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With a bow towards Hegel, if the right to be killed is the thesis, then the right to kill is the antithesis.

The synthesis is the vastly discounted cost of human life and the debauchment of its sanctity as a general principle. But, on the plus side, it widens the worship of consumer choice, the true religion of modernity.

Like all rights, especially bogus ones, the right to perform euthanasia can be both used and abused. Note that I’m not imposing on anyone my view that this ‘right’ constitutes an abuse ipso facto. I’m merely commenting on the vicissitudes of human nature.

When people are liberated from reasonable constraints, before long they’ll reach out for unreasonable licence. Tell a 10-year-old he can have a glass of wine with dinner, and he’ll grab five when the grown-ups aren’t looking. Tell ethnic groups they must protest against discrimination, and they’ll end up demanding privilege. Tell a woman that a comment on her looks breaks some nebulous moral law, and she’ll sue everyone in sight.

Extending the same observation to the subject in hand, when doctors are given the power to kill within a certain rigid framework, the inexorable pull of human nature will encourage them to expand the framework, making it more and more elastic.

Such is the warning issued to his British colleagues by Dr Bert Keizer, Holland’s prominent practitioner of euthanasia. Now, when someone like Dr Keizer is lecturing British medics on this subject, you know we’re in trouble.

That’s like Julius Streicher pronouncing on racial sensitivity, Lenin on the inviolability of private property, or Elton John on marriage. Listeners would be likely to consider the source and then ignore the message. Yet this message should be heeded.

In 2002 Holland became the first country to legalise euthanasia for consenting terminally ill patients. However, says Dr Keizer, “Every time a line was drawn, it was also pushed back.”

Specifically, it was pushed far enough back to compromise both the consenting and the terminally ill parts of that requirement. One example from a couple of years ago:

A woman of 74 suffering from Alzheimer’s decided to be euthanised. In preparation, the doctor put a sleeping pill into her coffee, and the woman dropped off. But when she woke up, she decided she didn’t want to die after all and began to kick and scream. But she was overpowered and killed anyway.

At about the same time a Dutch health official proudly stated that 92 per cent of the 6,000-odd patients euthanised that year actually were terminally ill. No one saw fit to ask about the remaining eight per cent, some 500 people who could have lived many more years.

Dr Keizer laments that legalised euthanasia is steadily moving towards “random killing of the defenceless”. Dutch doctors are now doing the job of the Dignitas suicide factory by killing even healthy people who simply don’t feel like living any longer.

Disabled children and prisoners serving long sentences will soon be culled en masse, fears Dr Keizer, and surely he’s right. Doctors these days claim the divine power of deciding who deserves to live and who doesn’t.

At the same time, many patients, schooled in the sanctity of consumer choice as the only sacred notion, demand that deadly syringe as of right. I didn’t choose to be brought into this world, they claim with a certain deficit of logic.

They don’t realise that the argument is self-refuting. Precisely because they didn’t choose to be born, they shouldn’t choose to die – and they certainly shouldn’t be assisted in acting on that macabre choice.

All this goes to show what happens to man when he is no longer subject to any discipline other than his own desires. All links connecting him with reason are severed, and he is cast adrift in an endless sea bubbling with infinite personal choices.

Life and death become products for sale, with everyone cast in the role of customer and, in this case, doctors acting as helpful assistants. That’s the stuff of erstwhile dystopic fantasies, now miraculously transformed into everyday reality.

The slippery slope that incomprehensibly vexes the Dutch merchant of euthanasia is getting ever steeper. Dr Keizer stops his train of thought halfway to its destination: when euthanasia becomes legal, at some point it’ll become compulsory.

I hope that the 1961 Suicide Act, according to which a doctor helping someone to die can get up to 14 years in prison, will never be repealed by our Parliament. This hope will likely prove forlorn: we no longer have any philosophical and moral ramparts protecting the sanctity of human life.

Without such bastions, we are at the mercy of the zeitgeist and its champions. And modern zeitgeist is a wind blowing in one direction only, if at varying strengths.

France has hundreds of beautiful places but, in this beholder’s eye, the tiny royal city of Senlis takes pride of place.

It’s tiny because its population is just under 15,000 and you can walk all over it in a couple of hours. It’s royal because it was the capital of Hugh Capet who became the King of the Franks in 987 and bequeathed the place to his descendants.

One of them, his grandson Henri I, married the Kievan Rus’ princess Anna in 1051, turning Senlis into a shrine for those interested in Russian history – and especially those who, like me, were forced to live it in their youth.

Kiev is now the capital of the independent Ukraine, and long may it continue. This long-suffering country has paid for her freedom in blood, spilled throughout history by her powerful neighbours Poland and Russia.

Russia is actually still at it, but that’s a separate subject – as is the fact that the Ukrainians did a fair amount of blood-spilling of their own. That’s still fondly remembered by visitors to Kiev’s Babi Yar, where tens of thousands of Jews were massacred in 1941, mostly by the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police.

Ukrainian patriotism has always been strong, as has been the people’s resentment of both Poland and particularly Russia. Specifically, the artificial famine that in 1932-1933 killed some five million Ukrainians didn’t do much to foster goodwill and neighbourly amity.

Patriotism, however, is a good but dangerous thing. Care must be taken for it not to become jingoism, the mill to which ignorance, stupidity and ideological fervour are the grist. I was reminded of that yesterday, looking at the Senlis statue of Anna erected by the Ukrainian sculptor Vladimir Znoba in 2005.

The inscription on the plinth identifies her as a Queen of France in both French and Ukrainian. That’s fair enough: the sculptor was entitled to use his mother tongue on a statue he gave Senlis as a gift.

However, some fire-eating patriot stuck a Ukrainian flag into Anna’s bronze hand, presumably on the assumption that she was a Ukrainian patriot too. No doubt she would have been, but for a small detail: the Ukraine didn’t exist at the time, and neither did her blue-and-yellow flag.

The word ukraina in its various Slavic versions means ‘outskirts’, an area at the edge of a country. It was first used in the vicinity of today’s Ukraine in 1187 – 102 years after Anna’s death – to describe the strip of land running between Kievan Rus’ and Poland.

As to the flag, it was first unfurled in 1848, making it a fair guess that Anna wouldn’t have recognised its significance. That makes the chap who thus decorated (defaced?) her statue the worst type of blithering idiot, one with an ideology.

Nor is this an isolated case. In 1988, London’s Ukrainian community erected a statue to Anna’s grandfather, Grand Duke Vladimir, identified on the plinth as ‘Ruler of Ukraine’, which word was first heard 229 years after he was born, and which country never really existed even a few centuries later. Vladimir was no more the Ruler of Ukraine than Alaric was the Chancellor of Germany or the Etruscan chieftain Tyrrhenus the Prime Minister of Italy.

Kievan Rus’ has even less to do with either today’s Russia or today’s Ukraine than the Rome of Augustus has to do with today’s Italy or the Athens of Pericles with today’s Greece. A strong magnifying glass could perhaps discern intersecting lines, but they would be tiny, peripheral and smudged.

Anna was a princess of the Scandinavian Rurik dynasty, a descendant of the Vikings (called Varangians in Russia) who in the ninth century established an outpost on the route to Byzantium, where they regularly went for marauding purposes.

When the Byzantines used a most unsporting weapon, called Greek fire, to burn their boats and repel their aggression, the Vikings retreated and settled in Kiev. Over the next two centuries they turned it into one of the most glittering European capitals.

In fact, Henri’s emissaries sent to Kiev to accompany the king’s bride to France had to apologise in advance for the comparative dinginess of French cities. The same held true for Anna and her bridegroom: he was illiterate, while she knew several languages and had even learned French in preparation for her marriage.

Ethnically, Anna was mostly Scandinavian on her father’s side and all Swedish on her mother’s side. A typical Ukrainian ancestry, in other words – at a time when the Ukraine wasn’t even a twinkle in God’s eye. Claiming Kievan Rus’ as a property of either the Ukraine or Russia is ignorance at best and ideological falsification at worst.

A message to the Ukrainians: chaps, my heart goes out to you when a KGB-run Russia pounces on you like a rabid dog. When that happens, I’m prepared to add my voice to the chorus intoning the proud battle cry: Slava Ukraine! (Glory to the Ukraine.)

But there’s neither glory nor dignity in raping history the way Russia rapes her neighbours. Amica Ukraina, sed magis amica veritas

I’ve translated this slightly abridged article by the German journalist Boris Reitschuster as a rare example of a Westerner who actually knows and understands Russia, where he was a correspondent for many years.

After the Navalny poisoning, ridiculous theories and rumours began to spread in Germany. One gets the impression that everyone has become an expert on Russia overnight. Yet many statements one encounters only testify to mass ignorance.

“The poisoning only harms Putin” is something one hears over and over again here in Germany. This shows a complete lack of understanding of both the balance of power in Russia and Putin’s personality. Alas, we apply our Western standards to the conditions prevalent in the world’s biggest territory. However, those conditions are incomparable to ours.

If Putin were indeed harmed by the well-known murders of his opponents, then, by Western standards, he’d hardly be able to retain his post afterwards. This logical inference lays bare the fallacy of such views.

In reality, it’s exactly the other way around: Russian rulers, not only during Putin’s tenure but, with a few exceptions, over centuries, have always relied on domination and violence. Their underlings knew: whoever rebels against them will be in trouble. Fear is the highest principle of Russian government.

We in the West find it hard to imagine that Putin’s KGB colleagues and other supporters glorify, or at least respect, him for eliminating his enemies. The Kremlin boss comes across as a ‘strong leader’, a ‘piranha’ punishing its opponents.

All this is part of a PR spectacle that also includes photographs and videos showing Putin with a bared torso, as a tiger tamer or a Kalashnikov wielder. We find this risible because this ritual show of strength is alien to us. For Putin, however, it’s par for the course.

What amazes me about the poisoning of Navalny, whom I know personally and view rather critically, is the number of people and especially my colleagues who have suddenly become experts on Russia, capable of offering their ‘competent’ assessment of the event. I, for example, would be extremely cautious about commenting on the events in the US, Turkey or other countries about which I know next to nothing.

These ‘experts’ know no Russian, aren’t familiar with the Russian media and usually have never even been to Russia, except perhaps for a short visit. They make up for this deficit of knowledge with loud voices and strong ‘convictions’. This leads to glaring errors of judgement.

Why did this murder attempt happen at this time? ask Putin’s acolytes. Because Putin always talks about fearing street demonstration more than he ever has since his stay in Dresden.

That’s what’s happening in Belarus, where hundreds of thousands have come out into the streets, hugely affecting Russia herself. And in the Far East, tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people have been demonstrating for weeks under the slogans of “Putin is a thief” or “Imprison Putin”. Coronavirus has crushed Russia’s economy. People sometimes have no money even for food. The situation is dire. Dissatisfaction is increasing steeply. Putin’s ratings are at an all-time low. At the same time Navalny spends every day uncovering the corruption and steady enrichment of the Putin elite.

How naïve do my colleagues have to be to deny a motive here? How badly do they want to pervert the facts?

Putin’s supporters claim reproachfully that the presumption of innocence should apply to him. That’s nonsense. This legal principle applies only to criminals, not politicians. Opponents to Putin have been murdered for 20 years, and it’s beyond my scope here to enumerate all the victims, many of whom I knew personally.

Boris Nemtsov told me a few months before his murder: “He’ll kill me, and I even know why”. That murder happened because he had said publicly that Putin was “buggered”. In Russian, that’s the worst insult, which no Mafioso can countenance. Responding to a question about Nemtsov’s murder, Putin later said: “He went beyond personal, but that doesn’t mean he had to be executed.” Not a single word of regret or empathy was uttered.

Any more questions? The murder of opponents has for over 100 years been the hallmark of the KGB, whence Putin comes. And this is a tradition he proudly acknowledges and regularly hails. Just imagine a German politician extolling the Gestapo and admitting to affection for it!

Stalin once said: “No man, no problem”. After the attempted murder of the defector Skripal, Putin declared that traitors must be liquidated. The evidence in the Skripal case is so transparent that it’s simply astounding that many still deny a conspiracy. Also astounding is that the West didn’t respond to that and other such crimes with serious and telling sanctions against Putin. The evidence of the polonium murder of Litvinenko can be traced back all the way to Moscow, because the radioactive poison left traces everywhere, even in Hamburg. So Germans were in danger too.

More than 3,000 people came in contact with the radioactive substance in London. That’s state terrorism. Litvinenko was poisoned shortly before he was to testify before Spanish judges trying the Petersburg-Tambov Mafia that has close links to Putin. The British government wanted to cover up that murder altogether – business comes first. Superrich Russians are a huge economic factor in London. The Stock Exchange there depends on Russian money. This shows up the absurdity of those who aver that the West simply wants to trip Putin up. It’s the other way around: the West and many here want Russian business and billions.

Litvinenko’s widow had to sue the British government, for there was no other way to make it continue the investigation. The British judge ruled that the murder had been ordered by the Kremlin. The evidence was more than clear. The message to Putin: you can continue to get away with your dirty work without fear of consequences.

By the way, Litvinenko’s murderer now sits in the Russian parliament and Putin awarded him one of Russia’s highest decorations. That happened shortly after the Nemtsov murder. It was proved that his murderers had links to the president of Chechnya, Kadyrov. Tellingly, Putin rewarded that murder with medals too. And after this, some people still insist on the presumption of Putin’s innocence.

Litvinenko’s murderer stated in parliament that Navalny could have been poisoned with novichok only in Germany, in the Berlin Charité clinic. Hence the attack on Navalny is a foreign provocation.

I can’t say definitively that Putin personally ordered the Navalny murder, though I could say a lot about Putin’s cherished ‘vertical of power’. But I can indeed say definitively that Putin bears a total political responsibility for everything happening in Russia.

Because it was he who created a political system under which murderers get parliamentary seats and medals. Political murders in Russia are neither prosecuted nor even investigated. The opponents are dehumanised and described as ‘fascists’. It was under that system that Navalny wasn’t allowed to go abroad immediately after the poisoning. And his wife wasn’t even allowed to see him. It was under that system that an attempt was made to prevent the emergency landing at Omsk of the plane carrying the dying Navalny.

The attempted murder of Navalny is unlikely to have consequences. After all, the 2019 murder of a Kremlin opponent in Tiergarten, a few minutes’ walk from the Chancellery, resulted in the expulsion of several Russian diplomats. That’s it. There was only one danger in store for Putin: he could have died laughing.

It’ll be more of the same this time. One of Merkel’s great successes is that she pretends to be Putin’s opponent, whereas in fact she’s his closest ally. They are alike, which is no wonder: they were both reared in professional communist organisations. Merkel has created the impression that our media are critical of Putin, whereas in fact it’s the opposite. Just think: who’s attacked more in the press, Putin or Trump?

Yet consider the differences between them: has Trump attacked his country’s neighbours? Killed political opponents? Imprisoned them? Was it Trump’s soldiers who, like Putin’s in the Ukraine, shot down a civilian airliner, killing almost 300 people? Or was it Russia that was held responsible for that crime by an international board of inquiry? However, in spite of these critical differences, Putin is much more popular here than Trump. I wonder why.

Many Germans are so disappointed with the media that they keep their eyes closed. Because they don’t know Russian they don’t realise that, rather than castigating Putin, our media are letting him off the hook.

I’ve experienced that myself, when I was deemed too critical of Putin for Focus magazine and even for our talk shows. Their policy was clear: one was allowed to criticise Russia’s deficit of democracy. However, Putin’s attempts to foment conflicts and his links with the Mafia are taboo. I know many colleagues from big papers who aren’t allowed to write about Putin because they are too critical.

When things aren’t going well for Putin, he can always rely on Merkel: it was she who prevented the Ukraine and Georgia from joining Nato. That cut the supply of arms to the Ukraine after Putin’s invasion. Merkel is pushing through Putin’s most important project: the Nord Stream II pipeline. It was she who cautioned against help for Belarus and pre-empted any sanctions. When it comes to Merkel, her words and deeds – and not only in relation to Russia – are diametrically opposite. I know this from politicians also trained in communist organisations. Westerners who have no such experience are usually incapable of understanding this. Merkel is Putin’s favourite woman – mainly because she hides this so cunningly.

Yesterday I commented in passing on the English Spelling Society’s initiative to vandalise spelling, making it not so much easy as unnecessary to learn.

They used Hamlet’s soliloquy by way of illustration, offering various possibilities that wouldn’t tax our comprehensively educated masses too much (caption on the left is one such). That’s appalling by itself – but it’s not by itself.

Changes in the language provide perhaps the most reliable clue to a society’s social, cultural and intellectual dynamics. After all, since language is intricately linked with thought, whoever controls one also controls the other.

That’s why revolutionaries, who by definition seek to control the populace, have always chosen language as one of their first targets. For revolutions don’t just aim to change the existing government, creating a new political dispensation. They aim to change the existing society, creating a new man.

Revolutionaries thus seek godlike powers, but these are hard to come by. However, the power to eliminate the old man, with his anachronistic notions, manners, culture and allegiances is an easier task, one within revolutionaries’ reach.

All revolutionaries are populist in reality or at least in pretence. They need to be seen as acting in the name of the people and in their best interests, with ‘people’ typically defined as common people.

Cultural mobility in revolutionary societies is invariably vectored downwards, and this doesn’t depend on the nature of a revolution or the degree of violence required to perpetrate it. The common man becomes the new king, if only putatively.

Language is one characteristic of the educated classes that sets them apart from the revolutionaries’ desired constituencies. That’s why, when the sniping starts, language is the first target in the crosshairs.

The differences among various revolutions are well known and universally taught. Yet I’ve always maintained that they all have much in common too, and the similarities both outnumber and outweigh the distinctions.

Staying within today’s topic, it’s profitable to look at such apparently dissimilar revolutions as those in America (1776), Russia (1917), Turkey (1922) and China (1949). What do they all have in common?

I’ve pointed out a number of similarities elsewhere, but one that interests me here is that they all simplified spelling shortly after taking over. In Russia that upheaval involved significant changes to the alphabet and in Turkey a shift to a whole new alphabet, which also happened in many ethnic areas of the Soviet Union.

The usual argument in favour of such sweeping changes is based on the need to make mass literacy more accessible. That’s a tell-tale sign of the revolutionary mindset: the incoming lot wish the whole population to be able to follow their propaganda.

That’s why I’ve always dismissed Castro’s fans who proudly declare that under his tutelage all Cubans learned how to read. “Quite,” I agree. “So what do they read? Santayana? Borges? Ortega y Gasset? Or speeches by Che Guevara and the Castro brothers?”

The cultural revolution under way in Britain hasn’t so far produced a violent overthrow of the existing order. But that doesn’t make it any less revolutionary, and certainly no less committed to lording it over language.

The blatantly fascistic aspects of this drive involve the imposition of PC vocabulary, with variously severe punishments in store for the recalcitrant holdouts. Yet the attempts to vandalise grammar, orthography and phonetics are no less pernicious for being more subtle.

Language is a living organism and, like all such organisms, it can only survive if it benefits from both static and dynamic elements, both homo- and heterogeneity.

Local, dialectal and class varieties enrich standard English, while at the same time emphasising its vital importance. The interchange between the general and the particular has to proceed at a measured pace and in the right volume. Too little leads to calcification and ultimately linguistic despotism. Too much produces anarchy – and also ultimately linguistic despotism.

Language has a capacity for self-regulation, controlling the amount and rate of change (including that in spelling) judiciously and organically. The problem with change by diktat is that it disrupts this natural process – and anything that disrupts also usually destroys.

Standard English, with its rules of grammar, spelling and pronunciation, is based on educated speech as it now is, which has traditionally provided an aspirational standard for all. It also has an essential unifying role to play: whatever patois a Geordie, Brummie or Cockney speaks at home, he ought to be able to use standard English to communicate smoothly with all Englishmen.

At the same time, he can subtly change standard English by drip-feeding his linguistic idiosyncrasies into it over time. We’ve never had an equivalent of the French Academy, with its noble but ultimately ill-conceived effort to protect standard language from change.

Rather than protecting, this effort would be more likely to result in stultifying if it succeeded. But it can’t succeed: only dead languages will stand still.

In addition to its socially unifying role, standard English also acts as a yardstick of culture and education. Abolishing it would be thus tantamount to abolishing any hierarchy of culture and education, which is the target most revolutionaries see in their sights.

Our current ones actually go further than their typological equivalents in different places and at different times. For, rather than replacing one uniform standard with another, they seek to eliminate a uniform standard altogether.

If you look, say, at the caption above, practically every word there could be spelled in any number of ways. English offers unlimited possibilities along those lines, as was first shown by an anonymous 19^th century reformer (and later by GB Shaw) on the example of the word ghoti, as a spelling variant of fish.

There, the gh is an f, as in enough; the o is an i, as in women; and the ti is a sh, as in revolution. If everyone spells every word in the Hamlet soliloquy in similar ways as he sees fit, without recognising any universal standard, the resulting Babel will make communication first difficult and then impossible.

But those English Spelling Society vandals are like all revolutionaries: they want to destroy first and worry about creating later – if at all. All educated people must join forces to fight this linguistic anarchy, thereby keeping all anarchy at bay.

For the ultimate fruit of anarchy isn’t liberty. It’s tyranny.

I spend about half my time within a two-hours’ drive from central Paris, which makes the odd visit hard to avoid.

The other day was one such occasion, when my wife had a medical appointment in Avenue Hoche, and I acted in my usual capacity of chauffeur. That gave me a couple of hours to kill, which is never easy in Haussmann’s Paris.

Unlike the Left Bank, it strikes me as too deliberate in its planning, too uniform in its architecture and too lifeless in its spirit. Normally, it’s also too touristy, but at least Covid has taken care of that.

Avenue Hoche runs into Parc Monceau, for me the best part of the 8^th arrondissement, a pearl in a sea of empty shells. That’s where I headed, looking forward to having a pleasant stroll and then reading the book weighing down my jacket.

Few things in life are as enjoyable and civilised as doing that… sorry, wrong tense. Few things were as enjoyable and civilised until this pre-Haussmann park was taken over by a new cult.

When I got there, every square inch of its 20 acres was overrun with compulsive exercisers, pounding, sweating, groaning herds of them. Even that objectionable activity was as carefully pre-planned as Haussmann’s urban totalitarianism.

For I didn’t spot any joggers or other exercisers who had come out on the spur of the moment. They were all, ones, twos or large groups, supervised by trainers, barking instructions in the tones of a drill sergeant at a boot camp.

That charming 18^th century park had been turned into a giant gym, featuring smelly people of all ages and both (all?) sexes running, pushing up, stretching, sparring, sitting up – with most faces contorted by expressions of excruciating pain.

Not being the type to admit defeat easily, I stubbornly stuck to my original plan. To begin with I walked a couple of miles back and forth on different pathways, dodging, with variable success, the stampeding herds threatening to trample me underfoot.

I tried to concentrate on the lovely ponds and grottoes, pushing impending dangers out of my mind, but they wouldn’t go without trouble. Every minute or so I’d be jostled by some old boy veering off his jogging course and muttering “pardon” as he brushed against, or bumped into, me.

Finally, I plonked myself on a bench and opened my book, only to find that reading was even more difficult. The thump of running shoes hitting the ground, the trainers’ loud attempts to teach their charges to speak body French grammatically and without an accent, the slapping leathery sounds of boxing gloves hitting one another – they all competed with TS Eliot’s essays, and the book came off a poor second.

The park always featured the odd jogger or two, all parks do. But I’d never seen anything quite so perversely pervasive before – it looked as if an otherwise depopulated 8^th arrondissement had emptied all its denizens into this 18^th century gym.

What was unfolding before me, I realised, wasn’t a normal, pleasant athletic activity, like a tennis knock on a Saturday morning. It was a ritual of a new pagan cult involving the sacrifice of dignity and perhaps also sanity.

Chaps, I felt like saying, you’re all going to die anyway. Why, even I shall probably die someday.

And I can unequivocally guarantee that making a spectacle of yourselves won’t delay that event one bit. Moreover, as someone who experienced a sense of shameful schadenfreude when Jim Fixx, the patron saint of jogging, had a fatal coronary on a run, I suspect this self-torture may actually hasten your demise.

People used to seek real immortality through worshipping God. Now they seek fake immortality through worshipping their own bodies – to the distinct detriment of their souls.

This is just one aspect of the anthropocentricity that defines modernity. Having taken God off his pedestal, man tried to take the place thus vacated, but the climb has turned out to be way too steep. Seeking the ultimate truth within himself, man found only himself there – a transient, mortal, fallible creature.

And a desperate one – desperate to prolong his physical existence because, according to him, there’s nothing but dark nothingness afterwards. Life has lost all purpose; or rather life itself has illogically become its own purpose.

This reminds me of a friend assigned to interview a woman who spent four hours every day working out in a gym. “Why do you do this?” asked my friend. “To build up my stamina,” replied the sweaty one. “Stamina to do what?” “To go to the gym.”

That has become the paradigm of the circuitous route taken by Modern Man, who has lost his theology and, with it, his teleology. Those joggers doing laps around Parc Monceau symbolise their lives that move around in circles without going anywhere.

P.S. If you’re still unsure who’s winning the cultural war, this should put paid to all doubts. The English Spelling Society is petrified to see that traditional spelling condemns millions of people to feeling illiterate and therefore inferior.

Rather than suggesting that teachers take their fingers out and actually teach English, as opposed to advanced condom studies, the Society insists that spelling be made more accessible.

As an example, they propose this version of the Hamlet soliloquy: “To be or not to be, that is th qeschun, whether tis noebler in the miend to sufer th slings and arroes of outraejus forchun . . .”. That way madness lies – or modernity, to use a full synonym.

P.P.S. If doubts still persist, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts should put them to bed. It has introduced new requirements for the best picture Oscar, “to encourage equitable representation on and off screen in order to better reflect the diversity of the movie-going audience”. No diversity, no Oscar, in other words. And there I was, thinking such matters were decided on artistic merits.

When I first took an interest in international politics, I was so young I’d sometimes confuse Eisenhower with Adenauer. It took me a while to sort them out, especially because the Soviet papers conflated both under the same rubric: enemy.

Since then I’ve followed with some interest the tenures of all subsequent 10 US presidents, which provides a fair basis for comparing Trump with the others. And in some aspects, he’s well-nigh incomparable.

No other president in my memory has aroused so much passion, pro or con.

As far as I can tell, the middle ground of the US electorate is made up of people who like Trump well enough to vote for him, considering the alternative; those who find Trump revolting but would still see him as the lesser evil (I’d fall into this category if I still voted there); those who think Biden is incompetent but still preferable to Trump; those who don’t care much one way or the other.

Without having reliable poll data at my fingertips, I’d estimate that all those groups together make up about 20 per cent of all voters. The rest seem just about evenly divided into those who either adore or loathe Trump, at equally hysterical pitch.

Trump’s policies in his first term don’t strike me as sufficient to rouse either passion. Some of them were good, others not so much, and I’d say that domestically the former outnumbered the latter, while in foreign policy they were the other way around.

Either way there wasn’t that much in it. So why all that hysteria among both the pro and con groups?

This is an interesting question because the answer goes to the very core of the American national character. Whether or not Trump wins a second term, he’ll be gone in the blink of an historical eye, whereas a national character is considerably more enduring.

His obsessive detractors fall into various subgroups, none of them attractive. Some are simply lefties who hate every word Trump has ever uttered, every policy he has ever put into effect and the palpable contempt he has for political correctness.

Others are simply conformists in passionate love with the establishment. They define the establishment as political mainstream represented by former lawyers sporting perfectly capped, unrealistically white teeth perpetually bared in fulsome smiles. Such men appeal to the peculiarly conformist nature of many Americans.

It’s peculiar because Americans are usually associated with the rugged individualism depicted in Hollywood Westerns. Americans do have such qualities, but they usually reserve them for commercial activities. In matters of the spirit, intellect and culture, however, most Americans tend to toe the line, wherever it’s drawn.

That is reflected in their language, overabundant in clichés. Many such come from TV advertising, proving yet again the effectiveness of my former profession.

I’m not as au courant with American speech as I used to be, but even in the streets of London one hears visiting Americans say things like “It’s Miller time”, “I’ll reach out to you”, or “Don’t leave home without it” – all of Madison Avenue provenance.

The cultural equivalents of these Americans in Britain would be embarrassed to show they can be influenced by advertising straplines, but Americans wear them on their sleeve as a badge of honour or at least identification. Alas, clichéd language, if overused for many years, may lead to clichéd thinking, and then to cultural and intellectual conformism.

Whatever else someone might say about Trump, he certainly doesn’t come across as a pillar of the political establishment. That by itself is enough for many Americans to hate him with the fervour of believers confronting heretics.

More interesting than Trump’s policies is the nature of his appeal to broad swathes of the American public. That, I think, offers a valuable insight into that great nation.

What I find repellent about Trump is his vulgarity, ignorance, narcissism and absence of higher (which is to say statesman-like) intelligence, a gap that’s only partly filled by a horse-trader’s common sense.

His admirers, including those who I know are otherwise capable of impeccable judgement, either deny such defects or, if they don’t, crack a Gnostic smile and say Trump only puts on that façade for popular appeal. At base, however, he’s a keenly intelligent man of refined tastes and unimpeachable morals.

Since neither I nor, by and large, Trump’s admirers know him intimately, his public persona is really all we have to go by. Hence whether he is all those unpleasant things for real or as make-believe doesn’t matter. What matters is that he was elected president, meaning that enough Americans either don’t mind those traits or, interestingly, actually like them.

This reflects America’s ideological commitment to the common, which is to say vulgar, man, whose advancement has been elevated to the aspirational peak of the American Dream. America was the first Western country genuinely committed to that desideratum, and in many ways it remains the only one.

Coming across as common men is essential not only for America’s politicians but even for her cultural figures. I recall that even the late writer William F. Buckley, a man of erudition and refinement who possessed (or rather used) the widest imaginable vocabulary, scattered much more slang around his narratives than any comparable British figure ever has.

It was as if Buckley was telling his readers: “Yes, I’m more cultured and talented than you, richer, better-educated, and I routinely use words like ‘encephalophonic’ even in everyday speech. But I know that Americanism is a club demanding membership fees, and I’m willing to pay them.”

That doesn’t mean that common Americans necessarily have all or any of Trump’s despicable qualities. But they must feel that his being proudly, triumphantly common outweighs whatever drawbacks he has.

They see him as the richer neighbour next door, or at least around the corner. And if having more money comes with being a narcissistic boor, then so be it – provided he’s a common boor.

If I still lived in America, I’d feel uneasy about the image of my country, as refracted through the prism of Trump’s personality. But then it’s largely to immunise myself against such disappointments that I left America in the first place.

Kate Burley of Sky News can’t open her mouth on any subject (such as, this morning, London transport) without fuming about the homophobic and misogynist Tony Abbott.

His views, according to Burley, her interviewees and just about every progressive person, disqualify him from holding any public job this side of Nazi Germany. Hence, uncountable progressive knickers got in a twist when Abbott was nevertheless appointed advisor to the UK Board of Trade.

The underlying assumption is that holding any other than woke views on any subject places a man outside the pale. Whether or not such views have anything to do with his prospective job is immaterial.

Now, I’ve never been considered for any public job and neither have I ever sought one. But sometimes one likes to indulge in hypothetical speculations, along the lines of “what if…”

What if I were a candidate for a job in some sort of advisory capacity or perhaps as proverbial dog catcher? Would I be able to run the vetting gauntlet of ‘public opinion’ (made up of about 50 politicians, a hundred media personages and about as many academics)?

The best way to decide is to compare my views with Mr Abbott’s. Since I don’t have his name recognition, for me to stand any chance I’d have to be more acceptable than him. Alas, I have to admit with some chagrin that the opposite is the case.

Mr Abbott is a Catholic, but one doesn’t have to be a Christian to oppose homomarriage, as we both do. In 2017, he led the campaign against it in an Australian referendum.

By broadening marriage, he said, homomarriage weakens it – and he is absolutely right. I’d go even further though. This abomination effectively destroys the vital institution of marriage by disengaging it from the millennia of Western tradition.

Rather than being a sacred union essential to creating families, the building blocks of society, marriage becomes an affirmation of some nebulous – and in this case downright perverse – human rights. It loses not just sacramental significance, but also any other.

If two homosexuals choose to live together, that’s their business. But conferring an official status on such unions is the business of society at large. By doing so, society agrees to redefine marriage so broadly that it becomes undefinable.

That was demonstrated by the late Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld, who married his cat and bequeathed much of his fortune to her. That was followed by a spate of similar ‘marriages’ all over the world, especially in the more fashionable states of America. And why not? If any marriage is a human right, regardless of the parties involved, then any objection to interspecies marriage becomes invalid.

In the same vein, Abbott is opposed to homosexual adoptions. He called marriage “the basis of family”, adding that “it is not homophobic to maintain that, ideally, children should have both a mother and a father”.

That’s another example of Christian doctrine overlapping with common sense. Every study I’ve ever seen shows that any other than the traditional family spells a recipe for disaster, social, psychological and economic.

Having two daddies who from one day to the next may decide to be two mummies, or else alternate in those roles, is perverse in every moral, aesthetic and intellectual sense. A child reared in such an environment has next to no chance of growing up a normal, well-balanced individual.

Mr Abbott also put homomarriage, rightly, into a broader context. “If you’re worried about religious freedom and freedom of speech, vote no,” he said. “And if you don’t like political correctness, vote no because voting no will help to stop political correctness in its tracks.”

Political correctness, I’d add, is a battering ram of the cultural revolution aiming to crash through every certitude of Western polity and indeed civilisation. At its extreme, it’s unadulterated fascism, different only in the scale and extent of violence from the nightmare of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.

An ability to see what appears to be an isolated problem as but a strand in the rich fabric of life is rare, and Mr Abbott ought to be commended, not castigated, for possessing it.

Then there’s the misogyny chestnut the likes of Kate Burley are trying to shove down our throats. To wit, when talking about the cost of electricity in 2011, Mr Abbott said: “What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing…” He needn’t have said anything else.

Housewives?!? Ironing?!?!? There’s a woman hater if the Kates of this world have ever seen one. Doesn’t that vermin know that the only differences between men and women are physiological or, given the advances in medical science, not even that?

Well, call me a troglodyte, but I’ve never handled an iron in my life. This job is always done by my wife, although I let the men’s side down by doing all the cooking.

Mr Abbott seems to believe, as I do, that, rather than being shameful and demeaning, housewifery is a vital social occupation, deeply rooted in human nature. If pressed, he’d probably invoke suitable biblical passages to that effect, but that’s unnecessary.

When both parents go to work every day and then share household duties, one such duty usually falls by the wayside: bringing up children. I could cite numerous examples to that effect, some from my own family, though I wish I couldn’t.

Agree or disagree, such remarks fall far short of misogyny. As does another statement Mr Abbott made, that men are better at exerting authority. That’s a truth flying in the face of totalitarian woke lies.

Exerting authority involves an aggressive personality, and aggressiveness is directly linked to testosterone. That’s basic physiology, confirmed by any number of clinical studies, and we don’t even have to go deep into sociology or indeed history to prove it.

It’s true that some women are more authoritative than some, or even most, men. Elizabeth I, Catherine II or, closer to our own time, Margaret Thatcher spring to mind. But statistical averages over the seven billion people inhabiting the globe would doubtless vindicate Mr Abbott’s statement by a wide margin.

What else? Mr Abbott has misgivings about climate change, although, unlike me, he acknowledges both its existence and anthropogenic nature. He only objects to some economically ruinous policies aimed at counteracting it.

He is also opposed to euthanasia, which is probably linked to his Catholicism. Yet one doesn’t have to be a Catholic to construct a strong and, to me, irrefutable argument in favour of the sanctity of every human life and therefore against the arbitrary taking of it.

I also go further than Mr Abbott in opposing abortion. He’d like to limit the number of terminations, while accepting that women have a right to have them. I disagree – on the same grounds as my opposition to euthanasia.

Since it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact moment during gestation when a human life begins, conception is the only indisputable point. And, if any doubt exists, it must decently be interpreted in favour of saving, rather than taking, a life.

When he was Australia’s PM, Mr Abbott secured many advantageous trade deals with China, Japan and others. That makes him qualified for the advisory job he has got – and any disqualifications exist only in the agued minds of our aspiring totalitarians.

In the unlikely, nay impossible, event that any government department is thinking of offering me a job, my message is a resounding don’t. I’d be buried under an avalanche of black balls, and I wouldn’t have the strength of Mr Abbott’s credentials to extricate myself.

The moment seemed right to dispel rumours about some nefarious connection to Putin. With the election looming, it was essential for Trump to take one arrow out of the Democrats’ quiver.

All he had to do was issue a statement similar to those made by Angela Merkel, Boris Johnson, Jens Stoltenberg and other Western leaders. Nothing too strident – just a few indignant words about the Navalny poisoning with a toxic compound that only the Russian government possesses and has used before.

And then, in the immediate run-up to the November election, Trump could have mocked the Democrats’ insinuations of links with Putin by citing, and profitably exaggerating, his response to the murder attempt.

A golden opportunity was presented – and missed. For Trump has effectively exonerated Putin and his gang of yet another crime.

“I don’t know exactly what happened,” he said. “It’s terrible, it shouldn’t happen.” But: “We haven’t had any proof yet but I will take a look.”

Criminals have been sent to the gallows on much less proof than in this case. The doctors at one of Germany’s top hospitals stated it was “beyond doubt” that Navalny had been poisoned with novichok.

Anyone who has ever had any experiences with medics knows they don’t say such things lightly. Doctors are like lawyers in this respect: they’ll couch every diagnosis in several layers of disclaimers, qualifications and words like ‘may’, ‘however’, ‘likely’ and ‘balance of probability’. So when top doctors say something is beyond doubt, it is.

Is Trump confident of his ability to “take a look” at a medical report and make heads or tails of it? A man who can rarely string a grammatical sentence together doesn’t strike me as a polymath. So what’s he going to take a look at?

Evidence that Putin ordered the hit personally? The sole standard of proof that might conceivably, though not definitely, satisfy Trump would have to come in the shape of a written order signed by Putin. As I mentioned the other day, such a document probably doesn’t exist or, if it does, will never see the light of day until Putin finds himself in the dock.

His KGB training taught Putin not to leave a paper trail. A simple phone call on a secure line would have sufficed for a hitman to crack a novichok ampule open.

Even in the absence of ironclad corroboration, any unbiased court would convict Putin and his gang of a string of political murders, including this attempted one. They are the only ones who have that lapidary forensic triad: motive, means, opportunity – plus exclusive access to novichok. As I said, people have been hanged on less evidence.

Then Trump went even further. Not only should Russia not be charged with this heinous crime, but Russia, and his friend Vlad, should be off limits even as a topic of discussion, never mind criticism.

He went on to say: “It is interesting that everybody’s always mentioning Russia and I don’t mind you mentioning Russia but I think probably China at this point is a nation that you should be talking about much more so.”

Dictating to the press what it should be talking about is an idea Trump must have got from his friend Vlad. And since when do our media concentrate on one subject only? They are perfectly capable of talking about both Russia and China, since both present a clear danger to the world.

However, do let’s keep in mind that China hasn’t occupied anyone’s territory since 1949, when she invaded Tibet. The list of Russia’s aggressive acts committed during the same period would be too tedious to mention.

China’s communist regime is evil, but I haven’t seen many reports of the Chinese poisoning their opponents all over the world. Nor have they been caught trying to subvert Western elections. Nor have they threatened the security of Nato countries, with potentially calamitous consequences.

That China is our enemy is beyond doubt, to use the current phrase. But so is Putin’s Russia, and in my view she’s a deadlier enemy, if only because of her location at the West’s doorstep.

But it’s not just that. Putin is using aggressive imperialism as a legitimising strategy, desperately needed to mollify his impoverished population. If the pinpricks he has engineered so far are found to be insufficiently effective, he may well try something desperate, like attacking one of the Baltics. Under such circumstances the West could do with a leader less sycophantic to the KGB colonel.

I don’t know the nature of the link between Trump and Putin. But the slightest doubts of its existence that anyone might have harboured has been removed. When it comes to dealings with Russia, Trump is definitely not acting as a free agent. This threatens us all.  

Trump’s remarks have been met with triumphant clamour by the Russian news agency Tass. Its name is a Russian acronym that stands for the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union. After the Soviet Union collapsed the agency lost its name, only to regain it in 2014 on Putin’s orders.

This reflects his plans to rebuild the Soviet empire to its erstwhile evil grandeur. Soviet methods of subverting the West are also very much extant, and cultivating ‘useful idiots’ (Lenin’s phrase) has always been prime among them.

At best, that’s what Trump is. I hate to think of what he may be at worst.

Since the West is now in the grip of what Lenin called a “revolutionary situation”, one is reminded of the aphorism in the title.

After the storming of the Bastille, Louis XVI asked La Rochefoucauld if there was a revolt under way. To which the courtier replied: “Non sire, ce n’est pas une révolte, c’est une révolution.”

I don’t know if the duke was fully aware of how profound his statement was. For, if we grasp the difference between a revolt and a revolution, we’ll understand the nature of all revolutions, features they all have in common.

A revolt may break out haphazardly, prompted by any grievance that’s bad enough. It may be a famine, a pandemic, an increase in taxation, an introduction of a law perceived as unjust or anything else that annoys people enough for them to rebel.

Once the pressure has built up, all it takes is a gifted rabble-rouser, a Wat Tyler type, issuing a battle cry, along the lines of “We’ve had enough of [fill in the blank]!” A revolt will ensue.

The authorities may either satisfy the rebels’ demands or suppress the revolt violently. One way or the other, that usually spells the end of the matter.

A revolution, however, won’t go away so easily. In fact, if experience is anything to go by, it won’t go away at all. And even if it ostensibly ends, it’ll always leave permanently festering wounds behind.

Unlike a revolt, a revolution results from a deep and widespread cultural shift, with most people feeling that a support for the ancien régime has somehow become impossible or at least embarrassing. That feeling is always reflected in the language – revolutions too start with the Word.

Since all Western cultures, different as they might be at the periphery, have the same core, revolutions, as distinct from revolts, are hardly ever contained within one country. Revolts are always national; revolutions, international.

Thus the American Revolution of 1776 was followed by the French one in 1789, 1848 happened across Europe, the 1917 Russian revolution triggered similar events in Hungary, Finland and Germany (including – and this never gets the attention it deserves – the Nazi putsch).

Just like a revolt, a revolution puts forth slogans seemingly reflecting its key objective. Yet for a revolt, trying to achieve this objective is the genuine cause. For a revolution, it’s merely a pretext.

If a revolt is prompted by the introduction of, say, an unpopular poll tax, the rebels demand its repeal. They’d be unlikely to change their opinion along the way and decide that, on second thoughts, the tax doesn’t matter.

Revolutions, however, are perfectly capable of changing their slogans more frequently than revolutionaries change their underwear. If Slogan A doesn’t elicit the desired effect, they’ll try Slogan B – and so forth, all the way down the alphabet.

For that reason, the slogans of revolts are usually more rational than those of revolutions. The people have a particular grievance, understandable and easy to articulate. Revolutions, on the other hand, seek to deepen, broaden and consolidate the comprehensive cultural shift that happened already.

Since that desideratum is hard to express in a catchy phrase, it usually stays in the background, hiding behind any number of interchangeable slogans that seldom have any rational content.

Thus, though the American, French and Russian revolutionaries decried tyranny, they were trying to depose the least tyrannical monarchs imaginable, George III, Louis XVI and Nicholas II respectively.

The specific slogans of those revolutions don’t stand up to scrutiny. Thus taxes, which seemed to be the bugbear of the American revolutionaries, were at the time actually higher in the metropolis than in the colonies. Even the cost of tea, which produced that jolly Boston party, was much higher in England.

“No taxation without representation” wasn’t particularly clever either. The underlying assumption, that representation is the only legitimate basis for taxation, is simply false – and in any case, many English taxpayers weren’t represented either. Incidentally, once the colonists won their independence, their taxes went up so steeply that they realised they didn’t like them even with representation.

The slogans of any revolution of note can be taken apart in the same manner, but neither the revolutionaries nor their audiences really mind. They know it’s not about slogans.

It’s about destruction, for the real purpose of a revolution is always negative. Revolutionaries know exactly what they hate, but they tend to be hazy on what they love. Revolutions are always against, not for.

The cultural shift that adumbrated today’s mess started with a systematic chipping away at the foundation of Western civilisation, Christianity. This process goes by the misnomer of the Enlightenment, but in fact there was nothing enlightening about it.

It knocked out the foundation in the poorly expressed and never really felt hope that somehow the walls would remain standing and the roof wouldn’t come down. Predictably, the building collapsed, and another one has to be constructed on the newly vacant lot.

So it was, but the structure was rickety to begin with, and grew more so with time. It’s interesting, however, to observe how even extremely intelligent materialists of today sound a great deal less intelligent when trying to repel attacks on the Enlightenment.

Their arguments, characteristically, all have to do with material progress. There was much human misery before the Enlightenment, infant mortality and epidemics were rife, sick people suffered tremendous pain, so did dental patients, there were famines – well, you know how that goes.

Yet all those things have improved thanks to the progress in science and technology. Ascribing it solely or even mainly to the Enlightenment is merely committing a gross logical fallacy known as post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

There’s no rational reason to claim that scientific progress wouldn’t have happened if most people had continued to go to church every Sunday. Somehow the pre-Enlightenment Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Leibnitz, Pascal and Descartes didn’t find faith and science incompatible.

However, the current “revolutionary situation” is directly ascribable to the spiritual and cultural vacuum created by the Enlightenment and made progressively worse by our progressive modernity.

Nietzsche’s statement that “God is dead” was a precise diagnosis. What that coroner to divinity meant was that at the time, in the 1880s, educated people had grown to regard religious faith as rather infra dig.

However, wrote Chesterton a few decades later, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” Moreover, he could have added, they have a desperate need to believe in anything.

The liberal democratic state that, after many trials and tribulations, emerged out of the ruins of Christendom, rests on a strong material base, but a weak spiritual and cultural one. And, because the latter is weak, the former gradually crumbles away too.

The present “revolutionary situation” bears every harbinger of an impending outburst. The requisite cultural shift has either occurred already or is in its late stages. The disease has set in, and the symptoms are there for all to see.

Law and order is disintegrating in the USA, the first, and indeed reference, country of modernity. Yet Western European countries shouldn’t gloat – they are but half a step behind.

That the conflict between blacks and whites is nowhere near as febrile in, say, Britain than in America is a moot point. As with all revolutions, the objective is to destroy the existing order. The slogans under which that’s accomplished are immaterial.

Historically, the racial conflict in America presents the best banner under which destruction can proceed apace. Slavery, especially the attendant dehumanisation of the blacks, left a wound that no amount of affirmative action will ever close.

Black Britons don’t have quite the same experience, and it’s only for copycat solidarity that they join BLM riots. But that doesn’t mean that our malcontents will be short of slogans when push comes to shove.

They, the malcontents of leftish persuasions, have already won their cultural revolution in the battle for the language. They can dictate, on pain of unemployment and increasingly prosecution, how language is used and what words constitute unbreakable taboos.

Even worse: they now have the power to dictate not only what people can’t say, but also what they must say. Like all revolutionaries, they are in a position to demand not just passive acquiescence, but enthusiastic endorsement.

What stratagem they’ll use to seal their victory is an interesting question to ponder, but ultimately it doesn’t matter. It may be BLM, Muslim emancipation, global warming, homosexual and transsexual rights – wait and see.

Once the cultural revolution has emerged victorious, any number of causes can act as pretexts for physical destruction. The pressure is high, the cauldron is bubbling, and the lid can be blown off at any moment.

We’ve seen it all before, in different guises. It’s just that so many of us fail to recognise the essence behind the guise. Then again, there’s nothing new about that either.

Merkel and Trump want just one thing from their friend Putin: that he shouldn’t make them feel embarrassed about that friendship. Yet Vlad doesn’t seem to care about their feelings.

He’ll do what he wants: murder opposition leaders, cull or maim recalcitrant journalists, poison his detractors with military-grade toxins at home and abroad, invade neighbours, suppress basic freedoms and so on. That puts Angie and Don in an awkward position, but that’s their problem, as far as Vlad is concerned.

This time around, German doctors are fighting to save the life of Alexei Navalny, opposition leader poisoned with novichok, the military-grade toxin of Salisbury fame.

This one event tells you everything you need to know about Russia’s kleptofascist regime (and its Western champions), provided that people are willing to listen. Could it be that Angie and Don will now unplug their ears?

First, the tendency to murder political opponents ought to place any regime out of bounds for civilised discourse. I shan’t bore you by citing yet again a long list of Putin’s victims: you’re welcome to surf my earlier articles on this subject.

But it isn’t just the murders – it’s also how they are covered up. When Navalny was first treated at Omsk, local doctors insisted there were no signs of poisoning. Navalny was simply suffering from hypoglycaemia.

Even rank amateurs knew that was a lie. Low blood sugar may make a person feel faint and listless. But it certainly doesn’t make the sufferer writhe in excruciating pain and scream at the top of his voice before passing out, as Navalny did.

That doctors were prepared to lie so blatantly shows that Putin’s FSB/KGB exercises complete control over them – and, by inference, over everyone else in the country.

Before Navalny was finally flown to Germany, those doctors kept him at Omsk long enough for, they hoped, every trace of the poison to wash out of his system. The Putin junta issued its first denial then: unless those German quacks identify the exact toxin, no talk of poisoning is justified.

Now that the toxin has indeed been identified, “beyond a shadow of doubt”, new excuses pop up, each more risible than the next. The most spectacular one came from Alexei Lugovoi, the murderer of Alexander Litvinenko and pioneer in the use of nuclear weapons on British territory.

It was German doctors, he explained, who poisoned Navalny with novichok, to throw a spanner in the works of Russo-German relations. It’s not that Lugovoi expects anyone to believe this drivel. What he is saying in effect is that yes, you know I’m lying, and I know you know. But I don’t care because there’s nothing you can do about it except shut up.

The less outlandish claim, one parroted by many in the West, is that there’s no proof that Putin personally ordered the hit.

What would constitute such proof in their opinion? A written order signed by Putin? That probably doesn’t exist: such orders are usually conveyed orally. And even if it did exist, the chances of it ever seeing the light of day are somewhat less than zero.

However, the absence of evidence isn’t the evidence of absence. Chaps, read my lips: there’s no way in hell that anyone other than Putin could have ordered a hit on such an internationally known figure.

It couldn’t have been a rogue criminal or your friendly local FSB man: such people would have no access to novichok and certainly no knowledge of how to handle it without poisoning themselves and everyone else around.

It absolutely had to be someone close to Putin, and nobody like that could have possibly issued such an order without his boss’s explicit instructions. Anyone who knows anything at all about Russian affairs will confirm this.

However, the same logic is at play here again. We know and Putin knows we know. But his implied response, just like Lugovoi’s, comes from the same gangster rule-book: So what are you going to do about it? Nothing? So shut up and play the game.

So far Angie and Don have been doing just that. Why, is a different matter, and one open to conjecture. We don’t know for sure: as the Russians say, someone else’s soul is always in the dark. Yet it’s possible to throw some light on it.

At the same time Putin served as head of the KGB Dresden station, Merkel was a full-time organiser of the Leipzig Young Communist League (Kommunistischer Jugendverband Deutschlands). In all communist countries, including Russia, the YCL was under party control only nominally.

It was in fact the KGB breeding ground (four KGB chiefs started their careers there), which means that at that time Angie and Vlad were more or less colleagues. They were also neighbours, what with Leipzig being only 70 miles down the road from Dresden.

I don’t know if they met at the time, but I’d be surprised if they hadn’t. In any case, Angie and Vlad show every sign of warm intimacy. They speak each other’s language and always use the familiar forms of second person singular (du in German, ty in Russian).

Under their stewardship, the two countries enjoy close economic ties, only slightly damaged by the EU sanctions imposed after the rape of the Ukraine. Specifically, Germany imports 92 per cent of her natural gas, and about a third of it comes from Russia. (Exact figures are unavailable because Germany stopped publishing them in 2016, citing privacy issues. Quite.)

Whatever the proportion, it’s bound to increase when the second pipeline, Nord Stream II is operational. The pipeline is almost complete, except for the last 75 miles running through Danish waters.

There’s a hold-up there due to the international indignation about various manifestations of Russia’s criminality. But Angie is fighting manfully to overcome all such resistance. Nord Stream II will go ahead, she said last week.

This week she has had to take issue with the novichok escapade, being careful, however, not to blame her friend Vlad personally. She hasn’t gone so far out on a limb as to demand a written order signed by Putin and to exonerate him in its absence. But she has come precious close.

Now Trump would rather sell Germany America’s shale gas. But otherwise he has been steadfast in refusing to condemn his friend Vlad for any kind of beastliness. Congress has forced Trump to impose some mild sanctions, but he has gone out of his way to delay their implementation. And he has so far refrained from uttering a single critical word about his friend Vlad, which testifies to Trump’s capacity for loyalty.

I shan’t speculate on the nature of that friendship, but it’s easy to see its manifestations. By the same token, I don’t know the exact nature of nuclear fission. But, on the evidence of Hiroshima, I’m satisfied it exists. So does the friendship between Don and Vlad, certainly on Don’s side (I don’t think a career KGB thug is capable of such sentiments).

Sometimes that one-sided friendship looks more like sycophancy, but that’s a matter of nuance. In essence, whatever his motives, Trump fights against any attempt to hold Putin personally accountable for his regime’s criminality.

So far neither Angie nor Don has betrayed their friend Vlad, even though numerous officials in their own parties have issued ringing denunciations of the Navalny poisoning. High officials in the British and Italian governments, the EU and Nato have done the same.

Yet, though Vlad doesn’t seem to be in any need of friends, he thinks he can still count on his friends in need. He may be in for a letdown.

After all, Angie needs to stay on good terms with the EU, which, along with a malleable France, includes countries like Poland and the Baltics that have fond memories of Russia and her KGB. And Trump will be asked pointed questions about his friend Vlad in the run-up to the November elections.

They may well throw their friend Vlad to the wolves if that’s the only way to save their political careers. We are friends, Vlad, I can hear them say, but this is just how life is.

I for one look forward to watching Angie’s and Don’s acrobatic contortions with some schadenfreude. Few things please me more than seeing politicians tie themselves in knots.