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For that coroner to divinity, God wasn’t a person whose life had come to an end. He was dead because clever people could no longer believe in him.

Nietzsche was absolutely right: scientific advances, social and political developments, new eudemonic philosophy with man as its fulcrum had all conspired to vindicate his conclusion – and it’s even truer now than it was then.

So yes, clever people can no longer believe in God. However, supremely intelligent people, serious thinkers, can’t function at any level above quotidian concerns without faith in a supreme being.

The tragedy of Nietzsche’s time, and even more of ours, is that many brilliant people who would otherwise be lavishly equipped to make the next step into supreme intelligence are held back by their atheism.

I can’t blame them, especially since some of them are among my closest friends. A man can no more be blamed for having no faith than for having no musical gift. For faith is a gift too, in the strict sense of something presented by an outside donor.

This is a blanket observation, one that applies equally to the lowliest of peasants, the loftiest of intellectuals and everyone in between. However, though none of the atheists can be blamed, some can be pitied.

These are clever people who really do try to understand the world, not just to survive in it comfortably. If they’re serious in that effort, sooner or later they’ll reach an impassable barrier with a sign saying ‘thus far but no farther’.

This isn’t to say that an equally intelligent believer will have no limit to his intellectual reach. He will, but for him it’ll appear farther down the road.

An atheist, however high off the scale his IQ, is by definition deficient in his ability to ask the next question. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, he may get as far as wondering how the world is – but not that it is, and especially not why it is.

Such questions aren’t answered, nor indeed asked, by natural science, politics, sociology, economics or double-entry accounting. The questions of being and existence are the domain of metaphysical philosophy and, ultimately, the highest of all sciences, theology.

This is a matter of fact, not opinion, and any intelligent atheist will accept it. The admission would be easy for him: he has implicitly agreed to apply dampeners to his thought and doesn’t see that as a problem.

He’ll usually just say that such things are so far beyond human understanding (meaning his understanding of course) that one might as well not bother. Being able to figure out today’s trials and tribulations is both hard enough and rewarding enough. Life’s too short.

That’s where he does a disservice not only to himself, but, if he has an audience, which some of my brilliant friends do, also to others. For, without understanding that, rather than being short, life is eternal, it’s impossible to solve even the simple problems he has set out to solve.

In my book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis, I analysed the far-ranging effects of atheism on economic behaviour, specifically the kind of behaviour that had caused the 2008 crisis – or rather the crisis that had come to the fore in 2008, the year in which it neither began nor ended.

It takes a book, rather than an article, to cover such issues adequately – and even a longer book to expand beyond economics into such areas as law, education, crime, social interactions, public morality and so on.

All such areas are beset with problems, and any ultimate solution can only come from an approach springing from fundamental philosophical verities. Intelligent atheists know this, and even a cursory investigation makes them realise that, in the West, such verities can only be found in Christianity.

The investigation doesn’t have to be more than cursory because ample empirical data, their ersatz deity, are in plain view.

Any honest observer will know that every attempt to replace Christianity with a secular alternative has failed miserably and catastrophically. The twentieth century, the first atheist one from beginning to end, spilled more blood than all the prior centuries combined – and it doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict that the worst may yet come.

That’s why Douglas Murray most recently and many brighter atheists before him have concluded that a return to Christianity is necessary to anchor reality and prevent it from being cast adrift.

At this point, I stop pitying atheists and start blaming them. For they effectively return to Nietzsche, with themselves cast in the role of der Übermensch.

Yes, they imply, of course God is dead, but only for us extremely or, as in Murray’s case, moderately clever people. We know better than to believe in all that mythical nonsense. However, our better knowledge can’t keep hoi polloi in check, maintaining social order, stability and liberty.

The masses need to be kept on the straight and narrow, for if they’re allowed to deviate, they may well threaten the existence of the clever people who know better. And centuries of trial and error have shown that only Christianity can steer the human herd into the right avenue.

I’ve stripped this kind of thinking to its essentials the better to show its hubristic, megalomaniac dishonesty.

After all, these people are atheists. Hence they believe that Christianity is false. To them it’s a lie, but a socially useful one, the kind they, clever people who know better, can use to build a successful society.

Well, I’ve got news for them: if a society is built on a lie, it won’t stay successful for long. And conversely, if it stays successful for long, it’s built on truth.

Christianity can only deliver a lasting social success if it’s true. And because it’s true, it did indeed deliver such success for centuries. Things only went terminally awry when God died – that is, when clever people could no longer accept the truth of Christianity.

Thus these neo-Nietzschean atheists can’t solve the problem for the simple reason that they themselves are the problem.

They should really stay off the subject of God altogether and concentrate instead on social commentary or, as in Murray’s case, the dangers of Islamic homophobia. They just might do some good that way.   

My oh my, aren’t we sensitive. Use the word ‘man’, singly or in compounds, and you brand yourself as a troglodyte everywhere, Personhattan and Personchester alike.

Tell a joke along the lines of “an Irishman, a Jew and a black man…”, and you’re a racist troglodyte.

Mention in jest that one can tell a gay bar by the fact that the stools are upside down, and you’re a homophobic troglodyte and, quite possibly, a criminal.

Universal scorn is your immediate punishment, accompanied with suggestions that “there ought to be a law…” Calm down, dears, the law already exists. Or if it doesn’t, it soon will. No one says anything we’re mandated to regard as offensive and gets away with it.

Thing is, most people aren’t really offended by masculine personal pronouns and some such. To think that they are would be tantamount to diagnosing a pandemic of madness, and one has yet to hear a government health warning to that effect.

People react that way because they’ve been brainwashed to do so. The combined efforts of the state, the media and our non-education create a zeitgeist that plays by contrived ethical rules.

Though it’s false through and through, most people have no mental strength to swim against the zeitgeist current. They are vulnerable to propaganda, both overt and surreptitious.

So no, no pandemic of madness is under way. But there’s no question that such vulnerability testifies to at least a mild form of mass idiocy.

Because everything about modernity is supposed to be progressive, this is a progressive condition. When it comes to mandated and affected sensitivity, what was a silly quirk when I first came to Britain, 31 years ago, has become unassailable etiquette.

In those days, a few chaps from the office and I often went for lunch to a local pub that had two pool tables and its own team. Since hustling pool was part of my misspent youth, I could hold my own and even once won a pub tournament.

That earned me the affection of the landlord we called Big Al on account of his girth. He’d always flash an avuncular smile when I walked in and say, good-naturedly: “Here comes the Russian c***.”

In response, I’d order a pint and ask Al how the fatties were doing. We’d then play a frame or two, which I’d usually lose.

Today something like that would be classed as a hate crime. I’d be expected to froth at the mouth, threaten to call the police or report Big Al to the Equality Commission.

It’s hard to escape the observation that, as people get thicker, their skin gets thinner. In the process, one of the most endearing traits of the English, a sense of humour and an ability to laugh at oneself, is falling by the wayside.

People are denied the right to say anything they wish as a joke, for shock value or simply because they like the line. We’re held responsible for every word we utter, and every word is taken at face value regardless of the speaker’s intent. Nothing is a joking matter any longer.

For example, if the IRA is discussed in mixed company, some people will look askance at anyone saying “I could murder a McGuinness”. A joke? A pun? Not on your nellie. It’s the utmost in crudeness at best, and quite possibly a statement of murderous intent.

And if the object of a quip is a member of an ethnic minority, a cripple, a mentally retarded person or a homosexual, the wag can confidently expect everyone present to contort his face in a gurning grimace of sanctimonious opprobrium.

The other day I was watching my lapidary five minutes of Sky News, where some lachrymose gorgons were waxing cloyingly sentimental about a boy with “special needs”, who, according to them could still have a rewarding career.

“Yeah,” I said to Penelope. “As a doorstop. Or else, with some rudimentary training, he could learn to bring you your slippers in his mouth.”

My long-suffering wife is used to such humour. But had I said the same thing at a large dinner party, I’d be seen as a ghastly man, which I probably am. But I’m not so ghastly as to hold such views in all their literal seriousness.

It was simply a line I thought funny at the time (I know opinions may differ on that score). That was the top layer. Underneath, however, it was Newton’s Third Law of Thermodynamics at play: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

When the zeitgeist pushes, some intrepid individuals will push back, and this doesn’t just apply to jokes, funny or otherwise. The counteraction may have far-reaching social consequences.

People will always bend under the weight of the zeitgeist. However, when the weight becomes oppressive, they may spring back to action.

Racism may well strike back at hysterical anti-racism, misogyny at fire-eating feminism, xenophobia at enforced ideological internationalism, fascism at ‘liberalism’ run riot and so forth.

Because human nature isn’t a physical phenomenon, the problem with an opposite reaction may be that it won’t be equal. It hardly ever is when popular resentment spills out.

The reaction to a king who didn’t respect Parliament wasn’t a king who did. It was Civil War.

The reaction to France’s weak monarchy wasn’t a stronger monarchy. It was revolutionary terror.

The reaction to the wishy-washy liberalism of the Provisional Government in Russia and the Weimar Republic in Germany wasn’t a better liberalism. It was Bolshevism and Nazism.

One detects all over Europe an incipient reaction brewing against the ideological influx of cultural aliens and the frenzied effort to erase the borders of nation states, with national laws overridden by international bodies. What form this reaction will take is anyone’s guess.

But not mine. I’m loath to impose on you my inveterate pessimism. Cracking irreverent jokes is safer – and certainly better than speculations about the cracking of human skulls.

Three news items have caught my eye this week, and, in a radical departure from my usual format, I’ll comment on all three.

But first an admission: when in France, I watch Sky News at breakfast. Each morning I bet with myself how long I can stand it, and I’m pleased to announce that the other day I broke by 25 seconds my previous personal best of nine minutes.

Part of the reason for this record-breaking endurance was that I was confused. A professional dietician and a full-time environmental activist were preaching nutritional and moral goodness, the kind of lesson I, keenly aware of my own deficiency in both virtues, always welcome.

The dietician praised avocados for their taste and high content of good fats, adding that it’s a quarter of an avocado, not a gluttonous whole, that constitutes a proper portion. However, it was the activist who led the discussion.

He agreed that avocados taste good and are good, but we shouldn’t eat them anyway because doing so destroys the planet (presumably the Earth). My breakfast that morning actually was avocado on toast, so I felt suitably shamed. Still, an explanation of some sort was in order and it duly came.

It turned out that avocados aren’t cultivated sustainably, which destroys the environment and therefore the planet. And the undestroyed part is then finished off by the need to transport avocados from Mexico to England, thereby trampling the planet under a giant carbon footprint.

Since we don’t grow avocados in Britain, explained the activist, they should be replaced with things we produce locally and don’t have to transport across the planet.

The dietician readily betrayed avocados and crossed over to the other side. Saving the planet was high on her agenda too. The nutrients we derive from this offensive fruit, she said, ought to be replaced with olive oil for moral reasons.

That confused me twice over. First, I couldn’t quite figure out a way of replacing avocados with olive oil in my guacamole. Second, I couldn’t for the life of me remember ever seeing many olive groves anywhere in England.

The activist spotted the geographical contradiction too and objected that, to improve our diets and save the planet at the same time, avocados must be replaced not with foreign olive oil, but with home-grown animal products, such as red meat and cream.

My confusion deepened. Both virtuous substitutes are full of cholesterol, which, as we all know, rivals cyanide for deadly potential and crystal meth for moral decrepitude.

As to red meat, I wonder what animal rights people will have to say about the recommendation to devour the carcasses of murdered creatures. Since man is nothing but an animal, such a diet is a moral equivalent of cannibalism.

I was again confused, and so was the dietician. The urgent need to save the planet clashed with the need to eat ethically, sensibly and without annihilating whole herds of innocent animals who are just like us.

Since I could bear neither her confusion nor mine, I switched to another channel, where Prince Harry was being praised for his own commitment to saving the planet.

Harry spoke, barefoot for some unfathomable reason, at a Google climate retreat in Sicily, where HRH was joined by swarms of A-listers, including every Hollywood actor and pop star I know and dozens of others who are so universally famous that I’ve never heard of them.

The A-listers pledged to do all they could to save the planet from warm weather, which, we must remember, is caused by carbon emissions.

Fair enough, the participants in this worthy event should redouble their planet-saving efforts just to counteract the effect of the 114 private jets and an armada of superyachts on which they had arrived in Sicily.

In addition, Harry also promised to save the planet by having no more than two children. I don’t know about the planet, but the royal family and all of us should be saved from having to cope with too many sprogs of Harry and Meghan.

Harry has clearly inherited his brains from his mother and possibly also his father, if those malicious, vindictive and manifestly false rumours are true. Ever since Harry met Meghan, he has been ignoring the anatomical fact that the thinking organ is located between the ears, not between the legs.

On an unrelated subject, I was privileged to receive the transcript of Joe Biden’s opening remarks at yesterday’s debate among more Democratic candidates than you can shake a machete at. Mr Biden used the opportunity to attack President Trump’s record. This is what he said:

“Friends, Americans, countrymen, lend me your ears. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown of US presidency, and Trump’s head has been lying throughout his elitist tenure.

“Never in the field of US politics was so much taken from so many by so few. That’s why I come to bury Trump, not to praise him.

“Trump has nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. He creates a desert and calls it peace. Hence we have before us many long months of toil and struggle until the next election. But we shall not flag or fail… We shall never surrender!

“The buck stops here – this man, the first Biden who has ever gone to university, is not for turning. And it’s time my opponents stopped banging on and on about my having plagiarised that Neil Kinnock speech. Immature politicians plagiarise; mature politicians steal. That brings me back to Trump…”

Following the news is such fun, isn’t it? I’m happy to be able to share my enjoyment with you.

First a modest suggestion to our new Home Secretary Priti Patel.

She’s good at rallying cries, but one should never underestimate the potential of rallying songs, especially those with catchy tunes.

Fortunately Leonard Bernstein has already written one to fill the bill. All Home Office employees can start every morning by singing: “I feel Priti// Oh, so Priti// I feel Priti and witty and bright!// And I pity// Any girl who isn’t me tonight”.

Miss Patel will need time to ponder the ramifications of such vocal team building. Meanwhile, she has adopted the rallying cry already issued by her boss, Boris Johnson: “We want to unequivocally make Britain the greatest country on Earth.”

Now, since I can split hairs almost as well as Miss Patel can split infinitives, I’m asking the question in the title above.

Her statement goes further than Donald Trump’s “Make America great again” and our own “Putting the ‘Great’ back into Great Britain”, first used for the trivial purpose of promoting Olympic Games.

Now great is no longer enough: nothing but the bombastic “the greatest country on earth” will do. Whenever such terms are bandied about, my first instinct is to head for the hills.

What does ‘great’ mean? What are the objective criteria, if any? And if the criteria are subjective, who’s the subject?

Now, as far as I’m concerned, Britain already is the greatest country on earth. I’ve lived in several, and Britain is the only one where I feel at home.

I don’t like everything about Britain. In fact, I never tire of pointing out things that are wrong with her. But Britain’s problems are existential, not ontological. There’s a reservoir of goodness from which we can still draw, even though successive governments have done their level best to poison the waters.

Few of the things I love about Britain have to do with economics. Such things matter less to me than those I consider truly important.

However, most people will probably rate money and the physical comfort it buys above all. And Britain certainly isn’t the richest country in the world. Her GDP per capita places her at Number 26, behind not only the usual suspects but, at Number 5, even Ireland.

Hence most Britons will perhaps feel that putting the ‘Great’ back into Britain means putting more money into their pockets. Is this what Miss Patel and Mr Johnson mean?

Some countries apply different criteria. Unable to serve Mammon, they try to mollify their disgruntled populations by pretending to serve God. Russia has used that trick since time immemorial, and she continues to claim, on no obvious evidence, to be the most spiritual – and therefore greatest – country on earth.

This is accompanied with a claim to imperial greatness: Russia is eager to force the benefits of her sterling spirituality onto her neighbours, by violence if need be.

Do Miss Patel and Mr Johnson judge greatness on this basis? Do they want our Toms, Dicks and Harrys to outdo everyone else in spiritual attainment and imperial muscle? Somehow one doubts it.

Whenever a nation claims or aspires to be the greatest in the world, it’s usually a sign of provincial cultural insecurity. Yet Britain has never been provincial, and she has nothing to be culturally insecure about.

Her cultural capital is being squandered, but this is the case everywhere. Britain has enough left to remain one of perhaps three or four most cultured countries around. Given the state of the world, this may not be saying much, but it’s still saying something.

Britons still possess enough taste not to make megalomaniac claims about themselves. They retain enough self-confidence not to toot their own horn, perhaps realising that, when a nation does so, the horn produces nothing but goose-stepping marches.

But we aren’t talking about the Britons here. We’re talking about the British government, and that’s a different matter altogether.

British, or any other modern, government isn’t in the business of using words to convey serious meaning. In this case, if probed, our leaders will probably admit that making Britain the world’s richest, strongest or perhaps the most spiritual country falls into the domain of wishful and shallow thinking.

However, Miss Patel and Mr Johnson aren’t putting forth a thought or, God forbid, a policy. They are shouting a slogan.

And whenever British ministers shout a slogan featuring the adjective ‘great’, especially in its superlative form, it usually means only one thing. They’re going to spend more of the money they haven’t got.

I haven’t tried to cost the promises Mr Johnson has made already and is continuing to make. I doubt he has either.

In that he follows the logic of all the recent governments: print and borrow promiscuously. Eventually the fiscal chickens will come to roost, but the next general election will come sooner.

Mr Johnson is already talking about ending austerity, as if it has ever begun. By analogy, a man who incontinently spends 30 per cent more than he earns doesn’t become more austere when that number goes down to 15 per cent. He becomes slightly less irresponsible.

Priti Patel used the promise to make Britain the greatest country on earth as a way of promoting her immigration policy based on the Australian-style points system. Yet this lofty aim can’t quite be achieved merely by asking immigrants what they do for a living.

In fact, this aim can’t be achieved at all because it’s always ephemeral and usually pernicious. Before a country becomes great, it should become good, and the two objectives are at odds as often as not.

Unlike great, good isn’t hard to define. The standards of personal goodness are laid down in Matthew, 5-7, whereas the standards of consistent political goodness have been indelibly written into Britain’s history by her sages and statesmen of the past centuries.

No other country in Europe can make the same claim. France, for example, has had 17 different constitutions since the seventeenth century, while England has had one. A mere 80 years ago Spain was being torn apart by a civil war, and Italy was a fascist dictatorship. And Germany… well, we know about her.

Britain is suffering from existential problems, threatening to enter the nation’s gene pool and become ontological. So instead of shouting empty phrases about greatness, a truly conservative government should try to make the country good again.

It has illustrious partners to co-opt: the sages and statesmen of Britain’s past, those who made her good and therefore, for a while, indeed great. And what do you know: they did so without opening the sluice gates to millions of immigrants, especially cultural aliens.

When foreigners like Holbein, Handel, Freud or for that matter the Duke of Edinburgh wished to settle in Britain, they didn’t have to score a certain number of points to gain entry. They – even Freud – just came and were cordially welcomed.

I doubt this government can make Britain great. However, I do pray it’ll be able to achieve simpler goals: getting out of the EU and defeating Corbyn. That would be good.

P.S. LibDem leader Jo Swinson has promised to fight Brexit tooth and nail even if a second referendum produces the same result. It’s good to see such strong convictions in someone so young, but what strikes me as slightly incongruous is that Miss Swinson’s party is called Liberal Democratic.

Boris Johnson promises to recruit 20,000 more police officers. Well, good luck with that – he’s going to need it.

Money is usually identified as a key barrier in the way of this ambition: such a massive recruitment drive won’t come cheap.

Funding is indeed a problem, one with which not only governments but also individuals are familiar. It’s like looking at something desirable in a shop window and realising wistfully that we can’t afford it.

Yet that’s only a small part of Mr Johnson’s conundrum. The bigger part is that there isn’t much in the shop window for him to buy.

Today’s young people seek a career in the police without having the slightest idea of what the job entails. And when during their recruitment interviews they’re given an inkling of it, they’re aghast.

The police report says: “Candidates stated they do not like confrontation or were shocked by the need to work different shift patterns and possibilities of cancelled rest days… their mental health or their ability to cope with certain situations is just not evident from day one”.

And the reason isn’t just that those candidates “have been wrapped in cotton wool”, though that’s certainly true. The real problem is that our education is spewing out youngsters who are soft not only generally, but also in the head.

Here we have young people who decide to dedicate their lives to keeping the public safe from criminals. On what basis have they made their decision?

Policing is often a family occupation, so perhaps their fathers or uncles are cops. Alternatively, they must have seen cop shows on TV or played cop games on their PlayStations. That too would have given them some idea of what policemen do for a living.

And even if they have no policemen in the family, and neither have they seen a single police show, they could have figured some basics for themselves.

Cops chase criminals. Criminals resist being chased and especially arrested. Once arrested, they try to keep the truth to themselves, forcing interrogators to catch them in lies.

Hence police work doesn’t merely have a potential for confrontation – confrontation is to cops what putting out fires is to firemen: their stock in trade.

The next link in this logical chain is to realise that criminals don’t keep regular hours. They may break the law at night and on weekends. Therefore those who chase criminals have to work odd hours too, matching their own schedule to the felons’ – such is the job.

Since young recruits are unable to figure out these things for themselves, the conclusion is inevitable: they’re morons. I’m using the word colloquially, rather than clinically, although in some cases the clinical definition may apply as well.

But most cases can’t be medicalised. The explanation is the same as one proffered by many criminals on trial: it’s all society’s fault. Except that here the explanation rings true.

Our schools, with the parents’ robotic acquiescence, are churning out whole generations catastrophically unable to face life’s simplest challenges to mind and character.

Would you like such people to man the line of defence separating evil-doers from you? One would think that lazy cretins shying away from confrontation are less suited to policing than to just about any other career.

However, staff shortages are so severe that police forces are planning to do a Mohammad and the mountain. Rather than trying to find some youngsters who’ve evaded the corrupting effect of our ‘education’, the forces may change their working practices to accommodate their low-grade human material.

Thereby things come full circle, and it’s as vicious as they come. For our successive governments have set out to corrupt every institution protecting our ancient liberties: parliament, the armed forces – and the police.

Our police forces resemble social services more and more, and law enforcement bodies less and less. They’re expected to function according to every pious precept of political correctness, a subversive dogma overturning every moral and intellectual certitude of British polity.

The concept of evil that leads to crime, and crime that leads to punishment, is no more. Reigning supreme is Rousseau’s fallacy of man being both perfect and, tautologically, perfectible.

Hence, when some men manifestly don’t end up perfect, the fault lies not with them, and certainly not with some mythical event that took place in the Garden of Eden, but with society. Somehow those poor souls have fallen through the cracks in the societal floor.

Now, producing potential police recruits unfit for the job may indeed be a collective problem. Yet the choice to commit a crime is always individual, but that understanding is now extinct.

Either society has failed to make criminals wealthy, or it has neglected their psychological problems, or it overlooked their lack of parental love, or whatnot. Now it behoves society to correct its oversights by easing those dears’ return to the straight and narrow.

Counselling, medical help (whether really needed or not), roomier social housing will all work better than punishment. And even if the crime committed is so horrendous that some prison time is inevitable, the purpose of imprisonment isn’t punitive but again social and educational.

Let’s not forget either that certain minorities are disproportionately represented in prisons. The reason can’t be that they commit more crimes – no, it’s society that discriminates against them.

This general ethos produces concrete policies designed to emasculate the police, such as the severe limit on stopping and searching suspects imposed by Theresa May, then Home Secretary.

Also, nonviolent crimes against property routinely go not only unsolved but indeed uninvestigated – the police are tacitly encouraged to treat them as an extension of the government’s own wealth redistribution. The butcher, the baker and the housebreaker all practise valid professions, goes the common belief.

This take on human nature, justice and law enforcement tears to shreds the old picture of a policeman, truncheon in hand, feeling an evil-doer’s collar.

That stark image has been replaced by a pastel-coloured picture of the new policeperson, a slightly sterner version of a social worker, whose principal task is to protect not the public’s safety but the criminal’s rights – and perhaps to satisfy his need for a hug.

A knack for confrontation has been replaced as a job requirement by wholehearted commitment to the ‘share, care, be aware’ ethos. Thus adjusting police operations to the intake of our non-confrontational youngsters makes sense.

The concern for the rights of criminals must extend to the rights of policemen, sorry, policepersons. Why should they work long hours and skip weekends? Isn’t that the violation of their human rights? Of course it is.

An influx of those non-confrontational, work-shy youngsters will simply hasten the inexorable change, including, no doubt, allowing policepersons to strike.

One wonders whether this is what Sir Robert Peel had in mind when he created the Metropolitan Police some 100 years ago. The question is rhetorical; don’t bother to answer.

The new Leader of the Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg has reconfirmed his conservative credentials by issuing a short style manual to his staff.

Mr Rees-Mogg wishes to expunge from office communications hackneyed words and phrases, illiterate punctuation, inappropriate forms of address and sloppy writing in general.

The only regrettable thing about this undertaking is that it should be necessary. Clearly, basic literacy is no longer an entry requirement for jobs in the civil service.

Yet any reader of police reports from, say, the ‘50s will find that even beat constables could then express themselves lucidly and grammatically.

In those antediluvian times, civil servants were expected to be able to use language properly, at times even elegantly. That this is no longer the case isn’t so much a problem as a festering symptom of one: pervasive cultural decay.

However, treatment often starts with symptomatic relief, and instilling linguistic discipline just may improve people’s discipline of thought and perhaps even of character. And that in turn may make them better people both intellectually and morally.

Evil rulers are scared of this possibility, which is why language often finds itself among their first victims, especially the language of official communications. Such rulers want the people to be sufficiently literate to be able to read propaganda effluvia, but not so literate as to develop a discipline of mind.

Not all modern states are evil, but they all have totalitarian tendencies. Hence governments see people who use language with style and rigour as not only superfluous but downright dangerous.

They may be sufficiently trained intellectually to discern that modern politicians are capable of uttering every known rhetorical fallacy in a short speech. How then can such overachievers be expected to vote for such politicians?

This may explain our comprehensive non-education, which is widely believed to have failed in teaching basic literacy. Yet, if we define failure as an inability to achieve the desired result, one is tempted to think that our education is succeeding famously: nothing like mass illiteracy to turn people into a pliable herd obediently voting in a succession of nonentities.

Rhetoric and logic are the latter stages of intellectual development, but grammar and style are the basics without which the latter stages will never be reached. Any intelligent conservative understands this – and is willing to act on this understanding.

Mr Rees-Mogg is a conservative par excellence, which etymologically suggests that he wishes to conserve things worth keeping. Enforcing correct English in his office is a good start.

For example, he insists on using correct forms of address in letters. Thus the names of all non-titled men should be followed by Esq., making me Alexander Boot, Esq. (but not Mr Alexander Boot, Esq. – this is an erroneous overkill).

Mr Rees-Mogg also decries American-style full stops after Mr, Miss, Mrs or Ms. [A note to Americans: women have periods; sentences have full stops.] I admire him for this, but my admiration would have become veneration had he banned the ideological usage Ms altogether.

Let’s add parenthetically that teaching TV presenters proper forms of address wouldn’t go amiss either. The other day, for example, a lovely Sky TV girl referred to the Queen as “Her Royal Highness”. It’s Your Majesty, dear.

Organisations, insists Mr Rees-Mogg correctly, are singular. Thus, for example, “the EU is [not are] corrupt through and through”. One could perhaps find a few situations where a plural verb would be preferable, but why bother if one welcomes the general idea?

One rule put forth by Mr Rees-Mogg strikes me as odd: no comma after and. Did he mean before, not after? If not, Mr Rees Mogg must find something wrong with the sentence “The EU is corrupt and, if one were to get to the bottom of it, subversive”, which I don’t.

While we’re on the subject of singular and plural, I’m surprised not to find among his taboos my particular bugbear: the ideologically inspired use of a plural personal pronoun after a singular antecedent, as in “Every EU commissioner is mainly after their personal gain”.

This outrage must have slipped his mind, for otherwise one would have to think the unthinkable, that Mr Rees-Mogg sees nothing wrong with that usage.

Also, if I were him, I’d announce to the staff that using he was sat for he sat or he was seated would be grounds for summary dismissal, but Mr Rees-Mogg must be a kinder man than I am.

His banned words include very, and quite right too: bad writers tend to overdo modifiers in general and intensifiers in particular. That’s showing disrespect for the English language, which boasts the largest vocabulary in the world. It’s almost always possible to find a single word that would obviate the need for intensifiers (for example, ‘distressed’ does the job of ‘very upset’).

Mr Rees-Mogg also dislikes hopefully, but only, one hopes, when it’s misused. Replacing ‘one hopes’ with ‘hopefully’ in the previous sentence would be wrong, but I doubt he’d object to “it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive”.

Proper style manuals run to hundreds of pages, and producing one wasn’t Mr Rees-Mogg’s aim in this exercise. He just wants the letters sent by his office to reflect the personality of its holder: a cultured conservative who knows that sloppy, ignorant language betokens a sloppy mind proud of its ignorance.

Such conservatism flies in the face of our seemingly permissive, but in fact tyrannical, modernity that puts permissiveness to the service of its tyranny. Leftist gurus of linguistic licence, such as Oliver Kamm, will insist that everything people say is right simply because people say it.

The underlying assumption is that everything people think, feel or do is right too, provided they don’t challenge the power of the leftist gurus. Mr Rees-Mogg sees through such knavish tricks and refuses to go along.

It’s good to have a real conservative in government, for once.

Our new, optimistic PM has abandoned the previous, and unfulfilled, Tory pledge to bring annual immigration under 100,000.

Instead he favours an Australian-style points system, whereby all residence seekers are vetted for their economic usefulness.

Points are awarded on the basis of such factors as age (no one over 44 is admitted), profession, education, experience, health, knowledge of English, criminal record and so forth.

The underlying assumption is that Australia is a hospitable but selective host. She decides who is and who isn’t a welcome guest, and she proceeds from the assumption that quantity should be determined by quality.

As far as general principles go, this is fine. What I find hard to accept is that the selection seems to be based on purely economic criteria (if I’ve got this wrong, I hope my Australian readers will correct me).

True, immigration plays an important economic role, either positive or negative. A young Indian engineer is a better bet than, say, an old Romanian pickpocket.

Also, someone who can be confidently expected to become a contributor to tax revenue is preferable to someone who’s going to be its recipient. That much is indisputable.

But mass immigration isn’t just an economic phenomenon. Much more important are its cultural and social aspects.

Discounting for the purposes of this argument foreign specialists who come to Britain on a temporary work visa, let’s consider those who intend to settle in the country for life.

Under such circumstances, immigrants’ value isn’t limited to their ability to hold a job and stay off welfare. They must also be capable of fitting into Britain’s cultural landscape, and speaking English is only one of its features.

The greater the number of immigrants, the more vital does this aspect become. Admitting, for the sake of argument, millions of aliens who quite like the benefits of the British economy but refuse to adapt to British culture – or worse still, despise it or, even worse, actively seek to undermine it – is tantamount to national suicide.

Did I say ‘for the sake of argument’? Actually, this situation is a grim reality.

For Britain already boasts 3,000,000 Muslims (those we know about), not many of whom have become culturally British or ever intend to do so. And that number is growing rapidly, threatening to outdo France’s 5,000,000-plus, although the French are doing their level best to stay ahead.

Whole areas of Britain are no longer Britain, and an inquisitive visitor is left in no doubt of that fact when he sees posters announcing that Sharia law is in force there. Children in such places are often even unaware that Britain isn’t a Muslim country, with hatred of everything indigenously British taught in schools and preached in mosques.

This isn’t immigration any longer. It’s colonisation or perhaps even occupation. In fact, Islamic leaders openly regard it as such: their declared goal is to turn Britain into a Caliphate, and demographics work in their favour. Our best weapon, they say, is the womb of every Muslim woman.

No country, and certainly none within the core European civilisation, can afford such a disaster culturally even if she can afford it economically. Britain certainly can’t, and her immigration policy must be based not just on economic considerations, but also on a survival instinct.

Allow me to spell it out the way no politician can: if Islamic immigration continues unabated, indeed continues at all, before long a certain critical mass will be reached. When that happens, Britain will die as Britain.

Islamic immigration turns our democracy into a suicide weapon, for the children of new arrivals vote and experience shows they vote as a bloc for the most subversive candidates on the ballot. An incompetent ideologue like Sadiq Khan would never have become Mayor of London if over a million Muslims didn’t live there.

Obviously, there are exceptions, and one of them now occupies the second most important post in Her Majesty’s government. But neither demography nor sociology deals with exceptions. Their stock in trade is large numbers, and these cry out against admitting swarms of Muslims every year.

So yes, an Australian-style points system has merit – provided it’s accompanied with a ban on Islamic immigration. An exception should be made only when a Muslim arrival is so valuable that no native talent can fill the same slot.

Thus, I’d admit a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, provided his political record is spotless. (It’s easy to be so magnanimous, considering that, while Trinity College, Cambridge, has produced 33 winners of the Nobel Prize for sciences, the entire Islamic world has managed just three.) But I wouldn’t admit a young Muslim even if he has some marketable skill and speaks decent English.

This is nothing Boris Johnson doesn’t understand. But it’s also nothing he can ever say – our whole ethos has been corrupted too successfully and for too long to allow such thoughts.

So perhaps he should instead ponder the fact that Australia has 30 times Britain’s area and a third of Britain’s population. Such numerical disparity alone must make one wonder to what extent Australian immigration policies are applicable here.

P.S. Boris has triumphantly declared that it’s time to end austerity. However, it’s hard to end something that has never begun. Then of course the Westminster definition of austerity is increasing deficit spending at a slightly slower rate.

Boris Johnson seems out to break records, which is one way of gaining a place in history.

First, by way of saying hello, our new PM sacked 17 ministers, with six more jumping before being pushed, which is the biggest cull ever this side of a busy abattoir.

Then he elevated five non-white MPs to top cabinet positions, which is more than all the previous PMs put together managed to do in our entire political history. The number of women in the cabinet is also close to the all-time highest.

The general impression is that Johnson has replaced Remainers with Leavers, but that’s not quite true. In fact, the balance between the two groups isn’t dramatically different from May’s cabinet, especially if we look beyond the top three jobs.

Moreover, among those Johnson sacked one finds quite a few consistent and principled Leavers, such as Liam Fox and Penny Mordaunt, whose thighs have been known to give me most un-Christian thoughts.

Now Boris Johnson is many things, not all of them commendable, but stupid he isn’t. Realising this ought to mitigate our amazement at the broad sweep of yesterday’s hatchet job.

Most commentators assume that the new cabinet has been put together to fight for Brexit. That may be so some time down the road, but it can’t be the immediate objective.

If it were, the PM would have thought ten times before putting on the back benches two dozen high-powered MPs with raw personal grievances against him. After all, the Tory majority is paper-thin as it is, or rather, if one counts the likely turncoats, non-existent.

Both Labour and LibDems have threatened a vote of no confidence, and I’m not sure the numbers stack up in favour of the new PM. Under such circumstances, creating two dozen new enemies within his own party is stupid, which we’ve agreed Boris Johnson isn’t.

Moreover, barring the possibility of the PM proroguing parliament to achieve a no-deal Brexit, by now it should be reasonably clear that the MPs will block any deal put before them.

Most will do so because they want to stay in the EU; others, because they don’t think any deal is good enough; still others, because they dislike Boris – and we shouldn’t underestimate the role of personal animosity in politics.

Yesterday’s cull beefed up all three groups, which is inexplicable. Or rather it would be inexplicable if going for the immediate Brexit jugular were topmost on Boris’s mind. But it clearly isn’t.

Deal or no deal, this parliament will block Brexit, pure and simple. And proroguing it would create a constitutional crisis of Cromwellian proportions, with no Col. Pride anywhere in evidence.

Yet nothing in politics is pure and little is simple. Johnson knows all this – and yet he has climbed too far out on the limb to backtrack now. Either Britain leaves the EU by 31 October or Boris leaves politics – the situation is unshakably binary.

The solution to his conundrum can be shown with a little orthographic trick: italicising the modifier in ‘this parliament’. True, this parliament will block Brexit, thereby putting an end to Johnson’s political career.

That’s why this Parliament has to be replaced with another, more amenable one. And that’s why this cabinet has been selected to fight a snap general election.

Hence their allegiance to Brexit is secondary to their allegiance to Boris: this cabinet has been chosen mainly on the basis of its personal loyalty and ability to appeal to a broad electorate.

This explains its demographics: giving the second most important government job to a chap who takes the parliamentary oath on the Koran won’t impress the EU, quite the opposite. But the hope is that it may impress a large swathe of voters who traditionally opt for Labour or LibDems.

If Boris manages to get a parliament reflecting the ideological makeup of his cabinet, he’ll acquire a gun to take to a knife fight with the EU. If he doesn’t, and either Labour or LibDems form the next government, that spells the end of Boris, his party and – much as I hate to be a doomsayer – Britain, as we know and love her.

Hence we may well be looking at one of the greatest constitutional gambles in British history, quite on a par with Churchill’s commitment to fight Hitler to the death, if with less sanguinary consequences. And Churchill is Johnson’s idol.

I wish our new PM all the luck in the world because he’s going to need it. Too many things could go wrong for him: he may lose the snap election to either Labour or LibDems or conceivably their coalition or, even if he manages to win with an increased majority, he may still not get a Leaver parliament.

Even more things could go wrong for Britain, starting with the unmitigated and probably irreversible catastrophe of a Corbyn government, but not ending there. For, even if the dice roll Johnson’s way, he may still prove to be the same louche, unprincipled weathervane PM as he has been throughout his political career.

Yet, answering the PM’s call to unbridled optimism, one must hope he’ll grow into the job and prove to be the statesman Downing Street has lacked since 1990. Stranger things have happened, although not many of them.

Occasionally, very occasionally, I re-run my old pieces when I feel they’re particularly relevant to current events.

This is one such occasion, for Boris Johnson and Jo Swinson are in the news together, Boris somewhat more prominently. Both of them have just been elected leaders of two major parties: the Tories and the LibDems respectively.

Well, it just so happens that five-and-a-half years ago they already co-starred in the news. Boris was then Mayor of London, while Jo held that vital post of Equalities Minister, without which no valid government can function.

(Activating a simple equation, one can infer that no government in British history had been valid and functional until Tony Blair first created this post.)

Anyway, I sensed then, without at the time realising I had sensed it, that their destinies would be intertwined. So here’s what I wrote on 14 January, 2013.

Can you see sparks flying? Are you deafened by ear-splitting bangs? These are coming from mutually exclusive pieties clashing all over the place.

Having devoted my life to promoting political correctness (well, merely the second half of my life, but only because the term didn’t exist in the first half), I find myself in a quandary. 

Just look at this. Mayor Boris Johnson is to offer London as the site for the 2018 World Gay Games, presumably to be called Homolympics.

Far be it from me to suggest there’s anything wrong with extending a welcoming hand to those whose lifestyle, though different from mine, is just as valid and commendable – morally, socially and above all politically. The PC community to which I proudly belong regards everything and everyone as equal in every respect.

However, it’s precisely our hitherto unshakeable belief in even-handed equality that’s being shattered by the very idea of Gay Games. I, for one, am shocked at the implications. What does it actually mean? Let’s consider the possibilities.

Possibility 1: The Games will involve sports in which only homosexuals can ever participate.

Other than adding a whole new meaning to ‘relay baton’, one hesitates to think what these might be.

Women’s tennis? No, that’s not it – there have been some notable heteros even among Wimbledon winners (springing to mind is Chris Evert and… er, Chris Evert).

Beach volleyball? Admittedly, its homoerotic potential has been popularised by the film Top Gun and, to make sure nobody missed the point, the female lead was played by a self-outed lesbian. But this is too marginal a sport to act as the fulcrum for a worldwide extravaganza. No, this possibility has to be discarded.

Possibility 2: Homosexuals have to compete in a separate event because their physical abilities are fundamentally inferior.

This raises such horrendous subtexts that any member of the PC community should recoil in horror.

Repeat after me: WE! ARE! ALL! EQUAL! This is the principle to live by, and in this case it has ample empirical support.

On the women’s side, the vile discriminatory proposition is refuted by a long and honourable roll of hetero Wimbledon champions, such as Chris Evert and… well, Chris Evert. (I’m not suggesting there have been no other straights among them, only that I can’t think of them offhand.)

On the male side, a few homosexual boxers have held world titles in even the heavier weight classes. And one didn’t see Justin Fashanu pull out of too many tackles. So this possibility bites the dust as well.

Possibility 3: Homosexuals must be segregated, as they can’t be allowed to mix with heterosexuals.

Yes, I know this is outrageous, but I’m running out of possibilities here, so bear with me.

To make such separation even remotely valid, other sporting events would have to exclude homosexuals. Yet no attempt to hold a Heterolympics has ever been made, nor ever will be. Anything like that wouldn’t just fly in the face of equality, but would indeed smash it to a pulp.

This is precisely what vexes such a strong champion of political correctness as me. Surely it’s discriminatory to limit a sporting event to those practising a particular lifestyle (that’s what homosexuality is, isn’t it?)? Isn’t it akin to having whites-only or, for that matter, blacks-only restaurants or swimming pools?

Of course it is. And I can prove this by simply inviting you to imagine the furore that would ensue if Boris Johnson announced that London is bidding for the 2018 World Straight Games. Why, Boris would be tarred and feathered faster than you can say ‘bigoted homophobe’ – and quite right too. Then why doesn’t it work both ways? I’m baffled.

In Boris’s view, “there should be no limit to London’s legacy ambitions”. Whatever that means, obviously one such limit ought to be imposed by our rejection of discrimination in all its forms. Otherwise the PC community, to which I belong so proudly, will be offended, and it offends easily.

Yet Jo Swinson, the equalities minister, went against her mandate by making me even more mystified: “I have always been a passionate supporter of sport being open to everyone and I am wholeheartedly behind the bid…”

But that’s precisely our problem: the Gay Games won’t be ‘open to everyone’; they’ll only be open to homosexuals. Then again, one doesn’t expect a barely post-pubescent girl, and a politician to boot, to think before she talks.

And is she suggesting that regular sporting events, such as Wimbledon, are at present not open to homosexuals? If so, she should by all means produce the supporting evidence, of the kind that would refute tonnes of contradictory evidence available.

A satirist complained the other day that his genre is moribund because no satirist can outdo our self-mocking reality these days. All one can do is come up with serious, rational suggestions, such as amalgamating the World Gay Games and Paralympics. I for one would love to watch the homosexual cripple jump, wouldn’t you?

In this bid London faces competition from Amsterdam, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Limerick. I’m especially intrigued by the last bidder, for all sorts of poetic slogans suggest themselves (such as, “A gay heavyweight from Khartoum//Took a lesbian champ to his room,// And they argued a lot// About who would do what// And how and with what and to whom”).

So I’m rooting for Limerick, but the others shouldn’t be discouraged. Go for it, chaps, and may the best men lose.

In the end, it was Paris that won the bidding game in 2013. Better luck next time, Boris and Jo. And Boris? If you ever find yourself in conference with Jo, keep your hands to yourself, there’s a good lad.

You may argue that throughout its history the Royal Navy has been a guarantor of our liberty and protector of our trade – and you’d be right, as far as it goes.

However, as a prominent American scholar once explained so persuasively, history ended in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Hence neither our liberty nor our trade required protection any longer – they were thenceforth secure in perpetuity.

One might argue that Iranian flags hoisted on two British tankers in the Strait of Hormuz contradict this observation. That argument has some merit, but not much.

The problem is that, since those Iranian mullahs may be unfamiliar with current scholarship, they are unaware that history is no more. That’s why they refuse to get in touch with their feminine side, indulging instead in machismo posturing.

Hence we don’t need gunboats to retrieve our tankers and discourage any further piracy. All we need is an educational effort, ideally conducted by sensitivity coaches or perhaps group therapists.

Gone are the old days of the British Empire, when the Naval Defence Act of 1889 adopted the ‘two-power’ standard. It called for the Royal Navy to maintain a number of battleships at least equal to the combined strength of the next two largest navies in the world.

If we replace antediluvian battleships with modern aircraft carriers, applying the same principle today would mean we’d have to have 12 carriers, which is how many the top two navies, American and Russian, run between them.

Instead we have, in round numbers, one. Or, for all intents and purposes, none because our solitary carrier has no attack jets to fly off it.

In 1982, when history was still going on, we had four carriers, which enabled Margaret Thatcher to launch the South Atlantic operation. However, now history has ended, the dastardly Argies have abandoned their designs on the Falklands – or should have done had they followed the current scholarship.

In 1982, we also had 13 destroyers to today’s six, of which only two are operational, and their engines conk out in high temperatures. Since, as everyone knows, the climate in the Strait of Hormuz is near-Arctic, our trade has all the protection it needs, in the unlikely event that the programme of sensitivity training fails to do the job by itself.

In 1982, we also had 47 frigates, to today’s 13, of which six are currently in maintenance. The remaining seven are armed with the same missiles that were fired at the Argentines in 1982, which is perfectly understandable: since the end of history there has been no need to upgrade our naval armaments.

Just think of the savings we’ve realised. An aircraft carrier costs some £3 billion, a destroyer £1 billion, and even a cut-price frigate £130 million. The money thus saved can be put to a more productive and socially responsible use.

Ask yourself this question: Would you rather have four more carriers and two more destroyers or foreign aid, on which we spend about £14 billion a year, roughly the cost of those six vessels?

I know I can count you to provide the right, sensitive and socially responsible answer: the latter, and need you ask.

Or look at it this way. Would you rather spend £9 billion on three new carriers or on non-European immigration, which is how much we did spend on it last year?

Again, the question is purely rhetorical, as I hope you realise. And if you don’t, perhaps it’s you and not the Iranian mullahs who require sensitivity training.

Rather than seeking to match other countries in naval strength, we should be proud of our giant strides in sensitivity training and, for that matter, pop music, where we are indisputably among world leaders.

Our rallying cry should be not “Britannia, rule the waves”, but “Britannia, rule the raves”. There, that’s much better.