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Every day I go through what athletes call warm-up and warm-down, except that mine are mental rather than physical.

I warm up by doing newspaper puzzles, and in the evening I warm down by watching some TV series. Presence of sex scenes, ideally gratuitous, can move a show to the top of my choices, and I know Fr Michael would disapprove.

I divulge this information to forestall suggestions that I reject films simply because of their depictions of graphic sex. I don’t.

I do reject erotic films pretending to convey a serious message, whereas their real purpose is to attract viewers by titillating their naughty bits. This brings me to the current BBC hit Normal People.

It traces the story of two young lovers, Marianne and Connell, who first hook up at school somewhere in Ireland when both are 18. By the final episode they’re 23-year-olds who have been through Trinity College, Dublin.

Their relationship is on-off: sometimes Marianne is on Connell, sometimes she’s off and he’s on her. In some episodes their nude lovemaking takes up over half the total footage, leaving this viewer wondering why good celluloid was wasted on the other half.

Yet according to most reviewers, the other half is what makes the effort so worthwhile. Marianne and Connell aren’t merely two youngsters intermittently rutting away, and the series isn’t just soft porn. It’s a distillation of the present generation, the millennials.

If so, this generation is dishonest, neurotic, tasteless, ignorant, immoral and stupid. It is, however, undeniably woke, which reviewers regard as a redeeming feature.

They praise the series for its sensitive treatment of consent and mental ‘issues’, which is the millennial for ‘illness’. I wasn’t aware that consent to sex was a wide-reaching existential problem, but then I’m behind the times.

When they are still at school, Connell is peer-pressured into keeping his relationship with Marianne secret. He’s a popular athlete, while she’s regarded as ugly and unworthy of him.

That’s where dishonesty starts, for no effort was made to make Daisy Edgar-Jones look any less pretty than she is. Casting a plainer actress would have strengthened the story, but weakened the soft port aspect of it. And that’s where the money is.

Since consent now tops the Decalogue in the commandments sweepstakes, Connell has to deflower Marianne in compliance with the strictest requirements. Hence just before penetration, or possibly even during it (the camera angle isn’t definitive), he keeps reassuring Marianne that they could stop at any moment.

Well, 18-year-olds are certainly different from what I distantly remember. In the old days, it would have taken a crowbar to prise a boy that age from a naked supine girl. But back then we were unaware of the existential value of consent, nor indeed of its cosmically broad definition.

Both protagonists, especially at first Marianne, are supposed to be exceptionally bright. Yet in my experience, intelligent people tend to say and do intelligent things.

Marianne, however, says nothing clever and acts in an erratic manner. And Connell at first comes across as borderline retarded. Where Marianne is truculent, he is taciturn – and not just the clichéd strong and silent type.

As Connell explains, he can’t express his thoughts in words. That’s not known as a sign of dazzling intelligence, especially in a chap who, like Connell, is a budding writer.

I’ve met many writers in my life, some of them more talented and indeed more intelligent than others. Yet I’ve never met a tongue-tied one. An aspiring writer who can’t put his thoughts into words is like a budding Formula 1 driver who can’t get a driving licence.

Anyway, having had countless clandestine trysts with Marianne, Connell then takes another girl, one more befitting his public image, to a school dance, leaving Marianne home alone and lachrymose.

Again this doesn’t ring true. By now we know Connell loves Marianne. Also, the girl scrubs up well: even though she wasn’t an ugly duckling to begin with, now that her inner sensual self has come out, she wears revealing jumpers and looks gorgeous.

No man would be ashamed to be seen with her, yet Connell commits an unwarranted act of unspeakable cruelty. No wonder Marianne ignores his protestations of love and stops taking his weepy phone calls.

Cut to them meeting at Trinity a year or two later, having been out of touch in the interim. Both have other lovers, and Marianne is now presented as a beautiful, popular girl – although her appearance hasn’t changed one iota since school.

Before long, they ditch their current paramours and resume the rutting, with Marianne spending most of the screen time stark naked. Sorry, I’ve misrepresented the situation.

Both of them are stark naked, which Miss Edgar-Jones highlighted in an interview as a blow for ‘gender equality’. When we were both topless, she explained, gender equality suffered because, when both sexes expose their torsos, the woman actually exposes more, existentially speaking.

However, when they were both starkers, equality was served. Here, as a lifelong champion of gender equality, I beg to differ. For a man’s primary sex characteristics are more visible than a woman’s.

In one shot we actually catch a glimpse of Connell’s, mercifully flaccid, penis. To match that on equal terms, Marianne should have faced the camera with her legs open. Yet the grateful audience was spared that delight.

For some negligently unexplained reason the two drift apart again, with Marianne passing like a relay baton from one lover to another. She is shown enjoying a full alphabet of sexual variants, S&M, B&D, you name it. Yet her heart isn’t in it because she never stops loving Connell.

Why not spare herself all that humiliation and stay with Connell in the first place? The show regards such questions as superfluous and tactless.

Connell, meantime, goes to pieces – partly because he loves Marianne who’s doing S&M with someone else, and partly because his school friend killed himself. Why, we aren’t told because it’s none of our business.

The suicide affects Connell deeply even though he hasn’t seen the lad for three years. He goes off the rails and ends up in free counselling. That’s where the sensitive treatment of mental ‘issues’ comes in.

The shrink mouths the usual banalities and asks the usual questions, along the lines of “How does that make you feel?” Connell provides a vivid answer by throwing a hysterical fit, something he managed to do well enough even without professional help.

The moral of that sensitive episode is that, rather than keeping one’s ‘issues’ inside, it’s much better to let it all hang out. Yet such emotional incontinence doesn’t do Connell much good, by the looks of it.

Round and round she goes. Marianne follows her abusive lovers to Italy, Sweden and back to Ireland, with Connell chasing her, or her chasing him, with varying persistence.

Each rutting get-together is followed by a breakup for no good reason. One gets the impression that, now unable to satisfy her masochistic cravings physically (Connell is rather orthodox in that department), Marianne seeks to satisfy them through mental anguish.

That said, the two actors are good, Marianne is lovely, Connell looks like a dead ringer for the ManU defender Harry Maguire, and the location sequences are shot well.

The show is reasonably entertaining – shame about the story, character development, believability and especially emetic messages. Soft porn should be served neat.

These words don’t often roll off my tongue when I read newspaper articles. So much more pleased I am to report that this morning they did.

The Telegraph piece that elicited my enthusiastic reaction was written by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet. The long title is self-explanatory: We French Love Our Health Service, But It’s Not a National Religion.

As a rule, I fill this space only with my own efforts, modest as they may be. But today I’m going to cite whole passages from Mme Moutet’s article, on the realisation that I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Also, having spent quite some time in both British and French hospitals, I can validate her comparisons of the two, unflattering though they regrettably are to Britain.

“Unlike you, we don’t and never did worship La Sécu: we see it not as one of the glories of our Scepter’d Nation, but as the kind of public service one expects from a modern country, like good trains.” I wish she hadn’t mentioned good trains, unless that was meant as a sly dig at Britain.

“The… romanticisation of your health system seems very strange. It’s as if you are afraid that… any change would destroy the mysterious compact initiated by Beveridge. The NHS seems replacement and compensation for your lost Empire. Staffed by so many Commonwealth nationals, it becomes a post-colonial iteration of goodwill…” 

I’m not sure about the post-colonial aspect of NHS veneration, but it’s clearly treated as more than just a method of providing medical care. 

However, having spent quite some in London hospitals, both private and NHS, I can testify to the preponderance of Commonwealth nationals, from the subcontinent, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, the West Indies. Yet that, I suspect, is merely a matter of dire staffing necessity, rather than “a post-colonial iteration of goodwill”.

“Most hospital rooms [in France] are for one or two patients only; the notion of mixed wards is rightly seen as unacceptable.” Again I can validate this statement on the basis of personal experience.

The first time I found myself in an NHS hospital (Chelsea & Westminster, brand new at the time), I shared a room with a couple of dozen patients, half of them women. Generally speaking, I don’t mind sharing my sleeping quarters with scantily dressed females, but the circumstances were just wrong.

It’s also true that in my several stints at a provincial French hospital I never had to share a room with more than one patient, and usually not even that.

“As patients, we feel you get a raw deal… French doctors, paid less than half their British counterparts, would never countenance denying procedures for having the ‘wrong’ lifestyle.”

True on all counts. My local GP in France actually gets less than half the average salary of his NHS colleagues. And a Gorgon of a GP in London once asked me in a peremptory manner: “Why should I treat you if you smoke?”

“Because it’s your job?” I suggested. “Because you took the Hippocratic Oath?” Wrong answer, as it turned out. The buzzer went off in her head and she dumped me from her practice.

“When I felt a lump in my breast two years ago, a text got me an appointment the following day, testing within the week, and an operation three weeks later: never was I happier to be living in France rather than in the UK.”

The timings Mme Moutet cites are, give or take, standard only for private medicine in the UK. However, anyone with personal experience of the NHS would react to Mme Moutet’s description of her ordeal with a rueful smile and perhaps some words that only appear in unabridged dictionaries.

The sacralisation of the NHS is an interesting phenomenon that requires serious study. Actually the National Insurance Act was only part of the whole story. A whole raft of socialist policies were adopted at the time, including wholesale nationalisation.

But the NHS, that child of William Beveridge and Aneurin Bevan, went to the top of Mount Olympus and there it has stayed as an object of pagan worship. The impetus  might have come from the loss of religion rather than of the Empire. Cradle to grave socialist propaganda certainly was a factor as well, as it continues to be.

Bien fait, Mme Moutet, and thank you for never mentioning insufficient funding as the source of NHS ills. Somebody has to tell the truth: the NHS is bankrupt because it’s based on a bankrupt philosophy. C’est tout, as they say in France.

By now you must be sick of coronavirus, if only, one hopes, figuratively. Seeking to provide some relief, I noticed the consonance of coronavirus and Coriolanus.

That turned my thoughts to Shakespeare, or rather the way his work is interpreted. I’d suggest we try to remould him in a modern, progressive image, which is understandable.  

It’s a natural tendency to whitewash people we admire. And in the Anglophone world, no one is admired more than the Bard.

Hence we gloss over some of Shakespeare’s traits, those that would get him ostracised in our enlightened times. Such, for example, as his ageism, crassly displayed in Sonnets 2 and 18: “When forty winters shall besiege thy brow/ Thou art no longer a darling bud of May”. 

But I digress. My subject today is Shakespeare’s sexuality that still remains as enigmatic as his true identity.

Modern commentators go out of their way to insist that Shakespeare was an active practitioner of the alternative lifestyle, which, incidentally, was a hanging offence in Tudor England.

One such commentator is the celebrated actor Sir Ian McKellen, noted for his performances in many Shakespeare roles, including, I think, Lady Macbeth and, in his younger days, Ophelia. “Did he sleep with another man?” Sir Ian asks himself. “I would say yes.”

This is a deplorable attempt to bring Shakespeare up to date. It’s true that in his sonnets the poet sometimes refers to young men as ‘sweet boy’ or ‘lovely boy’. Yet one can admire the beauty of an Adonis without wishing to copulate with him.

The same goes for Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” This apparent love poem is clearly written to a man, as proved by the use of the masculine personal pronoun further down:

“And often is his [my emphasis] gold complexion dimm’d;/ And every fair from fair sometime declines,/ By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;/ But thy eternal summer shall not fade…”

Then, in Sonnet 20, Shakespeare refers to his love object as the “master-mistress of my passion”. This sexual ambivalence might suggest homoerotic passions to some. To me it spells nothing but aesthetic appreciation, something to be expected from a sublime artist.

Some relationships between male protagonists in Shakespeare’s plays also give grounds for speculation. One Antonio seems to be in love with Sebastian in Twelfth Night; another Antonio dotes on Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice; Patroclus seems to enjoy a tender friendship with Achilles in Troilus and Cressida.

Yet it’s only to the dirty, sex-obsessed modern mind that love between two men must have an erotic component. For example, my male friends and I love one another. However, though I can’t vouch for them, I’ve never felt the need to express such feelings in ways that Leviticus and Romans don’t condone.

Then there’s Shakespeare’s family life. People with dirty minds ignore the three children Shakespeare produced with Anne Hathaway, the lesser known person of that name.

Instead they point out the difference in their ages, which may sometimes be a marker of a ‘lavender marriage’. But Anne was only eight years older than Will, not thirty, as in some marriages I could mention (not that I’m trying to impugn anything untoward in Manny Macron’s marital life). So that argument doesn’t cut much ice either.

And it’s certainly demolished by the evidence of Shakespeare’s homophobia I uncovered the other day when rereading Hamlet. In his instructions to Laertes, Polonius says: “Neither a burrower nor a bender be.”

‘Burrower’ is clearly a reference to a perverted practice that has since acquired a different name I can’t repeat out of decorum. And ‘bender’ is a widespread pejorative term for a homosexual.

Until the other day I thought this objectionable word was of a more recent provenance. Yet it’s clearly one of the 1,700 neologisms Shakespeare contributed to the English language.

You must agree that no man using such abusive terminology to describe… hold on a second.

Penelope has just looked over my shoulder, called me a name I dare not repeat and said I needed a new prescription for my reading glasses. Apparently I misread the cited quotation.

According to her the actual line was “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” Hence Polonius was merely warning his son against fiscal, rather than sexual, incontinence.

Be that as it may, such moralising is odd in a man who advised his son to sink into expensive drug addiction: “Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy…” 

Here comes Penelope again, telling me I should stop wasting space, which could instead be devoted to deep insights. Oh well, never mind.

First, an admission of ignorance: I  had never heard of the French writer Renaud Camus before reading about his (suspended) prison sentence. Albert, yes. Renaud, no.

It follows that I haven’t read his book Le Grand Remplacement (The Great Replacement). According to the newspaper reports Mr Camus’s central argument is that massive Islamic immigration to Europe represents a demographic invasion.

The author is quoted as saying in a later speech that: “The irreversible colonisation is demographic colonisation, by the replacement of the population… if the story continues, it will not be that of France.”

I don’t know what kind of royalties Mr Camus received for that book, but his oral pronouncement earned him a suspended prison sentence in a French court. The charge was “public incitement to hate or violence on the basis of origin, ethnicity, nationality, race or religion.”

Having already owned up to my ignorance of Mr Camus and his work, I have to go by the newspaper reports only. These abound in references to ‘conspiracy theories’ adorned by assorted epithets, branding Mr Camus as a white supremacist, racist and the devil incarnate.

For all I know, he may indeed be all those things. However, by some unfortunate oversight the newspapers omit any substantive response to the face value of Mr Camus’s argument, presumably because it’s deemed too ludicrous for comment.

But, being a pernickety sort, I tend to look at arguments first and arguers a distant second. Hence, considering Mr Camus’s pronouncement in a dispassionate manner, I find it rings true on various levels.

One level is the kind of maths I studied in elementary school. I vaguely recall those baffling problems about a swimming pool with two pipes, one filling, the other draining.

Whether the pool will drain, overfill or remain roughly the same depends on the flow rates in the two pipes. That’s all I remember, so please don’t test me on further knowledge.

From that mathematical premise, Mr Camus’s comment seems unassailable. Or it would be if he could show that the current level of Islamic immigration to France, coupled with the reproduction rates of the Muslims already there, exceeds any increase in the indigenous population.

Here one doesn’t have to have a wad of actuarial tables close at hand to see that Mr Camus, an objectionable person though he may be, has a point.

Europe in general and France in particular have been accepting Muslim immigrants in their millions, defending that policy on humanitarian grounds. Far be it from me to argue against charity, but here it clashes with maths.

The world has some 1.6 billion Muslims. It wouldn’t be a gross exaggeration to suppose that at least a billion of them (and probably more) would rather live in Western Europe than in the places they tend to inhabit.

Most of them can credibly claim some kind of oppression because, alas, such is the nature of most Islamic states, where human rights campaigners are mostly used for target practice.

Considering that the population of Western Europe is under 200 million, it’s clear that the high-rent part of the continent can’t accept a billion newcomers. And even admitting a sizeable proportion of them would indeed amount to the remplacement that so upsets Mr Camus.

Yet he goes further than ascribing the influx of Muslims to the good nature of Western governments. He talks about Islamisation as a strategy adopted by Muslim leaders and carried out with the help of enthusiastic acquiescence on the part of some European leaders.

Hence the accusation of spreading conspiracy theories, levelled by the French court. Now I hate conspiracy theories, as I’m sure do you. All God’s children hate them and with good reason.

However, if said children are blessed with a rudimentary knowledge of history, they’ll know that there have always existed actual, non-theoretical conspiracies. Some of them, such as Bolshevism, pursued the goal of world domination.

Can Mr Camus argue that Islam falls into that category? Modern Islamic ideologues give him ample grounds for that. “Our victory,” the president of Algeria once said, “will come from the womb of every Muslim woman.”

And the guiding lights of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood clarified what he meant by victory. Thus Mohamed Akram: the Muslims’ task “is a kind of grand Jihad eliminating and destroying the Western civilisation from within… so that God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” And thus Kamal El-Helbawi: “Our ideal is a global Islamic state”.

Such tirades can’t be dismissed as extremist rants: they are wholly consistent with Islamic scriptural sources, including the Koran (9:33, among many other verses). One may doubt that Muslim leaders deliberately engineer massive emigration to Western Europe – but not that they see it as a demographic shift in their favour.

What about acquiescence (I dare not say collusion) on the part of Western leaders? Mr Camus finds it hard to believe that immigration of millions could have just happened spontaneously. In my weak moments, so do I.

Moreover, in Britain at least, we have a frank confession by Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair’s right hand. With honesty some would describe as cynicism, he once admitted that Blair’s government actively promoted Islamic immigration as a way of stacking the electoral pack in favour of Labour.

Not all European leaders display the same honesty, but, as that notorious white supremacist book says, “ye shall know them by their fruits”.

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

At such levels, it isn’t immigration any longer. It’s indeed colonisation or perhaps even occupation. No country, and certainly none within the core European civilisation, can afford such a situation culturally even if she can afford it economically.

Bringing that swimming pool back into the discussion, if the present tendency continues at the same pace or even at all, Mr Camus will be richly vindicated. It’s just the arithmetic, m’lord. Or whatever they call French judges.

An event that can have graver ramifications than coronavirus, has passed barely noticed.

The latest edition of the Crown Court Compendium tells judges to drop the term ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. Instead they must give “clear instruction to the jury that they have to be satisfied so that they are sure before they can convict.”

I don’t mean to trivialise the murderous pandemic. However, Britain can go through such ordeals and still remain Britain. A different Britain perhaps, but Britain nonetheless.

For, awful as such trials and tribulations are, they are peripheral to the core that makes the country what it is. But what is that core?

Some people, perhaps nowadays most, will say democracy. That view would reflect the modern obsession with form at the expense of substance. However, democracy is nothing but method of government and, as such, should be judged on the basis of the society it brings forth.

If it produces a just society, it’s to be lauded. If it doesn’t, it ought to be rebuked. But a just society is the ultimate practically achievable end, to which democracy may or may not be the best means.

The italicised words are critical. There are many pies floating through the sky, each a half-baked fantasy about universal equality, absence of poverty and disease, nonexistent crime and some such. These do nothing but distract people from what the public sphere can realistically deliver: justice.

The English Common Law arguably serves justice better than any other legal system in history. Unlike positive law practised throughout the continent, our law has evolved over centuries by carefully accumulating precedents and hence an understanding of what is and isn’t just.

While positive law is passed down from top to bottom, the English Common Law is vectored in the opposite direction. It’s based not so much on flashes of legal brilliance as on human wisdom and common sense, the more reliable faculties.

This legal system comes closer than anything else to encapsulating the British national character. Originally spinning out of scriptural commandments, it reflects such fundamental British qualities as equity, moderation, fairness, prudence.

Should the English Common Law be abandoned or debauched, Britain would no longer be Britain. Alas, debauchment is exactly what has been going on for years now.

Our common law is anchored by concepts held to be immutable for centuries. These include jury trial, habeas corpus, double jeopardy, the right not to give self-incriminating evidence – and proof beyond reasonable doubt as a standard required for a conviction.

All of these have been under a concerted assault. Margaret Thatcher, for example, didn’t hesitate to knock out one of the cornerstones: the right not to give self-incriminating evidence. Her stated reason was an upsurge in IRA terrorism.

Then in 2005, when IRA murderers had been elevated to the rank of statesmen, the government of the ghastly Tony Blair abandoned another lapidary law, that of double jeopardy. That time it used not terrorism but newly fashionable sex crimes as a pretext.

And now the requirement for the prosecution to make its case beyond reasonable doubt bites the dust. And it’s not just a change in wording.

Telling jurors “to be satisfied so that they are sure” means for them to have no doubts whatsoever, not just reasonable ones. If anything could produce even a lower conviction rate, this is it.

In fact, the demand for ‘reasonable doubt’ was introduced in the late 18^th century specifically to make it easier for jurors to convict. Otherwise they feared the ancient law threatening “the Vengeance of God…” if they convicted without being sure.

Since the vengeance of God is no longer an omnipresent concern, why change the formula that has worked well for 250 years? According to the Judicial Office, “Judges may adapt their language to avoid difficulties some juries have with the phrase ‘reasonable doubt’.”

One wonders what part of reasonable doubt they don’t understand, and how their minds would be clarified by the new demand for, effectively, absolute certainty. However, if that problem is real, it brings into question the jury system as such.

For it can’t operate as an instrument of justice in the absence of a broadly based group of people who understand what justice is. That condition isn’t being invariably met in today’s British courts.

Thus an argument that a murderer had a tough childhood has been known to produce mitigated sentences or even acquittals, race has been seen as an extenuating circumstance, and political motives have been accepted as being more noble than unvarnished savagery.

That stands to reason. Jurors have to be drawn from the available pool of humanity, which, alas, has been poisoned by decades of comprehensive non-education and ‘liberal’ propaganda. As a result, courts are beginning to act as rubber stamps of egalitarianism, rather than agents of justice.

Something needs to be done, but the demand for absolute certainty will only make matters worse. Jury selection practices (indeed principles) deserve another look, something they are unlikely to receive.

For jurors are picked from electoral rolls, and everyone on them is deemed qualified not only to decide who knocked off that jewellery shop, but even who should govern the country.

Limiting eligibility for jury duty would be tantamount to limiting franchise, which is patently impossible – as I said earlier, modernity is committed to form at the expense of substance. And the form it’s committed to demands increasingly more, not less, egalitarianism.

The threat to our legality is real, and it can do something Covid-19 can’t do: turn Britain into something else.

While it’s too early to judge Boris Johnson’s tenure, his person has been in the public eye long enough for some conclusions to be drawn.

That he has always been precociously brilliant is beyond doubt. After all, The Telegraph posted Mr Johnson to Brussels as its bureau chief at the tender age of 24, which is remarkable even by the paedocratic standards of modern times.

His subsequent career as columnist, editor, author and finally politician also shows flashes of brilliance. He is probably the best-educated PM since Churchill and the most intelligent one since Thatcher.

He also enjoys (if that’s the right word) a reputation for being priapic and louche, which, though unfortunate, isn’t unforgivable. Neither quality is particularly rare among highly driven men seeking public appeal, though at times one wishes our PM displayed more gravity and less levity.

All things considered, one can already see that Mr Johnson is a vast improvement on every PM since Thatcher, a contrast made especially striking if one compares his way of handling both Brexit and the general election with Mr Cameron’s and Mrs May’s.

Hence it would be curmudgeonly to gripe about Mr Johnson’s intellectual failings, small as they are by comparison to his predecessors’. However, abandoning for a second the relativist comparative standards, one is justified in lamenting the dim background against which Mr Johnson shines.

For, as the evolution of his views on the EU shows, he makes up in brilliance what he lacks in depth. The same process casts doubt on his integrity as well.

In a 2014 interview our future PM explained that he had been a Eurosceptic since his Brussels posting from 1989 to 1994: “The fundamental idea of free trade, cooperation and mutual respect, ensuring France and Germany never go to war again… that is fundamentally not a bad idea.

“The question is ‘do you need to create supranational institutions acquiring ever greater centralised power?’ I became convinced in my time in Brussels for The Daily Telegraph that it was not necessary.”

There Mr Johnson essentially repeated the EU propaganda line mendaciously claiming that free trade and peace are the main reasons for its existence. In fact, any serious study of that institution’s history shows that creating a central supranational state has always been its overarching end.

Everything else, including “free trade, cooperation and mutual respect” has always been merely camouflage designed not to scare off the prey, potential members.

Peace between Germany and France is indeed a good idea, especially since these countries tend to draw everyone else into a conflict between them. But that aim was already achieved in 1945-1960, when Germany was effectively disarmed, and France went on to become a nuclear power during de Gaulle’s administration.

In spite of his epiphany, Mr Johnson managed to do a good job containing his opposition to the EU. Until 2016 he had been publishing ‘balanced’ articles highlighting arguments in favour of that pernicious contrivance.

In fact, his coming out in favour of Brexit in 2016 caught David Cameron by surprise: he had been counting on Mr Johnson’s support for the Remain cause, and not without reason. Later Johnson contradicted his earlier stories about his Damascene experience in Brussels by spinning a nice yarn about Epiphany Mark II.

Apparently, when the issue came to a boil at referendum time, he sat down and wrote two articles, one arguing in favour of the EU, the other against. He then weighed the two pieces in the balance and found the second piece more persuasive – this in spite of having supposedly realised that the EU was “unnecessary” more than a decade earlier.

Two things are reasonably obvious here. First, Mr Johnson’s understanding of the EU was superficial and clichéd – he clearly never gave himself the trouble to study the issue at sufficient depth. Second, if he has any convictions on this or indeed any other matter, they are strictly secondary to political expediency.

His championship of the Brexit cause, welcome as it was, was motivated not by rational arguments weighed one against another, but by a cold calculation of the effect either position would have on his own electoral chances.

His calculation has proved correct, and I for one am grateful for the support he gave the Brexit cause, and also for his success in keeping Trotskyist ghouls out of government.

Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect to see present-day Burkes in our government. In fact, it’s full of them, but there the word is spelled differently. Mr Johnson isn’t the worst option, which is less than effusive praise. It’s merely a realistic assessment.

Reading our newspapers, one could get the impression that the virus is a fully paid-up EDL member and Tommy Robinson’s best friend.

It’s clearly biased against blacks and ethnic minorities (BME), this at a time when even telling an ethnic joke may lead to unemployment for life. To its credit, coronavirus doesn’t mock ethnic minorities. To its eternal shame, it kills them.

Just look at the statistics. Blacks and Asians make up a mere 13 per cent of the UK population (Tommy would take exception to the ‘mere’ part), and yet they are occupying a third of all Covid-19 intensive care beds. And the plight of medical personnel is even worse.

Two thirds of NHS staff killed by the virus come from BME groups. This isn’t something the Royal College of Physicians is going to take lying down, as it were. Thus spoke its spokesman: “This issue needs to be addressed urgently. Ethnicity should be considered a risk factor in the same way age is.”

The issue is indeed being addressed urgently. Some hospitals are moving BME medics from frontline to support duties, which may create a staffing problem. After all, depending on the area, BME nurses make up 20 to 40 per cent of the NHS total number.

At the same time Carol Cooper, Head of Equality, Diversity and Human Rights at Birmingham Community Hospital (one wonders how the hospital functioned when that post didn’t exist), complains that some BME nurses are deliberately “being taken from the wards that they usually work on and put on the Covid wards and they feel that there is a bias. Many of them are terrified.”

As well they should be. Yet Miss Cooper sounds as if it’s not just Covid but also the NHS that is so racist that it uses BME personnel for genocidal purposes.

But why are blacks and Asians so vulnerable? As with everything else about Covid, no one really knows.

Many genetic, social and cultural factors are mentioned as possible culprits, and I can’t claim sufficient expertise even to list them. Yet I do have some background in looking at statistical data, and that experience has made me sceptical, not to say cynical.

A case in point, if I may. If, as experts testify, blacks and Asians are especially vulnerable to Covid because they have a rogue protein in their lungs and also suffer from a higher incidence of hypertension and Type 2 diabetes, then mortality statistics shouldn’t change much from one place to another.

Yet, according to the US National Center for Health Statistics, they do.

A report issued on 20 April shows that white Americans have a higher mortality rate (159 per million) than black Americans (132) and much higher than Asian Americans (62).

By far the highest mortality (373) was recorded in the OTHER group, mostly comprising people of mixed race. Apparently, black or Asian blood is at its most dangerous when served not neat but in cocktails.

I can’t explain this transatlantic disparity. All I can do is repeat the leitmotif ubiquitous in every possible medium, from tabloids to medical journals to government press releases: we haven’t a clue.

And one thing governments haven’t a clue about is the safest exit strategy. Yet one could hazard a guess on their plans, a temptation always hard to resist.

Apparently the governments of most Western countries, including Britain, have decided to follow a wait-and-see strategy that, depending on one’s disposition, one could describe as pragmatic, cynical or even dishonest.

They don’t want to take responsibility for lifting lockdowns too early and risking another spike in the pandemic. Nor do they want to cause an even deadlier damage to the economy by prolonging the lockdowns indefinitely.

Instead they seem to be relying on spontaneous public revolts flaring up everywhere. These can vary from rallies featuring firearms, as in several American states, to the more passive British response of getting out more, on foot or by car.

If coronavirus spikes as a result, the governments will tighten up the restrictions, while blaming people for their irresponsibility. If, on the other hand, the number of cases goes down, the governments will be able to step in, lift the restrictions and tout their own wisdom.

In other words, our politicians are acting in character, as they always do. Politics comes first, second and tenth. Human lives matter, but not nearly as much as the blame for their loss.

Oh well, seems like it’s not only statistics that I am sceptical, not to say cynical, about. Must be a character flaw.  

Merkel and Macron don’t see eye to eye on lending the poorer EU members a helping hand. In fact, it’s the word ‘lending’ that encapsulates their disagreement.

According to Merkel, aid to the stragglers should come as loans to be repaid – a version of the wartime Lend-Lease.

Macron, on the other hand, favours a straightforward bailout – a version of the post-war Marshall Plan.

That is, Merkel is prepared to offer bailout grants too, but only if the recipients submit to mandated tax policies, which is to say put paid to what little remains of their sovereignty. Otherwise, it’s a firm nein.

“The countries that are blocking [my proposal],” complained Manny, “are the same ones as ever, the frugals: Germany, the Netherlands, whose deep psychology and political constraints justify very hard positions.”

What interests me here isn’t so much Macron’s generosity as the perceived lack thereof on the part of the so-called ‘frugals’. What exactly is the nature of their frugality?

If Manny weren’t a modern man, he’d use a more precise word: Protestant. For that’s the schismatic form of Christianity predominantly espoused in the countries he finds so uncooperative.

Here he could do worse than reread (read?) Max Weber’s 1905 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Weber’s analysis hinges on the causative link between the Reformation and capitalism, both its rise and spread. Yet capitalism, narrowly defined as the use of one’s own or borrowed capital to economic ends, had been spreading steadily throughout the Middle Ages – in spite of the variously vigorous resistance on the part of the Church.

I’d suggest that replacing ‘Capitalism’ with ‘Renaissance humanism’ would make the title just as valid. The subsequent argument would revolve around the Reformation being in some important ways a continuation of the Renaissance by other means. But, to make that argument, Weber would have had to delve deep into matters religious, which wasn’t really his forte.

It is, however, a fact that Northern Italy was already in the 14^th century the banking centre of Europe. In a critical development, one of the Avignon Popes, John XXII, rejected the Franciscan insistence on the absolute poverty of Jesus and his apostles, thus setting the stage for the ecclesiastical endorsement of wealth.

The most important development came in 1403 when charging interest on loans was ruled legal in Florence. That was the first time neonatal capitalism managed to sweep aside the de jure resistance of the Church in a Christian society.

There is no denying that capitalism benefited from the Reformation, but was it caused by it? The answer is probably no, and Weber tacitly acknowledged as much.

But neither is this a case of a simple coincidence in time. Witness the fact that even in our time, Protestant countries boast a per capita GDP 1.5 times higher than in Catholic nations, three times higher than in Orthodox ones, and five times higher than in Muslim lands – this despite an ocean of petrodollars sloshing underfoot in the largest Orthodox country and quite a few Muslim ones.

Only modern ignoramuses would ignore religion as both a formative factor of national character and its reflection. That most European countries are now secular only masks that link, rather than severing it.

France introduced her laïcité in the same year Weber published his seminal work, and secularism has since become a matter of ideology there, with many Frenchmen openly mocking Christianity.

That’s their business, but the French, including their leader, should be aware of the intellectual cost of secularism. For, even though ideology is a cognate of idea, the two words are more philosophically opposite than related.

If Macron and other EU ideologues didn’t discard religion in their analysis, they’d think twice before shilling for a single state comprising nations of different religious backgrounds and therefore different characters.

Catholicism, Eastern and Greek Orthodoxy, Lutheran and Calvinist Protestantism are all represented among EU members, and the Muslim Bosnia will soon join the fold. Such incidentals may not matter to EU ideologues, but they ignore them at their peril.

It takes someone whose reason is densely clouded by ideology to expect, say, the Greeks, Italians, Germans, Frenchmen, Swedes and Bosnians to homogenise their economic behaviour enough to function successfully under the same economic policies or even principles.

Religion isn’t the only tectonic fault in the EU, but it’s perhaps the deepest. An earthquake is bound to occur sooner or later, and neither a Lend-Lease nor a Marshall Plan will stop it in the long run.

“If you let part of Europe fall, the whole of Europe will fall,” warns Manny, meaning the EU. From his mouth to God’s ear, I say.

Having grown up in a country where people were supposed to jump up and applaud on cue at various public rallies, I may be oversensitive to mandated collective enthusiasm.

Perhaps it does take heightened sensitivity to detect something sinister in such public displays. Yet even someone without my experience should at least sense they are in excruciatingly bad taste.

This is reflected in the ambiguous name for this new-fangled practice: CLAP FOR CARERS. It took me a while to realise that the first word is actually a verb rather than a noun. At first I couldn’t figure out why we should wish such an unpleasant disease on our heroic medics.

But double entendres aside, those clapping lemmings aren’t just potential putty in tyrants’ hands, and not merely people devoid of elementary taste. As their yesterday’s display showed, they are also stupid.

Hundreds of them gathered on Westminster Bridge at 8pm last night to prove they are happy to trade their individuality for mob membership. No social distancing was anywhere in sight: someone ought to have told the lemmings that two metres is rather more than two inches.

Hence, while celebrating the medics, the mob was doing its best to increase their workload. After all, social distancing regulations are there for a purpose, aren’t they?

Don’t closely packed crowds make it easier for the virus to spread? If so, the whole exercise looked somewhat circuitous: first the celebrants increase the number of patients in care, then they ‘clap the carers’. There’s no logic to it.

Unless, of course, they know something the rest of us don’t, that social distancing, lockdowns, face masks and so forth are a load of malarkey, ignored by people in the know.

There were quite a few possessors of that secret knowledge on the bridge: not just the ordinary happy-clappers, but also some staffers of the near-by St Thomas’ Hospital, and a heavy police presence led by the Met Police chief Cressida Dick (considering her predilections, that surname is an aptonym if I’ve ever seen one).

The back-up sound was provided by parked ambulances with their blaring sirens. The scene was sickening in every sense of the word.

Since Miss Dick’s job has less to do with policing than politics, one can understand her desire to grab any photo op going. What’s less immediately clear is how the police can then justify banning people from saying good-bye to their dying relations in hospitals.

Let’s remind ourselves that a just society is always rational, while a tyranny hardly ever is. On the contrary, it works by replacing reason with reflexes, sentiment with sentimentality and individuality with a craving for group identity.

That’s why aspiring despots always seek to draw people into a collective entity, house-trained to express joy or, as need be, indignation. Reason or – on yesterday’s evidence – prudence doesn’t come into it at all. In fact, people are actively encouraged to act irrationally and stupidly. 

Yet it’s not only coronavirus but also, more important, tyranny that ought to be kept at bay. And the best way of doing so is to resist being shepherded into a herd. We are neither sheep nor lemmings – we are people created in the image and likeness of God.

That our doctors and nurses have earned our gratitude is beyond doubt. But we ought to express gratitude as people, not livestock. May I suggest a quiet prayer of thanks?

The other day I wrote a facetious piece about protection against coronavirus. I ended on a joke that some of my readers found offensively misogynist, and one I vowed never to repeat (“There’s no such thing as an ugly woman. There’s only not enough booze.”).

Now, by way of redemption, I feel duty-bound to offset levity with gravity by writing a serious piece about a genuinely effective protection technique based on a law of nature discovered by… well, me.

Unlike many such discoveries, this one didn’t start with an a priori assumption, otherwise known as hypothesis. Instead it emerged a posteriori as a result of drawing inference from a body of empirical observation.

Covid-19 has made tennis impossible and, wife beating not being a viable exercise option, I had to look for some other physical activity. Hence I started walking miles every day, something I hadn’t done since my Moscow youth, when I had no car, hated public transport and couldn’t afford taxis.

Since the pandemic struck I’ve clocked the better part of 100 miles, walking London streets, parks and cemeteries. On my strolls I studiously observe the mandated 2-meter (6’7”) distance from other pedestrians.

Some of them follow suit eagerly, some reluctantly, some not at all. Obviously, telling those groups apart is important for someone who doesn’t wish to curtail his life expectancy.

But how can you anticipate the width of the berth you can expect from a pedestrian? To answer this vital question I’ve turned every walk into a scientific experiment, gathering and mentally tabulating data with the meticulousness of a committed researcher.

Only when I felt that my study sample was wide and representative enough did I attempt to draw some general conclusions. And only after I drew such conclusions did I arrive at an immutable law of human nature.

Here it is: generally speaking, the higher the pedestrian’s class, the wider the berth he’ll give you – and vice versa.

When I shared this discovery with Penelope, her first reaction was that of incredulity. However, invited to make her own observations on this morning’s 4-mile trek, she confirmed my findings.

Mine, however, isn’t an exercise in scholarly abstractions. This discovery has wide practical applications, and in many cases it can make the difference between life and death.

Hence, when choosing a route for an urban walk, one ought to map it though the kind of neighbourhoods where most other strollers can be confidently predicted to fall into the A and B+ social categories.

If you walk only in your own area, you probably know which side of the track is right and which isn’t. Yet if you venture too far outside your home patch, there are certain telltale signs to look for.

In the UK, the cars parked in residential streets are a reliable indicator. If most of them are upmarket German, with a smattering of Aston Martins, Jaguars and perhaps the odd Lexus, you’ll know your life is safe – especially if the cars are late models with an average resale value of £40,000-plus.

Conversely, if you see many beat-up Vauxhalls, Fords and iffy models from Southwest Asia, think of that neighbourhood as a leper colony: any local resident coming your way may make a homicide attempt of exhaling on you.

If you don’t know much about cars, you’re well advised to carry a copy of the Which Car? guide. It doesn’t weigh enough to slow you down, and it could save your life.

(IMPORTANT NOTICE: The car test may not work in other countries. Wealthy continentals, especially Frenchmen, are afflicted with both reverse snobbery and excessive parsimony. As a result, they routinely drive 20-year-old bangers that were no great shakes to begin with, the kind of cars that no self-respecting Londoner would be caught dead in. A Frenchman in a brand-new Porsche is likely to be either a drug dealer or a PSG footballer.)

Windows provide another useful indicator. Any mesh, net or muslin curtains on any windows, no matter how few, should have the same effect on you as a leper’s bell had on a medieval pilgrim. Run for your life.

The presence of much scaffolding in a street is a good sign. It suggests that the residents have enough money to improve or even expand their houses. Such people are unlikely to risk close proximity to a pedestrian. But do watch out for the workmen on the scaffolding: they may come down and walk towards you, chattering away in Polish.

And finally, make sure the area has no mosques, nor churches exhibiting a Jesus Saves sign or similar.

Of course, it’s possible for the wrong people to find themselves in the right neighbourhoods. How can you spot such interlopers?

Here are a few things to watch for: legible T-shirts, socks worn with sandals, any clothing items bespeaking support for any sports team, baseball caps (especially if worn backwards), tattoos and facial metal, closely cropped hair if any, excessive weight and – above all – a feral facial expression permanently frozen in a belligerent grimace.

When you see an individual like that coming your way, cross over to the other side of the street and hope he doesn’t take it personally.

Just remember: now that you know the Boot Law, there’s no reason you can’t walk the streets safely. Yet you’ll be even better off staying at home, saving lives and — most important — protecting the NHS. Or did I get the slogan wrong?