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Had I relied on the NHS 15 years ago, you’d be spared my immoral… sorry, I mean immortal prose.

To be fair, it was a brilliant NHS GP, Guy Lawley, who first spotted something wrong and referred me to a private oncologist for tests, which started within a couple of days.

However, back then I could still get to see him on a day’s notice, as opposed to the fortnight it would take today. And Guy is no longer with the NHS: he retired at 50, in disgust at having to spend most of his time filling useless forms.

Once in the hands of private consultants, and much to their barely concealed surprise, I managed to survive two different cancers, both in Stage 4 (there’s no Stage 5). An NHS patient with a similar diagnosis would almost certainly have died.

He would have had to wait much longer for each diagnostic test, especially exploratory surgery, longer still for hospital admission – and he wouldn’t have received the same state-of-the art treatment that saved me.

One example if I may. The kind of chemotherapy used in my type of cancer wipes out leucocytes, white blood cells, leaving the patient with no immunity to ward off infection and, until the leucocytes are rebuilt, at deadly risk.

That’s why, after each chemo session, a private patient receives a combination shot of three different agents, which takes 48 hours to restore the immune defences. The problem with that shot is that it’s expensive. In my day it cost £1,200 a pop, which was too rich for NHS patients’ blood.

Those poor souls received the same three drugs, but in three different syringes. That much cheaper alternative left them unprotected not for two days but for two weeks. They had to live for a fortnight knowing that any germ flying through the air was a poisoned bullet aimed at them.

This is just a bit of personal background to the impersonal statistics showing that the UK lags far behind other civilised nations in cancer survival rates. In just about all cancers, we’re at or near the bottom of the table.

Yes, I know the NHS is the envy of the world, as all other giant socialist projects always are. But the world clenches its teeth and manfully overcomes envy to get on with the business of saving lives.

Meanwhile, more than 100,000 British oncological patients a year are diagnosed when their cancer has already spread, reducing their chances of survival. The reason for this is given as NHS staff shortages, which I find baffling.

After all, the NHS is the biggest employer not just in the UK, not just in Europe, but in the world. Why then is it short of doctors and nurses saving people’s lives?

Anyone asking this question simply doesn’t understand socialism. It operates according to a law that says that any socialist enterprise, whatever its stated role, exists mainly for the benefit of its administrators and, ultimately. the state.

That’s why, while the frontline medical staffs are shrinking in the NHS, the administrative staffs are growing like mushrooms after an autumn rain. In fact, one gets the impression that doctors and nurses get in the way of the NHS’s real business, that entrusted to directors of diversity, optimisers of facilitation and facilitators of optimisation.

Whatever indispensable things those chaps can do, diagnosing cancer manifestly isn’t one of them. That’s why in 2017 115,000 cases were spotted only in advanced stages.

The same major study shows that three quarters of NHS services don’t treat cancer patients quickly enough. The guidelines call for 85 per cent of patients urgently referred by a GP being treated within 62 days (privately, I was treated within a fortnight).

Yet 94 of 131 cancer services in England failed to do that last year, almost a three-fold increase compared to five years ago. It’s useful to remember here that in some cancers an early diagnosis makes the difference between one in 10 dying and one in 10 surviving.

Every successive government pledges to throw more money at the NHS, and some even manage to do so. Politicians know vote getters and losers when they see them.

Even a hint at the remote possibility that perhaps other methods of providing medical services work better will spell the end of a promising political career – the voting public has been house-trained to worship the NHS with devotion formerly reserved for God.

This subject is impossible to discuss rationally and dispassionately. If you don’t believe me, just mention at a large party that papering the cracks in the NHS will never work, even if it becomes the only, not just the largest, UK employer.

Its problems, to use the medical parlance, are not symptomatic but systemic. The NHS, you might add, is run badly not because its practitioners are inadequate, but because its underlying idea is.

Then hasten to shield your head from the slings and arrows of the outrageous brainwashed. The projectiles will come in a swarm – as they always do when someone commits the ultimate sacrilege.

Meanwhile, the oncological argument goes on – and we are losing.

Replace the word ‘Jew’ in that question with, for example, Englishman, Frenchman or, for that matter, Christian or Muslim, and the answer would be reasonably straightforward.

Yes, a few taxonomic variations may be possible. Yet after some discussion, heated or otherwise, the argument can usually be settled.

The discussion could proceed by the process of elimination. Biting the dust by mutual agreement would be such impossible phrases as “He isn’t English; he’s a Catholic” or “He isn’t German; he looks Dutch” or “He isn’t French; he’s a Christian”.

Actually, France adopted laïcité as her essential national characteristic in 1905, and these days those seeking naturalisation have to prove they are comfortable with the notion. However, espousing Christianity or Judaism is still not seen as a disqualifying characteristic for citizenship, though things may well be moving in that direction.

Anyway, I suspect that Muslim applicants aren’t often ready to abandon their faith for secularism but, judging by their numbers admitted, the French system isn’t without some elasticity.

Some nations use different words for political and ethnic affiliations. ‘English’, for example, is these days an ethnic concept, while ‘British’ is mainly a political and cultural one: it may not include the ethnic element.

An outlander can become British by pledging allegiance to Her Majesty and thoroughly integrating into the British society and culture. But someone cursed with a less fortunate nativity can’t become English no matter how eager he is to swap cold vodka for warm beer.

If, according to Cecil Rhodes, “to be born English is to win first prize in the lottery of life”, then the lucky ticket can only be drawn out of the mother’s womb.

The Russians have a similar distinction, which is lost in translation. The words rossiyanin and russkiy are both translated as ‘Russian’, and yet the conceptual difference between them is the same as between, respectively, ‘British’ and ‘English’ – the former may not include an ethnic component; the latter always does.

What about Jews then? Here no such clarity exists for many reasons, some obvious, some less so.

First, until 14 May, 1948, Jews didn’t have a state of their own. Hence they lived all over the world, and no definition of a Jew could have possibly included political or geographic aspects.

Yet, since even now Israel accounts for less than half of the world’s Jewish population, its existence doesn’t entirely settle the taxonomic issue.

Then there was the Holocaust, when six million Jews were murdered simply for being Jewish. The Nazis, ably assisted by their enthusiastic accomplices from all over Europe, especially its eastern part, therefore had to adopt their own definition of a Jew.

It was purely ethnic, based on what the proto-Nazi philosopher Fichte called jus sanguinis. A person with two or more Jewish grandparents was a Jew who didn’t deserve to live. He might have espoused Judaism or any other religion or none: nothing but das Blut mattered.

This was in marked contrast to the Kaiser, who declared that “We have no Jews in Germany. We only have Germans of the Judaic persuasion.” The German language of the time could have clearly benefited from the nuances available in English and Russian.

The Holocaust has affected the definition of a Jew prevalent in the West, not least among Western Jews themselves, especially in America. Since to Hitler a Jew was defined by his ethnicity, then anyone who deplored Hitler had to drop ethnicity from his definition.

Therefore Jewishness became synonymous with Judaism, and American Jews in particular will insist on this overlap against all logic and every available evidence. Being an argumentative sort, I’ve often tormented them with provocative questions.

“So no atheist Jews exist?” The typical reaction is that of consternation. “Why not?” I’d press on. “If a Jew is defined solely by Judaism, then no atheist can be Jewish. And if an atheist can be Jewish, then why can’t a baptised Jew?”

Another one of my stock questions is: “Is it possible for a person to look Jewish?” The reply based on ideology and emotion is an unequivocal no. One based on evidence before our eyes has to be an equally decisive yes.

What does, say, Woody Allen look like? An agnostic? And what about Sammy Davis Jr, who converted to Judaism? He didn’t look Jewish, and – call me a Nazi and report me to the Equality Commission – Woody Allen does.

Israel’s Law of Return doesn’t clarify matters either. According to it, any Jew anywhere in the world has a right to settle in Israel. But that brings the definition of a Jew into sharp focus.

The Law states that ‘Jew’ means a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion.

The words I emphasised are a late addition to the ancient law, and they sound illogical to me. So worded, the Law of Return would bar such Christian converts as Felix Mendelssohn, Gustav Mahler or Simone Weil, while welcoming, say, Leon Trotsky, Yakov Sverdlov or, for that matter, Woody Allen.

In other words, a person may be a Jew for most of his life, but then stop being one by getting baptised. I wonder what the first 17 bishops of Jerusalem, all circumcised Jews, would have had to say about that.

Obviously, centuries of peripatetic existence make it hard to talk about any ethnic purity among the Jews. But then isn’t that also the case about many other, stationary, nationalities?

Some Russians, for example, look like Mongols and some others like Swedes, and yet they are all Russians. Frenchmen born and bred may look like Arabs or like Germans, while Boris Johnson, who’s as English as they come, has an extremely eclectic blood mix.

Yet for all their geographic uncertainty, many Ashkenazi Jews look like, well, Ashkenazi Jews, which has to point to some genetic pool shared at least partially, if not wholly.

This is also proved by a long list of diseases specific to Ashkenazi Jews. For example, they are 100 times likelier than anyone else to be afflicted with familial dysautonomia (Riley-Day syndrome). On a more joyous note, Jews also seem likelier than anyone else to play string instruments in symphony orchestras and win Nobel Prizes for science.

All this shows yet again how ideology can cloud one’s judgement. For, with numerous qualifications and disclaimers, Jewishness is largely an ethnic notion. An Englishman can’t stop being English while retiring to the Costa del Sol, and a Jew can’t stop being Jewish by renouncing Judaism.

That this was a view taken by the Nazis disqualifies it no more than Heidrich’s affection for Beethoven means we should shun the 32 piano sonatas. The crime of the Nazi murderers wasn’t that they defined Jewishness ethnically, but that they deemed that ethnicity sub-human and therefore subject to extermination.

I think – and my Israeli and American Jewish friends may disagree – that, by denying the blindingly obvious ethnic input, they divert the problem into a dead end, where fighting anti-Semitism becomes harder.

It’s impossible to affirm racial equality by denying the existence of racial identity. But, and many of my pieces end on this note, when ideology speaks, common sense falls silent.  

In 1729, Swift wrote A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick.

The eponymous modest proposal was that such children be used for food. “A young healthy child well nursed,” wrote the Dean, “is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”

The essay caused a backlash; some critics felt Swift’s flight of satirical fancy had taken him too far. Yet no commentators failed to see that it was indeed fanciful satire, not something to be taken literally.

Today A Modest Proposal would read as reportage. Cue in Prof. Magnus Soderlund, of Stockholm School of Economics, who believes that it’s about time society “awakened to the idea” of cannibalism.

Speaking on Swedish television, the good professor cogently explained that only thus can “our planet” be saved. You see, human flesh is more sustainable than meat or dairy products, and producing it has no adverse effects on climate change.

Since I’m pursued every night by nightmares of a planetary catastrophe caused by the consumption of hamburgers and pork chops, I’m sympathetic to the idea.

My only regret is that Prof. Soderlund failed to think his proposal through to its logical end. Unlike our great satirist, he only talked about scavenging, that is snacking on bodies already dead of natural causes.

Fair enough, those carcasses would otherwise go to waste, being either incinerated or buried to rot in the ground. Hence eating them would save our planet in two ways.

First, since Granny would be put to pasture only figuratively, her cultivation and feeding wouldn’t require tilling large tracts of land, which process jeopardises the planet almost as much as using deodorant sprays.

Second, since Granny could be fed on the carcasses of other Grannies who predeceased her, scavenging would in fact constitute recycling, which is tantamount to regeneration not only ecological but also moral.

However, while the planet lover in me applauds, the foodie sulks. For old people’s flesh has to be tough and stringy. Even with super-slow cooking, it would never achieve the juicy tenderness of younger meat.

Hence we shouldn’t ignore the nutritional and gastronomic advantages offered by stillborn children and, especially, foetuses aborted late, say in the third trimester.

The more one thinks about this, the more one appreciates Swift’s genius. For, from there it’s but a small step to slaughtering the post-natal babies of some undesirable people, such as global warming deniers, Islamophobes and Brexiteers.

The benefits would be staggering: promoting responsible nutrition, ecology, recycling – and cleansing society of the spawn of human vermin. I can already see a chain of human abattoirs, can’t you?

Prof. Soderlund graciously acknowledged that, alas, some anachronistic taboos of cannibalism still persist. But these can be expunged over time by “tricking” people into “making the right decision”. All it takes is “conversation” about eating human flesh, with Prof. Soderlund presumably acting as one party to that learned discourse.

This is where he went terribly wrong. For, if the aforementioned conversation is serious enough, no trickery should be necessary. People can be persuaded by rational arguments, and they may take the idea of cannibalism so close to heart that they’d actually eat Prof. Soderlund.

Lest you might think I’m prejudiced against Northern Europe (I am, but that’s a different story), another news item has caught my eye, this one dealing with France, my second home.

In 2013, Xavier X, whose full name can’t be revealed for legal reasons, went on a business trip from his Paris base to the Loiret. There he picked up a local woman, as one does, and took her to his hotel.

As the couple were consummating their budding love, Xavier X suffered a heart attack and, as the crude saying goes, came and went at the same time. His family immediately sued Mr X’s employer, for a hefty lawsuit is a natural by-product of bereavement.

The family’s lawyers, enthusiastically supported by French labour authorities, argued that, since Mr X had gone to the Loiret on his employer’s behalf, his death should be classified as an accident du travail, making his company liable for damages.

The company’s lawyers objected that, although Mr X did indeed die on the job, that wasn’t the job his employer had sent him out to do. However, that argument didn’t cut much ice.

The trial dragged on a bit, but yesterday the court found for the plaintiff. Mr X’s widow and children will receive 80 per cent of his salary until what would have been his retirement age. After that the company will be making sizeable contributions to the pension.

I can only repeat what many others have said before me: modernity makes satire redundant. Today’s Sophocleses, Juvenals and Swifts would be reporters or political commentators. Their readers might still laugh, but only through tears.

No, not that. It’s just that the president has been attacked by Mick Jagger, the leading light of the rather crepuscular Rolling Stones.

This marks a new tendency for Jagger. These days he likes to shoot from the lip, and God knows that’s a high-calibre weapon.

In the past, the Stone used to refrain from political pronouncements, instead choosing to lead by example. The examples he led by included starring in street riots, indulging in highly publicised sexual athleticism and consuming every illegal substance, imaginable or otherwise.

Plying his trade in the extension of the pharmaceutical industry that goes by the misnomer of music, Mick and his illustrious accomplices, such as John Lennon, were the shamans of a new cult: anomic, deracinated nihilism with satanic overtones.

They screamed their hatred for ‘the establishment’ so loudly that in the din no one caught the moment when they themselves became the establishment. They despised capitalism all the way to the capitalist bank.

Now, it’s wrong to dehumanise those one doesn’t like. Some people are too quick to describe their opponents as inhuman, subhuman or less than human, which diminishes not only those on the receiving end but indeed the very notion of humanity.

That’s why it’s essential to state that Mick and his colleagues are human both physiologically and, if you will, theologically. Having established that, and thus warded off any accusations of stridency, one is hard-pressed to define them as fully human in any other senses, especially those involving intelligence and morality.

Even rockers who start out with something approaching three-digit IQs then addle their brains with lifelong drug use. Hence typical rockers’ morality approaches that of a rabbit, while their intellect places them somewhere between a dachshund and a courgette, which ideally qualifies them to act as gurus to youngsters with gonadic minds.

However, unlike Lennon, Jagger was in the past worthy of some respect for merely showing youngsters how to live, rather than teaching them with highfalutin anarchist platitudes. Now he has forfeited any entitlement even to such qualified praise.

For he has come out to attack Donald Trump for his lack of – are you ready for this? – civility. That’s like Adolph Hitler castigating a US president for stifling racial equality.

Jagger bewailed “the polarisation and incivility in public life”, and really he shouldn’t use such long words. He’s better off sticking to his profound aphorisms of the past, such as “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need” or “A good thing never ends”.

“In my own country,” added Mick, things are just as bad, with Boris Johnson calling Jeremy Corbyn names, such as “chlorinated chicken”. (Note to Boris: When sniping at Corbyn, try not to hit Trump by ricochet. American chlorinated chicken is expected to figure prominently among the items specified in any future trade deal.)

One didn’t hear Jagger protest when Corbyn’s flunkeys were comparing Johnson to Hitler, so his championship of civility is selective. It’s also of recent vintage: he used to accuse Britain of being “too moderate” and “boring”. Now that Boris is belatedly trying to correct that image, old Mick is upset.

But never mind civility or lack thereof. Not only does Trump destroy social mores, but he also wreaks the same destruction on the whole planet by his decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement.

Now, contrary to what Jagger thinks (as it were), the president made that decision not out of a perverse urge to annihilate ‘the planet’, but because he felt that other countries neglected the Agreement’s provisions, thereby unduly penalising America and other civilised nations.

China, in particular, produces almost twice as much CO2 emissions as the United States, and the Chinese are churning out coal-fired power stations faster than anyone else. But of course, the Chinese, being both communist and off-white, are above criticism.

This isn’t to say that there should be no serious discussion about responsible environmentalism – only that Jagger isn’t the man to conduct it. Such matters ought to be left to the adults.

Jagger’s whole career was shaped by catering to adolescents, which has done wonders for his bank balance but destroyed whatever little ability he ever had to talk to grown-ups in their own language. Even worse, Jagger still identifies with the young, which is frankly pathetic in a man of 76.

His current idol is the mentally disturbed child Greta Thunberg, whose followers have just attempted to disrupt the Venice Film Festival, that immediate threat to ‘the planet’. “I am so glad that people feel so strongly about that that they want to protest,” said Jagger with his customary eloquence. That, then, is what he means by civility.

Please don’t take this as an attack on Mick Jagger – it isn’t. My problem isn’t with Jagger, but with a world where the likes of him have a wide, gasping audience lapping up their drug-inspired ideological nonsense.

I don’t know what Jagger is on these days but, if it’s cocaine, I wish he switched to heroin. Cocaine boosts activity and loquacity, while opiates have a relaxing, soporific effect and encourage silence. Mind you, he knows infinitely more about such matters than I do.

More than a year ago, I wrote a piece with a self-explanatory title: http://www.alexanderboot.com/the-apparat-is-invincible/.

I wish the intervening 14 months had proved me wrong, but, alas, they haven’t. The apparat has triumphed again, and we must brace ourselves for some 75 per cent of our laws continuing to come from Brussels and the rest from the Corbyn-McDonnell junta.

Parliament is forcing a three-month delay in Brexit, on top of the three years by which it has already been delayed. Out of idle interest, what’s the delay supposed to achieve that the previous three years haven’t managed to?

The only tangible achievement will be a great chaos and a further discrediting of the Tory party, along with the growing contempt of politics in general.

Coming next will be a mournful admission that, much as parliament would love to comply with the British people’s wish to leave the EU, this, alas, is proving impossible.

So good-bye to Brexit – and hello to an evil Marxist gang taking over in a bloodless coup. The apparat will yet again ride roughshod over loyalty to either major party and indeed to Britain, all in the name of democracy and parliamentary sovereignty.

These shibboleths are supposed to make everyone jump up and salute – and certainly not wonder what either democracy or parliamentary sovereignty has to do with this on-going obscenity.

On second thoughts, our MPs perhaps think that, since sovereignty belongs to parliament, it’s free to do with it as it pleases. If you wish to give your book to a friend, you can exercise your property rights and do so, can’t you? Likewise, parliament must feel free to offer its sovereignty as a present to anyone it wishes, including the EU (neither Saudi Arabia nor Putin’s Russia seems a likely receiver of such largesse, yet).

This shameful calamity has been largely made possible by a group of Tory lackeys to the apparat, who, by betraying their leader at a critical moment, proved what hardly needed proving, that they are Tories in name only.

Of that group, Boris’s brother Jo, Minister for Universities, committed an act of multiple betrayal by resigning his post and parliamentary seat. He betrayed not only his party and his people, but also his brother – at a time when Boris was fighting tooth and nail to do what both the people and, subsequently, parliament voted for and what both major parties pledged to do in their elections manifestos.

This sort of thing evokes the memory of Cain and Abel or, to offer a more recent and less dramatic example, Ed and David Miliband. (After all, Ed stabbed his brother in the back only metaphorically.)

A brother’s motivation to betray a brother may vary. It could be simple sibling rivalry for the love of the parents or, in Cain’s case, God. Or it could be boundless careerism, as in the case of Ed Miliband. Or it could be any number of deplorable but humanly understandable reasons. Nowt as queer as folk, as they say upcountry.

But Jo Johnson’s explanation of his betrayal, while definitely deplorable, has an extra quality of being emetically mendacious and sanctimonious. Apparently, he was torn between “family loyalty and national interest”, and national interest won out.

Being in a generous mood, I may accept that Jo actually does think that staying in the EU is in our national interest. The likelihood of this is less than one per cent, but it’s not nonexistent.

But surely, as an experienced political hand, he must realise that choosing the apparat over his party and its leader at this moment raises the possibility of a Corbyn-McDonnell government from likely to almost certain.

Surely he can’t think that would be in the national interest? Well if he does, the other day I outlined the ramifications of such a disaster, so I shan’t repeat myself. In any case, yesterday John McDonnell made my argument for me.

Comrade McDonnell vindicates his Marxist credentials by hating private enterprise in general and the financial industry in particular. Income, to a Marxist, must be earned by labour, ideally physical, not by manipulating money.

That’s why he froths at the mouth when he sees that the City of London delivers at least a quarter of our GDP, and that some of those who work there receive large bonuses.

Well, “change is coming”, he declared. Referring to the City, the Shadow Chancellor said: “If it hasn’t learnt its lesson, we will take action, I’ll give them that warning now. It’s a reflection of the grotesque levels of inequality that people now find so offensive. Action will be taken, full stop.”

Another action to be taken, according to Comrade McDonnell, is a transfer of £300 billion worth of shares to workers, something that has never been done in a Western country before.

What kind of action does McDonnell have in mind? It might have escaped his attention that both British factories and City firms are accountable only to their owners or, if publicly owned, shareholders. Only their boards of directors are thus empowered to decide whom and how much they pay in salaries and bonuses.

To take the kind of action McDonnell is warning of, that power will have to be wrested out of their hands and transferred to, well, McDonnell. This is consistent with Marxism, but not with anything historically acceptable in civilised countries.

What this ghoul, the greasy eminence of the Corbyn junta, is talking about is wholesale nationalisation guaranteed to reduce Britain to the status of the poorer end of the Third World. Maduro’s Venezuela, much beloved of Corbyn and McDonnell, springs to mind.

Is this the kind of national interest Jo Johnson had in mind? What a disgusting man.   

We all know about history and the subjunctive mood, and how the former has no latter. Fine.

However, we’d be well-advised not to think that, because things happen, they’re bound to happen. Different scenarios are often possible – and always enjoyable – to imagine.

The Second World War, for example, could have easily taken a different course.

It would have required just a few events going the other way. Such as Britain seeking peace with Germany in early July, 1940, just after the Nazis overran France but before they started those air raids on British cities.

Should that have happened, the Duke of Windsor would have again become Edward VIII, and Britain would probably still have her Empire, albeit in a truncated shape. The Nazis, on the other hand, would have attacked the Soviet Union without having to use a great chunk of their armed forces to cover their rear.

Considering how thoroughly they routed the Red Army in 1941 even with that handicap, it’s not hard to imagine Stalin suing for peace in the autumn of that year. Hitler, on the other hand, would have had no reason to press his advantage all the way to Moscow: he could have contented himself with downgrading Stalin’s military capability to a level where it would present no threat.

The Third Reich could then establish its eastern border along the Dnieper, guaranteeing a steady supply of natural resources and more Lebensraum than Germany would ever need. The war would have ended in December, 1941, and by now Europe would have had 78 years of peace.

What would have happened during this time? Hitler would have been ousted in the 1960s, when he became too old and feeble to micromanage all of Europe. Shortly thereafter he would have died under suspicious circumstances: totalitarian dictators seldom die under any other.

Economically, the Third Reich would have begun to suffer by then. Although the grinder of the Holocaust would have run out of material long ago, the memory of it would have been too vivid for the rapidly globalising economy, led by the US, Britain and Japan, to be overly hospitable to Germany.

Hitler’s successors would have then declared that the Third Reich was thenceforth a democracy. In fact, it wasn’t even the Third Reich any longer. It was now a German Federation, with all its constituent republics, from the Ukraine and Poland in the east to France and Iberia in the west, exercising almost as much autonomy as the US states.

The National Socialist Workers’ Party would have been renamed the International Socialist Businessmen’s Party, with its livery changed accordingly.

Germany would still enjoy some control, but she’d certainly loosen the reins. The Gauleiters, who until then would have possessed dictatorial powers in the constituent republics of the German Federation, would remain in place in an overseeing capacity only.

To reflect that, they’d now be called not Gauleiters, but Commissioners. They’d only interfere if a constituent republic refused to adhere to the strict fiscal discipline demanded by the German economy and national character, or else if the nationalist sentiments in places like Hungary became too strong.

Germany would have issued an apology to all her European satraps, now called partners, for the worst excesses of Nazism. To prove that such crimes could never be committed again, Germany would adopt a pan-German constitution demanding that both the metropolis and its partners held regular elections, with the small proviso that every party involved had to accept Germany’s leadership (Führung) and renounce secession.

Between 1965, the year of Hitler’s death, and 1992, the German Federation would have been accepted as an equal partner in the family of nations. It would feature prominently at all summit meetings of world leaders, those whose countries were as democratic as Germany would now have been seen to become.

Tight control over her European partners would no longer have been necessary, and the German government, working hand in hand with its biggest and most willing partner, France, would have decided to recall its Commissioners from the outer reaches of the Federation.

They’d all be put together at a single location in a major European city – say, for the sake of argument, Brussels. The Commission thus formed would still exercise control, but it would now be subtler and less hands-on.

At that point, to reflect the seemingly greater autonomy of the partner nations, the German government would have felt that the reichsmark, the single currency of the Federation, would have to change its name for something less overtly German. It would henceforth have been called the euromark, or the euro for short.

The Federation itself would have outlived its purpose. After all, a federation implies the existence of a metropolis at its core. Germany would have naturally acted in that capacity, but it was felt that the old name might stoke up local patriotism.

The name would have been thus changed for the European Union of Equal Partners, or the EU, as it would have become commonly known.

In line with that development, the Commission would have decreed that the medieval expression ‘all roads lead to Rome’ would henceforth read ‘all roads lead to Brussels’.

You see how interesting the ‘What if…’ version of history could be? Fantasy can sometimes elucidate reality – to a point where we’d no longer know where one ends and the other begins.

This isn’t a coup of parliament against the government. It’s not even one of parliament against the people.

No, for the first time in British history, the coup over the past two days was staged by the apparat against the government, against the people – and against the greatest constitution the world has ever known.

The people’s will has been defied, the government has been rendered impotent, and the apparat has ridden roughshod over party loyalties for the sake of preserving and increasing its own power. All in the name of democracy of course, the upholding of popular sovereignty.

Brexit is now unlikely to happen, while the most subversive opposition in British history, that led by unapologetic Trotskyists Corbyn and McDonnell, is likely to snatch power. It’s already calling the shots even without an electoral mandate.

One can hear corks popping in Brussels even as we speak. And the eurocrats have every reason to be jubilant.

Just imagine you’re an EU leader, and you’ve devoted your whole life to the creation, preservation and expansion of a giant supranational state. What’s your greatest fear?

It has to be that, rather than adding more new members, that contrivance will start shedding those it already has. All it takes is one significant member leaving and actually doing well out of it.

Such a result would fling the floodgates open, and before long the EU will be reduced to a united Franco-German state. Allemance? Francmany? Germance? Call it what you like, it would still spell a disaster, a collapse of your lifelong dream.

Suddenly, Britain, one of the three most important members, holds a referendum, and its people vote to leave. But the country’s cross-party apparat doesn’t want to go. It’s prepared to work with you behind the scenes to achieve what you want, not what the British people want.

Using the kind of perfidy that, according to Napoleon, is the defining characteristic of the British, the apparat manages to trick the country into a situation where it won’t under any circumstances leave without a ‘deal’.

Would you be prepared to offer a ‘deal’ that would make Brexit more likely? Of course not. You’d offer something that’s clearly unacceptable, a sort of new version of the French leave: saying good-bye without actually leaving.

In fact, you’ve already offered such a ‘deal’, and it has been thrice voted down by parliament after three years of deliberate procrastination and nauseating double-talk.

Are you now going to offer one that parliament will accept? Not unless you want not only to cut off your nose but also to rip out your heart.

The upshot is that Britain has now effectively declared it won’t leave without a ‘deal’, while you’ve stated in no uncertain terms that no deal is on offer. The only conceivable result is that Britain won’t leave. Sorted. Brexit is dead and buried.

Alas, the dirge we hear isn’t just for Brexit. It’s for the constitution of the United Kingdom. It has been subverted and prostituted, with the probable effect of the Corbyn-McDonnell junta grabbing power.

The consequences of such a development will be infinitely more catastrophic than even staying in the EU. Unlike a no-deal Brexit, where endless arguments about its aftermath are possible, there’s no arguing about the absolute, unshakable certainty of the disaster befalling Britain should those evil ghouls start running our lives.

Freedom will be curtailed in every possible way, private property will be nationalised or otherwise stolen, foreign currency will be restricted, taxes will skyrocket, borrowing will stop being profligate to become suicidal, crime will be not so much fought as encouraged, new waves of alien immigration will flood the country, capitals will flee – closely followed by capitalists, investors, foreign firms and those Britons who cherish their freedom, brains will drain out, economy will collapse…

Britain, in other words, will suffer calamities a parallel for which could be found in post-Exodus Egypt, but nowhere in British history. But the apparat will survive and thrive, which is all that matters to it.

Johnson, his back to the wall, will seek a snap general election, but he’s unlikely to get it. Two-thirds of MPs would have to support the motion, and the government has nowhere near that kind of majority.

Corbyn and McDonnel have been demanding a general election for years, but now they can smell power without having to risk going to the people. So they’ve changed their tune. No general election then, not until Britain has crawled back into the EU, her tail between her legs, and the Tories have lost all credibility.

Labour, the LibDems, Scottish nationalists and Tory turncoats all have their delegates in the apparatchik cabal, and the apparat is in charge now – supported by the civil service, thoroughly politicised by Blair, the most revolting man and the worst constitutional vandal ever to disgrace Downing Street.

Sorry to be sounding so uncharacteristically impassioned, but I can’t stay calmly detached when my home is going to the dogs. Ghastly, ferocious dogs – of the kind I saw running wild in the country of my youth.

Is this really Britain? Could have fooled me.

Everything in life, from governing a big state to running a small household, must have a hierarchical structure. Remove that, and chaos ensues.

Western civilisation was based on the understanding that, in matters secular, all men aren’t created equal. Modernity overturned this understanding by claiming the opposite was “self-evident” (meaning it could be neither proved nor demonstrated).

Since then the West has been trying to shoehorn reality into the confines of this fallacy. And some things have proved elastic enough to withstand such treatment.

For example, Western economy has benefited, on balance, from the democratic ability to spread wealth as widely as possible. Stratification remains, of course, and always will. But the lower strata are doing better than they’ve ever done at any other time or in any other place.

However, even there democracy isn’t an unqualified success. One of its by-products is a vast parasitic underclass born out of the culture of entitlement implicit in egalitarianism. This creates conditions for economic catastrophes, for Western governments have to live way beyond their means to accommodate millions of economic spongers.

Still, perfection is unattainable in this world. Even in today’s promiscuous corporatist economies, anybody who really wants to make a decent living can do so, provided he applies much – possibly all – of himself to that task.

This is manifestly not the case with the finer things in life, those dealing with the spirit rather than the stomach. There, an attempt to remove hierarchical tiers is tantamount to wanton destruction.

For, while the simple task of making a living isn’t beyond most people, the difficult task of acquiring real culture is. That’s why comprehensive education is an oxymoron: the more comprehensive it is, the less it’ll educate.

Some things just aren’t meant for wide consumption. Music, real music that is, is one example: it was created for few by fewer. Once the culture of patronage by the few went the way of most social hierarchies, music had to be financed by box office receipts.

Hence it had to become democratic, with millions of people voting with their cash for the kind of performances they liked. Music thus had to cater to common (in the sense of both general and crude) tastes, which gradually led it from the sublime to the cor-blime.

These days, concert platforms proudly feature fleet-fingered semi-nude girls as full of breast as they are empty of mind, who succeed in lowering the most magnificent creation of man’s spirit to the level of pop excretions.

The same democratic egalitarianism is ruining languages. There too, a little learning is all that’s widely available, for the simple reason that most people aren’t capable of absorbing more than that.

Alexander Pope warned of the concomitant dangers three centuries ago: “A little learning is a dangerous thing;// drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:// there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,// and drinking largely sobers us again.”

Apart from creating a popular expression, Pope communicated the lamentable fact that most people can’t drink deep – shallow draughts of learning are all they can manage.

Yet democracy promotes a sense of not only economic but also cultural entitlement. The assumption is that, since we’re all created equal, we’re also created equally cultured.

Before that fallacy took hold, language had been as stratified as the social hierarchy. There existed broad swathes of lexicon that were the exclusive domain of seriously educated people. The rest had no access to such vocabulary and thus were in no position to mangle it.

The democratic presupposition put paid to such exclusivity. A little knowledge is now universally available, and people do avail themselves of it. The results can be comic.

Now, I’ve never met an educated person who’d mock an uneducated one for using plain words of one or two syllables. On the contrary, such a chap is often praised for expressing himself clearly and unpretentiously.

However, neither have I ever met an educated person able to suppress a sardonic smile when an ignoramus misuses a long word or a foreign expression.

Actually, the French are even likelier than we are to provide such entertainment. They still teach things like philosophy and Latin at school, which exacerbates the natural French tendency to intellectual posturing.

Thus you can hear French football commentators (football commentators, for heaven’s sake!) utter astounding sentences, such as: “He’s a superlative player a priori, but in extremis he may be grosso modo careless in front of the goal.”

What’s wrong with, say, “He’s a good player, but he misses many sitters under pressure”? If you have to ask, you aren’t French.

Our commentators misuse words too, but at least they shun Latin solecisms – not because they know that a priori means ‘based on a self-evident postulate’, not ‘at first glance’, but because their comprehensive education kept such phrases off-limits. Nor do they share their French counterparts’ compulsion to sound like homespun philosophers.

Nevertheless, we too have to smile at numerous attempts by democratically egalitarian people to sound sophisticated. Thus, every time I hear someone say “it reaches a crescendo”, I have the same involuntary reaction as Himmler is, wrongly, believed to have had when hearing the word ‘culture’.

‘Crescendo’, lads, is a way of reaching a point, not the point reached, but that knowledge has fallen through the cracks in our comprehensive education.

And it’s not just long words but also foreign phrases that are bent out of shape by untutored hands. For example, describing a highly exclusive party in an interview, Helen Mirren once said that “all the hoi polloi were there.”

It would be unnecessarily pedantic to point out that, because ‘hoi polloi’ means ‘the many’ in Greek, preceding it with the definite article is like saying ‘the the many’. But, God bless her, our celebrated actress actually thinks the expression means ‘high society’, which is, well, funny.

For fear of boring you, I’ll spare you a long list of foreign-sounding words and phrases that are routinely disfigured in the public domain where they don’t belong. Suffice it to say that democracy won’t be kept within the confines of politics.

It sends shock waves throughout society, and in some areas they have the same effect as Hurricane Dorian has had on the Bahamas.

At least, that’s what the French government would like us to believe.

To be fair, the diplomatic briefing of French officials doesn’t say that much in so many words. But what it does say makes this inference inescapable. At least I couldn’t escape it.

The briefing note says: “There is unease regarding Cummings’s Maoism and what economic transformation in the UK could mean for long-term geopolitical relations.”

See what I mean? If Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s closest adviser, is a Maoist, then Boris himself is like Mao, at least typologically.

Now, though Mr Johnson does boast a rather eclectic ethnic mix, I’m unaware of any Chinese inputs. Hence, the French government must feel he’s like Mao not in what he is, but in what he does.

During his time at the helm, the Great Helmsman murdered over 60 million people and enslaved the rest. Of course, much as he’d want to, Britain’s comparatively puny population would make it hard for Mr Johnson to match those numbers, not without expanding his murderous instincts internationally.

But, as I never tire to point out, numbers shouldn’t affect the principle. Perhaps Mr Johnson is planning to match Mao’s scoresheet in proportionate rather than absolute numbers.

One way or the other, the French government seems to be convinced he’s out to go on a murderous rampage, execute or imprison most university graduates, invade an equivalent of Tibet and call for an all-out nuclear war.

No? Then what makes Johnson Mao, or Cummings Maoist? The same note explains it perfectly, if in slightly cryptic language. They aren’t like Mao in those insignificant details. It’s just that they, like the Chinese butcher, pursue an evil end, in this case Brexit.

One can understand their concern: anything less than a disaster for a post-Brexit Britain spells a disaster for a post-Brexit EU. Just imagine what will happen if, after a few months of transitional hiccups, Britain starts outperforming the eurozone economically.

What message will that send to other members, especially those called neither Germany nor France? Right. A couple of years of Britain’s post-exit prosperity, and the EU will almost certainly be reduced just to those two nations.

Both Messrs Johnson and Cummings are trying to comply with the will of the British people, which is why they are accused of raping democracy and acting in the style of Hitler, Mao and presumably Genghis Khan.

Moreover, the Johnson cabinet is actively preparing for Brexit by seeking beneficial trade treaties with non-EU countries, especially the United States. According to the French government, this is “humiliating” for Britain. As opposed, one assumes, to being governed by Germany in all but name. Now, that’s what the French call dignified.

The French must realise that, unlike their country, Britain has no recent experience of being run by Germany, and nor does one detect any urgent desire at the grassroots to acquire such experience. Neither does Britain, unlike France, have much experience of Maoist parties influencing government – a situation that made that Maoist analogy roll so easily off those French bureaucrats’ tongues.

What I find particularly endearing is that the French and the Germans have the gall to accuse Mr Johnson’s government of being insufficiently democratic and constitutional. That’s like an arsonist complaining about a shortage of fire extinguishers.

They’ve created a portmanteau superstate accountable to itself only and run by unelected officials, with a rubberstamping parliament in tow. In view of that, their touching display of affection for democracy doesn’t even make it to hypocritical. Schizophrenic, is more like it.

Ignorance also comes into it, on a rather embarrassing scale.

Thus Christoph Gusy, German authority of constitutional history, has evidently set out to prove that he really ought to look for a different line of work. Speaking of Johnson’s prorogation of parliament, Prof. Gusy proudly declared that such a thing would be “unthinkable” in Germany.     

“Apparently in the UK the constitution is still in a monarchical tradition,” Gusy said, thereby proving his impressive academic credentials. It must have escaped his attention that the UK is indeed a monarchy, which goes some way towards explaining its monarchical traditions.

However, Johnson’s move has nothing to do with that aspect of our constitution and everything to do with other aspects, those that have made it possible for several of our prime ministers to seek royal assent to prorogue parliament for a short time.

“What Johnson is doing now is exactly what was abolished in Germany a hundred years ago,” continued Gusy. In other words, he’s holding the Weimar Republic up as a shining political star for Britain to follow.

He’s right about his facts though. This sort of thing was indeed impossible in Germany 100 years ago. What, however, was possible, was the sort of thing that happened in Germany 86 years ago, when the unmatched Weimar constitution delivered power to Hitler – legally, constitutionally and democratically.

Then, 80 years ago, another thing became possible: Germany’s previous attempt to unite Europe under its own aegis. Really, the French and German eurocrats deserve one another. Neither seem to realise that, in their panic over Brexit, they sound like blithering idiots.

The good news is that Oliver Kamm no longer writes about English usage. The bad news is that he now writes about other things.

That’s a sign of a true polymath: he could write rubbish on every subject. Such as, this time around, the NHS.

“Private healthcare is no match for our fair and efficient NHS,” says his article, and anyone wishing to preserve his sanity would be well-advised not to read any further. I put mine on the line because the subject is close to my heart (and most other organs in my body).

As someone with ample experience on the receiving end of both private medicine and the NHS, I can testify that Kamm simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Then again, this has never prevented him from making weighty pronouncements.

For a self-proclaimed expert in matters linguistic, he doesn’t even use words properly. ‘Fair’ doesn’t actually mean the same for all. It means everyone getting what he deserves, and I don’t think, to cite a personal example, I deserved not to have my gangrenous gall bladder diagnosed for three days in an NHS hospital.

Nor did I deserve being treated like livestock thrown together in a barn, which is the nearest analogy to my ward of some 30 people, men and women together. Even overcrowded Soviet hospitals didn’t go unisex.

And my beloved mother-in-law didn’t deserve dying of MRSA, generously presented by one of our “fair and efficient” NHS hospitals. In the old days, before our medical care became “fair and efficient”, hospital-acquired infections were unheard of, mainly because matrons enforced the strictest standards of hygiene. These have fallen by the wayside.

As with any socialist enterprise, those who do the actual work play second fiddle to the administrators. A friend of mine, an NHS doctor, told me a few years ago that his hospital had cut the number of beds for lack of funds. At the same time, the hospital hired a director of diversity for £90,000 a year plus benefits.

Doctors and nurses get the impression they are extraneous to the true business of the NHS: increasing state control. That’s why they leave in droves: by current calculations, the NHS is short of about 100,000 frontline staff.

The deficit is being made up by importing thousands of foreign medics, many of whom are grossly underqualified and can’t even speak English properly. One such nurse once brought me a highly toxic mouthwash and told me to swallow it. Had I followed her advice, you’d be spared my vituperative prose now.

Third-world standards are even more noticeable in primary care. Good GPs are running away from the NHS at an Olympic speed: last year almost 600 fled, and this kind of drain has been going on for years.

The reason is simple: doctors want to do medicine, rather than admin. Yet the NHS, like all socialist concerns, is obsessed with bureaucratic wheel-spinning. As a result, the head of my local practice, the best GP I’ve ever known, left in disgust – more than half of his time was taken up by filling idiotic forms.

Because of its socialist genesis, the NHS hospitably throws its doors open to all and sundry from all over the world. That’s why the number of appointments goes up just as the number of GPs goes down.

Hence, even though the remaining doctors kill themselves working impossible hours and spending no more than 10 minutes per patient, we have to wait for appointments longer than in any other civilised country. Between January and March this year, 12.3 million appointments were completed 15 or more days after they had been booked.

To the likes of Kamm, ‘fair’ is a synonym for ‘socialist’, so no surprises there. But how does he justify the claim to efficiency, something that private care, with its short waiting times for both appointments and procedures, allegedly can’t match?

Simple. He bases it on cost-per-patient figures, which in Britain are “around the median” for the developed countries. Comparing the two systems I happen to know well from personal experience, he cites a cost of £2,989 in Britain and £3,737 in France.

Well, at least the French get more for their money. Generally, one can see a GP the same day or the next one at the latest. And in both my hospital stays in France I found myself in either private or semi-private rooms – and my neighbours in the semi-private ones were men, not women.

Another semantic nuance that seems to escape Kamm is that ‘efficient’ doesn’t mean ‘cheap’. In this context, it means either providing more service for the same amount or at least the same service for less.

Neither of these conditions pertains in the NHS, which is why, by Kamm’s own mournful admission, “no other country has adopted the British model of healthcare”. And there I was, thinking the NHS is the envy of the world.

“There is a good economic case for the NHS,” he claims, which is tantamount to saying that Britons aren’t overcharged for the privilege of dying of MRSA in unisex hospital wards, having the lowest cancer-survival rates in Europe and having to wait weeks for a GP appointment.

Even if we accept his figures, which I for one find hard to do, I’d say the NHS (the world’s biggest employer, by the way) is too dear at the price. The only case that can be made for it is ideological – and in that area Kamm is a past master. Whatever his subject.