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CBBC broadcasts programmes aimed at children aged between six and 12. With that audience, most shows can be assumed to have some didactic content, not always explicit but real nonetheless.

Hence a story about a violinist may pique the tots’ interest in music; one about explorers may interest them in geography; one about RAF pilots… well, you catch the drift.

At the same time, films showing a triumph of good over evil may, if nothing else, teach them the difference between the two or, as a minimum, that one exists.

It’s not for nothing that Aristotle once said (and Francis Xavier repeated), “Give me a child and I will show you the man”. The Greek knew that the best opportunity to educate people for life is when they are young.

By the looks of it, CBBC knows it too. That’s why its children’s drama The Next Step showed a graphic depiction of a lesbian kiss.

That’s par for the course these days. What’s surprising is that some residual resistance is still mounted, as witnessed by a flood of complaints inundating the BBC.

Modernity clearly still has work to do: some individuals seem to punch breaches in its totalitarian indoctrination in amorality. Defending such ideological ramparts, the BBC came out swinging.

Its children’s network, declared the Corporation, “could and should do more to reflect the lives of LGBTQ+ young people… This is an important part of our mission to make sure that every child feels like they belong, that they are safe, and that they can be who they want to be.”

It would be a much more important part of the BBC mission to make sure that every child knows not to follow a singular antecedent like ‘child’ with a plural personal pronoun ‘their’.

That, as a matter of fact, would be more in keeping with the BBC Charter: “The Mission of the BBC is to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain.” Not a word there about reflecting “the lives of LGBTQ+ young people”.

Being way outside the target audience, I can’t judge the entertainment value of The Next Step. Its informational aspect is doubtless superfluous if it indeed exists. By the time they reach the mature age of seven or eight, children have already learned about the delights of homosexuality at school. However, the drama’s educational value is worth discussing.

The key to that discussion is provided by the BBC’s exercise of moral equivalence in the next paragraph of its defence: “CBBC regularly portrays heterosexual young people dating, falling in love, and kissing, and it is an important way of showing children what respectful, kind and loving relationships look like.” 

This is where amorality comes in: the Corporation effectively denies that sex, and by extrapolation anything else, has a moral content. Children, according to them, “can be who they want to be”, except agents exercising moral judgement.

Showing a romantic relationship between a boy and a girl is, for an organisation committed to “high-quality and distinctive output”, the same as showing a romantic relationship between (or presumably among) people of the same sex.

Children can choose one or the other, leaving me feeling sorry for those who gravitate towards, say, bestiality or necrophilia, which have yet to be condoned by our “high-quality” broadcaster. It’s consumer choice gone mad: if the little ones can choose their computer games, why can’t they choose their sexual perversion to “feel they belong”?

I’m not suggesting intolerance of homosexuality. In England specifically, it has been tolerated for centuries. Everybody knew that Geoffrey was ‘a confirmed bachelor’ and Harold ‘not the marrying kind’, and nobody cared.

However, tolerance isn’t the same as endorsement. Things to be tolerated are by definition less than praiseworthy. If they weren’t, no tolerance would be needed.

Hence, though homosexuals are to be protected from abuse and generally tolerated, society too must be protected from propaganda of homosexuality as a valid, morally neutral exercise of free choice.

A society in which such basic things don’t go without saying, and those who do say them risk censure, is in dire straits indeed. It has lost its moral, and therefore any other, way. Those interested in the practical ramifications of aimless moral meandering could do worse than reread The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

P.S. Some of my readers, being of sound empirical disposition so characteristic of the English, may ask about the possible remedies for this malaise.

This format doesn’t allow a protracted exposition of this theme – nor am I sure that such remedies exist any longer or, if they do, that I’m capable of prescribing them in all their complexity. I can, however, propose the essential first step: take the BBC licence away. Let it peddle its notion of morality in the open commercial market.

P.P.S. I hope you can join with me in prayers for the great Pope Benedict XVI, who is very ill and frail.

All progressive people, among whom I proudly number myself, must rejoice. We live at a time of heightened moral sensibility, and our standards are higher than they’ve ever been.

Yet standards mean nothing if compliance isn’t rewarded and deviation isn’t punished. That’s why writers and academics who say or write things progressive people find objectionable lose their book contracts, jobs and careers.

However, and here rejoicing ought to become thunderous, we also apply our exacting standards to history, which is a good thing. Moral laws differ from criminal ones in that they can – indeed must – be retroactive, and no statute of limitations should exist.

Moreover, speaking of writers specifically, they ought to be censured for what they wrote not only in their books, but also in private correspondence. One wrong word, on race especially, and their books must be banned. Ideally, they should also be burned, even if the historical associations are a bit of a turnoff for some wimps.

When I say one wrong word, that’s exactly what I mean. Context doesn’t matter: the writer may be making anti-racist points in his book and indeed his whole life, but if he does so by putting racist words in his protagonists’ mouths, he deserves no mercy.

In that spirit, Loyola University Maryland has removed the name of Flannery O’Connor from one of its residence halls because the Southern writer consistently depicted the dignity of blacks and enormity of racists… sorry, I got that wrong. O’Connor did do all that, but it’s not what got her punished posthumously. It was her use of a racially derogatory term in her letters.

She was weighed against today’s standards and found wanting. This isn’t baseball, chaps; no three strikes for you. Just one, and you’re out.

That’s what Mark Twain got for his novel Huckleberry Finn, out of which, according to Hemingway, all American literature came. This is a passionate anti-slavery book, and the black protagonist there is perhaps the most sympathetic character. But because he’s referred to as Nigger Jim, our new morality can no longer tolerate the novel’s toxic presence in school libraries.

Anti-black racism in Europe is a relatively new phenomenon for the simple reason that there used to be precious few blacks on the continent. But Jews have resided here for many centuries, and not all great writers have treated that fact with equanimity.

Eschewing understatement, one could even say that most of them erred against the standards of our time, some consistently, others sporadically. In fact, so few of them can pass muster that abolishing literature altogether seems to be the most sensible solution.

As a side benefit, the billions of books accumulated in Europe could be used to fire power stations, thereby providing an instant source of energy to tide us over until all the windmills have gathered speed.

If you think this recommendation may be too harsh, just look at the three great literatures: Russian, French and English. You’d have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find any writers there who either weren’t virulent anti-Semites or didn’t depict Jews pejoratively or at least described them by ethnic slurs.

Thus, with the possible exception of Chekhov, most great Russian writers were either rank Jew-haters (Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Rozanov) or at least prone to striking anti-Semitic notes in their books and correspondence.

Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev are all culpable there, as is the subject of one of my books, Tolstoy. The good Count tended to regard himself as a world authority on any subject he had studied for a couple of weeks, such as education. When the famous pedagogue Friedrich Froebel had the temerity to argue with him, Tolstoy was aghast: Froebel was “just a Jew” who ought to have known his place.

Into the bonfire go War and Peace and Anna Karenina, followed by the rest of Russian literature: we don’t want to waste time digging through an anti-Semitic dung heap in search of a few rare pearls of philo-Semitism.

And please don’t get me going on English literature, just bring that box of matches out. Shakespeare, Dickens, Waugh, Greene, Belloc, Chesterton, Buchan, Kingsley Amis… need I go on? I needn’t – by now you must be ready to strike the first match.

But, as you do, please don’t forget those Frenchmen: from Voltaire and Diderot to Sand, Balzac and Céline, they all belong in the pyre. Of course, when the fire spreads it’s also likely to consume even works by innocent writers, but that’s acceptable collateral damage.

If we go to such (justified!) extremes, I hear you ask, what will our young people read? That’s an odd question to ask, considering the profusion of social media that provide such a broad panoply of life’s intellectual and moral content.

Who needs Dostoyevsky and Chesterton when we have Twitter and Facebook? Only dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries and intellectual snobs. So perhaps the time has come to consider tossing them too into the bonfire of books.

I do hope that the corpus of my work and this piece specifically have established my progressive credentials clearly enough for me to be spared. Just in case, let me repeat: Heil progress!

Rape prosecutions fell by 30 per cent last year, which, according to angry campaigners for women’s rights, effectively means the “decriminalisation of rape”.

If so, you can count on my support, ladies: rape is a heinous crime, and decriminalising it can’t be justified. But first I’ve got to look at the facts and figure out what they mean. It’s that little idiosyncrasy of mine: I must go through that routine before forming a view.

The numbers come in two sets. The first is the infuriating fall in rape prosecutions in the past 12 months, which indeed amounts to 30 per cent. Even a bit more.

A sip of Laphroaig to settle my nerves, frayed by that discovery, and I’m ready to look at the second set. And yes, the 1,439 convictions obtained over the past 12 months is the lowest number in five years.

However, we find out that the conviction rate for rape over the past 12 months was 68.5 per cent – compared to 63.5 per cent last year and 57 per cent five years ago. In other words, more than two thirds of the men tried for rape over the past year were convicted.

However, the aforementioned campaigners make an irrefutable mathematical point: if two thirds were convicted, a third were acquitted. And to them anything under a 100 per cent conviction rate constitutes a denial of justice.

While the progressive person in me desperately wants to agree, the cold-blooded thinker puts the dampeners on. For no crime category produces the conviction rate all progressive people crave.

Overall, prosecutions for all crimes in the UK deliver about an 80 per cent conviction rate, which is somewhat higher than the almost 70 per cent in rape cases. But rape isn’t really like all other crimes.

For one thing, prosecutions are still brought, and conviction obtained, on an evidential basis. Thus, if the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) feels the evidence is weak, it won’t prosecute. If the evidence is good enough for prosecution but not for conviction, the jury won’t convict. Agreed?

Good. Then you must also agree that, whatever the crime, if every accusation resulted in prosecution and every prosecution in a conviction, we’d be miraculously transported to a very different country from Britain. That country would be a tyranny to end all tyrannies. Such a high rate was never obtained even in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China.

A country ruled by law insists on strong evidence of wrongdoing before it punishes the wrongdoers. And getting such evidence in rape cases is notoriously hard.

That crime is usually committed without witnesses, which already makes things difficult. Unless some physical evidence exists, it’s the woman’s word against the man’s. The woman’s word may be her bond, but neither the CPS nor the courts can proceed solely on that assumption.

Even if physical evidence existed in the first place, it tends to disappear over time. In most cases, it disappears within days, to say nothing of weeks, months or years. However, for variously valid reasons, many victims are reluctant to report the crime immediately, sometimes waiting weeks, months or years.

Simon, a barrister friend of mine, recently had to try an 85-year-old man charged with rape committed over 60 years ago. As a result, Simon is seriously considering quitting criminal law.

Moreover, and I hurt inside for having to say this, some women bring up accusations of rape or sexual assault frivolously – at times, and here the inner pain becomes unbearable, fraudulently. In this they are helped by the steadily broadening concept of such crimes.

For example, two colleagues may check into a hotel room after work (not a hypothetical case), undress, get in bed, engage in prolonged foreplay followed by intercourse but, if the woman gasps ‘stop’ at the very point of no return and the man doesn’t stop, he goes to prison for rape.

If a husband assumes that a marriage licence is a licence to hanky-panky and dismisses his wife’s claim of a headache, he’s a rapist, barely distinguishable from a savage who jumps a passerby in a dark street. And so on.

Sexual assault is even worse. An uninvited pat on a woman’s behind at a party or a hand on her thigh at dinner are now treated as felonies, not just overly aggressive courtship. As we speak, a senior Tory MP is about to be charged with assault for trying to kiss one woman, putting his hand on another’s leg and using his position to have a year-long affair with a parliamentary staffer.

The latter woman claims rape because she feared that turning the libidinous MP down might damage her career. I must say I don’t understand.

The current belief is that rape is the worst thing that can happen to a woman, worse than even maiming or death. If so, a damaged career looks rather trivial by comparison, wouldn’t you say? I know what my choice would be.

Then again, an exchange of sexual favours for career advancement, a leg-over for a leg-up, goes back at least to Abraham’s wife Sarah, who pretended to be his sister so she could become the pharaoh’s concubine (“And he entreated Abraham well for her sake” Gen. 12-16).

None of this is to deny that rape, sensibly defined, is a brutal crime. However, rape is unlike any other brutal crime not just because it’s often hard to prove. Like racism and homophobia (also defined so broadly as to lose any meaning whatsoever), rape is a crime committed not just against its victim, but against the dominant ideology of our time.

All such ideologies are concocted to create fault lines in society by fostering alienation between classes, races – and sexes. Hence it’s essential to indoctrinate the populace in the belief that the relationship between men and women is inherently adversarial, not complementary.

Broadening the definition of rape and sexual assault is as instrumental there as insisting, against common sense and indeed sanity, that a woman’s statement is all the proof needed for prosecution and conviction. Never mind the rule of law; feel the ideology.

Going back to the two sets of numbers cited above, they represent a step in the sane direction. The CPS is beginning to apply tighter standards to rape evidence, which is why the number of prosecutions goes down but the conviction rate goes up.

The CPS has been allowed to get away with that so far, but I fear that before long a simple denunciation will suffice for prosecutions and convictions. As someone who grew up in the Soviet Union, I’ve seen it all before.  

By elevating Evgeny Lebedev to the House of Lords, Boris Johnson has just done the most revolting thing in his eventful life.

His very friendship with that man ought to have raised awkward questions, especially now, when KGB/FSB infiltration of Britain is hot news. (Oops, sorry, it isn’t hot news any longer – that was last week. Our attention span has the length of a gnat’s penis.)

But ennobling a man with links to history’s most ignoble organisation makes it hard to decide where KGB/FSB ends and British politics begins. Let’s just say that Johnson’s cynical act smudges the line to a point where it’s not always visible.

Anyway, I sat down to write about this emetic development, only to remember that I already wrote about Lebedev some nine months ago. Having looked up that piece, I realised I couldn’t improve on it, certainly not this morning when I’m slightly the worse for wear (one just can’t stop drinking Burgundy at a Burgundian dinner party).

So, in the spirit of responsible recycling, here’s that article, in a somewhat abbreviated form:

“Britain has been infiltrated by an ugly strain of Russia phobia,” complains Evgeny Lebedev, owner of The Evening Standard, The Independent and other media interests in Britain.

Anyone else would have written not Russia phobia but Russophobia. The difference is important – the latter is an irrational fear of Russians; the former, only of Putin’s Russia and those who do her bidding.

Lebedev’s name-calling was prompted by the current scandal of rich Russians meddling in British elections, just as they’ve been proved to meddle in US ones.

He himself has suffered traumatising abuse: “Newspapers that pride themselves on tolerance… have written… that Russians like me are a ‘fifth column in modern Britain’. One obscure publication… has called me a Russian spy.” Wounding words indeed.

Now, groundless accusations of a crime, such as spying for a foreign country, strike me as libellous. Is Lebedev going to sue? He should, for otherwise some sceptics might think the accusations aren’t as libellous as all that.

He then proceeds to unravel his own argument by uttering two seemingly innocuous phrases: “I have lived [in Britian] since I was eight years old” and “I bought The Evening Standard in 2009 and The Independent in 2010.”

Lebedev has such long residency in Britain because his father, Alexander, was a KGB spy working at the Soviet embassy under diplomatic cover. Actually, the past tense in that sentence contradicts Putin’s frank admission: “There’s no such thing as ex-KGB. This is for life.”

If Vlad is to be believed, Alexander Lebedev only ever left his KGB/FSB job supposedly. Like many other KGB officers, including Putin himself, he was infiltrated into legit life by his lifelong sponsor.

Following in the footsteps of Putin and his colleagues, Alexander became a billionaire overnight, ostensibly displaying a business acumen that puts to shame the likes of Bill Gates and Jim Ratcliffe, who both took years to make their fortunes.

In fact, they all – including Putin – acted as conduits for transferring KGB and Party funds, along with oil revenues, out of Russia and into the West. They can live high on the hog off the proceeds, but they only have the use of their money, not the ownership of it.

Theirs is a leasehold, with the freehold remaining in the firm grasp of the ruling KGB camarilla. Those people know that money can do so much more than buy yachts and palaces in the West.

It can also serve their nefarious ends in all sorts of other ways: by enabling them to penetrate political circles, skew Western elections, draw influential Westerners into blackmailable activities, spread Putin propaganda – and in general poison the air with the emanations of their putrid cash.

Lebedev’s “I bought…” is a barefaced lie exposed by a simple question: Where did the money come from, Evgeny? Where did a man still in his 20s and without any lucrative business experience find the funds to acquire major British media?

Oh well, he actually ‘co-owns’ the papers with his KGB father. In other words, those media outlets are in fact double-fronted. Evgeny acts as the front for Alexander; Alexander provides the same service for the KGB/FSB camarilla running Russia.

That’s why Lebedev’s indignant protests along the lines of “I have never met Vladimir Putin” are risible, if true. I don’t think Kim Philby ever met Stalin either, and I doubt Robert Maxwell ever broke bread with Andropov. Yet they both served the Soviet cause each in his own way.

The influx of filthy lucre pilfered by the ruling kleptofascist gang from the Russian people has a deeply corrupting effect on the host country. British politicians and other influential figures are being seduced and bought, wholesale or retail.

That’s why HMG has threatened to invoke unexplained wealth orders (UWOs) to seize the assets of rich Russians suspected of having profited from the proceeds of crime. But there’s nothing unexplained about their wealth. No one can make billions in Russia without being in cahoots with, and accountable to, the KGB camarilla. The wealth of every ‘oligarch’ is contingent on Putin’s good graces, which are in turn contingent on their toeing the line.

How they do so varies. I doubt, for example, that many of them engage in common-or-garden spying. More typically, they are agents of influence, talent spotters or simply bacilli of corruption slowly dripped into the veins of our society.

The new arrivals come bearing billions, and we welcome the loot. But, contrary to Emperor Vespasian’s adage, the Russians’ money does smell. It comes packaged with global laundering, regular assassinations and other criminal activities.

Thanks to Russian ‘oligarchs’, London has become the money laundering capital of the world, which corrupts the whole society. Filthy money sullies every hand that touches it.

Those purloined and laundered billions buy political clout, not just Belgravia mansions (the Russians purchase close to 80 per cent of London houses worth £10 million-plus). Today’s politicians lack the moral fibre to steer clear of ill-gotten loot.

This is a cross-party phenomenon. A few years ago, Osborne and Mandelson enjoyed hospitality on the yacht belonging to the mobster Deripaska (banned from entry in the US, by the way). Later, when Osborne lost his cabinet job, he had a soft landing as editor of Lebedev’s Standard.

And last year, Boris Johnson stayed with the Lebedevs at their Umbrian estate. “I am proud to be a friend of Boris Johnson,” boasts Evgeny. That’s no doubt true. But if Mr Johnson is equally proud of this association, he ought to remember what friendship with Putin and his emissaries has done to Trump’s entourage.

The Conservative Party follows its leader’s lead and avidly accepts campaign contributions from Lebedev’s friends, if not, if he’s to be believed, from Lebedev himself.

Those accepting their donations ought to remind themselves that the Conservative Friends of Russia (later renamed the Westminster Russia Forum) was launched by the senior diplomat Sergey Nalobin, who was subsequently expelled from Britain for espionage.

So Evgeny Lebedev should spare us his bogus indignation. He knows what’s what, and so do we. Well, some of us do, at any rate.

Joe ‘Kinnock’ Biden is a rara avis among politicians: with him, what you see is precisely what you get. Zero.

However, it seems increasingly likely that Americans will let Covid elect their new president, a man who has lost much of his already puny eloquence to senility, but little of his intelligence: he had none to begin with.

Voting choices are these days mostly knee-jerk decisions based on the latest news headlines and the resultant ‘feel-good factor’. Thus, natural disasters have often hurt the incumbent.

Before the pandemic, the US economy was doing reasonably well, and President Trump had a winning hand. All he had to do was sit quietly and wait until his challengers folded.

Then Covid reshuffled the pack. The economy suffered a blow, and Trump found himself holding at best a low pair, rather than a flush. However, even a low pair beats no pair, but we aren’t talking poker here. We are talking elections, where emotions trump reason, as it were.

In a rare display of self-awareness, Trump has attributed his low approval ratings to his personality. He has a point: I for one find his personality repulsive. However, given the choice between Trump and Biden, I’d vote for Trump – even, turning the tables on the Democrats’ time-proven strategy, more than once.

The president ill-advisedly hitched his wagon to the Dow Jones index, which is a notoriously fickle horse. Even without Covid, shares could have suffered a downturn, taking Trump’s chances the same way.

But Covid not only devastated the US economy, but painted a bull’s eye on Trump’s chest that his detractors can’t miss: accusing him of not handling the pandemic properly is the easiest thing in the world.

I’m not qualified to judge the advisability of the anti-Covid measures taken by the US administration. However, whatever they are or could have been, the president was on a losing wicket.

No matter what he did, people would have died and the economy would have suffered. Had he chosen the economy over public health, he would have been portrayed as a heartless murderer. Had he gone the other way, he would have been pilloried for destroying the livelihoods of millions of American families.

The same goes for Trump’s response to the BLM movement. Too soft, and he would have undermined his reputation for commitment to law and order. Too hard, and he would have been damned with all the same epithets he did attract even for his halfhearted response: racist, fascist, polarising, insensitive, supremacist and so forth.

Both Covid and BLM were such godsends for Biden that one can be forgiven for suspecting that the latter was organised specifically for that purpose. Operating in that wretched subjunctive mood, a pretext for such a campaign could have been found even without the brutal death of that drug-addled criminal George Floyd.

One way or another, Joe Biden, easily the biggest nonentity in US history to be a frontrunner at this stage, is leading Trump by eight points in the omnibus polls of voting intentions. Amazingly, he’s even leading in Texas, a state that would be impoverished if Biden were in a position to act on even some of his plans.

Texas derives much of its income from hydrocarbons, and Biden’s plans in that area are dominated by his touting of the climate-change hoax. He is promising “no new fracking”, “100 per cent clean energy” and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

If realised, such plans would reduce my former home state to penury, but Texan voters don’t seem to mind, yet. Their state is hit hard by Covid, emotions are running high and reason dips to a new low.

Biden’s campaign for the Democratic nomination was off to a faltering start. But then his strategists made a startling discovery: the less their candidate appeared in public, and especially the less he spoke, they better he would do.

Every time such exposure couldn’t be avoided, Biden mouthed inanities at best and downright bloopers at worst. At one point, he urged the crowd to vote for him in the Senate race, and it took a timely intervention by one of his staffers to remind the poor man that he was actually standing for a different office.

This explains why Biden carried some states in which he didn’t even campaign, and where his flacks could portray him as a moderate, nerve-soothing establishment candidate with the best chance of unseating that boat-rocking upstart in the White House.

It says a lot about today’s Democratic Party that someone like Biden, who in just about any other previous election would have been considered dangerously left-wing, is now seen as a moderate.

He himself has publicly stated his ambition to “go down as one of the most progressive presidents in American history”. If your political jargon is rusty, ‘progressive’ means, among other things, promiscuously high-spending.

In that sense, Biden is right: his announced plan to provide a further $150 billion to boost the black community will take the projected total spending to four trillion, and few people can even imagine that numeral. Tax increases are bound to follow, which prospect doesn’t seem to scare voters as much as it used to.

Biden’s campaign heavily depends on blacks voting for him as a bloc. By itself, this is nothing new: since 1968 no Republican presidential candidate has polled more than 13 per cent of the black vote, and most have received less.

That makes black voters the most significant swathe of the Democratic electorate, which is just a fact of life. But, in light of the BLM movement, this fact becomes sinister.

For, as the black activist Angela Davis explained, “[This election] will be about choosing a candidate who can be most effectively pressured into allowing more space for the evolving anti-racist movement… Biden is far more likely to take mass demands seriously.”

So far Biden has resisted the most extreme of such demands, those for defunding the police, closing down all prisons and legalising marijuana. The last demand is especially amusing because this is one area where libertarians and left-wing subversives agree.

The former support legalisation out of their fanatical commitment to free personal choice; the latter, because that would reduce the number of blacks going to prison. This concept of law and order makes up in logic what it lacks in sanity.

Indeed, the best way of reducing the numbers convicted of any crime would be to decriminalise it. Britain shows how, by effectively decriminalising burglary. A friend of mine, who often acts as a court expert, has calculated that an average burglary is punished by about three-day’s imprisonment – our shining example that America, for once, can follow.

On balance, I have no doubt that Miss Davis is right – trained by the Frankfurt School, she has perfectly honed instincts for Marxist subversion. A senile, vacillating, intellectually inadequate president with ‘progressive’ aspirations will indeed be putty in the evil hands of those who wish America ill.

Say what you will about Trump, and I do say many things about him, but I’d support him for precisely the same reasons Davis supports Biden: he’d be able to keep her ilk at bay for a while longer.

As to Biden, the only arguments about him are revolving around which black woman he’ll choose as his running mate. That chap wouldn’t dream of considering a candidate of a less fortunate race and sex – regardless of any other qualifications.    

I take a personal interest in the on-going debate on the data showing that musicians tend to have higher than the median IQs.

After all, I’ve spent much of my life in the company of musicians, having had the chance to observe dozens of them at close quarters. And true enough, some of them are highly intelligent. (By way of protecting my social and family life, I hasten to state unreservedly and unequivocally that both my wife and one of my closest friends fall into that category.)

However, most musicians I’ve known, including some famous ones, don’t strike me as intellectual giants. And some of those who can get around keys or strings at supersonic speeds, and command stratospheric fees, are simply daft.

Then, as any logician will tell you, correlation doesn’t equate causality. Music may not necessarily make people smarter, but those with high IQs are more likely to gravitate towards the concert platform.

Moreover, those who do make it to the concert platform typically start to prepare for that feat at a time when they haven’t quite learned to talk yet, much less make choices about their career plans. They were led to music by their parents, which at that stage says more about the parents than the offspring.

No such grown-ups can possibly have a pecuniary interest in encouraging their tots to study music seriously. After all, it takes years of lessons to decide whether a child has a professional potential, and more years to judge whether that potential is likely to be realised.

Hence it’s mainly for cultural reasons that parents spend oodles of time, effort and money to guide their children to Bach and Beethoven. They must love music, understand how vital it is to our culture and therefore believe that exposure to music will make their children better people – even if it doesn’t make them international stars.

It’s likely that parents who accept much personal sacrifice to pursue that educational goal are themselves intelligent people. And intelligent people are more likely to spawn clever children.

Also, an intelligence quotient measures not intelligence, but merely the potential for developing it. IQ relates to intelligence the way musicality relates to musicianship – musical people may never become musicians, and people with high IQs may never become thinkers.

For example, everybody considered Bobby Fischer one of the best chess players ever, but nobody – including probably even his mother – considered him an intelligent man. Yet his IQ was off every known scale. (Incidentally, many chess players are musicians and vice versa. The two skills are related: chess players develop the cognitive skills to arrange elements in space; musicians, to arrange them in time.)

This is yet another example of how deceptive statistics can be. An unvarnished datum may be a matter of interest, but it seldom elucidates an issue in all its complexity. That, however, doesn’t make statistics useless. They just need to be treated with caution.

In this case, the link between music and intelligence can’t be dismissed just because statistics don’t paint the full picture. For, combining logic with personal observation, I’m convinced that music makes some people more intelligent.

For example, it’s certain that musicians of the calibre of, say, Gieseking, Menuhin, Gould, Szigeti, Yudina or Grumiaux (and of course the two individuals mentioned in the second paragraph above) had their innate intelligence further developed by music.

The abundance of musicians who acquire the biomechanical skills necessary for virtuoso performance suggests that such talents are spread rather wide. However, great musicians are few because they go beyond that. They combine virtuosity with a deep analytical ability and a broad cultural outlook.

A great musician has to have the intricate mind to analyse the complex relationships of harmonies, tempi, sonorities and dynamics within a piece – and also to understand how the piece fits into the overall work of its composer, how the composer relates to the music of his time and over history, and how music expresses the ethos of our civilisation.

A mindless virtuoso can have a brilliant career without such intelligence. But he’ll never reach the level of the musicians I mentioned above, at random.

For all those Genome Projects and Decades of the Brain, the human mind remains a mystery, unsolved and probably unsolvable. Scientists don’t even know what a thought is, which is understandable. Natural sciences deal with the natural, which is to say material, world. And thought lives in another world, one that materialists stupidly insist doesn’t exist.

That’s why the questions similar to those I’ve touched upon will never be answered definitively. Not in a lab, not by a sociological survey – and, much as I hate to admit this, not even by me.

One thing is beyond doubt, to me at any rate: music too resides in that other world. And, if I can be forgiven wild conjecture, it may well live on a higher floor than even the rational mind.

Universal prosperity (otherwise known as ‘happiness’) is the implicit legitimising promise of post-Enlightenment modernity.

Dedicated as it is to the advancement of the common man, it has to promise the common man things he needs. And, snobbish but true, that breed has mostly material aspirations – especially now that its traditional metaphysical concerns have been roundly swept aside.

Such is the widespread belief. However, it’s not always, and never wholly, true. For the system best suited to fulfilling the implicit promise of modernity, what Marx called capitalism, comes in conflict with the ideology of egalitarianism begotten by modernity as an accompaniment to prosperity.

Arranging the demography of modern prosperity in any country will produce a pyramid, tapering from economic hoi-polloi up towards the rich. Nevertheless, by any historical standards, Western prosperity is as universal as humanly possible: most of those at the base of the pyramid still enjoy lives that most earlier generations would have regarded as luxurious.

However, ideology isn’t about double-entry accounting. It’s about activating the least laudable human qualities in pursuit of some pernicious purpose, usually political. It’s not for nothing that modern correctness is called political.

People’s ability to earn money varies widely, making it inevitable that some will have more than others. But ideologues promised equality, didn’t they?

And it wasn’t that obsolete namby-pamby equality of all before God either. Since God was replaced by Darwin, equality got to be mostly understood as an entity denominated in units of currency. Alas, while old equality followed from the essence of Christianity, new equality not only didn’t follow from the essence of capitalism, but was made impossible by it.

Hence it was easy to portray any capitalist system as inherently unjust and hostile to modernity’s cherished ideal of equality. By inference, that made everybody who did well out of the unjust system themselves unjust. They were increasingly portrayed as blood-sucking leeches on the body of a nation.

(This, incidentally, explains the predominantly socialist nature of modern anti-Semitism. Christian anti-Semitism went the way of Christianity, while conservative, clubbable anti-Semitism has more to do with snobbery and the desire to keep outsiders outside. As an old Tory explained to me once, “Anti-Semitism is hating Jews more than necessary”.)

Thus modernity differs from Christendom in one critical respect. If the latter tried, with variable success, to encourage the better part of human nature, the former implicitly fosters – and expiates – the full array of deadly sins. Envy and pride lead the way, with greed and anger following closely behind.

In parallel with inculcating such vices into the metaphysical makeup of society, modern Western nations extended egalitarianism to politics by both expanding the democratic franchise ad infinitum and downgrading all competing forms of power.

Specifically in Britain that manifested itself in steadily lowering the voting age and debauching both the monarchy and the upper, hitherto unelected, House of Parliament. That way the masses, brainwashed about the injustice of the traditional economy, could elevate to government those made in their own image.

Such developments can be observed, mutatis mutandis, in all Western countries. As a result, Western governments had to renege on the founding promise of modernity, that of comfort and a steadily improving standard of living. Ideology has begun to rule the roost.

Contrary to what Clinton’s strategist James Carville once said, it’s no longer the economy, stupid. It’s now ideology, stupid. That’s the new god and it’s athirst, demanding greater and greater sacrifices. The economy is one such.

Modern governments, largely made up of spivocratic nonentities capable of only following, not shaping, popular demands, demonstrate time and again their willingness to throw the economy under the wheels of the ideological juggernaut.

For example, it will cost Western governments trillions in any currency you care to name to cater to the climate hoax perpetrated by those who have an anti-capitalist axe to grind. Never in the history of human economics has so much been sacrificed by so many on so little evidence.

The less sophisticated mouthpieces of the hoax, such as that poor retarded child Greta, don’t even bother to conceal the anti-capitalist animus behind their crusade against warm weather. The clever grown-ups behind the scenes are more circumspect, trying to hide their true motives behind pseudo-scientific cant and the kind of arguments that any clever secondary school pupil could blow out of the water.

It’s too early to calculate the damage done by our response to Covid, which is probably incalculable anyway. Yet it’s easy to discern an ideological component in the drive for destroying the economy for the sake of rather nebulous health benefits.

Unlike with climate, this isn’t pure ideology, what with some of the dangers being quite real. Yet, comparing Britain with Sweden, where the government’s response was more restrained, one would find it hard to make a persuasive argument for the economic devastation chosen by HMG.

These are just the most recent and visible examples. But there exist many others.

The egalitarian ideology of modernity attacks the economy in all sorts of ways, most camouflaged with bien pensant waffle. If our governments were driven by economic goals, they wouldn’t have accepted the ideologically inspired welfare state – and the attendant ruinous burden of debt.

It goes without saying that civilised governments will make provisions for looking after the old and infirm. But our welfarism run riot goes well beyond civilised decency. Instead it enters the realm of economic madness that has dire social consequences as well.

Everywhere one looks, one can observe a clash between economy and ideology, with the latter running up a huge winning score. For example, ideology demands that all obvious differences between races and sexes be ignored, and the economy docilely complies to its own detriment.

The essence of capitalism, the system that has produced unprecedented, if unequally distributed, prosperity, is competition. And the essence of competition is offering the market the best goods and services at the lowest possible price.

That involves each business hiring the best talent it can afford, which in turn leads to competition not only for markets but also for labour. This is economics at its most basic, but in barges ideology at its most virulent.

It demands that, regardless of talent and ability, all races and sexes be represented in the workplace in proportion to their numbers in the population, or in some cases way beyond such numbers. That makes a travesty out of competition for labour and ultimately for markets.

Forced to hire not the best but the most ideologically acceptable, businesses reduce their productivity, with the quality of their offerings going down and the price heading in the opposite direction. That has a knock-on effect on everything: when businesses become less profitable, the tax base shrinks.

The government then has to borrow even more, and the merry-go-round never stops. Nor is it possible to jump off without risking life and limb.

The upshot is that capitalism is taken away from capitalists and placed in the tender care of ideologues. That means capitalism becomes corporatism at best, outright socialism at worst.

“The moment that Government appears at market,” wrote Burke, and I repeat these words of wisdom often, “all the principles of market will be subverted.” Replace ‘Government’ with ‘ideology’, and the statement will ring even truer.

The world does go round, but it’s not money that makes it do so. Those who insist it is ought to know better, and by and large they do. But ideology doesn’t let them tell the truth.

A tribunal of six Solent University governors sacked the lecturer Stephen Lamonby, 73, for gross misconduct, which in this case meant racism.

“We are pleased,” commented the Southampton university, “with the outcome of this hearing and its reflection of Solent’s commitment to our university values and to promoting equality, diversity and inclusivity.”

You may wonder how Mr Lamonby assailed those sacred values with sufficient vigour to justify his sacking. Are you insisting on an answer to this question? Fine. But prepare yourself: the truth is gruesome.

Talking to his colleague, Dr Janet Bonar, Mr Lamonby was complimentary about the Jews’ intelligence, especially as manifested in the field of physics. The Germans, he said, are good engineers, but the Jews are physicists sans pareil. Since Dr Bonar must be good at physics, Mr Lamonby then wondered if she was Jewish.

In response, Dr Bonar called him a racist and stormed off, as befits a modern person. She then reported Mr Lamonby to the authorities, as befits a truly progressive modern person.

Now, this episode can be analysed on many levels, including the least important factual one. First, if I were German, I’d be upset about my nation being deemed to be better at engineering than at physics.

I’d reel off a list of pretty useful German physicists, such as, in no particular order, Gauss, Röntgen, Planck, Heisenberg, Lenard and so forth. And, as Messrs Newton, Maxwell, Faraday and yes, even Hawking could have testified, it’s not just the Germans but also the British who have been known to infringe on the putative Jewish patent in this area.

It’s true that Jewish scientists tend to win about 20 per cent of all Nobel prizes, but then they also tend to dominate the string sections of all major orchestras. Such statistics require a deep, detailed analysis, and they can’t be explained away simply by suggesting the Jews have more intelligence or musicality than anyone else.

On the subject of music, some years ago Encyclopaedia Britannica published a list of history’s 20 most important composers, those without whom music wouldn’t be music. Seventeen names on that list were German, and not a single one was Jewish. Juxtaposing this statistic with the percentage of Jewish violinists, we can make only one conclusion: the issue is so complex that it doesn’t lend itself to any single explanation.

It’s also true that, in America, Jews have a higher median IQ than the rest of the country, except Southwest Asians. However, the Jewish population is almost exclusively urban middle class. And in that demographic group, the Jews’ IQ doesn’t stand out.

This issue can’t be discussed seriously without delving into a wide panoply of historical, cultural, social, political and religious factors. But then Mr Lamonby wasn’t trying to analyse that intricate problem. He casually referred to a widespread stereotype, that’s all.

Then, Solent took exception not to his loose treatment of facts but indeed to his mentioning an ethnic stereotype. That went against the grain of the new-fangled progressive ethic, according to which everyone isn’t just equal but the same.

The sacramental belief of our ‘liberal’ modernity is that no differences exist among various ethnic and racial groups. That is demonstrably false, but this whole thing isn’t about facts, is it? Facts might have been stubborn things to John Adams, but to progressives they are irrelevant things.

Language has had to be modified to reflect the new, heightened sensitivity. The word ‘racism’ used to mean the belief that some races were inherently superior to others. Now it means simply the belief that races may be different in any other than purely chromatic respects.

Thus it doesn’t matter whether or not a statement about such perceived differences is true, nor indeed whether it’s positive or negative. Saying, for example, that blacks can jump better than whites is as unacceptable to the progressives as making monkey noises.

Mr Lamonby is absolutely right in his vociferous protests against the verdict of Solent’s kangaroo trial. He was victimised by what he called denial of intellectual freedom, and what I’d describe, less moderately, as progressive fascism.

Under no circumstances can it be construed that Mr Lamonby’s statement is anti-Semitic. But, and here I’m trying to uncover another layer of the argument, that doesn’t mean Mr Lamonby isn’t.

Here I can offer only a lifelong observation, not any rational analysis. And my observation suggests that, with some exceptions, only two groups are most likely to point out the superior intelligence of the Jews: Jews and anti-Semites.

Both groups can say the same things on the basis of the same facts, such as the disproportionate Jewish representation in science, media, music, show business and what have you. But if Jews are likely to mention such facts with pride, anti-Semites unfurl them out of suspicion at best, envy and hatred at worst.

Neither group is to be complimented for their emotions, although only the second group was driven by theirs to exterminate the first. Let’s just say for now that anti-Semites are perfectly capable, indeed likely, to damn Jews with faint praise of their intelligence – just as genuine racists are capable of damning blacks with faint praise of their athleticism.

However, only in a febrile tyranny can such statements be taken as punishable offences, regardless of the feelings behind the words. Only a febrile tyranny can punish people for what they feel and think, and that’s what we all live under these days.

It would be both silly and presumptuous to claim that our great, if underrated, philosopher R.G. Collingwood has agreed to appear as guest columnist in this space.

It would be silly because Collingwood died in 1943. It would be presumptuous because I have no reason to believe that, even if he were alive today, he’d agree to act as my co-author.

Yet the two long quotations I’m going to offer apply to our situation today so accurately and exhaustively that they can almost function as a complete article. All I can offer is some ornamental commentary, pointing out the specific relevance of Collingwood’s insights.

The first one was an observation of how civilisations perish. In a single paragraph Collingwood dismissed simplistic explanations, while at the same time almost making long tomes redundant:

“Civilisations sometimes perish because they are forcibly broken up by the armed attack of enemies without or revolutionaries within; but never from this cause alone. Such attacks never succeed unless the thing that is attacked is weakened by doubt as to whether the end which it sets before itself, the form of life which it tries to realise, is worth achieving. On the other hand, this doubt is quite capable of destroying a civilisation without any help whatever. If the people who share a civilisation are no longer on the whole convinced that the form of life which it tries to realise is worth realising, nothing can save it.”

Collingwood’s second insight points out one key cause of our collective enfeeblement:

“The critical moment was reached when Rome created an urban proletariat whose only function was to eat free bread and watch free shows. This meant the segregation of an entire class which had no work to do whatever; no positive function in society, whether economic or military or administrative or intellectual or religious; only the business of being supported and being amused. When that had been done, it was only a question of time until Plato’s nightmare of a consumers’ society came true; the drones set up their own king and the story of the hive came to an end.”

A resounding yes on both counts. Any physical assault on a great civilisation can only ever succeed if the civilisation has lost its metaphysical core, what’s fashionably called values.

It takes a powerful hurricane to break a healthy oak in half but, when the oak is rotten inside, even a slight push will suffice. Collingwood cites Rome, but the same observation applies to us as accurately.

Anywhere we look we can see every traditional strength crumbling away, every certitude of yesteryear inverted. Man has assumed God-like powers of judging good and bad, virtuous and sinful, right and wrong, only to find that, in human hands, such powers can corrupt more than any others.

The West has abandoned the framework of discipline that’s a prerequisite for the existence of real freedom, making every notion, no matter how idiotic and subversive, acceptable and worthy of a place at the intellectual table.

Predictably that has produced a culture of self-imposed despotism that, uniquely in history, needs little help from the state’s good offices. Such help, however, is always on offer whenever the self-despotism alone can’t pull the garrotte tight enough.    

The real morality of Christendom has been replaced with a fake and ever-expanding code of tyrannical restrictions on every traditional Western freedom, each based on the Judaeo-Christian understanding of man as a creature made in the image of God and therefore possessing sovereign value.

Western economies are bending under the load of unbearable debt, which makes them susceptible to evil regimes ever ready to proffer investment that, upon closer examination, turns out to be economic sabotage.

Much is being written about the report showing that the British economy has become so addicted to Putin’s fiscal poison that going cold turkey may well prove fatal. It’s because of this medical condition that foreign gangsters, working on behalf of their evil governments, have found it so easy to buy British (and generally Western) politicians both retail and wholesale.

Western politicians are still residually accountable to their voters, who have systematically shed any metaphysical yearnings, having replaced them with a craving for physical comfort. They can accept any diminution of culture, social life, morality or civil liberties, but not that of physical well-being.

Hence it’s understandably hard for Western politicians to tell Putin’s agents to keep their trillions to themselves, what with the relative impoverishment that’s likely to follow such a principled stance. That’s why it took our (Conservative!) government almost a year to publish a tepid report on the Russian penetration denominated in political influence.

The report doesn’t go far enough, possessing as it does only some limited ad hoc value. To make a really devastating point the report would have had to reveal many shocking facts that have been coyly kept under wraps – and also put such facts in the context of the accelerating disintegration under way in all Western countries, emphatically including Britain.

It’s not just about a few politicians taking campaign contributions in soiled, and often blood-soaked, millions. It’s about a society growing so feeble, so lacking in self-confidence, so malignantly hedonistic that it’s no longer able to defend itself against its enemies – indeed so enfeebled that it even refuses to recognise its enemies for what they are.

The oak has become rotten inside, and the slightest push may well bring it down. When, say, Putin or one of his successors decides that the tottering has reached a wide enough amplitude, it wouldn’t take a massive assault to bring the tree down.

A little push into, say, Estonia would test the West’s resolve, only to find it non-existent. Dying for Narva would be as unthinkable as dying for Danzig was in 1938.

Our politicians and pundits wouldn’t miss a beat echoing Neville Chamberlain who spoke of “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”. When we learned, it was too late to prevent oceans of blood from spilling.

Why, that choir has already started to rehearse, with Peter Hitchens singing the solo part: “They are a poor, under-populated country nearly 2,000 miles away… We have no border with Russia, nor any other territorial, naval or economic conflict… We hardly trade with them…”

Now, Hitchens wouldn’t acknowledge a Russian threat even if a Spetsnaz brigade landed in Kent. But here the Chamberlain resonance is unmistakable, as is a complete, if possibly put-on, ignorance of modern geopolitics.

As ever, Hitchens is self-refuting. He never tires of writing – correctly, as it happens – about the woeful decline of Britain in every conceivable sense, while pretending not to realise how light an external push it would therefore take to bring about a collapse.

Those feral bearded chaps clad in bearskins also looked puny compared to the mighty edifice of Rome, with its well-drilled legions, modern technologies, firmly entrenched economic and legal principles. And then…

And then don’t read Hitchens, ladies and gentlemen. Read Collingwood instead. He saw the signs with the eagle eye of a prophet – who’d nevertheless hate to see his prophesies come true.

Today’s Times: “The disclosures came 24 hours after the intelligence and security committee (ISC) published its long-delayed Russia report and questioned whether the government ‘took its eye off the ball. by allowing oligarchs to invest billions of pounds in Britain and make high-level political connections.“

Who could have thought? Well, false modesty aside, somebody could. This is what I wrote on this subject in April, 2012. Some details mentioned in the piece were transient, indeed including Berezovsky, who was to be garrotted by Putin’s hitmen, but the bulk of it applies today just as it did then.

The other day the French authorities impounded some £11 million belonging to that worthy London resident Boris Berezovsky. The money, they declared, had been acquired in criminal ways and therefore its owner can’t claim legitimate property rights. Since the French acted at the behest of the Russian government, which is itself criminal, their reasons are questionable. But their action does raise interesting issues.

I’m not going to explore how Boris has made his billions. If you’re interested in the subject, read an excellent book Godfather in the Kremlin by Paul Klebnikov. The eponymous godfather is no longer in the Kremlin – having fallen out with Putin, he now resides in England. And Klebnikov is no longer alive – in 2004, as he was researching another book on Russia’s organised crime, he died in a hail of bullets fired (one hears by Chechens) from a passing car in central Moscow.

True to its heritage, Putin’s government spread the rumour that Klebnikov had been killed by a jealous husband. Of course he was. The MO proves that: two men firing submachine guns from a fast-moving car. Love does work in mysterious ways, especially in Putin’s Russia.

And now yet another Mafia hit, this time in London, reminds us that Russian ‘businessmen’ are just as capable of settling their disputes at our doorstep. The only sane response to this is NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). Yet this is a response we are unlikely to give.

Pecunia non olet (‘money doesn’t stink’), said the Roman emperor Vespasian when questioned about his tax on the urine sold by public lavatories to tanners. Vespasian was rather crude even by the standards of Roman emperors, so he can be forgiven for his soldierly directness.

What is upsetting is that after two millennia of subsequent civilisation we still haven’t outlived the principle first enunciated by Vespasian. Except that we couch it in legal cant based on property rights, a subject dear to every conservative heart. However, much as we worship this or any other right, we shouldn’t allow it to turn into a suicide pact. Society has a superseding right to protect itself.

Ever since the ‘collapse’ of the Soviet Union, Russian billionaires have been arriving in England, first in a trickle, lately in a stream. A good chunk of their money arrives with them, and we welcome it. The British can’t afford to buy £40-million houses; good job someone can. Who cares how that £40 million was earned? Pecunia non olet!

Everyone knows, or ought to know, that no one can become a billionaire in today’s Russia without engaging in activities that in any civilised country would land their perpetrator in prison. Since the KGB mafia fronted by Putin controls Russia’s economy, no Russian can become a billionaire without active cooperation with it, if only by paying protection money. And since the mafia is criminal, every Russian billionaire is, as a minimum, its accessory.

They all, possibly with one or two exceptions, have a criminal mentality, and they bring it to London along with their money. We close our eyes on the former because we like the latter. Pecunia non olet!

So we let the likes of Abramovich, Berezovsky and Lord Mandelson’s best friend Deripaska come to London. Their billions are welcomed, as long as we are sure they use our courts, not our dark alleys, to settle their disagreements. Meanwhile, Sloanie dimwits are falling all over themselves to get an invitation to Abramovich’s box at Stamford Bridge.

Girls previously only interested in the hats they were going to wear at this year’s Ascot now profess interest in holding midfielders, wingbacks and second strikers. Thanks to Abramovich’s money footie has become their nostalgie de la boue, today’s answer to the fashionable slumming of yesteryear. And the provenance of the money? Who cares? Pecunia non olet, and those who still remember their Roedean Latin won’t even need a translation.

One would think that the six shots fired into Gherman Gorbuntsov’s body would serve as a wake-up call, even though Gherman himself can hardly be confused with a boy scout. Wanted in Moldova and Russia for the sort of dealings that would tip the Old Bailey scales at the better part of 25 years, he already did some time back in the early 1990s. I don’t know what the charge was in Russia, but I’m willing to bet it wasn’t dissent.

And then Gherman committed the ultimate mafia crime of squealing. Specifically, he agreed to give evidence in the case involving another attempted murder, of the chap whose son at one point owned another English football club. (What is it about football that attracts those people? Why not polo? Go straight to the top, I say.) The death penalty is the only possible punishment, and silly Gherman thought they wouldn’t get to him in London. Little did he realise that, just as the ruling mafia had turned Moscow into the Wild West, so it was turning London into Moscow.

Miraculously, Gherman has survived and now he’s busily naming names, those who ordered the hit. One suspects his loquacity is the price Scotland Yard has demanded for its protection, but be that as it may Gorbuntsov has now pointed a finger at several chaps close to Putin himself. So when he recovers from his wounds, he’ll probably be allowed to stay here, until next time. After all, pecunia non olet, and his money is as good as anyone else’s.

I don’t know if Putin did commission the murder, and frankly I don’t care. It’s enough for me to know that this unrepentant officer in history’s most murderous organisation is perfectly capable of it. What I do care about is the moral damage these Russians are doing to us.

Pecunia non olet? You bet it does. It smells of blood spilled in London streets. It stinks of the Faustian deal we’ve struck. It reeks of a society in decay. Are you holding your nostrils? I am.