling out rifles, grenades and machineguns right in the embassy’s courtyard.

More recent and relevant was the 2018 drug bust at the Russian embassy in Buenos Aires, when Argentine police seized 858 pounds of cocaine worth about €80 million. Among other things, that showed that England holds no exclusive rights to Powder Plots.

That Russian diplomats routinely engage in contraband is reasonably well known. However, there’s something endearing about the Bicycle Plot.

If multi-million drug deals betoken vast conspiracies involving organised crime, nicking bikes and flogging them on the net has a nice down-home feel to it. It’s private initiative at the grassroots, a manifestation of the enterprising spirit so characteristic of the much-vaunted Russian spirituality.

Stealing everything not bolted down has always been a popular pastime there, and why should diplomatic missions be any different? As Horace wrote, “Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.” (They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea.) Or perhaps a Russian saying is more appropriate: like priest, like parish.

Post-perestroika Russia has elevated thievery to statecraft, where all public officials from the president down busily pilfer the country’s resources and monetise them through global money laundering.

Their loot, meandering through various offshore havens, is estimated at over two trillion dollars, and ordinary Russians don’t really mind, provided they can nick their fair share. A penny stolen is a penny earned, while we are bowdlerising proverbs.

Or, if you’d rather, he who does not steal, neither shall he eat. This version, more robust in the original, does exist in Russia, and it’s oft-repeated (Кто не пиздит, тот не ест, for the benefit of those studying Russian.)

Following the murder of Sarah Everard, or rather the hysterical reaction to it, misogyny will be classified as a hate crime.

This news came as such a shock that I began to doubt my command of etymology. Let’s see: misein means ‘to hate’ in Greek, and gyne means ‘woman’. Put them together and you get hatred of women – a nasty feeling for sure, but still only a feeling nevertheless.

But perhaps, when the word was transplanted into English, it changed its meaning? Into the dictionary I go, to find this definition: hatred of, aversion to, or prejudice against women. Again, only a feeling.

Now correct me if I’m wrong, but feelings aren’t traditionally criminalised in the English Common Law. For example, I may feel like eviscerating Tony Blair, but I’m not going to be prosecuted until I’ve tried to get into his house with a large knife (I know where you live, Tony) or at least stated a murderous intent publicly.

So why should misogyny be a crime? Turns out my knee jerked too soon. Misogyny, a Home Office minister explained, will only be considered a crime if it motivates other, violent crimes, “including stalking and sexual offences”.

Wiping my brow in relief, I realised that the new law isn’t so much idiotic as redundant. That, however, is a serious matter too.

Redundant laws encumber the justice system and, worse still, give too much leeway to arbitrary and unjust prosecution. In other words, if a law is redundant, it’s harmful.

In this case, we already have laws galore penalising violence against any of the 72 currently recognised sexes and any additional ones doubtless to be identified soon. Sexual violence, such as rape, is also covered, as is pure violence against women that’s not sullied by sexual assault.

One can see that, if a man known to hate all women commits a violent crime against one of them, his misogyny – or any other perverse motivation – may be held against him as an aggravating circumstance and, say, diminish his chances of an early parole.

But that’s basic common sense, and no legislation to that effect seems necessary. If a man tried for maiming a woman is shown to be a misogynist, surely even in the absence of this new law any prosecutor worth his salt can make this point to the jury – to secure both a guilty verdict and a more severe punishment.

Any way you look at it, this new law doesn’t seem to serve the cause of justice in any meaningful way. Yet that doesn’t mean it serves no other purpose either, and here we cross the line separating redundant and useless from sinister and evil.

Since all the usual crimes against women are already punishable by existing legislation, logically the proponents of the new law wish to penalise some new crimes, those that hitherto haven’t been regarded as such.

The key to this conclusion is hidden in the words “stalking and sexual crimes”, as they appear in the lexicon of the Home Office. Clearly the legal definitions of such transgressions are being expanded beyond any sensible limits.

For example, if your understanding of stalking is the same as mine, the word evokes an evil-doer stealthily following a woman (or lying in wait) to do her harm. He could be planning rape, kidnapping, robbery, revenge beating – you name it.

However, if our legislators shared this understanding, then again there would be no new law necessary. The old ones can do the job nicely, thank you very much.

Hence they mean something completely different, and what it is can only be inferred from the deafening feminist shrieks whose volume has been steadily increasing for decades. Following that highly publicised murder, they have reached an eardrum-busting decibel level.

Stalking can now mean, for example, trying to pick up a woman in the street, a crime I committed almost every day when a young Muscovite. In my defence I can only point out that I was motivated by love of sex, not hatred of women. Also such attempts (in my case, mostly futile) were common practice in Russia, and no one, including the women, saw them as criminal, although some – too many! – saw them as unwelcome.

A sexual crime may now include patting a woman’s rump without first obtaining a written, notarised permission – a boorish thing to do for sure, yet bad manners have never been criminalised before. But never mind unwanted physical contact.

Making a suggestive remark or a risqué joke to a woman may now also be interpreted as criminal misogyny. Even complimenting a woman on her body, particularly its secondary sex characteristics, can be classified as sexual assault.

If all redundant laws are unnecessary and therefore harmful, all ideological laws are subversive and therefore evil. There’s no doubt that this new law is designed to pander to the feminist assault on the social fabric of society. It is craven submission to a malicious ideology.

In addition to empowering zealots and ideologues, the new law undermines the foundations of the English Common Law and therefore the very concept of Britishness.

After all, even our able prosecutors can’t peek into a man’s mind to see whether or not his shout of “get your tits out for the lads” is motivated by hatred of women. To make this new law operable prosecutors must have the mandate to interpret his yobbish behaviour in any way they see fit.

This gives law enforcement the kind of powers that are incompatible with the traditional right of Englishmen. It also increases the power of the state over the individual, another development irreconcilable with the country’s constitution, developed gradually and lovingly over millennia.

As a firm believer in dialectical balance, I hereby propose that the new misogyny law be offset with laws penalising misandry. My wife, who protests when I watch too much footie, is ipso facto a prime culprit.

As someone who believes in the Second Coming, I don’t dismiss out of hand those who claim divine powers. Yes, usually they are cranks but still, what if? It’s possible, isn’t it, that Christ too will at first appear crazy when he comes again?

It’s in that spirit that I approached an article in The Times entitled 20 Things You Can Do Right Now to Stop Climate Change. And what do you know, its author, Lucy Siegle, not only claims divine powers over heaven and earth, but she also outdoes God by putting a specific timeframe on her miracles.

This particular miracle can be worked not at some time in the future, nor even at the end of the millennium, but right now. And like Christ conferring healing powers on his disciples, Lucy empowers us all to act as her conduits. Not only can she herself save Our Planet, but she can also teach us how to do so in 20 simple steps.

In addition to boasting a more precise chronology than God, Lucy can also do something God couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do: stop climate dead in its tracks. And there he was, thinking this was one area beyond the earthlings’ meagre capacities. For when God created this planet, he decreed that climate would be in a constant flux, blowing hot or cold at regular intervals.

Periods of global warming have always alternated with the odd Ice Age. The former last longer because, when all is said and done, earthlings survive much better in warm weather. Neither they nor their crops freeze to death, food is plentiful, life is prosperous.

Possibly because the deity is a loving God, the Earth’s temperature has been warmer than it is now for 85 per cent of its lifetime. Still, he started a cold period some two million years ago, just to keep the earthlings on their toes. But even there glacial periods alternate with interglacial ones, such as the one we have at the moment.

By far the greatest factor of climate change is the highly variable solar activity. That swings within a wide range both inside the Sun and in proportion to the Earth’s position relative to it. The Earth’s orbit changes every few thousand years, as does its axis, with each change affecting climate one way or the other.

When solar heat reaches the Earth, it’s mostly accumulated in the oceans, not in the atmosphere. Hence both ocean currents and the drift of continents also cause climate change.

There are many other scientifically proven factors, such as supernova explosions, bacterial activity, volcanic eruptions. Don’t know about you, but I’m buoyed by Lucy’s promise of teaching me how to acquire dominion over the Sun, the Earth, oceans, continents, bacteria, exploding stars and volcanoes.

Or rather that’s what I hoped her promise would be. Alas, like most of my hopes, that one turned out to be forlorn. My soul screamed an unspoken question: “Please, Lord Lucy, tell me where to begin!” The answer didn’t just take the wind out of my sails but snapped every mast in half: “Swap your loo roll for starters.”

You, see, Lucy is one of the dominant group of fanatical malcontents who feel the need to camouflage their hatred of our civilisation, along with its every technological, scientific and economic advance, with nauseatingly cloying pretensions of environmental virtue.

No such advance would have been possible without man’s mining of natural resources, mainly hydrocarbons, to produce energy. The use of coal, oil and gas results in CO₂ emissions, which the fanatics have singled out as the main, if not the sole, reason for climate change.

Since only three per cent of all CO₂ emissions are anthropogenic, the fanatics have to claim that global warming is triggered by these three per cent, rather than by the remaining 97 that come from natural causes. Moreover, CO₂ is a trace gas, accounting for only one in 85,000 molecules of the atmosphere.

So the premise from which Lucy and her ilk proceed is that a tiny trace of an infinitesimally minuscule trace is producing a crisis threatening life on Earth. Not only is there not a scintilla of evidence for this, but the very effect of CO₂ on climate is very much in doubt.

For example, anthropogenic CO₂ emissions have increased 10 per cent in the past 25 years, largely due to China’s push for global domination. Yet during the same period the increase in world temperature has been statistically indistinguishable from zero.

What’s not in doubt is that carbon is the greatest building block of organic matter, while CO₂ is an animating force of agriculture and therefore human life. Singling carbon out as the culprit in the mythical man-made climate crisis can only serve political ends and no other.

It’s to such ends that the left-wing malcontents who hate ‘capitalism’ while enjoying its products are trying to destroy modern economies, negate the great technological progress of the past centuries and lower our standard of living to pre-industrial levels. Such will be the consequences of “zero carbon emissions” inscribed on the altar to which the fanatics genuflect – such is the price they want us all to pay for their delusions.

Hence Lucy’s frankly idiotic 20 things we must do, such as sourcing loo rolls made of recycled paper. She particularly recommends a brand elegantly called Who Gives a Crap, warning that, alas, it only comes in 48-roll packs. I wouldn’t buy such a product for reasons of aesthetics and decency – as I wouldn’t buy, say, condoms called Who Gives a Toss.

But decency goes the way of sanity, intelligence and literacy when a pernicious ideology rears its head. For make no mistake about it: Greta’s fanatical flock is shepherded by ideologically inspired hatred.

That’s why they use the language of political propaganda, not sensible debate. Those who refuse to accept the half-baked musings of these hard-boiled zealots are called ‘deniers’, in a not-so-subtle parallel with Holocaust deniers.

Yet if what we are discussing is climate science, or any other science, there can be no deniers or asserters. There can be only facts that either prove or disprove a hypothesis. And there are no facts proving the hypothesis of global warming. There are hundreds disproving them.

The zealots conscript to their cause scientists wielding computer models with the dexterity of a chap playing three-card monte at a street corner. Somehow we are expected to believe that the same models that can’t accurately predict next week’s weather can tell us exactly what the climate will be like centuries from now.

Yet there are enough scientists who swear by their computer-generated ‘hockey sticks’ for the zealots to claim that a scientific consensus exists. They don’t give a puck for the truth.

And the truth is that whole regiments of scientists mock their claims. Thus a couple of years ago 30,000 American scientists, experts in all the relevant disciplines, wrote an open letter describing the orgy of scaremongering about climate as so much bilge (not in those exact words). However, the letter was ignored in the mainstream papers – they needed all their space to run the zealots’ hysterical rodomontades.

This is the behaviour of totalitarian ideologues, not of honest people trying to arrive at truth. It’s also the behaviour of cowards scared of confronting a newly hatched orthodoxy.

The less substance there is to a theory, the louder the shrieks of its exponents. Such as St Lucy Siegle of the Bog Roll.

No, not Covid, although God knows that’s deadly enough.

The blight in question is the three-month celebration of the Paris Commune, lauded by Marx, Engels and Lenin as a nascent “dictatorship of the proletariat”. The source of the contagion is Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor.

Actually, all the mainstream parties in France are socialist. The one that actually bears that name would be considered communist in many other places, with ample justification.

And Miss Hidalgo is on the left of even that party, which explains her affection for the 1871 attempt to turn Paris into an abattoir first and a charnel house second. It also explains why all my Parisian friends, admittedly a pre-selected group, loathe her.

Facilitated by the country’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the Commune prefigured every subsequent communist takeover, successful or otherwise. The revolutions in Russia (both of 1905 and 1917), Hungary, Germany and China all traced their genealogy to the Paris bloodbath in the spring of 1871.

Hidalgo and her Communist allies correctly detect a link between the Commune and the gilets jaunes riots, not to say the whole modern ethos. Laurence Patrice, her Communist deputy mayor, said the city was celebrating “the values that were embraced in 1871 and which hold good today.” The blighter has a point.

The Commune is an essential chapter in the communist canon. When I was a little tot in Moscow, I hadn’t yet heard of the American Revolution but I knew quite a bit about the Commune. Adolphe Tiers, the great historian turned statesman, who suppressed the revolt, was my mother’s bête noire, and she always referred to him by his nickname, Bloody Dog. (“Somebody had to be,” commented Thiers after order was restored.)

Like all revolutions, the Commune issued a full complement of bien pensant slogans, along the socialist, feminist and anarchist lines. But that was mere PR. In reality, they took over Paris and embarked on an orgy of murder, looting, arson and general mayhem.

Presaging the common practice of today’s terrorists, the Communards took hundreds of hostages, many of them clergy. Presaging the common practice of today’s governments, Tiers said: “We don’t negotiate with murderers”.

The Communards immediately murdered dozens of priests, including the Archbishop of Paris, and, for good measure, quite a few policemen. They then methodically proceeded to torch public buildings, starting with the Tuileries Palace and the Hôtel de Ville (unlike the Palace, it has since been restored, but don’t try to book a room there). The Richelieu Library of the Louvre was reduced to cinders.

Also destroyed was the Palais de Justice, while firemen managed to put out the flames engulfing the Sainte-Chapelle, the Church of Saint-Eustache, the Louvre and Notre-Dame. Revolutionary conscience is indeed fiery.

The government’s cause was indirectly helped by the Prussians, who released captured French soldiers from the POW camps in the nick of time. Tiers assembled a force of some 250,000 in Versailles and marched on Paris.

Members of the National Guard who were in cahoots with the Communards instantly dispersed, leaving the firebugs to fend for themselves. In short order they discovered that fighting a regular army was harder than shooting unarmed priests.

About 6,000-7,000 Communards were either killed in the clashes or later executed by order of the military tribunals. That’s what earned Tiers the sobriquet so favoured by my late mother, God bless her.

Some Parisians see these shameful festivities as Hidalgo’s attempt to curry favour with the Left in the hope of becoming the Socialist candidate in the upcoming presidential election and, Marx willing, the next president. Such politicking doubtless plays a role, but the real significance runs deeper.

The very fact that the capital of a core Western nation can be made to celebrate that Walpurgisnacht means that its inspiring ideas are socially and intellectually acceptable in the sense in which, say, Nazi ideas aren’t.

For example, I doubt that, should Berlin acquire an AfD mayor by 2023, he’d be able to decorate the city with swastikas to mark the centenary of the Beer Hall Putsch. The underlying spirit is beyond the pale, as it were.

By contrast, the spirit that animated the Commune is a spectre that’s indeed haunting Europe, in the enduring words of Marx and Engels. That’s why Paris is flying red flags, whose colour reflects the oceans of blood spilled around the world by Anne Hidalgo’s ideological brethren.

And that’s why a subversive, incompetent creature like her can harbour presidential ambitions in a country I love so much. God spare us.

“How the mighty have fallen!” is an Old Testament phrase that yet again proves the prophetic power of Holy Scripture.

For there’s no denying that, as president of the United States, Joe Biden is as mighty as they come. Nor is there any doubt that POTUS fell climbing the steps to Air Force One. Moreover, he outdid the biblical Samuel and Saul by falling not just once, but thrice.

Joe’s detractors are having a field day with his little mishap – well, three little mishaps to be exact. Refusing to give the president the benefit of the doubt, they talk about his senility, loss of motor and cognitive abilities and other such failings. One can almost sense the 25^th Amendment wafting through the air.

Naysayers! Imbeciles! Gloaters! Republicans! Pharisees! Your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness… but I should stop waxing biblical, even though, as you’ll soon find out, such references are appropriate in this context.

What Joe’s detractors don’t understand is that his actions are full of hidden meaning. They convey an elaborate lattice of intersecting symbols, unravelling for the initiated Joe’s deep thought and political acumen.

For this ostensibly awkward incident must be analysed on different levels. First, it’s wrong to blame the wind for Joe’s misfortune. He may have wind problems, but they are unlikely to make him clutch the railings on the way up.

And yet the wind mustn’t be ignored. For in spite of it Joe did manage to get to the top of the steps, thereby sending a subtle message. The wind of change is picking up, he was implying. It may cause initial discomfort, but it’ll never blow Joe off his charted course towards turning America into a kinder, fairer, more socialist country.

Then Joe’s opponents, especially those who continue to aver that Jesus Christ isn’t just a superstar, attack him on being a rotten Christian. That charge would be defanged by Joe’s admitting that, rather than being a rotten Christian, he’s no Christian at all.

Any one of you simpletons would opt for this copout. Yet Joe insists, stubbornly and truthfully, that he’s a Catholic in good standing. On first glance, that position seems hard to reconcile with his willingness to finance abortion clinics domestically and internationally.

Yet no one grasps the fundamental nature of presidency, the weight of the cross a president has to carry. Some stumbles along the way will happen, but Joe will always pick himself up.

Now who else stumbled three times when carrying his cross? Do you get it now? Joe only pretended to trip thrice, creating thereby a deep symbolic impression of his commitment to carrying his cross in spite of the odd stumble (such as paying for millions of babies to be killed). Those in the know realised that his was a statement redolent of Christian symbolism.

Then of course Joe has a reputation of being a faceless, humourless apparatchik, whose idea of a joke is passing Neil Kinnock’s speech for his own and seeing if anyone would notice. Not so!

Joe exudes knee-slapping humour, except his is of the slapstick, rather than verbal, variety. He is a master of the pratfall, giving Chevy Chase a good run for his money.

In case you forgot (or are too young to know), Chevy, a star of the old Saturday Night Live show, was famous for his opening sequences invariably ending with an acrobatic tumble down the stairs. Having hit the floor, he’d smile and shout: “Live! From New York! It’s Saturday Night!”

I have it on good authority that Joe has always found Chevy to be his inspiration. However, in the planning stages of his own pratfall sequence, his aides talked him out of falling all the way down to the tarmac and screaming: “Live! From DC! It’s POTUS night!”

For one thing, they said, only people close to Joe’s age would get the cultural reference. For another, that would be pushing the joke too far. Just stumbling three times would do the trick, Joe, they insisted. Everyone will see you’re a funny guy. Joe reluctantly agreed to rein in his devastating sense of the absurd and only limited himself to a comic salute at the top of the steps.

Then those pygmies who can’t see the sparkling facets of Joe’s personality, accuse him of senile dementia on the most risible of pretexts. Yes, he, seemingly unintentionally, promoted Kamala by referring to her as “President Harris”. ‘Seemingly’ is the key word there, for this slip was as deliberate as those on the steps.

Joe was simply reinforcing Kamala’s status as both his heiress apparent and his boss actual. For Joe is too busy with metaphysical and thespian pursuits to sully his hands with actually running the country.

He leaves such trivia for Kamala to sort out, and sort them out she does, with flying colours. Some troglodytes hiss that those flying colours feature hammer and sickle superimposed on the stars and stripes, but they would, wouldn’t they?

What else? What other vitriol will those ill-wishers splash out of their acid vials? Oh yes, they make a big deal of Joe’s apparent error in introducing his living and breathing granddaughter Natalie as his late son Beau.

Yet again those vipers fail to see the whole story. Joe was simply commenting on the metaphysical continuity animating the Biden family. All its members share particles of the same soul, which guarantees collective immortality. Beau is dead, Joe was implying, but his soul lives on in Natalie.

Some will sneer that this vision is more Buddhist than Christian, but then a POTUS has to be ecumenical by definition. As the leader of the whole nation, he can’t afford obtuse, Bible-thumping parochialism.

I hope Congress will see fit to amend the Constitution yet again by inaugurating the post of President Emeritus For Life and bestowing this distinction on Joe. Meanwhile President Kamala will continue to do a sterling job running America into the… upper reaches of liberty and prosperity, is what I mean.

Oh to be young again… Actually, not that young.

Although I do sometimes feel nostalgic about my lost youth, the golden age flashing through my mind postdates pubescence, by quite a few years. That’s why I’m grateful to my friend Vlad Putin for bringing back memories long since lost.

Responding to Biden’s accusation of being a killer, Vlad used the Russian equivalent of “takes one to know one” (кто так обзывается, тот сам так называется, for the benefit of my Russophone readers). Since no Russian says that past the age of sexual maturation, I felt coochy-coo warmth all over and an urgent desire to dust off my family album (see the photo).

Vlad is clearly trying to get in touch with the child within him, and I do hope he arrests that reversion before the onset of double incontinence. Anyway, since his little bon mot has been widely reported in Western papers, I’m breaking no new ground here.

Yet Vlad speaks not only through his own mouth, but also through those of his house-trained propagandists, many of whom proudly wear the sobriquet of Russian Goebbelses. Their comments are more interesting and, shall we say, grown-up. So I thought I’d translate a few for your benefit.

Andrei Turachak, First Vice Speaker of the Federation Council: “Biden’s statement is simply a triumph of America’s political feeblemindedness and her leader’s senile dementia.”

Military expert Igor Korotchenko: Russia “must increase the number of intelligence stations in the US.” Asked to explain his rationale, the scholar obliged: “To grab’em by the tit.”

Also, he added, “Russia must coordinate her nuclear strategy against the US with China”, eliciting the show host’s counter-suggestion that it would be preferable just to take Alaska back.

Addressing all Americans, Duma Deputy (MP) Zhuravlev diagnosed the nation’s problem: “If you have a moron in power, that means you are all morons.” Asked about an appropriate response, he suggested putting missiles back on Cuba.

Duma Vice Speaker, Pyotr Tolstoy, rivalled the historical erudition of his illustrious ancestor: “They shoved such things down our throats twice before, and we finished our reply in Paris the first time and in Berlin, the second.”

One of the most influential TV ‘Goebbelses’, Vladimir Solovyov, screamed: “This means war! A response is called for, and it must be tough!”

“They are painting a target on our country’s back,” added Solovyov, and he didn’t mean that metaphorically.

Svetlana Zhukova, another MP, must be a lawyer by trade. She submitted that Biden’s accusation of Putin lacked prima facie evidence, adding that this could be “grounds for a criminal prosecution”, presumably for perjury.

Following Biden’s remark, the ruble took a plunge in the currency markets. Waggish Muscovites are wondering whether the dollar would suffer the same fate if Putin levelled a similar accusation at Biden. Verily I say unto you, a sense of humour is the best relief valve – and the only one available to sane Russians.

Meanwhile, in addition to the idiom in the title, I can offer Vlad a few similar retorts he may find handy should Biden speak out of turn again, such as: “Oh yeah?” “Says who?” “Pull the other one”, “Go boil an egg”. Russian translations available upon request.

P.S. While we are on the subject of language, learning English is my lifelong mission. Lately it has been boosted by several new usages I picked up from football commentators, for which I’m eternally grateful. To wit:

Multiple uses of lacksadaisical, much better than the old and tired lackadaisical.

“The importance of this goal can’t be underestimated.” Again multiple uses, suggesting the goal has so little importance it’s unclear why the team bothered to score it in the first place.

“He exerted his right not to take the knee” – a stronger verb than exercised, previously used in such contexts.

“In the absence of the injured players, he picked up the mantelpiece.” If made of marble, that piece of furniture must take much strength to lift.

“… the amount of games left…[goals scored, injured players and some such – countless uses]” I wonder about the number of beer in the chaps’ glasses.

Indeed, a poor boy from downtown Russia has a lot to learn from native speakers.

The right word would have been a ‘murderer’, someone who kills criminally. Every murderer is a killer, but not every killer (for example, a soldier) is a murderer.

I’m glad we’ve cleared up this semantic confusion. But do let’s forgive Joe this little solecism – after all, he learned his oratorial skills from Neil Kinnock. Instead let’s congratulate him on telling the truth.

After four years of Trump’s playing lickspittle to the KGB colonel, Biden’s tough language rang mellifluous, especially since it also included a promise of action. Putin, said Biden, would “pay the price” for meddling in the 2020 presidential election (the 2016 election didn’t get a mention, but let bygones be bygones).

When a US president utters such words, they are never completely empty. They send a diplomatic signal. And the signal is clear: Russia is on notice. Further sanctions are coming, and there will be an escalator built in.

In response, Putin threw his toys out of the pram, that is pulled his ambassador out of Washington. And his loyal poodle Volodin, Speaker of the Duma, explained that insulting Putin means insulting Russia. After all, Russia’s entire landmass fits inside Putin’s chest cavity without remainder, as Volodin explained a few years ago.

When Jen Psaki, Biden’s press secretary, was asked for a clarification, she said her boss “does not hold back on his concerns about what we see as malign and problematic actions” by Russia. Such actions, she added, included not only election interference, but also offering bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan and the poisoning of Alexei Navalny.

Press conferences are usually brief, so it’s understandable that Miss Psaki was reluctant to provide a full list of Putin’s crimes. Had she done so, the jittery hacks would have missed every conceivable deadline. For the list is long.

A cull of opposition leaders and defectors, for whom even civilised countries can’t provide a safe haven; sustained electronic hacking and sabotage; brutal aggression against sovereign states; turning Western financial institutions (which are themselves complicit in such crimes) into giant laundries for purloined trillions; constant threats of nuclear holocaust; support for every conceivable extremist party in the West; a steady torrent of lying, destabilising propaganda – don’t get me going on this.

In Putin’s blood-stained hands Russia has become a malignant, malevolent presence in the world, an implacable enemy of the West. His kleptofascist junta is outdoing even the Soviets in the perfidy of what the Russian General Staff calls ‘hybrid warfare’.

Unlike Trump, who trusted Putin more than his own intelligence services, Biden seems to vector his faith differently. He looked at the report of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence and accepted its conclusion about the flood of Russian disinformation engulfing the presidential election. 

It has to be said that, though the Russians are incapable of producing their own computers, they operate American and Japanese imports with nothing short of virtuosity. For example, the troll factory in Petersburg churns out over 70,000 lies every day.

It’s owned by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, known as ‘Putin’s chef’ because his catering company supplies Vlad’s official dinners. However, his business interests go far beyond gastronomy. For example, Prigozhin finances the Wagner Group that provides mercenaries for Putin’s forays into foreign lands, such as Syria.

His diversified enterprises have earned Prigozhin an indictment by the US grand jury and sanctions throughout the civilised world. But what I admire most is his Petersburg troll factory, officially known as the Internet Research Agency, an organisation much more pernicious than the one sharing the same initials. Prigozhin’s IRA employs a staff of 1,000, working around the clock in two shifts.

Their job is inundating the airwaves with lies, threats, foul abuse and anything else the moment requires. About 600 of them are the frontline troops, with the rest acting in managerial and auxiliary capacities.

They sell their conscience cheaply, for about £500 a month. But that sum is nothing to sneeze at in an impoverished Russia, and in any case it constitutes gross overpayment for that brand of conscience.

Their daily quota is 120 trolls per person a day, which is how I arrived at the overall daily output of over 70,000. The IRA’s activities within Russia are rather crude. For example, the moment Prigozhin’s name appears on the net in any other than a laudatory context, the post instantly receives hundreds of dislikes and dozens of abusive and threatening comments.

I don’t know whether the IRA employs a different group for foreign-language trolling. Suffice it to say that their work is noticeable. Since even insignificant little I have found myself on the receiving end of computer-generated diatribes, one can only imagine the full scale of that op.

And please don’t get the impression that the IRA acts on its own. It merely supplements similar efforts of the SVR, née the KGB First Directorate. This represents a salutary cooperation between the public and private sectors, a sort of criminal equivalent of British medical care.

I must compliment my former countrymen on staying abreast of modern technology. Yet they don’t call this warfare ‘hybrid’ for nothing. Even as the Russians happily combine high-tech murder weapons (polonium, novichok) with common-or-garden guns and car bombs, they don’t rely just on computerised subversion.

Putin’s spymasters are busily recruiting Western agents both wholesale, including whole political parties, and retail, in the shape of journalists, academics and other willing propagandists. Some enter into such Faustian transactions for money, some for ideological reasons, and most are what Lenin so aptly called “useful idiots”.

But today’s specimens of this species are different. If in the past useful idiots were all variously extreme left-wingers, today they are recruited from the right. That, incidentally, reemphasises the difference between right-wing and conservative, even though the two words are often used, or rather misused, interchangeably.

I’m not holding my breath in the hope that Biden’s tough words will be translated into tough actions going beyond a new tranche of mild sanctions. Still, one detects a change of mood in the US administration.

This change is welcome, compared to the four years of Trump’s sycophancy. Lest you accuse me of being a crypto-leftie, this is the only change implemented by the Biden administration that I’d describe as welcome.

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.