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Or, to paraphrase, would you be able to do a better job of it than Johnson & Co?

Many scribes (not to mention Pharisees) answer this question in the resounding affirmative, displaying a most enviable self-confidence. I have only one word to say to them: Sweden.

Standing proudly alone among the high-rent European countries, Sweden refused to commit the crimes Johnson et al. are charged with. The Swedes didn’t countenance lockdowns, escaping their dire consequences for the economy and basic liberties.

Instead they declared business as usual, hoping to be protected by herd immunity. Hence they joyously filled cafés and bars, with their exorbitant booze prices. They attended sporting events and parties. And in between they continued to go to work, keeping the economy ticking along nicely.

Alas, one problem with emulating herds is that they tend to end up in the abattoir. So it has proved in this case.

At first, Sweden was doing better than the rest of Europe, or at least not worse. But then the abattoir got open for business.

The infection rate began to climb up, and so did the death count. At some point, the death rate in Sweden got to be ten times higher than in the adjacent and demographically similar Norway.

Then Sweden again began to do as well as other major European countries. But that was fool’s gold: the other countries had relaxed their restrictions, which made their infection and death rates go up to Sweden’s levels – not Sweden’s levels go down to theirs.

In response, the others tightened up again, and now Sweden’s infection rate is more than twice that of Britain, Germany and Spain. This doesn’t mean that smug smiles are wiped off the faces of our self-righteous scribes – nothing can have such an emollient effect. But the rest of us ought to ponder the related moral issues.

So far there have been some 40,000 Covid deaths in Britain, despite the lockdowns, social distancing, facial masks and what have you. Now suppose, in the absence of such iniquities, this number would have been multiplied by 10?

This isn’t a hard supposition to make. After all, our population density is 11 times that of Sweden. If Sweden at some point managed to outscore Norway 10 to 1, why couldn’t we? No reason at all.

Suddenly we leave the area of economic fluctuations and libertarian principles, entering instead a terrain densely strewn with tombstones. It’s possible, nay probable, that, had we followed Sweden’s lead, Covid would have claimed 400,000 British lives, rather than 40,000.

Numbers are of course even more impervious to the subjunctive mood than history is. So let’s keep it less precise and just say that the draconian measures adopted by HMG have saved thousands of lives.

This isn’t to say that HMG has handled the crisis impeccably – far from it. It could have been more efficient about testing, for example. Yet it has redeemed itself to a large extent by pushing the Pfizer vaccine through the regulatory process at what in the context of state bureaucracy can only be described as lightning speed.

Incidentally, such rapid action would have been impossible had Britain stayed in the straitjacket of EU red tape. So, if anyone still needs arguments in favour of leaving, he can add this one to the tally.

Yet the moral questions remain, even though libertarians tend to pose them in arithmetical terms. After all, they say, we don’t really know how many lives those Covid restrictions have saved. What we do know is that the economy has been dealt a mighty blow from which it may not recover for a generation, if ever.

Since libertarians tend to think along the lines of economy über alles, they regard the economic debacle as more catastrophic than any, especially hypothetical, loss of life. Economic freedom is a god on their Olympus of liberties, and it’s perhaps superior to other deities for being more tangible and measurable.

Yet liberties, economic or any other, are always suppressed at dangerous times. Since Covid could have conceivably claimed as many British lives as did the Second World War (about 450,000), our times are dangerous enough. They therefore call for desperate measures.

Admittedly, this argument isn’t watertight. Much of it is too speculative to dispel all doubts. Some are bound to persist.

And this is where the argument becomes moral. For it’s my contention that any doubts should be resolved in favour of preserving human lives. Hence if it’s highly possible, or even likely, that the Swedish way would have cost thousands of lives, then it fails on morality even if it succeeds on economics.

I use a similar logic when arguing, on purely secular grounds, against abortion. My point is that allowing abortions in the first trimester or up to any other point is based on an arbitrary decision of when during gestation human life begins.

The only indisputable moment is that of conception – any other is open to reasonable doubt. And even our system of criminal justice doesn’t require a tighter standard of proof than that. Hence, since it’s at least possible that a foetus is actually a human being at any stage in its development, abortion constitutes manslaughter.

So, as it turns out, does Sweden’s insouciance in handling Covid. Witness the fact that, faced with a steeply climbing death rate, the Swedes are now introducing lockdowns all over the place, tacitly acknowledging that their laissez-faire approach was wrong.

As to HMG, I’d give it a B- for its handling of the pandemic (as opposed to its economic aftermath). Which brings to mind a professor of some recondite discipline at Moscow University. When marking exam papers, he always said: “Only God rates an A, I rate a B, meaning that you, young man, rate a C at best.”

I maintain that only God Almighty could have tackled this crisis perfectly. So HMG has done rather well.

I hope I shan’t compromise my liberal credentials by observing that, for some unfathomable reason, men tend to outperform women in sports.

That is, the reason is unfathomable only to liberals like me. We desperately want men and women to be not just equal but the same. And if sports, with their annoyingly objective criteria of success, show some differences, we like to ascribe them to purely environmental factors.

Take her dollies, pink pinafores and lace away from a little girl, expose her to the same training as boys get, and she’ll grow up competing with men on equal terms. Such is our article of faith.

But then I look at male and female athletes, who have indeed undergone identical routines of training, diet and conditioning, and latent doubts begin to gnaw at the pit of my stomach. For the men still have a much higher muscle mass and a much lower fat content – and these are just the differences visible to the plain eye.

That’s why men and women have always competed in separate events: exposing female athletes to the innate physiological superiority of men would be unfair. If the women’s 100m record stands at 10.49, it would be silly to make them sprint against men, whose record is almost a second lower (9.58).

However, it pains me to report that the bodies governing sports have always applied antediluvian criteria to establishing what constitutes a woman. We know that a woman is anyone who identifies as such. Yet those troglodytes insist on certain biological markers, showing gross insensitivity to everything we hold sacred.

Now, as every liberal knows, communist countries were much more advanced than the West in every respect, social, political – and scientific. That’s why they insisted on fielding female athletes who weren’t everyone’s idea of, well, a female.

Yet back in the old days the only way to establish an athlete’s sex was to pull his/her/its knickers down and have a look. That procedure, declared the communist countries, was demeaning to the honour of communist athletes. Hence they refused to comply, and international federations went along – God forbid communist probity be offended.

Thanks to such sensitivity, ‘female’ athletes from the USSR and Eastern Europe were harvesting a rich crop of cups, medals and records. However, in 1966 perfidious capitalists prevailed and chromosome testing was introduced. Suddenly, it became hard to insist that providing, say, a saliva sample was degrading.

A magic wand was thereby waved, and a lot of questionably female athletes from communist countries (the Soviets Tamara and Irina Press, Tatiana Shchelkanova, Klavdia Boyarskikh, the Rumanian Iolanda Balàzs, the Pole Ewa Klobukowska and many others) announced their retirement.

But then progress arrived, or rather accelerated. The liberal personkind has won the battle of the sexes, and those fascisoid biological markers have fallen by the wayside. As we now know, the difference between men and women is purely a matter of personal choice – and quite right too.

Yet those international federations remain stragglers on the march of progress. They obtusely insist that intersex persons (who used to be called hermaphrodites), especially those who are closer to men than to women, enjoy an unfair advantage. That’s why they ought to be kept out of some – not, God forbid, all – athletic events, such as running the Olympic distances of 400, 800 and 1,500 metres.

But the liberals have launched a massive campaign to repeal such discriminatory restrictions. And naturally, in order to succeed, any such crusade must have a celebrity figurehead. Acting in this capacity here is Caster Semenya, Olympic champion in some of the proscribed events.

I shan’t bore you with the details of her courageous decade-long fight to admit men into women’s events. I use the word ‘men’ advisedly and obsoletely, to designate anyone who, like Miss/Mr/Ms Semenya, was born with XY chromosomes and male levels of testosterone, if, one likes to believe, without a certain male appendage.

Thanks to her heroic efforts, international bodies are now prepared to overlook those silly chromosomes. Yet the fight is only half-won since they still insist that Miss/Mr/Ms Semenya suppress her testosterone levels either chemically or surgically, to bring them down into the range normally associated with women.

As a fully paid-up, card-carrying liberal, I’m aghast. And I’m not the only one.

Our cause is valiantly defended by an organisation called The Human Rights Watch, which describes such restrictions as abominable. For one thing, argue its spokespersons, there’s no evidence that high testosterone levels improve performance.

I’m sure they acknowledge that there’s plenty of physical, measurable evidence (all those seconds and metres). But they also know, as I do, that the ultimate truth isn’t physical but metaphysical. And, metaphysically speaking, the 13-second difference between men’s and women’s 800m records is trivial, not to say nonexistent.

“These regulations demean women, make them feel inadequate…,” runs the organisation’s statement. “Modern sport should adapt itself to support inclusion and non-discrimination rather than perpetuate exclusion and discrimination.”

Hear, hear. Moreover, “These regulations are damaging because the underlying assumptions are inherently sexist – that women athletes are always inferior to men athletes, so we must police women’s sports in order to protect women. This policing does nothing to protect women; it only serves to harm them.”

I couldn’t agree more. It’s time we brought down those artificial, socially constructed barriers to give the persons of all currently identified 74 sexes equal access to all sporting events.

To that effect, I hereby propose that all competitions be opened to all sexes. Since male physiology confers no performance advantages whatsoever, at least on the solely relevant metaphysical level, let them all compete together – and may the best man/woman/other win.

As to Miss/Mr/Ms Semenya, she should be given the highest award of her native South Africa, elevated to sainthood in every church where that institution exists, and given the status of Honorary Woman. We must give our heroes their due.

“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend,” wrote EM Forster, “I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

The choice would be hard, and mercifully I’ve never had to face it. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never betrayed either my country or a friend, although I was once accused of treason by a KGB interrogator.

In a display of youthful polemical audacity I replied that I didn’t consider the Soviet Union my country, meaning I couldn’t betray it by definition. Then get the hell out, suggested Major Gazonov (I’ve changed the first letter of his surname, don’t know why). Thought you’d never ask, I said – and here I am, 47 years later.

My appetite for polemics, though no longer youthful, is still well-nigh insatiable. And four years ago it led me, well, not to betray a friend, but to upset one, and a really good man to boot. I did that in an article arguing in favour of what I thought was best for my country, Britain.

The issue was Brexit, and the friend in question was Brian, Lord Kerr of Tonaghmore. For many years he and his delightful wife Gillian used a flat next to ours as their London pied-à-terre. Their main residence was then in Belfast because Brian was the Law Lord of Northern Ireland.

Better neighbours one couldn’t wish for. We looked after the Kerrs’ flat when they were away, and they let us use it when we had an overflow of guests. From time to time we’d have a drink together, talking about nothing in particular, as friends do sometimes.

Whenever serious topics came up, we veered off by unspoken consent, sensing that our political views, specifically on the EU, were somewhat different. Actually, as I recall, Gillian’s were then closer to mine than to Brian’s, but that didn’t really matter. They both exuded goodness and kindness, and late in my life such qualities had moved closer to the top of my ratings than they were when I was overcome with hatred for everything Maj. Gazonov represented.

Then in 2009 the Kerrs moved out because that judicial abomination, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, was instituted, and Brian became one of its first Justices. We lost touch until a couple of years later, when we ran into the Kerrs by chance in a Westminster street. They invited us over for a drink in their new flat nearby, and we had another lovely evening in their company.

Brian suggested I visit him at the Court when it was in session, and I said I would, knowing I wouldn’t (my curiosity about the workings of that institution is rather understated). In any case, we lost touch again. You know, one of those things, you tell your wife why don’t we call so-and-so, she says definitely, but somehow you never do.

Then in 2016 Brian was one of the Supreme Court Justices who made a ruling that slowed Brexit down, and I wrote a piece about it. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but let’s just say that sometimes I neglect to pull punches in the heat of debate.

Frankly, had I thought Brian was likely to read my article, I wouldn’t have written it: our difference apart, I genuinely liked him. Then neither was I facing an EM Forster choice: had I shown kindness to that nice man, I don’t think my country would have felt betrayed – she probably doesn’t care about my scribbles one way or the other.

Alas, read the article Brian did, and he was sufficiently upset to ask someone on his staff to write to me and remonstrate. Under normal circumstances, my natural response to such missives consists of two words, of which the second is ‘off’. But on that occasion I offered profuse, and sincerely felt, apologies.

Brian was the last man I would have wanted to upset or, worse still, insult, and I felt rotten about having done so. I feel even worse about it today, having read his obituary in The Telegraph. For Brian died on 1 December.

We offer our condolences to Lady Kerr and her two sons, and hope these will be received in the spirit in which they are offered, that of sympathy and love. Mine are also tinged with regret and another, alas posthumous, apology.

Upping the stakes though, I’m not sure how I would handle EM Forster’s dilemma if I were confronted with it. Come to think of it, neither evidently was he.

Lord Kerr of Tonaghmore, RIP

Hundreds of Russians who fought in the Second World War are in for a pleasant outing. The Investigation Committee led by Gen. Bastrykin has asked them to come over and finger perpetrators of Nazi wartime crimes.

Actually, ‘asked’ is the wrong word. They were issued summonses, each ending with a warning that “If you fail to appear without a valid reason you may be arrested according to Articles 54 and 113 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.”

Now, the youngest war veterans are at least 93 years old: 1927 was the last conscription year of birth. Considering the state of public health in Russia, people who have exceeded the average life expectancy by a third would find it hard to make the trip even under the best of circumstances – which these aren’t.

Those over 65 are actually forbidden to leave home due to Covid. Just in case they dare disobey, the state has thoughtfully removed their discounts for travelling on public transport. The arithmetic can’t be faulted: since most crumblies survive on a pension of £100-150 a month in our money, they can’t afford even bus fare.

Now they’ll have to: since the Investigation Committee combines the functions of our Crown Prosecution Service, Special Branch and MI5, its summonses aren’t to be ignored. Not that those who have lived under the Soviets are likely to ignore such orders.

Most of those nonagenarians are probably trembling in mortal fear. Indelibly burned into their minds is the memory of such summonses in times olden, when a visit to any law enforcement agency typically started with a beating and ended in imprisonment, or worse. Today’s heirs to that fine tradition are perhaps laxer on imprisonment, but beatings and torture proceed unabated.

My heart goes out to the poor old chaps, while my mind is focused on understanding this bizarre development. Gen. Bastrykin is happy to clarify: “The Nuremberg trials did not convict all those responsible. Irrespective of whether or not they are alive, we must name those names.”

This desire to name names is commendable, and would be even more so if it weren’t so selective or, in this case, superfluous. After all, quite apart from the Nuremberg trials, Nazi crimes have been exposed thousands of times over.

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Soviet citizens were punished for wartime misbehaviour, be that collaboration, cowardice, desertion or simply allowing themselves to be taken prisoner (my father was lucky: he got away with merely an internal exile for that last crime). Some of them were punished more than once.

Solzhenitsyn writes about collaborators who served long prison sentences and were released – only then to be ‘uncovered’ years later, retried and executed. I still remember the look of utter consternation on their faces as the televised verdicts were announced. Hours after the trial they were shot, faster than you could say double jeopardy, to the accompaniment of encomiums for the vigilant ‘organs’ that had tracked the vermin down.

Even assuming that those few who have evaded the dragnet are still alive, hauling old people off their deathbeds and taxing their fragile memory 75 years after the war ended looks futile. Moreover, it looks misdirected.

After all, Soviet crimes are much fresher in people’s memory. Many of the perpetrators are still in good health, some of them still active. It was thanks to their tireless efforts that 60 million Soviet people died in CheKa-GPU-NKVD-KGB cellars and concentration camps, while millions more lived through imprisonment and forced labour. Yet not a single one of those loyal citizens has been prosecuted.

Even today a third of all adult Russian men have done some prison time, which proportion is impressive but hardly surprising. After all, the country is run by the same organisation that in the unlamented past turned it into a nice blend of labour camp, morgue and army barracks.

So fine, do name names by all means. But not just those few of the remaining Nazi criminals, but also those of the multitudes of Soviet screws, executioners, interrogators and simply snitches, millions of them. And here we get to the crux of the matter.

For the ludicrous campaign of abuse against old men is designed precisely for concealing, or at least drawing attention from, the crimes perpetrated by home-grown monsters. The scions of those ghouls are committed to vindicating the past, thereby justifying the present.

Glorifying Stalin’s USSR, especially of the wartime vintage, is a key part of this effort. No country is still banging on about the Second World War as much as the Russians, the message being that yes, you the plebs may live hand to mouth, but only because the Soviet Union heroically bore the brunt of Nazi aggression.

The war has been sacralised and turned into a sort of pagan orthodoxy. For the sake of verisimilitude, this requires show trials of heretics, those who dare besmirch the figurines sitting on the totem pole.  Hence Putin’s henchmen have introduced a law against “re-writing history”, meaning exposing the lies of Stalin’s version of the war.

In the good tradition of a thief crying “Stop thief!” the loudest, they are accusing others of what they themselves are doing. For example, an historian was recently charged under the new law for stating the simple fact that it wasn’t just Hitler but also Stalin who attacked Poland in 1939.

During the brief quasi-democratic interlude in the 1990s, the Russian government denounced the Nazi-Soviet Pact as the actuator of the world war. This has now been repudiated by Putin personally, who has reverted to Stalin’s lies about the USSR’s peaceful intentions, as witnessed by the Pact.

Similarly, in 1991, after decades of barefaced lies, the Russian government finally admitted that it was the Soviets and not the Nazis who executed 22,000 Polish officers in Byelorussian woods. Now Stalin’s lies have been taken off the mothballs and jammed back into the brainwashed minds of the credulous public.

According to Gen. Bastrykin, Putin’s university classmate, the veterans’ testimony is necessary to preserve “historical continuity” and ensure “a happy life for future generations”. Some continuity. Some happy life.

When railing against the dismissal of the Eton master Will Knowland the other day, I was guilty of slapdash research.

Before putting my hands on the keyboard, I hadn’t listened to his lecture, The Patriarchy Paradox, going instead by long quotations cited in the newspaper reports.

That oversight has now been corrected, and I’m happy to report that the sacking verdict is looking more justified.

If I were the Eton provost, the post now held by Lord Waldegrave, I might sack Mr Knowland myself, in the unlikely event that I would have hired him in the first place. Yet my reasons for this conclusion are different from Lord Waldegrave’s.

His Lordship’s two cuts of beef are that Mr Knowland pushed a “false narrative” and, when ordered to make amends, disobeyed “internal discipline”. Both gripes are spurious.

Far from being false, Mr Knowland’s narrative is accurate on every rational level, supported as it is by copious scientific and historical evidence, not to mention the blindingly obvious observations made by anyone not blinded by ideological afflatus.

Mr Knowland takes issue with the currently dominant view that any differences between men and women are merely social constructs. This view has no foundation in biology, anthropology, zoology, history, psychology or anything else having to do with reason.

It’s nothing but a garbled signal of misconstrued virtue, sent out by a coalition of strident fanatics as long on emotional frenzy as they are short on rational thought. That much is clear, and it would be even clearer to anyone who can find half an hour to listen to Mr Knowland’s lecture.

The only factual quibbles I’ve seen so far have to do with his assertion that “rape, is not a unique claim for male oppression of women because male-on-male rape in jails dwarfs male-on-female rapes outside them”.

Then, responding to a comment underneath the video clip, he added that “the only serious scientific studies ever done on the subject estimate that… 40-60 per cent of rape accusations are false.”

I can’t prove or disprove Mr Knowland’s data because I haven’t seen the studies in question. At first glance, the proportion Mr Knowland cites looks on the high side, but I’m in no position to argue one way or the other. However, pedantic quarrels over details shouldn’t in this case change the essence of the argument, which is worth discussing.

There’s no doubting that a) many claims of rape are indeed false and b) the definition of rape is broadening by the day, while the required standards of proof are loosening at the same rate.

We read endless reports of careers and even lives destroyed by such false accusations. Moreover, their frequency tends to increase in proportion to the social and economic standing of the accused.

Thus, say, a professional footballer is more likely to be falsely accused of rape than, say, a professional carpenter. Striker Ched Evans found that out the hard way by spending two years in prison only then to have his conviction quashed. (He was later found innocent on retrial.)

Such examples are made so much more numerous by the police being overeager to press charges, and the courts to convict, on a woman’s say-so.

If you were to accuse me of stealing your watch but fail to produce any evidence to that effect, the case would never even go to trial. If it did, the prosecution would be laughed out of the courtroom. Yet women may claim rape decades after the supposed fact, with the alleged perpetrators prosecuted and often convicted.

Newspapers are also full of stories of women who claim rape after getting in bed with a man, indulging in imaginative foreplay and then saying no in mid-stroke. The man is expected to practise instant coitus interruptus or else be accused – and probably convicted – of rape.

Just as the definition of rape is getting broader, the definition of consent is getting narrower. Nothing but an explicit statement (ideally written and notarised, though oral may still do at a pinch) of “I hereby consent to sexual intercourse” exculpates a frisky male.

I’m not trying to trivialise real rape, which is indeed a heinous crime. However, if every ‘no’ whispered by a naked woman in bed were taken as a legally enforceable injunction, the birth rate in Britain would drop way below the replacement level.

In fact, rape is trivialised not by me but by those who expand its definition, thereby putting on the same level a vicious degenerate jumping a jogger in the park and a man who refuses to believe his wife really does have a headache.

Rape is also trivialised by fanatic feminist propaganda, teaching women to regard every man as an oppressive, raping brute. Any sexual impropriety – an unwanted kiss, a hand on the knee, a pat on the rump – is supposed to be treated as sexual assault, rather than bad manners, insensitivity or flirtatious behaviour.

If this tendency continues, and if no statute of limitations applies to such ‘crimes’, every man in His Creation – including, regrettably, me – will be branded a criminal. That would constitute the ultimate trivialisation: if everybody is a criminal, nobody is.

I have no doubt that Mr Knowland can support his data with appropriate references. After all, everything else he says is amply documented. But that wouldn’t make any difference to Lord Waldegrave et al.

They object not to the substance of the argument but to the very fact that it’s made. Mr Knowland’s appeal to freedom of speech rings hollow in the empty spaces of woke crania.

Lord Waldegrave’s other charge, violation of “internal discipline”, is eerily reminiscent of the Soviet Union I remember so fondly. There, in the name of party discipline, people were supposed to repent crimes they had never committed and mouth gibberish they found repulsive.

When told to remove the lecture from the Eton website, Mr Knowland instantly complied. However, he did refuse to remove the text from his own YouTube channel, which features a disclaimer that the views expressed therein are his own and not his employer’s.

He invokes free speech, in the naïve belief that the notion still obtains. It clearly doesn’t, and neither does the distinction between discipline and tyranny.

Eton’s insistence that it has the authority to police statements made on its employees’ own media is tyrannical and therefore unjust. Hence anyone working there has not only the right but indeed the obligation to resist.

Now, if you’ve read this far, you may be tempted to backtrack to the beginning of this piece and wonder why I’m now more amenable to the sacking of Mr Knowland. Well, I’m happy to explain.

As any conservative, I’m a strong believer in social and cultural hierarchy. Eton, historically, is the hatchery of fledglings slated to inhabit the upper perches in that vertical structure.

For such a hierarchy to perform a valid social function it not only has to exist, but be seen to exist. Hence, each of its levels must come with a clearly visible badge, exclusive and at the same time aspirational.

Obviously this goes against the grain of our decultured, deracinated and demoralised modernity. So much more the reason for vigorous rearguard action to be fought by our ancient institutions, such as the monarchy, aristocracy, church – along with Eton, Rugby, Harrow and other exclusive schools.

They should flaunt their hierarchical badges, thereby flouting the mob ever ready to stamp them into the dirt. One such badge, perhaps the most visible, or rather audible, of all, is the accent.

In the past, schools like Eton had easily identifiable accents, each subtly its own but all generally upper-class. Yet Mr Knowland’s lecture, unimpeachable as it is on content, fails on form.

For he speaks with, at best, a middle-of-the-road accent, as far removed from the traditional Eton phonetics as, say, Essex from Belgravia. Moreover, he makes frequent references to the kind of proletarian TV shows that no Etonian of the past would have even heard of.

Had Mr Knowland been dismissed on such grounds, I’d be the first to applaud. Yet Lord Waldegrave knows that even obliquely referring to such standards would lead to his own dismissal faster than you can say ‘toff snobbery’.

Hence, rather than trying to inoculate society against the soul-destroying egalitarian contagion, Eton happily falls its victim. There goes England.

The Manchester United striker Edinson Cavani is in mierda profunda, as they may or may not say in his native Uruguay.

Responding to a tweet from a friend congratulating him on a cracking match, Cavani wrote back, saying: “Gracias negrito”. Now, the first word, meaning ‘thank you’, passes muster, just. But the second, meaning ‘little black’ and sounding suspiciously like ‘negro’, will earn the bigoted foreigner a three-match ban, if he’s lucky.

Personally, if Cavani indeed has racist tendencies, I’d ban him for life and pass the case on to the CPO to see if there is enough corpus delicti for them to prosecute. But then I tend to be too extreme in defending the right of our woke modernity to put its foot down.

Still, it’s good to see that those arrivals from iffy lands inhabited by funny-sounding foreigners can’t pull a fast one on our vigilant Football Association. The bureaucrats running it are polyglots to a man, alive to fine nuances in every one of the 6,500 languages used – and abused! – in the world today.

However, this may be one of those negligibly few instances when their precisely attuned antennae caught the wrong signal. Here I can cite my own, albeit vicarious, experience with the Uruguayan people, especially both of them who happen to be pianists.

Many years ago, I lived with the ex-wife of one Uruguayan pianist, whereas my wife Penelope had been married to the other before she experienced the Damascene epiphany in my sturdy shape. Both women, especially Penelope, who still speaks fluent Spanish, often referred to the fine points of River Plate slang, a lexical layer in which the words negro and negrito (or the feminine negra and negrita) figure prominently.

These words are desemanticised terms of endearment used to describe persons of any race whatsoever. Penelope, for example, is impeccably, these days I’d say offensively, white – and yet her former mother-in-law used to call her negrita. Not a single drop of tar was thereby implied.

(Penelope reassures me that, though one of her ancestors was a bishop of Lagos, in those Victorian days that post was invariably held by Englishmen.)

Thus the proper translation of Cavani’s tweet would have been “thank you, mate”, but that’s not the point, is it? The striker can insist till he’s blue in the face that his own mother and siblings routinely call him negrito, even though, literally speaking, he isn’t. As far as I’m concerned, he’s still at fault.

Having claimed sovereign rights over English usage, our woke bureaucrats are commendably expanding their authority to cover words that, though innocuous in their native habitat, sound offensive in English. If they don’t police all that foreign gobbledegook, the natives may well be remiss in their duty to enforce propriety.

In Victorian times, when Penelope’s ancestor was a bishop of Lagos, this was called ‘liberal interventionism’. Since nowadays ‘liberal’ and ‘woke’ are synonyms, we have a licence from the God of Political Correctness to enforce woke interventionism.

If those natives know what’s good for them, they should leave those assegais in their quivers and come along without trouble, like. Especially if they choose to ply their trade in the country of woke interventionists who are sensitive not only to semantics but also to homophones. And homophobes, come to think of that.

A message to my Russian friends: think twice before you use the word negr to describe a person of Afro-Caribbean descent in Britain. Yes, you may argue that in your language this word is semantically neutral and carries no pejorative implications whatsoever.

But if you do come up with such specious arguments, I have only one word to say to you: Cavani. Get it, you racist swine?

P.S. While we’re at it, I insist that both the River Niger and the country Nigeria be renamed in line with the new morality. May I suggest River Woke and Wokeria?

Referring to the Duke of Wellington’s famous, probably apocryphal, comment on Eton, Matthew Arnold wrote:

“Alas! disasters have been prepared in those playing-fields as well as victories; disasters due to inadequate mental training – to want of application, knowledge, intelligence, lucidity.”

George Orwell, himself an old Etonian, was equally scathing a century later in his essay The Lion and the Unicorn: “Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”

Though both writers had ideological reasons for attacking that smithy of British elites, and Arnold also personal ones (his father was the headmaster of Rugby), their comments sound nothing short of prophetic in light of Eton’s on-going farce.

Upholding its reputation as the breeding ground of leaders for over 600 years, Eton has trained 20 of our 55 prime ministers. However, the fact that its latest two alumni to occupy 10 Downing Street have been Cameron and Johnson makes one think that these days Eton doesn’t so much lead as follow.

The real lead comes from our toxic, destructive, schizophrenic modernity whose chief pastime is raping reality on the bed of ideology. Eton follows dutifully, as witnessed by the sacking of its English master, Will Knowland.

Mr Knowland is guilty of gross misconduct, as this transgression is nowadays defined. He dared to challenge the “current radical feminist orthodoxy” by delivering a video lecture on “The Patriarchy Paradox”.

There he presented a balanced argument saying that men and women are psychologically different, and not all the differences are socially constructed. Even in the absence of a balanced argument, this has to be obvious to anyone who has ever observed men and women, which is to say to everyone.

Anyone, from a physiologist to a psychologist to a zoologist to an anthropologist to a random man in the street, will know it to be true. The scientists may cite reams of experimental evidence, while the passers-by will rely on empirical observation, but neither will dispute the truth of this fact. 

Yet in addition to his regrettably socialist essays, Orwell also wrote the novels 1984 and Animal Farm, in which he showed how truth is trampled underfoot in a society that develops socialism logically. (This proves yet again that the artist in a man can see things that the thinker doesn’t.)

Mr Knowland broached the subject with a sensitivity that’s beyond me, as I’m man enough to admit. Early on he warned that his narrative might hurt brittle sensibilities. Then, as if preparing his future defence in an inevitable employment tribunal, he cited over 40 references to scientific papers by Nobel laureates, books by other writers and even popular TV shows.

All to no avail: that bastion of the Tory establishment has already sunk into a putrid swamp inhabited by the creepy-crawlies of woke horror who survive by devouring truth. Mr Knowland was sacked, and his professional survival now depends on a tribunal verdict.

To their credit, some 800 Etonians past and present signed a petition demanding that Knowland be reinstated. After all, it’s not just his Eton job that’s at stake, but his future livelihood as well. If the tribunal finds for the school, Knowland may never see the inside of a classroom again.

However, the wording of the letter provides indirect proof that, even if Mr Knowland is reprieved, our culture is beyond salvation. “The common opinion,” write the petitioners, “is that Mr Knowland presented the ideas in his video with as much academic nuance and sensitivity as could reasonably be expected. His video is arguably a model for how to convey a contentious argument impeccably.” [My emphasis.]

If even at the supposedly best secondary school in Britain, some will say in the world, Mr Knowland’s argument is regarded as contentious, not only has our civilisation reached an impasse, but there’s no way back.

Contentious to what exactly? The effluvia exuded by illiterate ideologues seeking self-vindication in wholesale destruction? The hysterical shrieks of bra-burners? The innumerate arithmetic of the gender-benders identifying 74 different sexes?

Any school, never mind one that charges £42,500 a year, is duty-bound to ignore such annoying nuisances. Instead it should concentrate on teaching intellectual, moral and aesthetic truth, along with the methodology and corpus of knowledge required to arrive at such truth.

When even a timidly qualified attempt to do just that is regarded as contentious or, worse still, iniquitous, that educational establishment no longer educates. It brainwashes, dumbs down, indoctrinates and corrupts.

Yet things aren’t all bad. Eton’s exorbitant fees mean that many of its pupils are scions of Russian, Chinese and Arab villains. Since one can assume that upon matriculation they’ll spread the contagion contracted at Eton to their native lands, perhaps we are witnessing an exercise in biological warfare.

Provided we can square this with the Biological Weapons Convention, the effort is worthwhile. After all, how else can we stand up to hostile powers?  

God didn’t die in 1883, when Nietzsche first sat down to write Also sprach Zarathustra. God died on Wednesday and, defying the Old Testament tradition, his name can now be revealed: Diego Maradona.

That is, of course, if one accepts the theology laid down in the Gospel According to Manny, summarised in his eulogy for the late midfielder. My first thought on reading that speech was that I must have a serious talk with Manny’s maman Brigitte.

She has manifestly failed in her lifelong mission to educate the lad in some essential disciplines of thought and conduct. One of them is logic.

We don’t know if Diego will rise on the third day, for the simple reason that three days haven’t yet elapsed from his demise. But even if he does, the normal sequence of events suggests that his resurrection will follow his death, not the other way around.

Not so according to Manny. Speaking about Argentina’s victory over England in the World Cup, he said that “This resurrection took place…” Yet following the techniques outlined by Aristotle, a man has to die first and only then resurrect.

Yet Manny concluded his eulogy by saying: “There was a King Pelé, there is now a God Diego.” This confirms two things: first, Maradona wasn’t yet God in 1986; second, since he was neither God nor dead nor Lazarus at the time, he didn’t resurrect.

Brigitte ought to give the little one six of the best for this confusion alone. But it wasn’t the only one.

Manny tacitly acknowledged that Maradona hadn’t yet ascended to divinity at the time – he only had God on his side: “On June 22, 1986, in Mexico City, he scored his first goal with God as a teammate.” Here Manny rephrases Diego himself, who at the time described his first goal as “the Hand of God” (mano de Dios). But then cocaine can make even a God speak rashly.

That first goal, defined by Manny in the same idiom as a “miracle”, was indeed deliberately scored with Maradona’s (not God’s) hand. Rather than being miraculous, that was blatant cheating. Yet one can infer from Manny’s panegyric that Diego’s teammate, God, not only acquiesced in that sleight of hand but actually abetted it.

Now I understand – and in fact often observe first-hand – that France’s laïcité has seeped into the nation’s bloodstream in the 115 years since it was first mandated. Still, for old times’ sake, let’s activate that same logic that Brigitte was so remiss in teaching son petit.

Either there is a God or there isn’t. If there is no God, then invoking him is meaningless. That’s why, for example, I have jolly good fun at atheists’ expense when they say that God is evil because he allows… well, whatever. In response I crack what I think is a devastatingly sardonic smile: “How can he be evil if he doesn’t exist?”

Now, if he does exist (and I hasten to reassure the pedants among you that I use this verb colloquially, without any theologically rigorous reference to the Thomistic concepts of existence and being), he can’t by definition be a cheat. There isn’t a religion in the world in which God tells his adherents to swindle infidels, although in one, which will go nameless, Allah does order killing them.

Another thing Brigitte has failed to teach her lifelong pupil is conduct appropriate for civilised persons, especially those in high office. As part of that code, hatred ought not to be voiced too forcefully even if deeply felt.

As proof of her lapse, Manny described that 1986 quater-final as “the most geopolitical match in football history”, coming as it did four years after Britain repelled Argentina’s aggression against the Falklands.

It has been obvious for some time that Manny loathes Britain with a passion that regrettably still survives at the French grassroots. It is, however, rare among cultured people – unless of course they zealously worship at the EU altar.

Manny is one such: he inwardly genuflects every time that circle of stars is unfurled. If Maradona is Manny’s God, then the EU is at least a demiurge. Hence he feels about post-Brexit Britain the way his 13^th century ancestors felt about the Cathars, whom they treated as a deadly threat to the survival of a Catholic France.

Since, apart from Diego, the EU is Manny’s God, he no doubt would like to do to the British what the papal legate told the Crusaders about the Albigensians invested at Béziers. When the soldiers asked him how to tell the Cathars from the Christians there, he said: “Kill them all! God will claim his own.”

That’s fair enough. But Brigitte ought to have trained little Manny to be more moderate and follow Talleyrand’s idea that speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts. Frothing at the mouth when talking about a Nato ally is bad style, bad manners and bad politics.

On second thoughts, it’s doubtful that France treated Britain as an ally even before the Maastricht Treaty. In the Falklands War, for example, she was busily selling Exorcet missiles to the Argentines, who then used them to sink Her Majesty’s ships. Hardly a friendly gesture, is it?

While Brigitte tries, doubtless in vain, to improve son petit’s rhetoric, she should also give him a quick lesson in history. To begin with, treating football as an extension of geopolitics is frankly idiotic, which idiocy is typically practised by only the less savoury regimes.

But some do just that, and that Hand of God match wasn’t the most geopolitical one in history. That dishonour belongs to El Salvador that in 1969 attacked Honduras over a dispute about a World Cup qualifier. Over 3,000 people were killed in that war, which shows that Latin Americans do take their footie seriously.

And, alas, not only they. To see the leader of a residually civilised nation talk about a dead ball-kicker in those terms was most distressing. By doing so, Manny added his voice to the global chorus of hosannas for a chap who off the field was an alcoholic, cokehead brawler, who admired villains like Castro and Chavez, and went on frequent pilgrimages to their fiefdoms.

Maradona was a fine player, but he certainly didn’t rate the ecclesiastical-sounding eulogies he has received. He wasn’t, after all, a great composer, thinker, poet, doctor or inventor. He merely kicked an inflated leather balloon very well.

But then it’s pointless expecting a sense of proportion from modern barbarians. Including those residing at the Palais de l’Elysée.

“Build, build, build!” is Chancellor Sunak’s message to the nation. What Rishi the Builder actually means is “spend, spend, spend!”.

These words are key to Mr Sunak’s suicide note. Not his own suicide, I hasten to add, to calm or, depending on your point of view, disappoint you. The infamous last words were delivered on behalf of our economy.

The only sensible parts of his announcement were the public sector wage freeze and a £5 billion cut in foreign aid. Typically, it was this latter plan that forced Foreign Office minister Baroness Sugg to tender her resignation.

In her place, I would have resigned had the Chancellor not cut foreign aid. But then I’d have looked at the rest of his programme and resigned anyway.

Dave Cameron’s law committing Britain to spending 0.7 per cent of GDP on foreign aid was ill-advised to the point of being idiotic. He should have read the work of the late development economist Lord Bauer, who defined foreign aid as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.

I used to advocate cutting out the middleman and depositing money direct into the Swiss bank accounts of assorted tinpot dictators, thereby saving large sums otherwise spent on administering such a vast charity. Yet these days the problem is even worse.

For as a manifestation of our charitable nature, we’re pumping billions into some bigger economies than our own. Grateful recipients include China, which is about to celebrate Mao’s anniversary by landing a man on the moon.

Yet the £5 billion so commendably saved is but a drop in a leaky bucket. For the Chancellor has optimistically allocated £100 billion for the biggest public works programme this side of the one designed in the 1930s by Hjalmar Schacht for you-know-whom.

The plans are indeed optimistic because no large-scale government programme has ever come in on budget. Pigs don’t fly and governments overspend – both statements are equally unassailable.

The HS2 project, designed to shave an hour off the train ride from London to Manchester, is a useful illustration of this law of nature. Originally budgeted at just over £30 billion, its cost is now estimated at £106 billion, which rate of increase is par for the course where government projects are concerned.

Needless to say, our cowboy builder reaffirmed the commitment to that megalomaniac madness. It’s vital, he said, “to deliver essential north-south connectivity”. Like most of his other statements, this one requires a translation.

In the last general election, the Tories managed to carry the north of England, dazzling the voters with shining prospects of prosperity. It’s already clear that Covid, ably assisted by the government’s economic incompetence, has moved those promises into the realm of mythology.

Suddenly a redundancy note for Messrs Johnson, Sunak et al. looms large, growing every day as the 2024 election draws nearer. The HS2 project is a sop – call it a bribe if you wish – for those irate northerners to please, please, please keep this lot in Westminster.

In their understanding of political economy, today’s governments, emphatically including this one, overemphasise the adjective and ignore the noun. They want to pay for their jobs with our money, which is as morally deplorable as it is economically ruinous.

For HS2 is only another drop in the aforementioned leaky bucket. Rishi the Builder wants to build houses too. “’To build housing, we’re introducing a £7.1 billion National Home Building Fund, on top of our £12.2 billion Affordable Homes Programme,” he says. Do remember to multiply every projected sum by at least three to arrive at the actual future cost.

Our broadband, already adequate if far from perfect, will also benefit from Mr Sunak’s largesse. He’ll spend, spend, spend to speed it up, as well as  providing 4G mobile coverage for 95 per cent of the country.

And we haven’t yet even talked about the madcap ‘Green Industrial Revolution’, which will burn untold billions in the bonfire of economic and scientific sanity, nor about the 16.5 billion hike in the defence budget (remember the multiplier of three to be applied) and so on, ad infinitum.

“Our plans deliver the highest sustained level of public investment in more than 40 years,” said Rishi the Builder, pretending this is something to boast about, not to lament. Yet another unsolicited effort in translation is called for.

For it was 40 years ago that Margaret Thatcher first tried, with quite some success, to introduce a note of sanity into the economy of “the sick man of Europe”, as Britain was rightly called at the time. Johnson’s government, in this case fronted by Rishi the Builder, is repudiating her legacy both implicitly and explicitly.

Hjalmar Schacht’s programme, which evidently inspires this ‘Conservative’ government, had one of only two possible long-term outcomes: an economic disaster caused by the war, or an economic disaster caused by the programme itself. In purely economic terms, the latter could have been even more ruinous because no Marshall Plan would have come to Germany’s rescue.

Our activist cowboy builder at Number 11 ought to know that the state can only ever affect the economy positively by not affecting it adversely. Another German, Ludwig Erhard, showed the right way to get out of an economic crisis in the 1950s.

Instead of launching a spend-and-tax spree, the finance minister of a devastated Germany tightened the money supply, cut down public spending and taxation, and told the people to stick it out for a few years. That delivered the economic Miracle on the Rhine (Wirtschaftswunder for short, and don’t you just love the German language).

By doing exactly the opposite, Rishi the Builder is unfailingly steering the economy towards the Debacle on the Thames. And you know what makes the situation really hopeless? The other lot are even worse.

I’ve always regarded liberal arguments as intellectually, and therefore morally, unsound. However, one exception exists: capital punishment.

Though liberals oppose it and I don’t, I recognise the validity of their arguments even as I refute their truth. For one can’t deny that a society weaned on the notion that human life is sacred is bound to regard as emotionally repugnant the spectacle of a state executing people in cold blood.

However, the function of emotions in cognition is to activate reason, not to supersede it. And reason finds that the state does many repugnant things that nonetheless serve an essential purpose. Thus, most people accept that killing five million Germans in 1939-1945 was necessary. That great sin was expiated by the greater good.

Since liberalism appeals mostly to emotions and conservatism mostly to reason, a clash is inevitable on many issues, especially one of judicial killing. However, even many conservatives argue against the death penalty, citing, for example, the corrupting effect it has on the executioner – or else doubting the right of mortal and therefore fallible men to pass irreversible judgement.

The issue is serious and it deserves a serious debate. This, however, is something it no longer gets in Britain, where the death penalty for murder was abolished in 1965, and for any crime in 1998.

That absence of debate is a pity because this issue touches tangentially on many others that, put together, go to the ontological essence of man. As such, the death penalty deserves to be discussed by philosophers, not just politicians and public advocates.

Alas, when it does come up, the debate inevitably inhabits a lower storey in the edifice of reason. Mostly it revolves around the issue of deterrence, which a priori makes said edifice creak on its foundations.

In the years preceding 1965, the Crown executed about four convicted murderers a year. Comparing that number to the number of murders – and even to the number of convictions – one realises that the rate of executions indeed had a derisory deterrent value. A man had a greater chance of being killed by driving his wife than by killing her, and yet such statistics didn’t adversely affect car sales in a pre-1965 Britain.

The fundamental problem about deterrence is that it can’t be proved one way or the other. Looking at the number of pre-1965 murders, we know exactly how many were not deterred by the death penalty. But how do we know that, in its absence, the number wouldn’t have been, say, twice as high? We don’t.

Common sense suggests that a chap contemplating a murder would be more scared of hanging than of imprisonment, but common sense is an unreliable guide in this case. In British jurisprudence, it may work in civil cases, requiring as they do only proof on the balance of probability. Yet criminal cases demand proof beyond reasonable doubt, which requirement goes way beyond common sense.

In general, arguing this issue on purely material considerations always leaves gaping holes in one’s intellectual trousers.

For example, murder calls for a mandatory life sentence in Britain – that is the maximum possible penalty. What’s then to prevent the convict from murdering someone, a warder for example, in prison? He only has one life, and it’s already spoken for.

Then life doesn’t necessarily mean life. Most cases have a tariff applied, meaning that some murderers may be released after a number of years, leaving them free to kill again. One indisputable argument for the death penalty is that it undoubtedly deters the executed criminal.

Yet those arguments are frivolous, for they invoke technicalities, not the principle. An opponent of capital punishment may just say that solitary confinement will put paid to the first argument, and abolishing tariffs to the second – and then flash a smug QED smile that’s never far from a liberal’s face.

My argument is that, rather than denying the value of human life, the death penalty affirms it. By executing a murderer, society proclaims that this value is so high that it can’t be offset by any number of years in prison.

That’s why the death penalty was never regarded as objectionable in the founding moral code of the West, the Scripture. Most saints, and all important ones, from Augustine to Aquinas and everyone in between, saw no conflict between Christian morality and the death penalty.

When society was still guided by Christian ethics, the moral validity of the death penalty was never in doubt. It was understood that murder sent a shock throughout the community, and the amplitude of those destructive waves could be attenuated only by a punishment commensurate with the crime. Without it, the agitated community would run the risk of never recovering its eirenic order.

Today’s society has become anaesthetised to violent death, having lived through history’s first atheist century, the twentieth. Having replaced Christian morality with its secular perversion, mankind then proceeded to kill more people than in the previous thirty centuries of recorded history combined.

Eirenic social order is now a distant memory, and murder no longer shocks the way it did even a few decades ago. Most people still find that crime heinous, but their inner reservoir of outrage has been squandered – there are so many murders reported that each can receive only a soupçon of wrath.

Thus each individual human life has been so devalued that any attempt to reassert its significance by imposing the death penalty on a murderer is resisted out of insouciance and torpor. This can then be post-rationalised into a seemingly valid, but in fact defunct, moral argument.

Having discussed crime and punishment on the BBC a couple of times, I realised the utter futility of arguing the issue seriously. For the liberals’ railing against the death penalty simply camouflages their opposition to punishment as such.

This too springs from post-Christian secularism. Each person used to be regarded as a sovereign moral agent endowed with free will and therefore bearing individual responsibility for his actions.

Since man was fallen and therefore fallible, it was recognised that making moral choices was taxing. An individual moral choice deserved praise; an immoral one, punishment. Like any other freedom, that of the will presupposes bearing the consequences of one’s actions.

The liberal view going back to Rousseau is different. Man is perceived as inherently good and, if one turns out bad, he has been failed by society. Society didn’t open enough paths for his good nature to reach its pre-determined destination of virtue. Hence, by passing a sentence on a criminal, society in effect condemns itself, which is illogical.

A liberal will at a pinch agree that imprisonment may be a necessity, but only if prison is used as a combination of social services and a school. Prison is supposed to improve and educate, rather than punish in the service of justice.

Since the death penalty neither improves nor educates a criminal, it’s so far beyond the pale that it doesn’t even merit discussion. Who are we to inflict the worst possible punishment on Rousseau’s noble savage – even if this particular savage has acted in a rather ignoble way?

This again is a relatively new, and absolutely unsound, way of thinking. It goes to show yet again how thoroughly, and one fears irreversibly, the so-called Age of Reason has destroyed reason.

To a Christian thinker, it was eternal perdition, not physical death, that was the worst punishment. It was therefore possible to love one’s enemy and still kill him, provided one prayed for the salvation of his soul. That’s partly what St Augustine meant when first formulating the concept of just war. War was no longer evil if it prevented greater evil, and killing, as opposed to murder, didn’t contradict Christ’s commandment to love our enemies.

The modern liberal is deaf to such subtleties. He happily campaigns against the death penalty, while giving the benefit of the doubt to mass-murdering left-wing regimes. And of course his secular interpretation of the sanctity of life can never stretch to abortion or, increasingly, euthanasia.

His moral sensibilities can accommodate those with ease. It’s only the death penalty accepted by Christians as just for 2,000 years that awakens his moral sensibility – specifically because it was accepted by Christians as just for 2,000 years.