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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.  

“Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that,” said the great football coach Bill Shankly.

True enough, many Britons base their whole identity, philosophy, morality and consciousness on the football club they support.

And then there are intelligent people, who abhor any display of such brainless tribalism. Mention football in their presence, and they’ll wince like someone who has accidentally touched a slug.

Those snobs don’t know what they’re missing. For, looked at properly, football can offer invaluable sociological and cultural insights.

Yesterday, for example, I chanced on a video of a 1967 friendly between the Soviet Union and France (to my shame, I remember watching the match live). The video was posted in 2011, 44 years after the event, and the commentator waxed slightly nostalgic about the good old days.

It was in that spirit that he mentioned in passing that only three of the 11 Soviet players were still alive. I did some quick mental arithmetic, which isn’t my core strength, and calculated that eight out of the 11 didn’t make it to their late sixties, early seventies.

But, added the commentator in an attempt to look on the bright side, all 11 French players were still alive and well. You see now how useful it can be to follow football?

For this little datum is the end of a strand sticking out of a ball of wool. Pull on it, and you’ll unravel the lot.

This statistic tells you more about life in the Soviet Union and the delights of socialism than you could learn from many a scholarly tome. Since I have no intention of writing one, on this subject at any rate, I’ll put a full stop here and pass on to the next football story.

This one involves the English footballer Harry Maguire who recently received a suspended 21-month sentence in a Greek court for a brawl outside a Mykonos restaurant.

Harry and his eight friends emerged from that establishment after a five-hour drinking session, in the course of which the generous footballer had spent £67,000. The management must have seen them coming for Harry was, among other things, charged £18,000 for a bottle of 2002 Dom Perignon.

Since that same bottle retails at an average of £185 in London, Greek restaurateurs have a peculiar idea of what constitutes a reasonable mark-up. That by itself would be a subject worth studying, especially in a course on comparative cultures or perhaps European federalism.

But it gets deeper than that. For interesting questions may well be raised about a society in which Harry earns £195,000 a week, whereas the average UK salary is £29,000 a year.

Yes, I understand – and welcome – the concept of supply-demand and the supremacy of the market with its invisible hand. But, since the market is driven by people’s tastes and preferences, I wonder about a society that values the service provided by the likes of Harry so much higher than those provided by teachers, doctors, engineers or priests.    

This isn’t to cast aspersion on Harry personally, since he’s obviously a man of broad erudition and impressive cultural attainment. True enough, while he manfully engaged five Greek cops in fisticuffs, Harry was issuing the usual battle cries of a British football player or indeed fan.

Expressing himself with a freedom of expression hard-won over many centuries of British history, Harry was frank in his negative assessment of the Greeks, policemen in general and Greek policemen in particular. His language was par for the course, as will be confirmed by anyone who has ever been within swearing distance of a football stadium.

But one of Harry’s remarks caught my eye. Having gone through a lengthy list of the individuals, institutions and countries he’d like to copulate with, Harry then screamed: “F*** the Greek civilisation, I don’t give a s***”.

Sexual intimacy implies some degree of familiarity, and I’m sure Harry studied that offensive civilisation in detail. No doubt he is aware of the contribution Greece made to Christendom. Pre-Socratic philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, Homer and Aristophanes, Pericles and Solon, Iktinos and Praxiteles must have all been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

Harry must sense, as I sometimes do, that the Renaissance, for all the masterpieces it produced, must on balance have had a detrimental effect on Christian civilisation. He must feel that, rather than merely injecting a resuscitating dose of Hellenic antiquity into the bloodstream of the West, the Renaissance delivered an overdose.

Caught in the heat of a modern-day Thermopylae, and almost as outnumbered as those 300 Spartans, Harry couldn’t have gone into such issues in any depth at the moment, restricting himself to epigrammatic shorthand. But the very fact that he has obviously pondered them testifies to the vertiginously high level of British education.

I bet none of those Soviet footballers had a view on the comparative merits of Hellenic and Christian civilisations. Actually, perhaps it was shame about their ignorance that contributed to their premature demise. But that’s something for the medical scientists to consider.

When a cowboy’s horse breaks a leg, he mercifully finishes it off with a quick shot. This is a useful metaphor for Rishi Sunak’s actions.

Our economy is the horse lamed by Covid and the promiscuous public spending deemed necessary to counteract the pandemic’s effects. And Chancellor Sunak is the cowboy whipping out his trusted .45 to put the economy out of its misery with three rounds through the head.

The metaphorical bullets represent the three measures the Chancellor has announced. He is going to raise capital gains and corporate taxes, while also lowering the threshold for tax-free contributions to private pensions.

Essentially, this is a £30 billion raid on the ‘wealthy’, which is how Mr Sunak and other socialists describe the productive middle classes. Here I’d like to mention incessant conversations I’ve been having about Covid with a close friend, a writer and a doctor to boot.

We agree that nobody really knows what the best course of action is, not with a pandemic that has never happened before. It’s easy to criticise our government, or any other for that matter, but what would we do in their place?

My friend is particularly fond of asking me this question. My honest reply is that I don’t know, though I envy those pundits who discuss the issue with self-confidence bordering on arrogance. I suspect total lockdowns are wrong – but I don’t really know. Muzzling the whole population with those ridiculous masks seems silly – but I don’t really know. Quarantining arrivals from most countries for a fortnight looks excessive – but I don’t really know.

However, before my friend gets the chance to compliment my self-effacing candour, I hasten to add that some things I do know. Such as, how to pull the economy out of its mess.

I then propose a few steps, and what do you know? They are the exact opposite of those Mr Sunak is going to put into effect.

I would lower all tax rates, starting with capital gains and corporate. And I would increase the tax-free threshold for pensions. For, if history shows anything at all, it’s that higher tax rates usually result in lower tax revenues.

That stands to reason because tax rates directly affect the economic behaviour of both individuals and corporations. None of them, for example, would do any work if the tax rate on incomes and profits were 100 per cent.

I covered these points in my article of 15 July, so there’s no point repeating myself, other than to plagiarise that piece for two short paragraphs:

“If high tax rates in general and those on assets in particular improved the health of the economy, then Harold Wilson’s tenure back in the ‘70s would have gone down in history as a period of unprecedented prosperity.

“After all, he introduced a top marginal tax rate of 83 per cent on earned income – and 98 per cent on the ‘unearned’ variety. Yet such economic sagacity earned Britain quite a different reputation, that of ‘the sick man of Europe’.”

Yet one point I didn’t make then is worth making now. For Covid isn’t the only economic upheaval pulling our economy down. The other potential one is Brexit, which will happen de facto on New Year’s Eve.

Brexit can turn out to be either a crisis or an opportunity, and it’s up to the government to avoid the former and promote the latter. The big question is, how do we stay competitive against the large protectionist bloc that’s the EU?

There’s only one realistic answer to that. We must use our newly acquired freedom and flexibility to gain a competitive advantage over the overblown, slow-moving Leviathan staring at us from across the Channel.

To do that, we must inject a shot of dynamism into the bloodstream of the economy. We must, on pain of destitution, encourage individuals and corporations, both domestic and foreign, to do exactly three things: invest, invest and invest.

But corporations, individuals and pension funds aren’t driven by charitable impulses. They make investment decisions by coldblooded calculations of pros and cons. Hence courting their business involves making our economy appeal to their accountants’ hearts with attractive offers.

Such as low rates of corporate and capital gains taxes; ideally, much lower than anywhere on the continent. For, just as those chaps aren’t driven by charitable impulses towards us, neither do they feel especially charitable towards our competitors. The chairman of, say, a Japanese car company looking for a European base, would push a button on his computer and instantly get a spreadsheet of debits and credits, pluses and minuses, pros and cons.

His decision will be made on one basis only: that numeral in the bottom right corner. If ours looks better than the others’, then that’s it. Banzan is your uncle, Fuyo is your aunt.

All this is clearly too simple for our Chancellor to understand. Which is why he wants to make absolutely sure that our hypothetical Japanese mogul will look elsewhere. And even our pension funds, which account for much of British investment, will be looking for safer havens to moor their cash.

As an immediate and devastating result, Covid and Brexit will join forces to put our economy six feet under. This, instead of helping the latter mitigate the effects of the former.

Please remind me again which party is in power with a landslide majority. At times it looks as if Harold Wilson and James Callaghan came back as Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. After all, all the same policies were in Corbyn’s Labour manifesto.

We’re in the midst of a pandemic endangering our civilisation. No, I don’t mean Covid, which by comparison only qualifies as a minor annoyance.

Covid mainly attacks the lungs, but the pandemic I’m talking about affects the brain. We are, I believe, in the midst of a cerebral catastrophe, and no vaccine is being developed.

The aetiology goes back to the Enlightenment, and the clinical picture includes multiple symptoms. But the most telling one is rapacious mass appetite for swallowing any rubbish on offer.

Brainwashed in the evils of discrimination, our comprehensively educated public can no longer discriminate between truth and falsehoods. It even seems to be unaware that a difference exists.

Examples supporting this observation are too numerous to bring together in a short piece. So I’ll just pick a couple off the top, choosing the most current.

Earlier this month we had scorching temperatures, way above average. Consequently, not a single weather report either in print or broadcast failed to mention global warming, climate change or words to that effect.

The difference between weather and climate is lost on most people, which is understandable. After all, unseasonably hot weather may well be a sign of some global trend.

Fair enough. I’ll go along, even though I’ve read a few books on the subject and therefore know that there’s infinitely more to it than meets the eye. But I recognise that not everyone is prepared to read long tomes full of arcane science, graphs and charts.

So fine, hot weather is an argument for global warming. However, by the same token unseasonably cold weather should be an argument against it, shouldn’t it? However, this elementary logical inference escapes most people – that’s the pandemic for you.

As I left the house at 9 o’clock this morning, the temperature was 12 degrees Celsius (54 F). That’s unusually cold for late August, and it has been like this for a week or so.

Yet not a single weather report I’ve seen, nor a single commentator on such matters, has rued that there goes global warming, right out of the window. That would be a poor argument con, but no poorer than a reference to hot weather as an argument pro.

Of course, most of our media are ideologically committed to the global warming scam. They get paid good money for scaremongering, and I find it hard to blame them. God knows I’ve advertised some dodgy products for money.

Yet the people at large, those who have no vested or pecuniary interest in the hoax, don’t mind gobbling up this rancid fare. Their mental olfactory sense has been lost to the pandemic.

That’s why grown-ups with university degrees and responsible positions in the academy, governments, charities and arts cheer when a conspicuously backward child, Greta Thunberg, harangues them and demands action in response to her diatribes.

She’s doing a Violet Elizabeth Bott, who threatened to “thcweam and thcweam until I’m thick”, which is what children do. Yet the adult protagonists in Just William books neither succumbed to Violet Elizabeth’s threats nor applauded her tantrums.

But the non-fictional adults I’ve mentioned venerate Greta for demanding that all carbon emissions be eliminated instantly, a measure that would just as instantly result in famines killing millions of people.

True enough, today’s professional humanists don’t mind turning large swathes of the world into today’s answer to Maidanek and Magadan just to make an ideological point. That, however, only makes them evil, not necessarily stupid.

But what about millions nodding their acquiescent heads whenever that child from hell froths at the mouth all the way into the eagerly awaiting arms of the Nobel Committee, whose embrace she only narrowly missed this year? They’ve fallen victim to the pandemic in question.

Then there’s the news of JK Rowling jumping before she was pushed. The writer has returned her human-rights award to the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation that denounced her for transphobia.

For those of you not up on the woke lexicon, the word designates reluctance to deny that the difference between men and women is that of nature, not nurture – and that the difference can’t be reversed on a say-so.

Miss Rowling’s take-your-award-and-shove-it act was prompted by millions of cretinous protests following her seemingly unassailable remark that women menstruate. That physiological tendency can’t be acquired, nor made irrelevant, simply by ‘identifying’ as a woman – any more than a rapid increase in the melanin count can’t result from ‘identifying’ as black.

Sky News magnanimously acknowledged this morning that biological differences between the sexes do exist. However, its presenters could also see the other side of the argument, namely that, by stating that biological fact, Miss Rowling caused great offence, and possibly irreparable psychological damage, to the “trans community”.

The implication is that the psychological damage in question supersedes that already suffered by those wishing to change their natural sex – and that such traumatised people make up a community speaking in the same voice.

In fact, many disturbed men who went the whole hog to become sideshow women support Miss Rowling. They resent the poltroons who shun surgery and still insist they are as womanly as, well, Miss Rowling. Who, to my experienced eye, is very womanly indeed.

But their resentment doesn’t make a dent in the ideology of Sky News – nor, more to the point, in the readiness of its millions of viewers to have their opinions deformed by these opinion formers. That’s the pandemic for you.

We must never let our attention waver as we watch the events unfolding in America. For observation suggests that the worst US developments are a taste of things to come in Britain.

We don’t borrow the good things with the same alacrity, such as American industry and enterprise, understated class envy, distrust of big government. But show us some perversion, and sooner or later it’ll make its way to our shores. The time lag used to be about 10 years, but it’s getting shorter now.

The observation I’m talking about is actually my own. I lived in the US for 15 years before moving to Britain in 1988 and heaving a sigh of relief: emetic political correctness that was already plaguing America was nowhere in evidence.

Fast-forward a few years, and Britain caught the same contagion. Suddenly Britons who had never set foot in the States were rebuking me for referring to American Indians as such. “Do you mean Native Americans?” was the sanctimonious response from an Englishman who yearned to fight other people’s battles.

That explains the speed at which BLM travelled to Britain. Tectonic racial tensions here are nowhere near as seismic as in America, but the desire to exploit them to pernicious ends is just as strong, and the malcontents just as ubiquitous. That’s why, as I watch the riots afflicting America, I wonder if I’m looking at Britain circa 2025.

This time around the fire conflagrated in Kenosha, Wisconsin. A policeman shot Jacob Blake, a black man wanted on charges of sexual assault. Though the culprit later turned out not to be armed, he was resisting arrest and trying to get into his car to flee.

It’ll take an investigation to establish whether or not the force used by the police was excessive. I don’t have a view one way or the other. However, the appalling spectacle of ensuing mob violence isn’t open to interpretation: it’s stamping the rule of law into the dirt.

Within three days the rioting Kenosha mob set 34 fires, destroyed 30 businesses, looted shops (stolen in one of them was 90 per cent of its inventory). That triggered off herd solidarity, and the riots instantly spread farther afield, to the state capital Madison and all the way to Portland, Oregon.

Madison rioters looted 75 shops (and counting), smashed windows at the state capitol, the courthouses and numerous businesses, with silvery shards covering the city centre. That was the BLM version of Kristallnacht, and the parallel isn’t gratuitous.

Just as the Nazis triggered off the pogrom by spreading lies about Jewish crimes, including the notorious blood libel, so was the looting mayhem in Madison set up by spreading false rumours that officers had shot a black murder suspect, who in fact had shot himself as the police were about to arrest him.   

And just as the Nazis used to attack anyone refusing their demand to scream “Heil Hitler!”, so did a marauding BLM mob in Washington DC assault a woman for refusing to raise her fist as ordered. She was lucky to be only harangued, not maimed.

The governor of Wisconsin declared a curfew and called for help from the National Guard. President Trump obliged, as is his right and indeed duty. When local authorities can’t maintain law and order, the federal government has to step in.

But before the National Guard arrived, defence groups had taken to the streets. That’s to be expected, especially in a country whose constitution includes the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms. Actually, the Amendment was designed to help Americans protect their freedom against some future state tyranny.

Yet a collapsing rule of law and a state incapable of defending its citizens against a rampaging mob may jeopardise freedom as effectively as some tinhorn despot. That’s why armed locals began to patrol Kenosha, trying to protect its people and businesses.

Irresistible force came up against an immovable object, and two of the rioters got shot dead. The media gobbled up the story avidly: the youngster who pulled the trigger had been spotted at a Trump rally.

Since most US papers and broadcast channels have assumed an unpaid role as Biden’s PR department, they made an instant connection. Trump supporters are murderers, stalking Biden supporters who are blameless, righteously indignant – and black. Trump is therefore their accomplice.

Just as left-leaning Britons now feel called upon to describe Indians as Native Americans, blacks as Afro-Americans, and presumably dogs as canine Americans, so do our media accept that version of the events, or something close.

This morning, Sky News interviewed a black American preacher, who didn’t look like any cleric I’ve ever met, and I’ve met many. He wore gangsta clothes, sported a cornrowed hairdo, and mouthed gibberish in strident tones.

America is institutionally racist, and police ten times so. Discrimination is rife; nothing has changed in that respect since 1960 or, deep down, from 1860. Peaceful protests are met with violence on the part of individual racists and racist agencies of the state. That’s the kind of hell Trump has created… well, you know the drill. I’m paraphrasing, but only slightly.

That wasn’t an argument, an analysis or even a biased account. It was unalloyed propaganda, of the kind that shouldn’t have found an outlet in a civilised country.

At Sky News, however, it found not only an outlet but unquestioning sympathy. Not a hint of a counterargument was offered – all the chap got from the interviewer were mournful facial expressions, a shaking head and encouraging interjections. That Blake was a fleeing sex criminal was never mentioned.

As I watched the fires raging in Wisconsin and elsewhere, I wasn’t just seeing Kenosha, Madison and Portland. I was seeing – as clearly as if exactly the same things were happening there – Leeds, Birmingham and Leicester.

We have the same mindset in the opinion-forming media, the same culture of discontent, the same mobs awaiting a pretext for rioting, the same rabble-rousers. If you want to see the same explosions, just wait a few years.

Seldom since the 21 to 1 vote to convict Louis XVI in 1793 have all political parties in France been so nearly unanimous.

They disagree about everything: mass Islamic immigration, les Anglo-Saxons, Putin, public spending, education, rioting, crime, Covid, Macron’s sexuality.

But for once politicians from all the main parties are in agreement: France’s identity is under threat. So is her culture. So is her liberté. So, if you add all those together, is the very essence of France. And MPs from all parties concur on both the existence of the threat and its source.

This most devastating assault on France since 1940 has been launched by two gendarmes in Sainte-Marie-la-Mer, a resort 70 miles south of Montpellier. Those two cops, one woman, one man, asked three female sunbathers in their 60s to put their bikini tops on.

That act of wanton tyranny occurred after a woman with two children complained that she didn’t want her tots exposed to the ungainly sight of three grannies playing footie with their mammaries.

Another holidaymaker witnessed the scene and was so enraged that she immediately contacted the local TV station. The station considered the event sufficiently newsworthy for its evening programme, and public indignation burst out like the cork out of a bottle of tepid champagne.

A wave of puritanism is sweeping the country, screamed the media, the public and its representatives. France’s quintessential freedom of exposing les seins on beaches is being undermined.

David Lisnard, the Republican mayor of Cannes was aghast: representatives of the state were enforcing “regressive prudishness”. The left, in the person of socialist MP Christine Pirès Beaune, was also “fed up with all these puritans and moralising people”.

Jean Messiha, of the Le Pen party, couldn’t agree more: French identité was under threat.

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin explained unassailably that “freedom is something precious”, implying that asking women to cover their breasts is the thin end of a wedge. Next thing you know, cops will be executing people without due process, and foie gras will be banned.

And Aurélien Taché, MP from the ruling La République en Marche party, summed up the argument as succinctly as one expects from an heir to the legacy of Mirabeau, Danton and Robespierre: “Everyone is free to dress or undress as they like.”

Now, not being French, an MP or heir to that glorious legacy, I’d suggest that this blanket statement calls for at least some qualification. Even in France public nudity is confined to beaches, and a person walking naked through, say, the Champs-Elysées is likely to be arrested.

In any case, the amount of nudity permissible anywhere has nothing to do with inalienable human freedoms or historical national identity. It’s a matter of consensual convention, and conventions change over time.

However, the convention that women’s breasts should be at least partially covered in public never changed in the West for many centuries. A woman aiming her nipples at variously interested faces used to be a feature of brothels or cabaret shows like Folies Bergère or Moulin Rouge.

Anything else was regarded as an offence against decency, propriety and elementary manners (in the case of those Sainte-Marie-la-Mer sunbathers, also against aesthetics). However, at some point that convention changed, and topless sunbathing became commonplace on French beaches.

This happened in the 1960s, at roughly the same time when revolutionary students were paralysing Paris, taking over university buildings, building barricades, abusing non-Communist professors, fatally defenestrating conservative students and endangering the very existence of the French state.

The movement of the soixante-huitards (I call them ‘soixante-retards’) was inspired by an anomic ideology having our whole civilisation in its crosshairs. Against the background of that cataclysm, the spread of topless sunbathing looked innocent.

Yet the two developments had something in common. Topless sunbathing was also inspired by a subversive ideology, one related to the student revolt and, in the long run, possibly even more destructive.

That ideology is militant feminism, which shares the appalling features of all ideologies. It’s rabid, hare-brained, based on mass appeal to the lowliest of emotions, devoid of any sensible rationale, and socially devastating.

Like all ideologies, feminism strives to burn every traditional certitude down to cinders, hoping that New Man will emerge Phoenix-style out of the ashes. Its target isn’t human institutions, but human nature.

In the case of topless sunbathing, feminists, ably led by their founding mother Simone de Beauvoir, were asking questions they considered rhetorical: “If men can bare their torsos on the beach, why can’t women? We are all equal, aren’t we?”

That was a no-brainer, in the literal sense of absent brains. We may all be equal metaphysically, dears, but equal doesn’t mean the same. Specifically, women’s breasts are different from men’s physically, physiologically, sexually and culturally.

That’s why, in our civilisation, they have always received a special treatment. And not just in ours, come to that. For example, in India covered breasts were a class characteristic: only women of the top castes concealed their charms from prying eyes.

Shame about nudity was regarded in the West, when it was still called Christendom, as a consequence of breaking a covenant with God. Over subsequent history faith in such doctrines ebbed, but it left a residue. Like all fundamental Western laws, shame about nudity has scriptural antecedents; like them, it has outlived faith in Scripture.

On a more down-to-earth level, nonchalant public nudity destroys the source of so much of Western culture, especially poetry. Lyrical poetry would have been impossible without some mystique attached to the woman’s body.

Seeing it unclothed used to be a prize to be won by wooing, courtship, professed adoration, a display of wit and passion. When men can see naked breasts swinging all around them, they stop seeing them – and their possessors – as something special, to be cherished and pursued.

Typically, they either ogle those appendages with lazy lust or, even worse, pay no more attention to them than they do to slabs of beef in the butcher’s window. This has far-reaching social and cultural consequences, every one of them destructive.

Conventions and traditions fall by the wayside all the time, which in itself is neither good nor bad. A lot depends on why they disappear, and also on what kind of social dominoes will fall in the process.

When traditional standards of decency change under the influence of pernicious ideology, no other standard is safe. One doesn’t have to be a “moralising puritan” to see that. One only has to be an observant person who can draw conclusions from what he sees.

When Uganda has more tanks (239) than Britain (227), one begins to wonder which world we’re living in. Let’s see: Uganda is definitely Third World…

If such residual questions still lingered, they’ve received a resounding answer: Britain’s entire force of tanks and armoured vehicles will be scrapped. This in a country that, on 15 September, 1916, was the first to use tanks in anger.

Much has changed since the Somme: military technology and tactics, geopolitical balance – and the understanding Britain used to have that the state’s prime function is to protect its population.

Our battle tank, the Challenger II, was born in the 1990s, and it needs upgrading. The cost of that, however, is seen as unaffordable. We’d rather spend our money on throwing benefits at freeloaders from the world over and propping up lame nationalised Leviathans.

It would be almost bearable, if no less reprehensible, if the government came out and honestly admitted that Britain can no longer afford playing a viable role in Nato and therefore the defence of the West. We are skint, and if that makes us a Third World weakling, then so be it. See if we care.

Instead, however, the government is making mendacious noises about rechannelling the funds into cyberwarfare, aviation and other modern tools. This is bilge.

There’s no question that tanks can no longer be used as they were in the First World War, when they played an auxiliary role, or in the Second, when they dominated the battlefield.

In the Second World War, tanks were practically invulnerable to air attacks because even low-altitude bombing didn’t then provide enough accuracy to hit even a stationary tank. Typically, dive bomber aces counted themselves lucky if they could hit a 100x100m square.

That could have been marginally effective against masses of tanks advancing in close formations, but not against tactically astute tank commanders who knew how to spread out and manoeuvre evasively. Throughout that war, tanks could really only be defeated by other tanks, anti-tank artillery or infantry weapons such as the German Panzerfaust.

The situation is different now. Precision bombing with laser-guided ordnance has made tanks exceedingly vulnerable to air attacks. That, however, hasn’t made them useless. It only means that new weapons require new tactics.

An enemy ability to turn advancing armour into sitting ducks can be downgraded or even negated by achieving air superiority before pushing the tanks through. After all, if the warplanes’ ability to hurt tanks with precision bombing has improved, then so has the ability to wipe out enemy airfields with similar weapons.

Coordinating the efforts of different army branches is as paramount now as it always has been, perhaps even more so. Yet no military man will claim that wars can be won from the air only, with armour relegated to the scrap heap.

With one exception, no modern war has ever been ended without tanks rolling in and clearing the way for the infantry. For example, both Hitler’s Germany and Saddam’s Iraq were bombed flat, with Germany gratefully receiving an almost three-megaton present from the Allies.

Yet neither war was won until armour moved in to claim the prize. Air attacks had made victory possible, but without the tanks they would have been merely an exercise in vindictive cruelty.

The one exception I mentioned earlier was Japan, which capitulated after those two well-known air raids. The atomic weapons used were so apocalyptic that the Japanese realised their country could be obliterated and then invaded at little cost to the invader.

That situation hasn’t changed since 1945: a confrontation with a strong adversary can’t be won by air attacks only – unless nuclear weapons are involved. If our government thinks tanks have outlived their purpose because they are vulnerable to laser-guided bombs, what about our small island’s vulnerability to nuclear bombs? These are bound to come if we solely rely on such weapons for our survival on the battlefield.

Since the Challenger II first saw the light of day, the Russians have introduced five new generations of tanks. They now have 12,950 of them in active service – and tens of thousands of older models mothballed.

If that increasingly aggressive country decides its time has come to recreate the Soviet Union, it would take the Americans weeks if not months to supplement their current force of 87 tanks in Europe. Since the Channel is rather narrower than the Atlantic, British tanks could be on the continent within hours, to help Nato defences.

With our armour scrapped, what help are we going to offer, assuming that a nuclear strike is off the table? Computer games with cyberwarfare? Some air support?

The military understand how ridiculous this is. One senior source said: “We simply will not be viewed as a credible leading Nato nation if we cannot field close-combat capabilities. It places us behind countries such as France, Germany, Poland and Hungary.” And Uganda, which isn’t even a Nato member. Perhaps she could take our place.

There’s no doubt that Covid has strained the Exchequer, but there are others in the same boat. Yet only Britain is planning to disarm in response to the financial squeeze.

Our governing spivs aren’t bothered about defence of the realm. They have more urgent concerns: how to bribe the electorate into voting the right way at the next election. They forget that neglecting defence is akin to playing Russian roulette – with an automatic.

P.S. We are good at cultural surrender too. It has just been announced that Rule, Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory will after all be played at the Last Night of the Proms – but without the lyrics. The cultural spivs are confusing something: it was Felix Mendelssohn, not Thomas Arne, who wrote songs without words.