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Gold dust flies off celebrities like down off a poplar tree, and many snobbish hangers-on jump up in the air hoping to catch some of the glitter.

For a few years during her life, Princess Diana’s power to draw such acolytes was second to none, and she has retained some of it even 23 years after her death.

This brings me to Rosa Monckton, otherwise known as Mrs Dominic Lawson. Mrs Lawson still goes by her maiden name that’s considerably more illustrious than the one she acquired through marriage.

That’s understandable. If, say, a Cavendish girl married, say, a Jones, she’d have to be unrealistically free of any snobbery or class prejudice to become Mrs Jones, wouldn’t she? Miss Monckton isn’t entirely devoid of such qualities, which is why she is still tirelessly establishing her credentials as a PROFROD.

I use this acronym for the sake of brevity, since Professional Friend of Diana is unwieldy. Yet this is the role Miss Monckton has been playing for years, squeezing every particle of gold dust out of her association with Diana.

Why anybody would be proud of friendship with a conniving, not particularly bright egotist is beyond me. But gold dust gatherers don’t ever think about such incidentals. Their thirst for social elevation by association is unquenchable.

Yet Miss Monckton doesn’t have regular access to a wide audience gagging for yet another reminder that she’s a PROFROD. Her husband, he of the family where the girls are named after their fathers, does.

Mr Lawson is a popular, and often good, journalist, but he too likes stressing his vicarious ties with the dead princess, and one would think being married to a Monckton would be enough to satisfy most men’s social ambitions.

Hence his article today, snappily titled Callous, Cruel and Calculating, Martin Bashir Poisoned Princess Diana’s Mind. No Wonder She Told My Wife She Regretted It.

The old cynic in me suspects that the only load-bearing words in this title, indeed in the whole article, are ‘Princess Diana’ and ‘my wife’. But, though brevity may be the soul of wit, these four words don’t quite work as a cogent piece.

Hence Mr Lawson fumed for another 1,400 words about the awful BBC and that scumbag Bashir who tricked the saintly girl into agreeing to that infamous interview. Or rather fewer than 1,400, for some of those words were used up to remind those slow on the uptake several times that “my wife Rosa Monckton was one of the Princess’s closest friends”.

Apparently, “it has become clear that the BBC man had, quoting ‘intelligence sources’, been poisoning the Princess’s mind with concocted tales of nefarious plots, even including the disgusting assertion that her son, Prince William, had a watch which was secretly recording their conversations.”

Now, I don’t doubt for a second that Bashir was perfectly capable of resorting to such tactics. He isn’t the first sleazy hack to get a story by dishonest means and he won’t be the last.

However, Mr Lawson also tells us that Bashir didn’t plant such fears into Diana’s mind: “It is true that Diana had for quite a while been convinced that she was the victim of some sort of conspiracy.”

But “he knew that this was Diana’s great fear, played on it ruthlessly and dishonestly to win her confidence – and thus the interview that every broadcaster in the world coveted.”

Nothing in this story sounds unlikely, especially the Bashir part. Yet the Diana part doesn’t quite add up.

I’m sure that the hack had to exaggerate only a little, if at all. For our security services would have been grossly negligent had they not kept a watchful eye on Diana’s shenanigans.

For the princess had been at war with the royal family practically from the first day she joined it. Diana was either too stupid, or more probably too self-centred, to realise that the duties of being our future queen are as onerous as the rewards are spectacular.

Marriage to the heir to the throne isn’t a culmination of a love story. It’s a lifelong job, involving hard and self-sacrificial work. A royal marriage has little to do with ‘lurve’, and much to do with service.

If the heir to the throne cares more about his mistress than about his wife, that’s unfortunate, even deplorable. But it’s not the same as, say, a salesman playing away from home. The nature of the marriage contract is different.

Diana, being a thoroughly modern young lady, couldn’t get her head around that. And being vindictive, she started fighting her husband and his family. At first her response was merely self-destructive, taking the shape of various eating disorders, deliberately falling down the stairs and other such attention-seeking excesses.

In due course, however, she began to fight back in earnest. To that end she recruited a whole army of hacks and paparazzi who were surreptitiously directed to Diana’s whereabouts. They would then descend on her like a swarm of bees on a honey tree – only for the princess to complain bitterly about being haunted by reporters.

Soon, to score hits on her real enemy, she began to weaponise her lovers, of whom Captain Hewitt was far from the first. Again, reporters followed, having been quietly tipped off.

Eventually the couple separated, and Diana began to sow her wild oats on an even wider field, carefully choosing paramours who would most enrage, and more effectively compromise, the royal family. However, she still remained the wife of one future king and the mother of another.

That made her behaviour technically criminal, for adultery by the wife of a present or future king is high treason in English law. Yet no one would have thought of enforcing that. Of greater concern was the potential damage Diana could have caused by consorting with shady characters whose feelings for Her Majesty’s realm were tepid at best.

So yes, while I find it improbable that the royal family was plotting against Diana, I’m sure somebody was keeping an eye on her activities. Now what could she do about it?

One obvious response would have been to divorce Charles, withdraw from the public eye and do whatever she was doing more discreetly. That, however, would have done nothing for her war on the royals.

Instead she allowed Bashir to seduce her the same way she allowed her lovers to seduce her. In each case, the relationship was bilateral: she was seducing them too, with equal gusto.

I can’t quite follow the logic of why admitting to adultery before an audience of millions solved whatever problem Diana was supposed to have with dastardly conspiracies against her. The logic of wishing to cause maximum pain to her enemies was, on the other hand, unassailable.

That Bashir and the BBC behaved in an immoral, possibly actionable fashion is beyond doubt. But it takes an inveterate PROFROD to portray Diana as the innocent victim. She was no more a victim of Bashir than she was one of Captain Hewitt.

When Nietzsche pronounced his famous verdict, he didn’t mean it literally. He meant that God had been excommunicated from serious discussion because educated people no longer believed in him.

Conservatism is dead in the same sense and for the same reason. Throughout the West, the same correlation obtains: the likelihood of voting for left-wing parties increases with the educational level.

In Britain some 65 per cent of the poorly educated (under GCSE) vote Tory, while only 20 per cent of university graduates do so. This circle is bound to be vicious for it’s university graduates who control local politics, the media and of course education itself.

They are the ones who create what’s disingenuously called public opinion, and what’s in fact the opinion of the neo-totalitarian establishment. They exerted an inordinate influence for a long time, but only over the past decade or so have such ideologues begun to dominate the public discourse.

They speak in one voice, doing their utmost to mute any polyphony at the grassroots. Hence, the few conservatives working at universities, newspapers or TV stations find it socially and professionally hard to express their views – just like those 19^th century intellectuals who sensed that any reference to God was infra dig.

Such is the face of neo-totalitarianism, the kind that sports a patronising smile rather than a savage scowl. But let’s make no mistake about it: the absence of blood dripping off the fangs doesn’t make it any less totalitarian.

However, a mechanism for forcing, as opposed to brainwashing, people into acquiescence isn’t yet there, although those who think the West is immune to violent totalitarianism are too optimistic. Yet for the time being people may still vote their conscience and reason.

And basic conservatism speaks to both, even if intellectual conservatives no longer do, for the simple reason of being outnumbered and outshouted. Hence Trump’s triumph in this election.

Yes, I know he lost, by a whisker. What makes Trump’s campaign triumphant is that he only lost by a whisker.

He was fighting the election in the midst of one of the worst natural disasters in recent history, and such disasters are always blamed on the incumbent, however irrationally. Presidents and prime ministers have been known to lose office because their countries underperformed in sporting competitions, because of hurricanes, floods – and of course epidemics.

Hence it’s astonishing that Trump managed to run the neo-totalitarian establishment so close at a time when hundreds of thousands (billions, Mr Biden?) of Americans are dying. This testifies to the success of his policies, while his defeat bespeaks a systemic failure of American, and generally Western, conservatism.

Trump lacks many traits I regard as essential for a conservative. Most of these have to do with personality and style, and these, more than any set of ideas and policies, characterise a conservative. Militant vulgarity, ignorance of history (and most other things that matter), narcissism, jingoism, crassness of mind and manner, lack of self-restraint – all these aspects of Trump’s personality disqualify him from being a conservative as surely as Marxist beliefs would.

And it’s not just a president’s policies but also his personality that matters, for he is the face his country presents to the world. However, if we strictly look at Trump’s policies, then I think that, with the possible exception of Reagan, he’s the best president in my lifetime.

Trump struck a mighty blow for democracy by doing during his tenure exactly what he had promised to do during the campaign. Hence the hysterical shrieks about Trump somehow undermining democracy are ludicrous. By electing Trump, American voters got what they had voted for – and I can’t think offhand of any recent president who merited the same accolade to the same extent.

Trump’s commitment to deregulation and lower taxes was at least as staunch as Reagan’s, and probably more successful. Governments in residually free countries can’t take all the credit for the economy’s success, but some policies are known historically to work better than others. Trump’s definitely succeeded, and, but for Covid, he would have won this election at a canter on the strength of the economy alone.

A massive influx of illegal immigrants across the Mexican border has been a problem that every previous president acknowledged yet none even attempted to solve. By the time Trump became president, even talking about this issue had become well-nigh impossible for fear of incurring the neo-totalitarians’ wrath.

Yet Trump not only talked about the problem, but actually tried to solve it as best he knew how. It’s easy to criticise his solutions, but none of the critics has come up with a viable alternative. (Criticism in general is easy in the absence of responsibility and accountability.)

Trump’s foreign policy was by far the best this side of Reagan’s. His playing lickspittle to Putin is a blot, but it’s the only one.

He displayed more firmness than any other recent president towards North Korea and Iran – and his confronting China has been courageous, considering the West’s addiction to the poison of China’s cheap labour. Trump was also firm to his Nato allies, especially when insisting they pull their weight on defence, which doesn’t strike me as unfair.

It is somewhat illogical, since America pays not just for Europe’s defence but also for the lucrative privilege of being the Leader of the Free World. One shudders to think, for example, what would happen to the US economy if the dollar stopped being the world’s reserve currency, one in which America’s suicidal debt is denominated. But, on balance, it’s hard to argue with Trump on this issue.

He is manifestly contemptuous of every verse in the neo-totalitarian scripture, such as the global warming hoax. Unlike Biden, Trump isn’t committed to crippling the economy for the sake of an ill-conceived and anti-scientific ideology based on the Marxist hatred of capitalism. One has to welcome his decision to leave the Paris accords, thoughtfully designed as they are to destroy economic growth in the West and boost it in China.

Trump has made more progress in the Middle East than any other US president I recall. He has left the world in no doubt that it’s the Israelis and not Hamas who are friends and allies to the West. Again, he refused to succumb to the neo-totalitarian worship of the Third World, which is another aspect of hatred for the West.

Trump’s response to EU protectionism with protectionist measures of his own might have upset David Ricardo, but a politician can’t always be guided by theoretical rectitude. ‘They do it to us, we do it to them’ is the language easily understood by those to whom a president is accountable, the people.

Everywhere I look, I see that Trump’s policies are those any sensible conservative would favour, give or take. I am sorry, however, that it takes someone like Trump to champion such policies.

The argument for reason (the word I use interchangeably with conservatism in this context) should be put forth and won not by shrill demagogues, but by serious writers and philosophers. It’s their confident voice that should be distinctly heard in university halls, TV stations and editorial boards. Alas, by their very nature conservatives can’t outshout lefties: the former do all the thinking and the latter all the screaming.

By leapfrogging the neo-totalitarian establishment and emulating its shrillness, someone like Trump may appeal directly to the people’s better instincts. That way he may win a victory for some conservative policies, but, in the absence of an intellectual and cultural victory, conservatism will still lose.

Sooner or later the crude, homespun conservatism of a Trump will be shunted aside by the neo-totalitarian establishment. A tragedy will ensue, and there’s no doubt in my mind that the Biden-Harris victory will score a direct hit on America, and on us by ricochet.

Harris had the honesty to announce that her life’s ambition is to become “the most left-wing president in American history”. One could argue that this ambition has already been fulfilled, for Biden will be president in name only.

Even if only some of the incoming administration’s plans are realised (and one hopes that a Republican majority in the Senate and a largely conservative Supreme Court will be able to apply some brakes), this triumph of the neo-totalitarians may spell America’s downfall.

Everywhere one looks, from the projected trillions to be spent on socialised medicine and the criminally idiotic Green New Deal to the onslaught of the ‘downtrodden’ to a foreign policy more likely to be anti-Western (and specifically anti-British) than anti-tyranny, one can see a disaster looming.

Those Americans who were quick to respond to the neo-totalitarian prodding and call Trump divisive will learn what divisive really means. At least I hope they will – for the alternative is the submissive uniformity of castrated thought so beloved of all totalitarians, neo- or otherwise.

I always admire human qualities I don’t possess. Such as the unbridled self-confidence of columnists like Piers Morgan who, before any investigation has been conducted, know for sure that no electoral fraud was committed.

This reemphasises that, like everything else in life, vote counting has become a matter of ideology, not fact. For, other than ideological bias, what makes those chaps so sure?

Do they believe that American democracy is immune to cheating, or that the Democratic Party is incapable of it? If so, they must have played truant when political history was taught.

The Tammany Hall machine of the Democratic Party in New York controlled both the voting and, especially, the counting nicely for the better part of two centuries. Closer to our time, in 1948 Lyndon Johnson won the Senate race in Texas by a whopping 87 votes, which earned him the nickname my title above borrowed for Biden.

Much of Landslide Lyndon’s enthusiastic support came from supporters who had been dead for decades at polling time, but even that wouldn’t have worked had a box of uncounted ballots not been mysteriously discovered at the last moment.

Incidentally, that’s how fraud is usually detected. Here investigators use the forensic method developed by casino pit bosses to spot the card counters at the blackjack tables. What gives those intrepid individuals away is their irregular betting patterns, tipping the balance of probability against them and leading to their expulsion or, in times olden, worse.

Sudden and massive changes of statistical fortune may happen, but they are exceedingly unlikely. When they do occur, fraud is usually involved.

Thus, when JFK’s 1960 election was hanging by a thread, and Illinois was the key swing state, Chicago mayor Daley made a solemn pledge to the candidate: “Don’t worry, Mr President,” he said, confidently using the title to which Kennedy wasn’t yet entitled. “Your friends will deliver Illinois.”

He was as good as his word. Kennedy’s friends bussed hundreds of hirelings from one polling station to another, where they voted with equal gusto each time. Kennedy moved to the White House, and Nixon, displaying the kind of dignity that has since gone out of fashion, refused to mount a legal challenge. That, he said, would diminish the institution of the presidency.

Now, if Kennedy’s friends could deliver Illinois, what makes Morgan et al. so sure Biden’s friends couldn’t deliver, say, Wisconsin? After all, political morals are now considerably less robust than in 1960, and ideological passions much more febrile.

I’m not saying Landslide Joe has stolen the election, but any Las Vegas pit boss would be wary of certain statistical irregularities.

For example, some magic wand was waved in Wisconsin and 112,000 ballots suddenly came Biden’s way within just one hour. In a similar pattern, 138,000 ballots went into Biden’s boxes in Michigan at the same time when not a single one was cast for Trump. How likely is that?

Also, Virginia, citing a clerical error, switched 100,000 votes from Trump to Biden. Clerical errors do happen. But then so does fraud, let’s make no mistake about that. Why, even a country worshipping at the altar of Democracy (always implicitly capitalised) is capable of it.

If the Democratic Party has some form in winning elections by sleight of hand, the hard left ideologues who are beginning to dominate the party live by it. After all, their founding ideology is fraudulent, and they’ve never shied away from upholding it in delinquent ways. In fact, their lacerating self-analysis, backed up by experience, must have led them to the realisation that people can only be cheated, not persuaded, to support left causes.

None of this will stick in court, and neither, I’m afraid, will Trump’s lawsuits. But between us girls we aren’t going to insist that legally provable and true are always the same thing, are we?

Nonetheless, I agree with Richard Nixon. Even an election fraudulently won is less damaging to the country than one decided by the Supreme Court. Especially since even that august body can no longer be confidently trusted to be guided by facts rather than ideology.

So, grudging congratulations to Landslide Joe – and especially to President Kamala Harris, who’s doubtless looking forward to a 12-year rule, first de facto and then de jure. God save America.

For those who were spared my kind of childhood, Pavlik Morozov was a Stalinist saint, perhaps the most worshipped youngster in my youth.

Without going into too much detail, that 13-year-old peasant denounced his father to a GPU murder squad and was consequently lynched by his surviving family. The story is largely apocryphal, but that’s not the point.

The point is that all Soviet children were brainwashed to see Pavlik as their role model. He was canonised for arranging his loyalties in the right order: Stalin first, communism second, everything else way down the list. Such devotion put his face on thousands of posters and stamps, his statues on hundreds of pedestals and his name into millions of immature hearts.

Now Scotland’s Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf, the blood of kilted, sporraned warriors coursing through his veins, has taken the fight inspired by Pavlik to the ideological enemies of the Scottish people.

Inciting hatred in conversations over the dinner table, he announced, must be prosecuted under Scotland’s hate crime law. Mr Yousaf posed two questions he doubtless considered rhetorical: “Are we comfortable giving a defence to somebody whose behaviour is threatening or abusive which is intentionally stirring up hatred against, for example, Muslims? Are we saying that that is justified because that is in the home?”

The answers are no and yes. No, intentionally stirring up hatred against, for example, Muslims isn’t nice, although something in me whispers “what goes around comes around”. And yes, if such unworthy sentiments are expressed in the privacy of one’s home, they are justified legally, if not necessarily morally.

But even morally, prosecuting such sentiments is infinitely more reprehensible than the sentiments themselves. For, if uttered in private, how will those incendiary speeches (jokes? toasts? oblique allusions?) become known to the authorities?

Suppose for the sake of argument that Mr and Mrs Angus McMorozov sit down to dinner with little Paul, whom they affectionately call Pavlik. And somewhere between the haggis and the deep-fried Mars bars (sorry about crude ethnic stereotyping), Mr McMorozov expresses his dismay over having a Muslim as Scotland’s Justice Secretary.

Let’s assume that this statement can indeed be construed as inciting hatred. Let’s also assume that Mrs McMorozov shares her husband’s appalling biases. And let’s further assume that the McMorozovs’ dining room isn’t bugged, although these days this isn’t a safe assumption to make.

So how can the authorities find out about the crime committed? One way only: little Pavlik McMorozov must shop his faither.

To be fair, it’s not just Scotland. Our Football Association has issued a new slogan telling people to report racism (however loosely defined). There are hoardings in London reminding the populace to denounce benefit cheats, tax evaders and presumably anyone else they feel like denouncing.

I maintain that the moral and social damage caused by fostering a Pavlik Morozov culture of snitching is much more appalling than the misdeeds to be reported, be that cheating on benefits, evading taxes or even inciting hatred of Scotland’s justice secretaries.

The country I grew up in amply vindicates this observation. Take my word for it: that’s not a good example to follow.

If we define schizophrenia as losing touch with reality, then either the world is schizophrenic or I am. (I have only one response to any confirmation of the latter: You too, sunshine.)

The black actress Jodie Turner-Smith will play Anne Boleyn in an upcoming Channel 5 series. This is a further development of the transsexual, transracial craze turning our performance arts into an unfunny joke.

One expects that any idea, no matter how eccentric, implemented by directors has an honest artistic meaning and none other. And honesty is essential to artistry, for without it any work of art will look and sound tastelessly phony.

Yet it’s instantly obvious that the avalanche of blacks playing white roles, women cast as men and vice versa, black women as white men and all other conceivable permutations has nothing whatsoever to do with any artistic purpose.

The aims are strictly ideological, which is to say idiotic and dishonest. The directors want us, the audience, to perform an impossible double act: both to notice and not to notice that the role of, say, Juliet or Lady Macbeth is played by a black actress.

When queried, they spout drivel, saying what’s important is the inner truth of the character, not any external attributes. Hence it doesn’t matter whether Lady Macbeth is played by a black man, or Romeo by a black woman.

My response is, if it doesn’t matter, why not use white actors, especially in the roles of historical personages known to be white? Then the audience really wouldn’t notice their race, rather than trying manfully to pretend it doesn’t notice. One obstacle to instant communication removed, job done?

Now that’s an awful thing to say. No one can expect an answer to that question, and anyone capable of posing it belongs in one of the re-educational facilities doubtless soon to be created in Britain.

Commenting on her new role, Turner-Smith mouthed a few banalities about Anne Boleyn being “formidable and fierce” and then linked those traits to the BLM movement: “It doesn’t make sense that Black people are being senselessly mowed down by the police,” she said, commenting on the queen beheaded by her hubby-wubby for allegedly playing away from home.

She and her director evidently see Anne Boleyn as a precursor of the BLM movement who could have suffered for her race had she indeed been black, although she lamentably wasn’t. After all, Henry VIII was white and therefore a racist. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Of course it does, to a certifiable schizo.

Two tweets on the subject have caught my eye, each testifying both to the cultural level of the projected viewers and their mental health.

“What difference does it make to her story if she’s played by an black actress?”, tweets one aspiring drama critic. “I’ll tell you: absolutely NONE’.” You know my answer to this one: if it makes no difference, why not use an white actress? I haven’t noticed any shortage of those.

Another refined chap wrote: “anna boleyn doesn’t need to be white, just in her paintings she was portrayed as white, being white has nothing to do with her at all, but martin luther king needs to be black, he was an amazing person who stood up for black rights and a role model for so many people.”

Disregarding the slightly unorthodox syntax, one has to congratulate the writer for spotting something not immediately obvious: a direct link between anna boleyn and martin luther king.

The latter stood up for the rights of blacks to be equal and was killed for it. The former stood up for the right of queens to have sex with their brothers, and also paid with her life for that heroic stand. Let’s hear it for the two role models, anna boleyn and martin luther king.

The problem isn’t that there are so many deranged morons out there. The problem is that our media, arts and politics increasingly proceed from the assumption that everyone is a deranged moron.

And this is a gift that keeps on giving: the more they treat people that way, the more the people will fit the imposed model. Does anybody know a good shrink?

My heart goes out to all those irate Muslim protesters harassing French embassies all over the world, including in London.

How would you feel if hundreds of thousands of your brethren (and sistern, natch) were thrown into concentration camps, used as slave labour, forcibly sterilised, tortured, killed to harvest their organs or simply for the hell of it?

Wouldn’t you protest if your places of worship were desecrated and wrecked, if your sacred scrolls were destroyed, if your cemeteries were bulldozed, if the government forbade you to give your children names prescribed by your religion, if your children were taken away from you and brainwashed in re-education camps?

I know I would. I’d be outside that French Embassy in Knightsbridge, burning the tri-colore, screaming abuse at embassy officials, threatening their lives… Hold on a minute.

Penelope has looked over my shoulder and said that at my age I can no longer get away with just scanning the news. I need to concentrate on reading every word, or else I’ll make a bloody fool of myself – as I just did.

Turns out it’s not France that’s responsible for all those atrocities, which some experts call genocide, others ethnocide, still others democide. It’s China, and the group on the receiving end is her 12-million Uyghur minority, an enclave of Islam surrounded by communism.

That news utterly confused me. After all, all France did was issue a timid statement that she isn’t prepared to sacrifice her core civil liberties to mollify Muslim sensibilities.

So why, I asked Penelope, isn’t there a single protest going on outside Chinese embassies, while the French ones are under permanent siege? She told me to figure it out for myself, if I’m such a hot shot (she actually used a slightly different word). Fine, let me try.

Anyone who still believes that Islam is primarily a religion should be disabused of that misapprehension on the strength of the cited facts alone. The events unfolding all over the world prove yet again that Islam is mainly a militant political movement, doctrinally committed to global conquest.

Thus, whoever decides where and how to organise those protests (and believe me, mass protests are always organised) has to use strategies developed by political and military analysts. One such strategy, unchanged since the Punic Wars, involves striking at the enemy’s weakest point where the chances of a decisive breakthrough are at their most realistic.

Hence there’s no point in Muslims harassing Chinese embassies. The only tangible effect of such actions would be a further increase in brutality towards the Uyghurs. Now, France is a different matter altogether.

The Muslims are justified to regard France, or any other Western European country, as a soft spot. The liberal ethos prevalent in the West precludes any serious resistance, other than the hot air blown by politicians.

Large swathes of Europe (including Britain) have already had Sharia imposed on them; millions of European Muslims are refusing to honour any laws other than those dictated by their cult (they’ll compromise on accepting Western welfare cheques). And the West does nothing.

Sorry, that’s another thing I got wrong. The West actually does quite a bit: it imports millions more cultural aliens who don’t even bother to learn the local language. What they do learn is the jihad rhetoric spewed out at practically every mosque and Islamic Centre.

The West is ripe for the picking, they are told. Redouble your efforts, and in a decade or two Europe will become a caliphate. And oh yes, Allahu akbar, let’s not forget that.

And the Uyghurs? Very regrettable, that, but not to worry: 72 virgins are awaiting them in heaven. The men among them, that is – the women will have to go without. 

Imagine a Martian landing on Earth and trying to make any sense of it. That was me, 47 years ago almost to the day.

When I arrived in America from the Soviet Union, my baggage included some conservative instincts and a total ignorance of how to relate them to life in the West.

A week later, when visiting a Washington friend, I first saw an episode of Firing Line, a weekly talk show hosted by William F Buckley. “He’s conservative but very good,” said my host, for whom the conjunction ‘but’ was a necessary partition between ‘conservative’ and ‘good’.

I was instantly captivated. The first thing that enchanted me was Buckley’s language. Even though I had devoted my life to studying and eventually teaching English, I had never heard it spoken that way.

My English vocabulary was good, or so I had thought. That smugness turned out to be unfounded: practically every sentence Buckley uttered in his lazy mid-Atlantic drawl contained some words I didn’t know. More important, the ideas discussed on the show, and the sources cited, showed me a clear path for my instincts to follow in search of a rational base.

During my subsequent 15 years in America I never missed a single episode of Firing Line, nor a single issue of Buckley’s magazine, The National Review, which boasted among its contributors some of the most brilliant conservative minds of my lifetime.

Soon I began to devour all the primary sources Buckley and his colleagues mentioned, and consequently they lost some of their ability to enlighten me – a TV interview or a magazine article can’t compete with books. However, their ability to delight me was intact, and both the show and the magazine continued to do just that.

Then I moved to Britain and lost touch with Buckley and his work. Those were the pre-Internet days, when reruns of old shows weren’t readily available. And I began writing magazine articles myself, steadily veering way off the American path Buckley followed.

Then, a month or so ago I started binge-watching old episodes of Firing Line, now available at the touch of a computer key. The nostalgic element was strong, as was the forensic desire to retrace my steps.

I’ve found, with some lamentable self-satisfaction, that my vocabulary has grown exponentially since I first saw Firing Line: I now know every recondite word in Buckley’s lexicon. Also, at the risk of sounding immodest, I’ve moved even further beyond the intellectual level of a TV talk show, even one as luminous as Firing Line was.

But luminous it was – I’ve never seen a talk show in America, Britain or France that comes anywhere near the depth, wit and erudition of Firing Line. Its old shows also remain useful.

Even though I no longer learn from these reruns anything I don’t already know, they have lost none of their capacity to stimulate my own thoughts, especially on the leitmotif of Buckley’s life’s work: exegesis and propagation of conservatism.

Buckley was both a conservative (although he sometimes also referred to himself as a libertarian) and a true American patriot. However, he constantly struggled with the difficulty – I’d say impossibility – of reconciling the two.

Just yesterday I saw a 1984 instalment of Buckley talking to a Republican congressman. The battle lines were drawn between Buckley’s orthodox conservatism (these days called ‘paleoconservatism’ courtesy of my friend Paul Gottfried) and his guest’s moderate version.

Neither party bothered to define conservatism: the definition was self-evident to both. Yet perhaps had they agreed on that essential premise to begin with, the whole discussion would have gone in a different direction.

As it was, all they talked about was economic policy, things like farm subsidies, caps on public spending, the comparative value and compatibility of balanced budgets and tax cuts, inflation, etc.

Such things are doubtless important, but they have little to do with conservatism. They may indirectly derive from it, but they aren’t it. Such subjects would only be essential to a very different debate, one between libertarianism and statism.

Conservatism starts with an answer to the question of exactly what it seeks to conserve. The only sound reply has to be: as much of the legacy of Christendom as is possible to preserve without sinking into obscurantism and Luddism.

Economic libertarianism, desirable though it may be, has a barely discernible link to that tradition. It touches only tangentially on the real legacy of Christendom, which is religious and cultural.  

That tradition was destroyed, deliberately and cruelly, by that great misnomer, the Enlightenment. It ripped the religious heart out of Christendom and secularised, which is to say vulgarised and perverted, the rest.

Thus love (and therefore the sovereign value) of all human beings simply because they are indeed human derived in Christendom from God who is love. The Enlightenment sidelined God and produced a secular theology of human rights as its core. That was tantamount to sawing off the base of a pyramid, then putting it on its tip and watching it fall.

The West tumbled on a slippery slope and began to slide downhill at an ever-increasing speed. The cultural and social debacle we are witnessing today is close to the bottom of the abyss.

Hence the problem Buckley couldn’t solve or perhaps even acknowledge. For the US is the first and most consistent Enlightenment state, constituted as such from birth.

If Western European conservatives, especially in countries where monarchy is extant, can still fight some rearguard action under the banner of God, King and Country, American conservatives are obliged to worship the Constitution, which abolished the middle element of that triad and marginalised the first.

Buckley was blessed with a formidable intellect, and he was a cultured, multilingual conservative who knew every note of Bach and could play many of them. Moreover, he was a devout orthodox Catholic who detested Vatican II and could eloquently enunciate his opposition to it.

However, he refused to see that the US and all the cultural and social perversions he despised had the same progenitor. As an American patriot, Buckley simply couldn’t afford the freedom of questioning the core assumptions of modernity, and therefore of his native land.

Had he done so, he would have realised that real conservatism is impossible in any Enlightenment construct, be that America or, perhaps to a lesser extent, France. What’s possible are either easy surrogates, such as economic libertarianism, or else apophatic proclamations of what conservatism is not, i.e. socialist, statist, extremist and so forth.

Apophatic theology can exist, but apophatic political science can’t: sooner or later its practitioners will find themselves at an intellectual dead end. At that point they’ll either have to admit defeat or state unequivocally what their conservatism is and how it can relate to practical life.

That was a problem Buckley faced, through no fault of his own. However, he fought his way out of the systemic cul-de-sac with an élan, wit and sheer brilliance never seen on television before or since, and seldom ever seen at all.

I’ll continue watching and re-watching Firing Line with pleasure, gratitude – and some nostalgia for the innocence of youth I’ve lost since first illuminated by the dazzling light that was William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008).

“We lack Macron’s courage to call the savagery what it is: Islamist terrorism,” writes Rod Liddle, and he’s supposed to be the good sort.

For those unfamiliar with Liddle’s oeuvre, his stock in trade is trespassing on the territory signposted by Richard Littlejohn: gor-blimey, don’t-give-a-monkey’s style of journalism, a sort of vox populi on wheels.

This isn’t my favourite genre, but at least Littlejohn almost always says sensible things. He doesn’t seem to claim implicitly that his folksy style gives him a licence to say anything that pops into his mind.

Liddle’s prose, on the other hand, often makes me wonder if he or anyone else edits what he writes. He’s one of those ex-lefties who reinforce my conviction that no leftie is ever really ex. Liddle tends to sound generally right-wing (no one who routinely uses words like ‘fuck’ in writing can sound conservative), but one senses neither real conviction nor serious thought behind the façade.

Thus he is one of those ‘useful idiots’ on the right who adore Putin and wish we had a strong leader like him.

That’s tantamount to desiring to have in Her Majesty’s realm a leader who siphons purloined billions into his own offshore accounts and those of his flunkeys, suppresses free speech, despises the rule of law, conducts active global subversion, routinely threatens nuclear annihilation, pounces on his neighbours like a rabid dog, imprisons or murders his opponents at home and abroad, claims his undying loyalty to the most diabolical organisation in history and acts in its spirit, mixed with the ethos of organised crime.

Does Liddle dispute any of this? If he does, he’s ignorant. If he doesn’t and still worships the KGB colonel, his moral compass has gone haywire. In either case, he isn’t fit to enlarge on important issues.

Just look at the headline I cited in the first paragraph above. What Liddle is saying there is false: every PM in recent memory has had enough courage to decry Islamist terrorism. None, however, has had “the courage to call the savagery what it really is”: Islamic terrorism. Neither does Liddle.

Or perhaps he just doesn’t realise that the two terms aren’t exactly synonymous. If so, I’m happy to help – we none of us want a hack to refute himself so blatantly.

‘Islamist’ evokes the popular, and false, image of a crazed loner inflamed by his woeful misreading of the ‘religion of peace’ (so termed by numerous politicians who don’t mind railing against each individual atrocity). ‘Islamic’, on the other hand, describes in this context faithfulness to the tenets and history of Islam, whose scripture does, after all, contain more than 300 verses explicitly prescribing violence towards infidels.

Or perhaps I’m being unfair, and the problem isn’t so much individual as collective or, if you will, civilisational. As such, it goes deeper than a simple deficit of either courage or intelligence.

I believe that within the framework of liberal, which is to say modern,  Weltanschauung it’s simply impossible to call a Muslim terrorist a Muslim terrorist. Anyone daring to suggest that Muslims commit their atrocities because of Islam, not despite it, will face accusations – and possibly even charges – of racism, white supremacism, fascism and other such indictable offences.

At least, people like Liddle only exert influence on their readers, or not, as the case may be. People like Macron, on the other hand, have the power to formulate policy, or not, as the case may be.

For they labour under the yoke of the same civilisational folly that forces Liddle to confuse Islamist with Islamic. Hence Macron has added another duty to his already onerous load, that of reformer of Islam, a composite of Martin Luther and Denis Diderot with a shaggy beard attached.

Manny has the commendable self-confidence to believe he can facilitate the creation of what he called an “Enlightenment Islam”. Even uttering such words, never mind trying to act on them, betrays either total ignorance or, more likely, a tacit acknowledgment of the constraints I mentioned earlier.

Unlike Christianity, Islam aggressively discourages freedom of thought. That’s why, in the 1,400 years of its existence, it has precluded even the remotest possibility of real reform or, on the plus side, anything that in the West goes by the name of the Enlightenment (‘Crepuscularism’ is the term I’d prefer).

The essential Christian doctrine of free will presupposes the freedom of apostasy, with the erosion of the church it may entail. However, if the Christian church were to abandon that doctrine, it would stop being a Christian church.

The church has historically believed that erosion at the periphery, lamentable as it is, wouldn’t weaken its doctrinal and ecclesiastical centre. That self-confidence has been vindicated: for all the attrition the church has suffered, it has still survived for 2,000 years.

On the other hand, if Islam allowed the same freedom of thought, it wouldn’t last a decade. In acknowledgement, it enforces on pain of death unquestioning obedience and unwavering practice. That’s understandable: Islam doesn’t have the theological strength to withstand sustained critical analysis.

The cult of Mohammed is vital to it, and Islam is the only Abrahamic religion in which a non-divine personage is worshipped with such fervour. Any parallels between Christ and Mohammed in this regard are spurious.

According to Christian doctrine, Jesus Christ wasn’t only fully man but also fully God, the creative hypostasis of the Holy Trinity. Muslims, on the other hand, believe that Mohammed was only a prophet of God, not God himself.

Thus their hysterical worship of Mohammed strikes me as more of a cult than a religion. And it’s with cultish zeal that Muslims jealously protect Mohammed’s image and follow his every word – including the words that incite terrorism.

I’m sure Macron knows as well as I do that the role of the Imam of All Imams he has claimed for himself is unplayable. He just said those words because the entire logic of the modern liberal mindset would allow no other, and he had to say something.

And it’s for the same reason, I suspect, that Rod Liddle pretends to be ignorant of the semantic difference between Islamist and Islamic. Of course it’s also possible that, as an alumnus of the Fabian LSE, he’s indeed ignorant of it.

According to the governments of Turkey, Iran and Pakistan, along with the mullahs and multitudes of pious Muslims in most Islamic lands, Manny Macron has declared a crusade on their religion.

And following the fine tradition of the previous eight Crusades, the Muslims aren’t going to take it lying down. Rallying the faithful, Malaysia’s ex-PM said that Muslims have a right “to kill millions of French people” if they insult the Prophet.

He didn’t specify how many millions, but at least his co-religionists have made a good, if by their standards still modest, start. Now, having beheaded several days ago a Paris teacher for daring to defend freedom of speech, they’ve added three parishioners of a Nice church to their score.

Just as he did the other day, Manny Macron vented his crusading spirit thunderously: “The entire nation will stand so that religion can continue to be exercised freely in our country,” he said. And then, sounding positively Churchillian: “We shall never give in!”

Realising how unfashionably radical those statements sounded, he immediately mitigated them by calling for “unity” and asking “not to give in to the spirit of division”. If I understand Manny correctly, France’s commitment to multiculturalism won’t be weakened even if Muslims butcher the recommended millions of Frenchmen.

That’s as far as the Ninth Crusade has gone, as far as it will ever go. Manny (or any other Western leader) will express his indignation at the murders and sympathy for their victims (“Our thoughts and prayers go to…”), call for unity, reiterate his commitment to civil liberties, explain that Muslim terrorists are sick individuals in no way inspired by their cult, and promise to stand firm.

The neo-Crusaders will thus arm themselves with hot air only, while the Muslims will defend everything they hold sacred with knives, guns, bombs and heavy vehicles driven through crowds. Such is the balance of power.

I’m touched by Manny’s outspoken commitment to the free practice of religion in France. It’s good to keep things nice and general, refraining, in the spirit of multiculturalism, from singling out any one religion in particular.

Since France used to be a Catholic country, and since Muslims are already perfectly free to practise their religion without fear of beheading, Manny could have uttered the dread words ‘Catholic’ or at least ‘Christian’. But he didn’t. The God of Multi-Culti is athirst and he can smite any infidel.

You’ll have noticed the baffling fact that France suffers more terrorist attacks than any other European country. That is, the fact is baffling only to those who fail to make the forensic observation that came to me in a revelatory flash: the number of terrorist incidents in a country is directly proportionate to the number of Muslims resident there.

France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe, which is why the edge of multiculturalism is there at its most cutting. Apparently, cultural differences manifest themselves not only on hot kebabs, but also in cold steel.

Forget about crusades; they aren’t going to happen. But is there anything at all Western governments in general, and the French one in particular, can do to protect their people against Islamic savagery?

The answer is no, not without a complete cultural and political volte-face that’s about as likely as an air thick with flying pigs. Still, one is allowed to daydream in one’s weak moments.

In that blissful state one could think of any number of measures – all springing from the basic premise that the only good Muslim is a bad, which is to say impious, Muslim. Good, which is to say devout, Muslims are incompatible with Western societies because their religion is.

Regarded in that light, any mosque or Islamic centre where a single jihadist word has ever been uttered, and especially where a single terrorist has received instruction, should be summarily closed. In parallel, and this is an important point, all its members must lose their state benefits.

This point is important because, as the Figaro columnist Eric Zemmour showed the other day, most of the French Muslim terrorists are beneficiaries of state largesse, be it income support, lodgings or whatever. Putting a lid on that trough may also have the effect of limiting any further influx of migrants from Islamic lands.

In any case, such immigration should be severely curtailed, ideally stopped. The underlying assumption that in due course Muslim immigrants possibly, and their children definitely, will adopt their new culture has been proven false, some exceptions notwithstanding.

When the number of cultural aliens exceeds a certain critical mass, the culture itself is diluted into disappearance. And France, whose population is already 10 per cent Muslim, has evidently reached that point.

Any countries registering their approval of terrorism, never mind supporting it in more tangible terms, should have punitive sanctions imposed on them. If they instigate terrorist attacks, this must be treated as a casus belli and punished with military force, of apocalyptic proportions if need be. Such decisive response, however, must be based on more solid evidence than whatever inspired Messrs Bush and Blair to attack Iraq in 2003.

Western societies provide sufficient legal mechanisms to seek redress for grievances and insults. If Muslims find, say, a caricature offensive, they are free to sue their offenders – but, much as we all appreciate cultural diversity, not to cut their heads off.

I suggest that any Muslim wishing to become a permanent resident or citizen of a Western country be tested for his comprehension of, and compliance with, the laws and culture of his adopted land. When these aren’t evident, he must be instantly deported.

I’d even go further and recommend that the same test ought to be applied to those who are already citizens, even if born and bred. When the presence of a certain individual in the country endangers the lives of others, the country shouldn’t be held back by the formality of birth certificates or naturalisation papers.

Also… well, I’d better stop now before my collar is felt by the thought police. I don’t think they’d find my affection for Avicenna, Averroes, Saadi and Omar Khayyam to be a mitigating circumstance.

Not in his entirety, I hasten to add. It’s only Cartesian epistemology or, to be precise, its central postulate that’s deemed delinquent,.

All knowledge, wrote the philosopher, is based on comparing two or more things. Now, I have both philosophical and theological problems with that notion (it denies, for example, intuitive or revelatory knowledge, along with the knowledge of God, who is by definition incomparable).

But Putin’s objections are more practical than that. The other day the Duma proposed, and Putin endorsed, a law making it illegal to “equate the objectives, decisions and actions of the Soviet leaders, generals and soldiers with the objectives, decisions and actions of the Nazi leaders, generals and soldiers.”

One can deduce two things from this, one false, the other true. The false inference is that no parallels between the Soviets and the Nazis exist and therefore drawing them can yield no knowledge. The true inference is that the parallels do exist, but the knowledge they yield is unacceptable to Putin and his coterie.

If Euclid is to be believed, parallel lines can’t converge – which is why they are called parallels and not overlaps. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be drawn. In this context, though Bolshevism and Nazism weren’t identical in every respect, their similarities outweighed their differences.

The Duma member who proposed the law singled out Poland as the principal culprit in drawing those objectionable parallels. Yet one wonders how anyone can deny that the Poles have every right to wax Cartesian in this respect.

After all, on 23 August, 1939, the two evil regimes, Hitler’s and Stalin’s, signed a pact (followed by a lesser-known friendship treaty) dividing Europe in general and Poland in particular between them. To claim her piece, Germany attacked Poland on 1 September; Stalin followed suit on the 17^th.

Thus at the beginning of the war Hitler and Stalin were allies. They fired the first shots, and Poland was the first target.

Before the year was out, the Soviets deported more than a million Poles. Most ended up in Siberian concentration camps, others in unmarked graves – and the 22,000 officers murdered at Katyn and elsewhere are far from being a complete list of victims. At least 300,000 Soviet Poles also fell victim to Stalin’s genocidal purges, with about 100,000 dying of bullet or neglect.

Under those circumstances one can understand the Poles’ inability to distinguish between Brown and Red concentration camps, or between Brown and Red hit squads – especially since most Poles who perished in the Nazi camps were actually Jews (who accounted for three million out of the five million Poles killed during the war).

Actually, since the affection for Jews in Poland has always been rather understated, most Poles who lived through the war regard the Soviet occupation as worse than the Nazi one. And when the Soviet troops re-entered Poland in 1944, they began to rape, loot and murder on a scale that exceeded the Nazi crimes, which took some doing.

Moreover, having occupied the country, the Soviets installed a version of their own evil regime that continued to enslave the Poles for the next 50-odd years, while the Nazis only managed to do so for less than five years.

Moving on to a more fundamental level, both communist and Nazi ideologies – which is to say both nationalism and internationalism – are offshoots of the Enlightenment. A major difference between the two is that the Nazis declared war on the whole world except their own people, while the Bolsheviks’ war was waged on the world, including their own people.

While national and international socialism each developed in its own way, both were doctrinally committed to extreme statism, with state worship replacing religion, to which both regimes were violently opposed. That model came courtesy of Marx, and both Hitler and Stalin acknowledged their debt to him, the first obliquely, the second directly.

As part of the alliance established on the state level, the NKVD and the SS forged their own links. In 1940 the NKVD-SS Friendship Society was inaugurated with the approval of both Stalin and Hitler. The two diabolical organisations were comparing notes and exchanging pointers.

Even before the natural affinity between the two was institutionalised, a profitable exchange of ideas and equipment had been under way. The SS learned from their Soviet colleagues how to set up and run a network of concentration camps – and how to use gas for mass murder.

The Soviets were the first regime in history to use poison gases on their own people. That happened during the peasant uprisings in the 1920s, when gas shells were dropped from planes on the forests where the rebels were hiding. At the same time, the Soviets pioneered the use of gas vans, mobile gas chambers of low throughput but high efficacy.

The Nazis saw the potential of that innovation, used it in the early stages of the Holocaust and later developed it into the stationary facilities since then amply documented. In gratitude, the Gestapo shared with their NKVD colleagues the torture equipment essential to the needs of the Soviet growth industry.

In short, the parallels between the Soviets and the Nazis are perfectly valid and clearly visible, mutatis mutandis. But one can understand why Putin’s gang regards them as obnoxious.

Its ideological basis is a return to the imperial glory of Stalin’s Russia, if without the attendant communist slogans. Hence Putin’s propaganda machine is busily fostering the image of Russia as a noble fighter for goodness surrounded by enemies colluding to destroy it.

Russia emerges as a sort of prostitute with a heart of gold whom everyone screws and no one loves. Explained in those terms is everything awful that happens to Russia, such as her appalling poverty (outside Putin’s trusted lieutenants), the former constituent republics claiming their independence, and the West responding with sanctions to Putin’s holy mission of reversing “the worst geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century” (i.e. the disintegration of Stalin’s empire).

Putin’s Goebbelses are spinning the same yarns as did Soviet propaganda from Lenin onwards. NATO, using that ghastly Poland as its spearhead, is planning an invasion of Holy Russia, starting with her historically lawful, if illegally detached, property in the west.

This week Putin’s answers to Der Sturmer are screaming about the impending NATO thrust into Belarus to be launched from Poland and Lithuania. The only possible response is of course to preempt that aggression by dispatching Russian troops into the country, whether she wants it or not.

Reviving the ethos of a virtuous Soviet Union heroically fighting off its enemies is part of the propaganda offensive. Obviously, anyone daring to compare Stalin with Hitler jeopardises this signalling of nonexistent virtue. Clapping such a spoilsport into prison becomes the only logical response.

If old René were alive today, he’d have to think twice before indulging in his epistemology. Comparing those two things might or might not yield knowledge. But it could definitely earn him a tenner in one of the extant camps.