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A British woman, 31, living in Dubai argued with her Ukrainian flatmate over the use of the dining room table during lockdown.

The argument was conducted over WhatsApp, which is odd. Why not face-to-face? Whenever Penelope and I have an argument, we do so without resorting to electronic media. That way I can watch her facial expressions and know when a punch is coming.

Then again, the Dubai flat may well be much larger than ours. No one would wish to walk across a dozen rooms to sort out the use of furniture items.

Anyway, it was WhatsApp that provided a battlefield of cultural war. And, in keeping with her culture, the British woman concluded the dispute with “fuck you”.

Outlanders among you may not realise this, but this largely desemanticised locution is a popular greeting throughout Her Majesty’s realm. To emphasise the friendly nature of the expression, it’s often accompanied by the salutation ‘mate’, which highlights British commitment to universal camaraderie.

If you plan to visit Britain, be prepared to find yourself on the receiving end of this idiom each time a stranger you’ve accidentally jostled wishes to befriend you. And whatever you do please don’t be offended. Your interlocutor may take that as a rejection of his friendship and respond with physical chastisement.

The Ukrainian woman was deaf to such cultural nuances. She did indeed take offence, and then acted according to the imperatives of her own culture – by reporting the Briton to the police.

You see, the Soviet Union has left its former constituents a rich legacy of civic responsibility. All citizens were encouraged to report crimes, even minor or nonexistent, to the authorities. Depending on the severity of the crime and regardless of whether it was real or imaginary, the authorities would then mete out just punishment.

The system’s output proved its efficacy: millions of people ended up in labour camps, sometimes over trivial arguments similar to the one in question. This approach to legality proved so successful that Britain is introducing a similar system, with children encouraged to inform on their parents, friends on one another’s tax irregularities, and everybody on lockdown violations.

However, in Britain the system of universal snitching is only making its first tentative steps, while in the Ukraine it’s unfathomably on the way out. However, as our example shows, it hasn’t quite reached the exit yet.

So there we have it, two cultures clashing. Yet the conflict wouldn’t have led to a dramatic denouement had it not occurred within the domain of a third culture, that of the UAE.

Muslim lands are now the last unconquered bastions of morality and probity. Spare the rod and spoil the visitor seems to be the guiding principle of Islamic jurisprudence.

For Muslims insist that foreigners follow Islamic moral and legal dicta even in their own countries, not just Muslim ones. As a champion of decency, I can only regret that so far they lack the means to enforce compliance in Britain. Polygamy, for example, would be welcome, although the stoning of adulterers may be premature at this time.

Compared to some other lands, Dubai is unconscionably liberal in its laws. Even alcohol consumption doesn’t incur beheading, stoning, defenestration or caning, as it may elsewhere. However, a line has to be drawn somewhere.

Hence cybercrime, including the use of abusive language on electronic media, is punishable by a hefty fine or even up to two years at the Emir’s pleasure. That added an interesting twist to the trilateral clash of cultures.

The swearing incident occurred in October, but the offender didn’t realise she was in trouble until last week, when she decided to go home after a two-year stay in Dubai. She shipped all her belongings to Britain and tried to board a plane, nostalgically looking forward to that first bite of Cornish pasty.

However, she was arrested upon arrival at the airport and is now awaiting trial. The defendant-to-be tried to plead with her accuser, begging her to withdraw the charge. But the law-abiding Ukrainian held firm. “It’s now a criminal matter,” she explained. Dura lex, sed lex, as they say in Kiev.

There’s much we can learn from this tale of woe. First, we must all hone our cultural awareness, reminding ourselves that all cultures are equally worthy and most of them are superior to ours. Second, we must consider the efficacy of snitching as a moral regulator.

In the past, disputes were settled by duelling. Now we don’t have to risk bloodshed any longer. All we have to do is report an offender to Customs & Excise. Even if a subsequent audit reveals no irregularities, the old adage comes into play: you can beat the charge, but you can’t beat the hassle.

And third, don’t even think of going to Dubai or any other Muslim land. No matter how culturally aware you are, you may still find yourself in deep… well, trouble of course. What did you think I was going to say?

Never in the history of human folly has so much been squandered by so many on so little evidence.

One day Churchill’s famous oratory will be thus bowdlerised to describe our obsession with reducing anthropogenic carbon emissions. Meanwhile, this insane ideology is gathering momentum.

That’s what ideologies do: they are like snowballs rolling down a hill slope into an abyss. As they go, they gather speed and bulk – until they hit the bottom and disintegrate. But while still in motion, they could add up to a deadly avalanche.

Like any other ideology, this one is sustained by mendacious propaganda. For example, one of the current Volvo ads pontificates on climate change, claiming that the Earth has been cool until now.

There exists a code of practice that doesn’t let advertisers lie about their products. Evidently, lying about anything else is fine. In this case, the Earth has been warmer than it is now during about 85 per cent of its existence – but never mind the hard facts, it’s the woke feeling that counts.

Car manufacturers are committed to replacing all their IC cars with electric vehicles. The impression conveyed is that, when everyone drives a Go-Kart, mankind will breathe clean air free of carbon dioxide.

Now we can sleep peacefully at night, rather than being pursued by the nightmares of either burning alive or suffocating, whichever comes first. In fact, 42 per cent of Britons list climate change as their main concern. Say what you will about propaganda, but one thing is for sure: it works.

True enough, transportation produces some 28 per cent of all anthropogenic carbon emissions. Aren’t you glad that in a decade or two cars will no longer be spewing out the stuff?

If you are, consider a few more numbers. Carbon dioxide makes up only 0.04 per cent of the atmosphere. Of that minuscule proportion, 95 per cent comes from natural sources that have nothing to do with human activity. Thus anthropogenic CO2 accounts for 0.0016 per cent of the air we breathe. Puts that 28 per cent in perspective, doesn’t it?

But forget the perspective. Let’s agree with the ecofanatics that reducing 0.0016 per cent by a quarter is a worthy goal. However, we won’t reach it even if we drive every IC vehicle off the road.

Electric cars are powered by batteries, and their production requires lithium, cobalt and manganese. Alas, the mining and refining of those metals releases an awful lot of CO2.

How much is an awful lot? According to a new study, producing a single Tesla battery will emit between 23,000 and 32,000 pounds of extra carbon. Multiply that by the total number of cars in Britain, currently standing at 40 million, and… well, I can’t count that high.

An ecofanatic will argue that this will still produce a net reduction compared to IC cars. Perhaps. But when buying a car, are you prepared to pay an extra £10-20 thousand for a possible marginal reduction in the 28 per cent of 0.0016 per cent?

Add to this the cost, both financial and environmental, of producing the extra electricity required to charge tens of millions of batteries, and we are beginning to bite into those tiny percentages even more. But no expense is too high for the fanatics to claim moral ascendancy.

However, on closer examination their moral ground appears quite a bit lower. For, in addition to producing harmless CO2, the mining of battery minerals causes real environmental damage, not to mention the harm to the miners’ health.

When we consider where these metals are produced, the ecofanatics’ smugness begins to look not only factually unfounded, but also morally defunct. Most of the world’s cobalt is produced in the Congo, South America delivers most of the lithium, and between them South Africa and China account for about half of all manganese.

Therefore most miners are… how shall I put it without risking censure?… not exactly white (it’s not South American or South African whites who go down the mines). How does this tally with the woke commitment to pan-planetary racial equality?

I detect a clash of pieties there, which is always nice to observe. The European and North American ecofanatics, who are predominantly left-wing, don’t mind cobalt and lithium miners getting cancers produced by radioactive particles. As long as their own virtue is properly signalled, they feel self-satisfied.

Everyone can see exhausts coming out of tailpipes, but those dying miners are safely tucked away out of sight in faraway lands. This trompe l’oeil creates the illusion of a carbon-free ride, which I for one find repugnant. Don’t you?

When she was young, Miss Down was gorgeous but, by her own admission, stupid. Now, at 66, she’s just gorgeous.

Back then Miss Down put impure thoughts into the minds of many young men (me included). Now she comes up with pure thoughts of her own.

One of those she vented when asked about her role as Margaret Thatcher in the film Reagan. The interviewer was probably expecting a heart-wrenching admission of a tragic inner conflict involved in trying to get under the skin of a known monster.

True enough, Miss Down admitted she disliked Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s. But then she disappointed the interviewer by stressing the past tense of that admission: “I was a stupid Leftie with my vapid brain twisted by ridiculousness which affects so many young people even today… But in retrospect, I think the woman was wonderful and a genius.”

What’s the matter with her? Doesn’t she know that a conservative can be neither wonderful nor a genius – nor indeed a woman?

Leftie feminists refuse to acknowledge that Margaret Thatcher’s success struck a blow for womankind. American conservatives Phyllis Schlafly and Jeane Kirkpatrick suffered the same fate: they lacked the political dimension of womanhood, and it’s really the most important one. Sex, like race, has become a political statement, not a biological fact.

I’m happy to welcome Miss Down into the conservative fold, which isn’t blessed with a surfeit of film stars. Yet I don’t wish to besmirch her reputation by ascribing to her my own misgiving about our unchecked democracy run riot.

She said nothing amounting to an explicit argument against democracy. However, what she did say can be logically extrapolated into that area. Allow me to repeat: “I was a stupid Leftie with my vapid brain twisted by ridiculousness which affects so many young people even today.”

Replace ‘even’ with ‘especially’, and one can see that Miss Down described not just her own youthful failings, but a prevalent condition. For her evolution up from Leftie stupidity was rooted in the physiology of the human brain.

In my rather long life I’ve met only two people who started out as conservatives and then evolved leftwards over a lifetime – and hundreds whose evolution had the opposite vector.

This stands to reason on any number of levels. Physiologically, we become smarter as we grow older. It takes 20-odd years for an average brain to wire all the synapses properly and to start functioning at a reasonable level – and then perhaps as long again to acquire wisdom.

The thought process of the young isn’t so much cerebral as gonadic, and the gonads are better at producing emotions and appetites than reason. Hence the young are more susceptible to propaganda, which is a predominantly left-wing pastime reliant on easily digestible slogans.

Conservatism doesn’t lend itself to sloganeering. For example, when a Leftie says we must take from the rich and give to the poor, I can’t think of a spiffy phrase to counter that slogan. I could think of a longish sequential argument, but young people seldom stay still long enough to listen, and now less than ever.

Their brains seek not reason but stimuli, of the kind that can activate hormonal outpourings. When the gonadic output slows down with age, reason moves in to claim an ever-increasing role. This tends to coincide with the person acquiring experience, responsibilities, social status and a greater stake in society.

Thus the notion of redistributive justice  may begin to look more subversive than just. Wisdom sets in, and a conservative outlook may follow.

No political democracy can produce social virtue unless the electorate votes in a responsible, informed and thoughtful fashion. Since people under, say, 25 can’t do so, they shouldn’t vote, it’s as simple as that.

I am generalising here. We’ve all met intelligent youngsters amply qualified to pass judgement on governance. But democracy of universal suffrage is a game of large numbers and statistics. That, for example, Trump won eight per cent of the black vote in 2020 doesn’t invalidate the generality that blacks vote Democrat.

Extrapolating from the extrapolation, we can now acknowledge that it’s not all about age. Adulthood is a necessary but not sufficient condition for responsible voting.

Also critical is education. Youngsters must be taught the basic concepts of political science, economics, philosophy, morality, history and contemporary geopolitical realities to give them a proper grounding for future adulthood – and voting.

That democracy is dysfunctional in the absence of proper education was clear to both Plato and Aristotle at the time when democracy was inchoate. Yet one doesn’t have to possess their genius to figure this out.

None of us would consider getting into a car driven by someone who doesn’t know how to drive. Yet most of us see nothing wrong in having our lives affected by incompetent ignoramuses who unerringly elevate to government those made in their own image.

An electorate dominated by cannibals won’t vote in anyone who considers cannibalism morally repugnant. Similarly, an electorate of ignorant, immature, irresponsible voters will easily fall prey to unprincipled demagogues with loud voices but modest intellectual abilities.

Our voting age is 18, and the Lefties understandably wish to get it down even lower. They know that the younger the voting age, the better their electoral chances – as Miss Downs explained, perhaps unwittingly.

We today are fetishistically obsessed with method of government, rather than its essence. Most of us won’t agree that truth will emerge out of a head count. Yet we worship at the altar of indiscriminate, unchecked democracy as the best possible way of governing a country.

We happily accept statutory competence requirements for such simple activities as plumbing, driving or shooting, but throw up our hands in horror whenever someone suggests that only competent people should take part in the infinitely more complex business of government.

Yet our only requirements for voting are citizenship and the risibly low age of 18. Anyone advocating greater limits on suffrage, those of age, mental competence, education, property ownership or whatnot, is seen as an enemy in need of re-education.

All I can say is, chaps, listen to Leslie-Ann Down and draw the logical conclusions. The lady is talking sense.

It’s good to see that Russians remain quick learners. One can see that, compared to a week ago, both sides have honed their skills.

Yesterday’s protesters showed even better coordination, using social media to great effect. They have also learned to stay on the move, rapidly shifting the action from one part of town to another.

When attacked by the police and the National Guard, they resisted even more strongly than a week ago. This time they didn’t just rely on bare fists – there were instances of paint being thrown in the cops’ visors. That shows both courage and planning.

Also, the old Scythian tactics of hit and run saw the light of day. Faced with an overwhelming force, the protesters would quickly disperse, hiding in doorways and courtyards – only to come back when the cops moved on.

Still, Putin’s stormtroopers have much better resources and they weren’t bashful about using them. Both tear gas and tasers came into play, with some protesters tasered multiple times. If a week ago it was mostly cops who saw action, this time they were reinforced by the National Guard, a military force created strictly for internal use.

This may explain a much greater number of both arrests (5,000 compared to 4,000 a week ago) and injuries inflicted on the protesters. This time around 82 reporters also got arrested for reporting, which activity is becoming ever more dangerous in Russia. Some detainees were beaten up after being arrested.

In another interesting development, cops in Petersburg and elsewhere were brandishing firearms. This bodes well for the future: following Chekhov’s dictum, if a gun appears in Act 1, it must fire in Act 3. It’s possible, nay likely, that the next act will see the stormtroopers opening up not with tear gas and tasers but with live rounds.

Russian history shows that, when an army stains its uniforms with the blood of its own people, the regime totters. Whether or when it falls depends on a confluence of factors. Here we must learn from the best, and, while history knows many theoreticians of revolutions, one mechanic stands above the rest: Vladimir Lenin.

In my classification, Vlad Putin’s namesake narrowly beats Stalin, Hitler and Mao to the title of the most diabolical monster of modernity. But credit where it’s due: Lenin knew how to foment havoc.

As a precondition for a successful power-grab, he identified what he called “a revolutionary situation”, when the rulers no longer can, and the ruled no longer will, live the old way. A successful subversive must work tirelessly to create a revolutionary situation, spot its arrival unerringly and then act decisively.

To that end, Lenin eschewed all attempts to create a large revolutionary party uniting all and sundry in a common cause. In his 1902 book What Is to Be Done, he opted instead for a small cadre of “professional revolutionaries” coalescing around a strong leader.

I can’t predict how things will develop in Russia, nor whether, how and in what direction the protests will escalate. However, applying Lenin’s lessons to current events, I’m not sure the preconditions for an impending regime change are in evidence.

The first sign of a “revolutionary situation”, the rulers no longer able to rule the old way, isn’t immediately discernible. Putin remains in control of the siloviki (muscle men): the army, police and internal troops. All successful revolts in Russia have involved large swathes of siloviki switching sides, which so far hasn’t happened.

I don’t know if Putin continues to enjoy the loyalty of his political power base, the coterie of KGB/FSB types (about 85 per cent of the ruling elite) fused with the godfathers of organised crime. If he doesn’t, they may use the protests to depose him, but that would mean replacing Putin Mark I with Putin Mark II – a distinction without a difference.

The second requirement stipulated by the currently mummified expert was the people’s refusal to live the old way. That too lacks any compelling evidence.

So far the protests have featured somewhere between 150,000 to 250,000 participants, most of them under 35. How many have fundamental problems with the government and how many simply come out for the ride remains to be seen.

Young people’s gonads produce an inordinate amount of bubbling hormones demanding an outlet for pent-up energy. By confining so many youngsters to quarters, the Covid pandemic has reduced their options, making a chance to grapple with the cops while screaming bien pensant slogans seem like a welcome diversion.

This is a factor, though I don’t know how significant. Perhaps more important is the huge economic downturn caused by the pandemic. This isn’t unique to Russia, but there the slide started from a lower plateau than in the West.

The Russian economy lives in a permanent twilight, sporadically punctuated by false dawns caused by spikes in oil prices. Since young people can’t see a reasonable future for themselves in Russia, many of them seek it elsewhere.

Over two million of them have left since Putin’s ascent to power in 2000. Moreover, some 20 per cent of all Russians, and a higher percentage of young ones, say they’d like to leave.

However, the remaining 80 per cent still haven’t abandoned hope, and their discontent could perhaps be channelled into the conduit of a “revolutionary situation”. This brings me to Lenin’s third sine qua non: the existence of a disciplined, dedicated core of “professional revolutionaries” led by a charismatic, skilful and ruthless figure.

Now, if the existence of the other preconditions is open to debate, this one isn’t: neither such a cadre nor such a leader exists. At the moment, Navalny provides the focal point of mass opposition, but – and I may live to regret making hasty predictions – a Lenin he isn’t.

His quiver of anti-Putin weapons holds one arrow only: a drive against corruption. Now, as any reader of Gogol, Chekhov or Saltykov-Shchedrin will confirm, the Russians regard thieving officials not as a correctable outrage, but as a permanent, if undesirable feature: a bit like a blizzard or a hurricane. The tsars also showed remarkable equanimity in that respect.

Under Catherine II, government officials in the provinces were often unsalaried: it was assumed they could live off the fat of the land, a bit like the Mongol invaders of old.

Alexander I and Nicholas I extended that principle to the army, anticipating by a century Brecht’s line: “You only have to feed a soldier without a gun. A soldier with a gun will feed himself.”

The two brothers created so-called military settlements, where soldiers combined service with small-scale agriculture and large-scale looting. Effectively, the Russian army was an army of occupation in its own land. “I don’t think even the Mongols behaved worse,” wrote the great historian Vasily Klyuchevsky.

This fine tradition has largely immunised the broad Russian masses to government corruption. In any case, thieving officials are symptoms, not the disease – and certainly not the aetiology of the disease.

A revolution, as opposed to a series of jacqueries, requires an opposition that can first whip up systemic, rather than merely symptomatic, resentment and then use it as an irresistible battering ram. I can discern no signs of such a group in Russia.

The so-called liberal opposition is frankly pathetic. Far from being capable of leading a successful revolt, the liberals don’t even understand the roots of Western polity, the saplings of which they wish to transplant into their native soil.

All they can do is mouth wokish slogans borrowed uncritically from what they call THE WEST, meaning publications like The Guardian, Le Monde and The New York Times. They don’t realise that these represent only one strain of Western opinion, and it took some six centuries for such ideas to germinate to the detriment of Western society.

History shows exactly what happens in Russia when Western ideas are forced down the people’s throats. The first liberal republic lasted some eight months in 1917. The second, about as many years in the ‘90s.

The first one proved impotent to keep Lenin’s gang from plunging the country into decades of blood-stained despotism. The second one quickly converted freedom into anarchy, free enterprise into organised crime and democracy into a kleptofascist dictatorship.

Yet, as Paul Valéry remarked, “history teaches precisely nothing”. Russian liberals are still guided by The Guardian ideals and by their own apophatic self-identification from the negative: they are a resounding ‘no’ to every ‘yes’ of Putin. If Vlad said tomorrow that Bach was a genius (admittedly a slim chance), they’d start screaming “Down with Bach!”

To sum up, I doubt that, if Lenin’s mummy came alive, it would diagnose a revolutionary situation. At best, it might express a slight worry.

Hence, even if Putin may be on the way out, I suspect Putinism isn’t. But this is one instance where I’d be ecstatic to be proved wrong.

Navalny’s film about Putin’s palatial monument to bad taste has now been seen by 100 million people – Hollywood, eat your heart out.

None of the Russian viewers gasped with incredulity. That sort of thing is par for the entire course of Russian history. In the West, rich men become politicians; in Russia, politicians become rich men. Everyone knows that.

Still, knowing it and seeing it are two different things. In a country where over 20 per cent of the population have no indoor plumbing, the room-by-room virtual tour of Putin’s palace came close to causing a scandal, and it was certainly a factor in mass protests.

Within hours of the film being uploaded, Putin’s spokesman Peskov told journalists Putin isn’t the proud owner. Who is then? Peskov clearly wanted to say “He hasn’t been appointed yet.” Instead, he said “I haven’t a clue”.

Now, even in Russia the circle of people who could afford such a monstrosity is rather narrow. And if we look at those who could have it guarded by a company of FSB thugs, protected by a cocoon of a no-fly zone and insulated by a 2km exclusion zone for sea traffic, then the circle narrows down even more.

Yet Peskov didn’t even venture a guess, and the inquisitive pundits left the press conference dissatisfied. Their frustration quickly worked its way into an outburst of mockery, mostly vented in foreign media. Rather than fearing Vlad, the world began to laugh at him. His attempts at pathos were becoming pathetic.

Something had to be done. Simply denying Putin’s ownership was no longer enough. A stand-in owner absolutely had to be named for verisimilitude, which caused a bit of a scramble in the Kremlin.

Urgent phone calls went out to the Abramovich types around the world, but none was eager to carry the can at first. “Really, Vlad,” they must have been saying. “Who on earth could believe such a thing?”

“I don’t give a monkey’s what they could believe!” Vlad must have objected. “It’s what they could prove that matters. And I’ll make it worth your while.”

It says a lot about the grotesque unreality of the situation that it took Vlad all of 10 days to find a stand-in owner. But find one he did.

His childhood friend and judo partner Arkady Rotenberg finally agreed to go before the press. “It won’t remain a secret any longer,” he announced.

“I’m the owner. The project was complicated, there were many investors involved, but I managed to take over. It’s quite a find: the location is terrific.”

For a cozy retreat? No, for the apartment hotel that the palace will become. “I like this hotel business a lot,” said Rotenberg. “Especially since it can become tourist business.”

According to him, he bought the estate several years ago. Then why did he keep his ownership secret and, once the news broke, have to wait 10 days before acknowledging it?

“Because of the purely human factor,” explained Putin’s pal, one of the Russian gangsters under sanctions in the West. “Insinuations are being written.”

That’s where he lost me. I would have thought that precisely for that reason Rotenberg should have come forward within minutes of the film’s first run. Why wait 10 days while his best friend and benefactor was dragged over the coals of worldwide ridicule?

After all, but for Putin, Rotenberg would still be an obscure judo trainer in Petersburg, with perhaps a side line in some small-scale crime. It was Vlad who picked him and his brother out of obscurity and made them billionaires within a couple of years.

It was Vlad who gave him 30 per cent of the vodka business (Russia’s sole growth industry), a bank with 100 branches all over Russia, a construction company with an inside track to the juiciest state contracts and God only knows what else.

So why leave his friend and godfather so exposed for so long? The answer is, Rotenberg didn’t. It simply took Vlad and Peskov a while first to come up with this transparent lie and then to appoint the right figurehead.

My heart bleeds for Vlad. For even he won’t be able to get away with keeping the palace for himself now. He’ll actually have to give his retirement bolthole to Rotenberg, who’ll then have to convert it to an apartment hotel.

Considering the existing layout, that would probably mean gutting the palace and redesigning it from scratch. But hey, what’s a billion or two among friends? There’s always more where that came from – the impoverished, browbeaten, tyrannised Russian people.

And, even more bizarre, why do so many atheists defend their anti-Semitism on supposedly Christian grounds?

Back in Russia, I used to hear fervent communists refer to Jews as Christ-killers. So you believe in Christ? I’d ask innocently. Since in those days that sounded like a ringing denunciation, they invariably replied “Of course not, he’s a figment of bourgeois imagination.”

With my characteristic pedantry, I’d then wonder why they hated Jews for having killed Christ. You can’t be charged with killing a figment, can you?

Yet what interests me here isn’t anti-Semitism in general, but specifically Christian anti-Semitism, which is flagrantly incongruous in a religion of love. The principal genres of Jew-hatred in the West are currently racial and ethnic, but these too may be legitimately traced back to Christian roots.

Post-Christian hatred of Jews is largely rooted in Christian hatred of Judaism, which sentiment represents a tragic historical accident. The history is ancient, going back to Jesus’s earthly lifespan, when, according to popular mythology, the Jews rejected Christ and killed him judicially. This is indeed a myth.

The Jews as a whole didn’t reject Christ; only a few hundred Jews in Jerusalem, led by the Sanhedrin, did. The rest couldn’t possibly have rejected Christ simply because they were unaware of his existence.

Hence even at that time hatred of all Jews went contrary not only to Christ’s teaching of love but also to basic arithmetic. Those early anti-Semites should have remembered that even God was willing to spare Sodom if there was a single righteous man found among its denizens.

And by Christian standards, Jews had many not just righteous but saintly men at the time. It was they who first heard and recorded Christ’s message, followed him, mourned his death, rejoiced in his resurrection and died for their faith.

Some disciples carried the message outside Palestine, and Paul in particular was known as Apostle to the Gentiles. Yet at first the word mostly meant Hellenised Jewish communities around the Mediterranean, and much of Paul’s mission was trying to reconcile their old beliefs with the new faith.

It’s only when Paul began to strike farther afield, all the way to Rome, that Christ’s message reached communities with no Jewish background. Hence Paul’s teaching on justification by faith, not by following the Mosaic law and its rituals, particularly circumcision.

It was then that Paul began to preach Christian universalism, rising above ethnicity, social status and sex: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

However, it was also the time when Christians became hostile to Jews and, by way of reciprocity, vice versa. The reasons for that animosity are rooted in human psychology activated by a theological error on the part of the early Christians and the contemporaneous Jews.

Any religion claims exclusive rights to the ultimate truth, which is integral to the very definition of religion. Similar claims of other creeds are usually regarded with indifference and perhaps mild condescension. Hatred is rare, and it’s typically caused not by the theology of an alien creed but by its hostile actions.

Hence I’ve never observed any Christian hostility to, say, Buddhism, Hinduism, animism, Taoism or pantheism. Many Christians do dislike Islam, but mostly in response to objectionable acts perpetrated by Muslims.

Purely religious, if you will theological, hatred does exist, but it’s almost exclusively reserved for heretics and apostates: none so hostile as divergent proponents of the same creed. It follows that, the closer two creeds are perceived to be to each other, the more likely they will be to treat each other as implacable enemies.

The relationship between the Jews and early Christians could have followed the principle that sociologists call “both… and…”. Instead, tragically, it was “either… or…” that conquered.

Both parties overemphasised the undeniable fact of Jesus’s Jewishness. In his earthly life he was indeed a Palestinian Jew, who delivered his sermons in an Aramaic replete with references to the Pentateuch and other holy books of the Jews.

Even his dying words, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, are a quote from Psalm 22:1. And Jesus’s living words were couched in Jewish scriptural terms.

The Book of Daniel in particular is a regular thesaurus of Jesus’s divine claims, oblique and recondite to outsiders, but instantly understandable to his audience, weaned as it was on metaphorical expression. To them, Jesus stated his divine nature as clearly as he would have done with a straightforward message along the lines of “I am God thy Lord”.

Jesus used a roundabout idiom because no communication can be effective unless put in a language the audience can understand. It’s for that reason that Jesus often referred to himself as Son of Man, a phrase his listeners associated with the Messiah.

Yet the Messiah isn’t God. In Judaism he is a human king from the Davidic line anointed by God to rule the Jewish people and ease their path to the kingdom of God. Had Jesus been nothing but that, no Christian universalism would have been possible, no Hellenised Christian theology and philosophy would have appeared.

However, they did appear, which shows that Jesus’s Jewishness, while important to his earthly life, isn’t essential to Christianity. Had both parties to the argument realised that at the time, they could have seen their way clear to theological peace and even friendship.

The Jews were chosen by God, but that didn’t preclude the possibility that God could have also chosen another group within their ranks and destined it for a different mission. In their turn, Christians could have gratefully acknowledged the virtue and wisdom of Judaism, borrowing many of its key tenets.

They could have adopted, for example, the Jewish cosmology, the Ten Commandments, the teaching on the soul, and the concept of a single, merciful God – all without claiming that Christianity had absorbed Judaism, thereby making it redundant.

Since that claim amounted not to adaptation but to usurpation, an historic opportunity was missed. Instead of seeing the Jews as adherents of another, strictly discrete religion with a parallel claim to unique status, the early Christians began to regard them as heretics and apostates, whose claims were inherently subversive.

The Jews committed the same tragic error. Rather than acknowledging the Christians as another Chosen People related to the Jews but following an entirely different fideistic and theological path, they treated them as traitors to Judaism.

That bilateral intransigence activated the psychological mechanism I mentioned earlier. People may forgive faithfulness to another religion, but not apostasy to their own.

Since, unlike Judaism, Christianity has no biological obstacles to its spread, it went on to become the religion of the West, with the Jews dispersed throughout the Roman Empire and then Christendom. The original enmity grew in scale and intensity, eventually acquiring a life of its own even after the West severed its Christian roots.

This hatred has hurt the Jews physically, the Christians morally, and both sides theologically. Hence neither religion found itself at peak strength to resist the onslaught of ruinous secularism, otherwise known as modernity.

It’s not only beauty but also ugliness that’s best appreciated from afar. Now we can observe the EU from a distance, the former recedes into the background, while the latter comes to the fore.

The latest proof of this optical phenomenon was kindly provided by Manny Macron, a simple soul who doesn’t always realise what he’s saying, especially when his foster mother Brigitte isn’t in attendance. The interview he gave Andrew Marr is a case in point.

By way of backdrop, I don’t regard democracy as an unqualified synonym of political virtue. Hence I’d have little quarrel with Manny if he openly said that the EU supersedes democracy for the sake of more effective and enlightened government.

I might take issue with ‘effective and enlightened’, but I’d mark him up for honesty. Anyway, since the EU is ruled by an unelected body, it would be a statement of self-evident fact, but one that could engage people in a rational debate.

Yet EU functionaries make no such admission. They want to have it both ways: rule by fiat while at the same time paying lip service to democratic rectitude. That’s cheating, and Manny is good at such legerdemain tricks.

The subject of Brexit came up in the interview, and Marr asked Manny if a similar French referendum would yield the same result. “Yes, probably, in the same context”, came the reply.

Meaning what? Oh well, explained Manny, “It’s a mistake when you just ask ‘yes’ or ‘no’, when you don’t ask people how to improve the situation and to explain how to improve it.”

This is a recurrent theme among EU lovers, certainly in France. I wonder what part of referendum they don’t get.

Any meaningful referendum asks for a simple binary answer, ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or else in this case ‘leave’ or ‘remain’. Again, I’d probably agree with Manny had he honestly said that government by plebiscite runs against the grain of representative government.

Moreover, the elitist in me would probably even nod if he said that most people are ill-qualified to make seminal decisions about how their country should be governed. But if Ben Franklin lived today, especially in France, he’d never say that honesty is the best policy. Certainly not as far as Manny is concerned.

What he’s talking about is fudging up the issue, befogging it in a smokescreen of obfuscation. In his nimble hands a Frexit referendum wouldn’t ask the French whether they want to leave or remain.

Instead it would invite them to erect a tall pile of malodorous suggestions on how to improve the unimprovable, what is colloquially described as polishing a turd. Buried underneath such a pile would be the whole issue of Frexit, which is Manny’s whole point.

The will of the people and consent of the governed clearly don’t even play a peripheral role in his calculations. France shall be kept in the EU by hook or, if must be, by crook. How the French feel about it is immaterial.

Any referendum will be designed with that purpose in mind. And if the people still vote wrong, the referendum will be annulled, and they’ll be told to vote again and keep doing so until they get it right. The EU has form on such chicanery.

Since I love France and, until Covid, spent half my time there, I’m sad to see her governed so badly and, more important, dishonestly. And I’m staggered by Manny’s nerve to comment on Brexit and our impending demise as its result.

His understanding of Brexit, he said, “is that middle classes and working classes decided that the recent decades were not in their favour”. For the likes of Manny, support from such lowly quarters ipso facto invalidates the results morally and intellectually.

He then highlighted his own moral and intellectual credentials by explaining what it was that those British hoi polloi disliked about the EU: “I think one of the reasons was precisely an organisation of our EU which probably gets too far in terms of freedom without cohesion. Towards free market without any rules and any convergence.”

I get it. This giant intellect thinks that Britons voted Leave because they felt there was too much economic and other freedom in the EU, and not enough single-state integration. Give them a giant Leviathan with a command economy and they’ll be falling over themselves to join the ranks of the EU.

The cheek of this statement is as refreshing as its idiocy is stultifying. For the truth is exactly, diametrically, totally opposite. By voting Leave, the British expressed their loathing of an unwieldy, dictatorial, protectionist bloc dead set on creating a single European state run by the likes of Manny.

They know their own government may be incompetent, but at least it’s indeed their own, accountable to them if only every few years. They may not have any say in what it does, but they can punish it at the ballot box if it’s not to their liking.

Conversely, submitting to the rule of motley continental powers defies the British national character, the country’s entire political history and ethos. That’s not what les Anglo-Saxons do, what they’ve never done.

Such is the simple truth, but it’s too simple for Manny to understand. Perhaps he should ask Brigitte, she may be able to tell him what’s what.   

Frederick the Great, who in common with many historical figures failed to anticipate modern sensibilities, believed an army marched on its stomach.

That proves yet again the irredeemable crassness of every prominent member of any generation before our own. Frederick must have laboured under the misapprehension that a successful army must be well-fed, well-armed and well-drilled.

While admitting that such things are still marginally important, we today know that the most essential aspect of battle-worthiness is heightened sensitivity to… well, everything we must be sensitive to.

Such as personal pronouns. Never mind that a soldier may be short of food, ordnance and training. Just arm him/her/it/them/zie/hir with sensitivity to personal pronouns, and the army will vanquish in any cultural battlefield, if no other.

Such is an inference from another instalment in the saga of Joe and Kamala, showing it’s not just great minds who think alike. Since Joe Biden is the Commander-in-Chief of the US armed forces and VP Kamala Harris is effectively his deputy, it’s good to see they are in agreement.

Kamala spearheaded the attack by publicly specifying that her own pronouns are she/her. The cosmic significance of that announcement at first escaped me. In my naivety, I’d address a woman by those pronouns without being encouraged to do so.

I forgot that, the way language works nowadays, it’s not denotation but connotation that matters. And in this case the connotation signals sensitivity to institutionalised and ideologised transsexuality.

It stands to reason that, if people can choose their sex from a menu currently including 74 offerings, they should also be entitled to choose the pronouns that reflect their new sex.

Here the menu is somewhat limited, but it’s growing. Thus a transsexual may prefer to be addressed in the plural, as ‘they’ and ‘their’ (“John is weird. They wear their sex on their sleeve.”)

Actually, following a singular antecedent with a gender-neutral plural pronoun is now par for the course – even when the person’s sex is in no doubt. Thus, “This striker needs to work with their coach” is now the norm in sports reportage, even though one can confidently expect any Premiership player to be a man.

What’s still less common is the growing use of impeccably neutral pronouns, such as ‘zie’ and ‘hir’. This proves the tremendous elasticity of English and its capacity for endless expansion.

Also constantly updated are the titles of address. The first step in the right direction was taken decades ago, when ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs’ were ousted by ‘Ms’, laudably erasing the distinction between married and unmarried women.

Yet a step in the right direction still falls short of the ultimate destination. Progressive though ‘Ms’ is, it’s still distinct from ‘Mr’ and therefore does nothing for gender neutrality. That oversight is being widely corrected by the growing use of a gender-neutral title of ‘Mx’.

There’s only one progressive alternative to starting a letter with ‘Dear Mx Smith’: dropping the title altogether. ‘Dear Smith’ would have the additional benefit of looking as if the correspondents both went to a good public school, where addressing one another by the surname is common.

That was the signal Mx Harris sent and I initially missed. But Mx Biden, the Commander-in-Chief, heard it in every tonal detail and acted accordingly. Yesterday he overturned Trump’s ban on recruiting transsexuals in the army.

The ban didn’t cover the 8,980 transsexuals already on active duty; it only precluded adding to that number. That’s no longer good enough: “President Biden believes that gender identity should not be a bar to military service, and that America’s strength is found in its diversity,” said the White House statement.

Without disputing the source of America’s strength, one should still ponder whether it’s indeed diversity that makes an army strong. Even if it does, one would think this factor is rather low down on the list, below things like physical and tactical training, discipline, marksmanship, esprit de corps and other aspects traditionally seen as essential to martial glory.

Actually, armies thrive not on diversity but on uniformity, with each unit bringing together a number of men thinking, acting and fighting as one. Why, soldiers aren’t even allowed to express their individuality sartorially, with everyone clad in identical fatigues.

They go into battle with an understanding of one for all, all for one. That requires seamless cohesion in every unit, with the collective subsuming the individual. A good soldier still has to think for himself, but only within the uniform framework of regulations, manuals and orders.

Moreover, soldiers are by their nature aggressive types whose purpose in life is to kill anyone who wears a uniform of different design. This fosters a laddish atmosphere with a strong flavour of machismo, and all armies are similar in that respect.

Now, the US army doesn’t normally attract arty types hanging out in Greenwich Village or Rodeo Drive. Most recruits are simple (as distinct from simple-minded) lads from the backwater of Iowa, Alabama, Arkansas and other such places.

Sensitivity to those they describe as ‘preverts’ can’t possibly be high on their list of masculine virtues. Now imagine their reaction to him/her/it/them/zie/hir turning up in the barracks of their infantry platoon.

I’d venture a guess that him/her/it/them/zie/hir would have a life similar to the canvasses of Hieronymus Bosch, not those of François Boucher. Him/her/it/them/zie/hir would be certain to suffer an ordeal for which bullying will be an inadequate description.

That means the platoon would have to undergo an extensive programme of sensitivity training, supplementing and in due course possibly replacing the kind of training traditionally associated with infantry units.

Normally I’d bemoan the erasure of the line separating decadence from degeneracy. However, taking Mx Biden’s word, I’m willing to accept that America will become stronger as a result of his new law. But, dollars to doughnuts, as him/her/it/them/zie/hir might say, the army won’t.

As that great philosopher Joseph Stalin once said, “There’s a man, there’s a problem. No man, no problem.”

Too bloody right, thinks Vlad Putin. Alexei Navalny, that hireling of the CIA, MI6 and George Soros, is definitely a problem. And one that Vlad has tried, so far unsuccessfully, to solve Stalin’s way. But you can’t get decent help these days. Today’s FSB nincompoops can’t even poison a man so he stays poisoned.

So what do you know, that underpoisoned rat produces a worldwide sensation with his film about Vlad’s Gelendjik palace, so far seen by 80 million people. Odd, that. What’s the big deal? A man has a right to get a little retirement bolthole to brighten up the twilight of his life.

And what’s this with hundreds of thousands braving Covid, frost and police truncheons to scream “Putin is a thief!” and “Putin out!”? Stalin, that sainted father to his people, would have spanked them with tanks and orders to fire at will. But Vlad can’t afford that sort of thing, not yet anyway. So what’s a chap to do?

Oh well, it’s hard to second-guess another man’s thoughts. So I’d better tell you my own, always the safer option.

To begin with, I was one of the 80 million viewers of the Navalny film. As I found out, Vlad’s estate is 39 times the size of Monaco, ruled by a prince. Could this make Vlad a prince 39 times over?

Now there’s a thought. If Vlad resigns, as the demonstrators demanded on Saturday, he could declare his bailiwick a sovereign principality, with himself as its hereditary monarch. Perhaps he could strike a deal with Navalny. You become president of Russia, I became prince of Gelendjik, no hard feelings. And especially no legal proceedings. Okay?

I’m impressed with Vlad’s palace – Albert of Monaco, eat your heart out. Yes, aesthetically Vlad’s retirement bolthole makes the sets of Bollywood films look like paragons of subtle refinement. But I love the eclecticism of the place.

If it’s true that a man’s house reflects his personality, then one has to admire the vast expanse of Vlad’s soul. Nice to see the sacred and profane dovetailing so seamlessly.

The sacred is served by a detached mock-Byzantine church for Vlad to offer genuflecting devotions to his recently acquired God. The profane is caressed by a pole-dancing room for Vlad to pay manual tribute to his favourite art genre. Pure Hegel, that, the unity and struggle of opposites. It’s all good, provided Vlad remains sufficiently compos mentis to match the right rituals with the right place.

As to the billion-pound cost of the cottage, that’s no reason to tar Vlad with the corruption brush. And stop trying to calculate how much and for how long a man on £99,000 a year has to save to end up with a billion quid. It’s not Vlad’s money, is it? His own billions are safely tucked away in numbered offshore accounts all over the world.  

The palace money came from friends expressing their gratitude for Vlad’s sage leadership. A hundred or so do a whip-around, 10 mil each, pocket change really, and Joe’s your uncle, Nikita’s your aunt. Up goes the palace. Happiness all around.

However, as the weekend events showed, happiness isn’t really all around. Some 250,000 Russians came out to demand that Navalny get out of prison and Putin out of the Kremlin. That doesn’t seem like a lot in a country of 140 million, and neither are the sheer numbers unique: Moscow alone has been known to field over 100,000 protesters in the past.

But there’s the rub: this time Moscow wasn’t alone, far from it. Demonstrations took place in 112 cities, and if in the past Moscow accounted for 80-90 per cent of all protesters, on Saturday she only boasted a quarter, if that.

Moreover, the action was perfectly coordinated. Protesters carried all the same posters everywhere and shouted all the same demands, none strictly local. Such things don’t happen by themselves – coordination bespeaks coordinators.

Even far-away places now seem to have a core of 100-200 anti-Putin activists capable of organising mass action – and inspiring people to fight the police and the elements. That is a promising development, unprecedented during Putin’s reign.

The elements were inclement on Saturday. The temperature in Yakutsk dropped down to -50C, which still didn’t keep hundreds of protesters off the streets. Yekaterinburg had a balmy -30C, and the turnout was higher, upwards of 10,000.

It’s not only geography that matters, but also demography. Anti-Putin protests used to feature mostly old codgers with a durable anti-Soviet chip on the shoulder. This time around, about two thirds of the protesters were young, in the 18 to 35 bracket – Putin’s children fancying parricide.

The police treated the protests with customary brutality, yanking people out of the crowd and busting their heads with truncheons. Photographs of such unlawful treatments of lawful protests have filled the net, with blood flowing freely. One middle-aged woman had the temerity to ask the cops why they were beating up a youngster. The reply came in the shape of a mighty kick that put her in a coma.

But, in another new development, this time some of the violence was reciprocated. Fights were breaking out, and one photograph shows two young lads playing footie with a policeman’s helmet (his head wasn’t in it). The police still had the upper hand in violence, but they no longer had the monopoly on it.

What’s going to happen now to all the players, Navalny, Putin and the people? Here I have to leave reportage for speculation, which is a notoriously soft ground to tread on. However, some things are reasonably clear.

Navalny certainly has a talent for what some may describe as inspiring the masses and others as rabble-rousing. He has become the focal point of dissent, and the only political figure seen as a plausible challenger to Vlad.

He is trying to unify various factions in what may become a sustained protest movement, to which end Navalny is uttering plenty of liberal phrases. But his heart lies elsewhere.

Navalny’s problem is with Putin’s epic corruption, not his declared political sentiments. While Putin’s may indeed be only declared and Navalny’s deeply felt, the sentiments are similar: Russian nationalism, empire building, suspicion (if not hatred) of the West and so forth.

Hence one hopes that Navalny will only act as a battering ram breaching the wall surrounding the kleptofascist regime, not as its one-for-one replacement. But such hopes are often forlorn.

Navalny may not get the chance to challenge Putin in earnest. Vlad has shown that he doesn’t mind turning Navalny into a martyr, and he may still feel Navalny is more dangerous alive than dead. After all, another plausible challenger, Boris Nemtsov, was shot dead 100 yards from the Kremlin six years ago, and no mass opposition has rallied around his body.

Hence I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of Navalny suffering a sudden heart attack in prison. Or else being released and then run over by a runaway driver in an unlicensed car. Such things do happen.

However, there are signs of Putin preparing an orderly retreat from power. Rumours of his deteriorating health, if not fatal illness, abound in Russia, and Vlad’s energy conspicuously falls short of that of the youthful protesters.

Two months ago he pushed through the Duma a constitutional amendment guaranteeing lifelong legal immunity for former presidents, which is to say himself. That he needed such an amendment was taken by many as a sign of impending retirement plans. The palace itself is another such sign: Vlad doesn’t really need it while still in power.

Then again, there exists the Stalin option of unrestrained terror. Vlad may indeed ratchet up oppression, but I don’t think the River Moskva is likely to foam with much blood: Vlad is no Stalin, and, more important, today’s Russians are no Soviets.

They may share Vlad’s resentment of the West, and they may buy the imperial myth of Russian spirituality trumping Western materialism. The Russians may even accept some thievery on their rulers’ part. As any reader of Gogol, Chekhov, Tolstoy and such great historians as Karamzin, Soloviov and Kliuchevsky will confirm, that’s nothing new.

What is new, however, is wide and instant availability of data in an Internet age. And the official data show that at least 20 million Russians live below the poverty line of £170 a month – the actual number may be twice as high.

Against that backdrop the palaces of the ruling gangsters, even more modest ones than Putin’s purloined fiefdom, may arouse justifiable and exploitable resentment. If what we are seeing is indeed an inchoate protest movement, rather than isolated outbursts, then it can’t be short of suitably incendiary messages.

The ruling junta, on the other hand, isn’t short of truncheons, bullets and prison cells. History shows that these sometimes triumph over messages, and sometimes they don’t. I wouldn’t want to venture a guess which way it’ll go this time.

However, if you insisted, I’d suggest that Putin’s political days are numbered. But whether or not his kleptofascist regime will be replaced by something better is a different story altogether. I refer those interested to Russia’s entire history.

What’s this white stuff coming down? Don’t tell me… oh yes… I seem to remember now… Gosh, it’s been years…