Blog

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?

Thank you NHS signs adorn London streets. And at 8 pm every Thursday, thousands of lemmings in the throes of mandated collective enthusiasm rush to their window to applaud the NHS.

An outside observer could assume that the NHS is saving lives. Yet such an assumption would be based on what in rhetoric is called a category error. In this case, the error is in confusing NHS doctors and nurses with the institution that employs them.

That our heroic frontline troops are risking – and losing – their lives in the battle against the pandemic is beyond doubt. Yet their heroism no more justifies the NHS than the Light Brigade’s heroism vindicated the system that had sent those young men to charge Russian guns at Balaklava.

Doctors and nurses become doctors and nurses because they want to save lives. They do so under any system of medical care in His creation: private, public or a mixture of the two. They even try to save lives where no system exists, say in the far ends of Africa.

And of course they do so in Britain. Yet here they do their noble work not because of the NHS but in spite of it.

Acting in the manner of every giant socialist bureaucracy, the NHS ties medical professionals hand and foot with red tape, buries them under an avalanche of idiotic forms, wastes their time in courses on such non-subjects as diversity, subjugates them to self-serving administrators and consultants.

To create high-paying positions for those parasites, the NHS cuts hospital beds and frontline jobs. As a result, more and more excellent doctors who can’t take that nonsense any longer retire in their 50s or even 40s.

Now that coronavirus has scared the country out of its wits, medical professionals find it easier to navigate their way around parasitic administrators to do their jobs more efficiently than they ever could before.

Part of the reason the NHS is now moving somewhat faster than normally is that it grudgingly has to accept help from private enterprise. But the system’s socialist DNA still forces it to sabotage such cooperation – even with lives at stake.

Thus a British PPE manufacturer had to sell millions of masks, gowns and aprons abroad because the NHS was giving it a bureaucratic run-around. The manufacturer said it had spent “five weeks hammering at the government’s door”, all to no avail.

According to the BBC, at least five other companies have been unable to contact the government with offers of supplies. Many MPs also have similar stories to tell about their constituencies.

And even Labour MP Diane ‘Corbyn’ Abbott, herself a borderline communist, complained: “I have at least one company that has hit a brick wall with the NHS bureaucracy.”

When even socialists begin to whinge about a socialist showcase, things must be really bad. Let’s remember that next time when we feel compelled to thank the NHS.

False modesty aside, I can claim I’ve come close to solving the problem of coronavirus.

Well, perhaps solving the problem is a bit of an overstatement. But I can certainly suggest preventive measures that have so far escaped the medics’ attention. They seem to be unable to connect the dots already in the public domain.

DOT 1: Men are dying of coronavirus at twice the rate of women. My question is, why does this misandrist virus discriminate against men? Is it to pay us back for discriminating against women?

Logical as this guess sounds, it presupposes that the virus possesses a capacity for rational thought and moral judgement, which is unlikely. Yet a physiological explanation is out there, hiding in plain view.

It turns out that men’s testicles provide a safe haven for the virus. Covid-19 gets down there, bonds with testicular proteins and refuses to leave with the obduracy of a Romanian squatter. It then strikes – and Bob’s your undertaker.

This much is well-known, to any tabloid reader at any rate. Yet no one before me had been able to draw the right conclusion. No one had experienced the same flash of inspiration.

Archimedes in his bath, Newton under that apple tree, Mendeleyev snoring in his bed – looking at that information, I experienced a similar, ostensibly spontaneous flash of discovery.

If your testicles can kill you, why not just have them removed prophylactically? (This procedure is best performed professionally. But, if you opt for the DIY solution, remember to disinfect your garden shears beforehand).

If you find this preventive measure too drastic, think of Angelina Jolie who had a prophylactic double mastectomy because she was afraid she might get breast cancer. And Angelina’s breasts were a money-spinning asset, unlike your testicles (if you’re not a Y-front model).

You won’t be able to have children afterwards, but who needs those little spongers anyway? Yet when it comes to the really important things in life, otherwise known as how’s-your-father, fear nought.

Regular testosterone injections will keep what’s left of your genitalia in working order. And, job done, your girlfriend happy, your wife none the wiser, you can still reach for that cigarette.

DOT 2. No, I’m not kidding. I realise that most of you probably don’t smoke. But, unless you wish to defy medical research, you’d better start.

It turns out that cigarette smoke keeps Covid-19 at bay. That discovery was made by David Hockney, better known for his paintings than for medical breakthroughs.

However, this amateur’s revelation was supported by professionals. For example, one US study showed that, while 14 per cent of all Americans smoke, only 1.3 per cent of coronavirus patients are smokers. In Britain, the corresponding numbers are similar.

So go ahead, light up and, unlike Bill Clinton, you can even inhale. Eventually you may die of lung cancer, but ‘eventually’ is the operative word. Whereas cancer will be years in arriving, coronavirus may kill you next week.

Leaving the domain of medical science, we’re now entering one of my personal observation.

DOT 3. Covid-19 discriminates not only against men but also against blacks, who suffer at two to three times the scale of their proportion in the population.

Since no one can explain this phenomenon adequately, here comes my observation. I wish to disclaim in advance that I’m drawing no conclusions on this basis, and neither I hope will you.

Penelope and I walk some three miles every day, with our trajectory resembling a slalom rate: whenever another couple comes our way, we veer to one side in a single file, they veer to the other, and the cause of social distancing is dutifully served.

Now it pains me to have to say this, but black couples we come across are much less likely to make such adjustments. If that’s a general tendency, could it explain the higher incidence of coronavirus in that group? I don’t know. But all the dots now connected support the ancient adage of prevention being the best cure.

P.S. Speaking of prevention and ancient adages, some irresponsible chaps complain that mandatory face masks will make it hard to tell pretty women from ugly ones.

They would be well-advised to remember the old Russian wisdom: There’s no such thing as an ugly woman. There’s only not enough booze.

There’s an opportunity in every crisis, and Manny Macron sensed that coronavirus presents an opportunity of a lifetime.

“I believe the EU is a political project,” he declared, thereby abandoning the legacy of the EU founders. Yes, they, the Monnets, de Gasperis, Schumans of this world, knew that their goal was political: the creation of a single European superstate.

But they largely kept that knowledge to themselves, wary of scaring off potential suckers. Instead they insisted that, for tactical purposes, every step towards further integration should be presented as a purely economic measure.

Isn’t it a good idea to pool our coal and steel production? Of course it is. Fine, now we’ve done that, shouldn’t we create a free trade zone? We all believe in free trade, but no? And so forth, until the time came to ditch subterfuge and relegate those perfidious founders to distant history.

The EU is indeed a political project and only that – always was, always is, always will be. Manny thus gets top marks for honesty from his foster mother Brigitte. But politicking is an expensive business. So who’ll pick up the tab?

That’s where the opportunity knocked, and Manny grabbed it with both hands: “We have no choice but to set up a fund that could issue common debt with a common guarantee.” And obviously that would mean a common finance minister at least or, better still, a common government with Manny at the helm.

Now imagine the same proposal being put to the denizens of a village. Some of them would own their houses outright, others would be up to their ears in mortgages and remortgages. Taking a wild guess, which group will support the idea of mutualising debt and which one would oppose it?

The answer is obvious. Just as obviously Germany, Holland and other northern EU members, net EU contributors all, are up in arms, while Italy, Spain and all other broke countries teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, back the idea wholeheartedly.

Manny was aghast at the selfishness of the sales boches. “Qu’est que c’est que ce bordel?” he screamed. “The whole damn EU thing was your idea, not just ours, and now you refuse to pay? What d’you want, kick the project into touch?!?”

This is a rather loose rendition of Manny’s actual tirade. But he did say words to that effect: “If we can’t do this today, I tell you the populists will win – today, tomorrow, the day after, in Italy, in Spain, perhaps in France and elsewhere.”

In case your EU is somewhat rusty, allow me to translate. In that language, ‘populists’ is a broad-spectrum term of abuse designating a) conservatives, b) patriots, c) those harbouring doubts about a European superstate, d) Marine Le Pen, e) those who dislike Manny and f) generally disagreeable individuals.

So yet again those northern overachievers will have to crack their chequebooks open, for understated generosity will spell “the collapse of the European idea”, as Manny put it.

This isn’t time for fiscal sanity, free enterprise and sound economics in general, he explained. “We are going to nationalise the wages and the financial accounts of almost all our businesses. That’s what we’re doing. All our economies, including the most liberal are doing that. It’s against all the dogmas, but that’s the way it is.”

Yet again a translation is called for. What Manny means is that all EU members should use the pandemic as a smokescreen behind which they can push through wholesale nationalisation.

Splendid idea, that, but I have to disagree on one minor point. That sort of thing isn’t against “all the dogmas”. Quite the opposite: it fully conforms to the dogmas laid down in Das Kapital and its spinoffs.

Thereby yet another cat jumps out of the bag whose strings were loosened by Manny. ‘The European idea’ is a socialist idea, and that’s all it can ever be. It’s a scaled-down version of a single world government, a notion cherished in every socialist heart.

And, divested of its bien pensant jargon, based on Christian ideals of brotherhood and solidarity bowdlerised and perverted, socialism is nothing but the tyranny of a giant central state. That’s the ‘idea’ for which Manny’s loins ache. His speech is nothing but an attempted power grab: he clearly sees himself as a potential present-day Charlemagne, minus all that ‘Holy’ business.

Now how do you describe the moral character of a chap who regards a deadly pandemic as a propitious moment to push through his pernicious political agenda?

I could provide a description or two, but I’m opposed to swearing in print.

P.S. My one-time friend Roy Kerridge, the last great eccentric among journalists and the last great journalist among eccentrics, died on 6 April. RIP.

Modernity’s first inaugurating document stated its commitment to “the pursuit of happiness”.

That word wasn’t used in the Greek sense of eudemonia, which more or less equated happiness with virtue. As a subsequent document, the Federalist papers, explained, happiness was mainly understood in the material sense: money, acquisition, comfort.

By itself, there was nothing wrong with that. But that commitment didn’t come by itself. It came packaged with an attempt to build a new civilisation around the common man and his material aspirations.

That common man, the axis around which the new civilisation was to rotate, was deprived of religion, which is to say a check on his passions and appetites. Love stepped aside as the desideratum of life, to be replaced by greed (provided it was expressed within human laws).

Aristotle warned about the dangers of such an arrangement some four centuries before Christ: “A society that pursues wealth rather than morality will end up using this wealth against itself.”

What we are observing at the moment vindicates that maxim. For the pandemic was largely caused by our voracious appetite for cheap goods and therefore greater comfort.

Hence we avidly do business with evil regimes in the name of free trade and globalisation. However, when we step outside our civilisation, free movement of goods may well result in the free movement of infections.

Communist China has a callous disregard for human lives and the practices that protect them. Hence most major blights have in my lifetime originated there. They include the murderous pandemics of Asian flu in 1957 and 1968, and, emphatically, the current disaster.

Enough has been said about the mechanisms involved. Perhaps the most evil thing those heirs to Mao did was putting their reputation before human lives, which is why they lied about both the onset of the pandemic and its scale.

Yet it’s we in the West who have blithely turned an evil regime into a world power: our greed came before any moral considerations, and now our commercial amorality is backfiring yet again in a crudely material way.

The West has form in such suicidal commercialism. The two most satanic regimes of modernity, Bolshevism and Nazism, wouldn’t have reached maturity without huge injections of Western capital and technology. And today the West spares no effort to absorb the looted lucre of Russia’s kleptofascist regime and the cheap goods flooding in from communist China.

None of my message is a call to poverty. Note that Aristotle was only talking about relative priorities, not absolutes. He warned not against pursuing wealth as such, but only against putting that activity above morality.

Christianity followed the same logic. Its injunctions were aimed not at money in se but at a wrong sense of priorities.

People had traded goods they produced since time immemorial. Since money was sometimes involved as a means of exchange, it was natural to expect that more money would eventually end up in some hands than in others.

Hence labour implicitly presupposed the possibility of enrichment. Yet in spite of that the New Testament contains direct endorsements of work.

These come across in the Lord’s Prayer (“give us this day our daily bread”), in Jesus the carpenter talking about “the labourer worthy of his hire”, in Paul the tent maker saying that “if any would not work, neither shall he eat.”

This was understood by Christian theologians. Thus Aquinas: “The perfection of the Christian life does not consist essentially in voluntary poverty, though that is a tool of perfection in life. There is not necessarily greater perfection where there is greater poverty; and indeed the highest perfection is sometimes wedded to great wealth…”

Note the qualifiers: ‘essentially’, ‘not necessarily’, ‘sometimes’. Rather than issuing a licence to acquisitiveness, Aquinas was expressing the fundamental Christian view on pursuing wealth: Go on then, if you must. Jesus, after all, only said man shall not live by bread alone, not that man shall live by no bread at all. But do remember what comes first.

Addressing seven centuries after Aquinas a world that no longer put God first, John Paul II said essentially the same thing: “It is necessary to create lifestyles in which the quest for truth, beauty, goodness and communion with others for the sake of common growth are the factors which determine consumer choices, savings and investments.”

That was wishful thinking. A West where wealth could be approached in that manner is long since gone. Yet, though we can no longer be expected to do the right thing, we can still identify it.

As a general rule, we mustn’t trade with evil regimes: lying with dogs can have most unpleasant hygienic consequences, such as catching Covid-19.

As immediate measures, we should suspend all trade with China and impound the looted Russian funds laundered through our financial institutions. We’d suffer some short-term commercial damage, but nothing like the economic catastrophe that’ll follow this pandemic.

We’d still be capable of making as much money as we need. We’d still be able to invest our surplus income. We’d still be able to live in decent comfort, eat good food and wear stylish clothes. Yet we’d be able to do all those things without destroying either our souls or our societies.

For that to happen, we’d have to backtrack to the guiding principles of the civilisation we’ve systematically betrayed. That means it won’t happen: we are too set in our ways, too incapable of learning our lessons. Including the one being taught at the moment.

I’ve followed the destinies of all post-war presidents, although my memory of Truman is compromised by my age at the time. That’s 12 presidents all together.

On the basis of that survey sample, I can state with absolute confidence that not a single one of them has divided opinions as much as Donald Trump.

The emotional pitch reached by those who love him is only matched in intensity by the febrile fervour of Trump haters. No middle ground is anywhere in evidence, which forms a vacuum famously abhorred by nature.

Acting on nature’s behalf, my feelings about Trump touch neither extreme of love or hate. Instead they cover a narrower range, demarcated by squeamish revulsion at one end and grudging appreciation at the other.

The first end covers Trump’s personality; the second, many of his policies. And the past few days have bolstered both ends.

First, the president confirmed yet again my general assessment of his character. As an admirer of our civilisation, I’m saddened to see a man so spectacularly untouched by it.

Trump is ignorant, vulgar, rude, bombastic, narcissistic, impulsive, loud-mouthed and generally savage. Such qualities aren’t rare among the first generation of wealth in an American family.

However, the scions of chaps who clawed their way to riches (such as Trump) tend to acquire gentlemanly manners, decent education, refined or at least grammatical speech and sometimes even culture.

Trump bucks this trend like a demented mustang. At times he displays unconscionable vulgarity accompanied by grotesque ignorance.

On Monday, for example, he declared that he could order individual states to end the lockdown when he saw fit. “When somebody is the President of the United States, the authority is total,” Trump explained.

Eh, not quite. Replace ‘the United States’ with ‘Russia’ or ‘Zimbabwe’, and the statement would be unassailable. In the US, however, there exists this minor matter of the Constitution, which Trump undertook to “preserve, protect and defend”.

Its Tenth Amendment specifies that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Nowhere does it say that the president has total authority to end lockdowns.

In response to some governors’ demurring, Trump displayed the breadth of his cultural references: “Tell the Democrat Governors that ‘Mutiny On The Bounty’ was one of my all time favorite movies. A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain.”

He’d do better drawing his inspiration from the Federalist papers than from a Hollywood concoction. However, he got even that modest reference wrong: the mutineers of the Bounty put their captain in a lifeboat and set him adrift. Or perhaps, rather than getting the film wrong, Trump revealed his fear of suffering a similar fate after the November election.

Then, at a press briefing, a CBS correspondent challenged Trump’s self-serving boast that he had saved lives by restricting travel from China. She pointed out, not unreasonably, that it had taken him a month and a half to recommend social distancing.

Trump’s response was in character: “You’re so disgraceful, it’s so disgraceful the way you say that… You’re a fake. Your whole network is a fake.”

Though it’s hard to argue against his general assessment of CBS, civilised people don’t respond to substantive criticism that way. Barbarians do, and that’s exactly what Trump is.

However, and here we reach the other end of my feelings about the president, he’s the kind of barbarian who gets many of his policies right. Thus one has to applaud his decision to withdraw US funding from the WHO.

That organisation was complicit with China in suppressing the early data on the deadly effect of Covid-19. That’s hardly surprising because Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, comes from Ethiopia, China’s client state.

Even though US contributions to the WHO were 10 times the size of China’s, Tedros never breaks his labio-gluteal contact with China and follows its lead with unswerving devotion.

That’s why he ignored the data provided by Taiwan’s government as early as in December. In an e-mailed letter based on in situ research by Taiwanese scientists, Taiwan informed the WHO that an unknown virus was causing atypical pneumonia.

However, as far as China (and therefore Tedros) is concerned, Taiwan is a non-country, and therefore anything it says must be ignored. When the pandemic spread, Tedros even lied that no such letter had been received, forcing Taiwan’s government to produce the e-mail with its date.

China and the WHO are thus accomplices in a crime. Their shenanigans caused a deadly delay in other countries’ response to coronavirus and cost thousands of lives. I don’t know what Trump’s response to China will be, but his suspension of WHO funding was justified and, well, presidential.

There you have it, a dichotomy in the flesh. On balance, if I still voted in US elections, I’d pinch my nostrils and opt for Trump, what with the alternative being unimaginable. But I wouldn’t feel good about myself in the morning.

Looking at the fatality statistics around the world, one might think that Covid-19 is doing a good killing job without any outside assistance.

However, as far as Moscow’s mayor is concerned, there’s no limit to excellence. And fair enough, he must feel that the city is grossly overpopulated.

When I left Russia in 1973, Moscow’s population was a meagre seven million. Today it stands at a whopping 12 to 15 million, depending on who’s counting. Just think of providing enough residences and municipal services for that human beehive – not an easy problem by any means.

Hence Mayor Sobyanin, while publicly bemoaning the human cost of the pandemic, must secretly see it as more of a solution than a problem. Anyone wishing to contest this hypothesis should look at his actions, not listen to his words.

Since Muscovites aren’t the most obedient people in the world, their compliance with the lockdown is less than perfect. That’s why the mayor introduced a tracking system, whereby anyone wishing to leave home has to download a digital code.

That may be granted or denied, depending on how valid that person’s reasons are for going walkabout. Those who satisfy the authorities on that score download their code and rush to the nearest tube station.

Alas, the new system makes the Moscow underground as hard to enter as a top secret defence installation.

Everyone wishing to avail himself of that conveyance must produce his digitalised pass and also his internal passport. The policemen at the door scrutinise both documents and check the digital code on their computer.

As a result, the average waiting time at the entrance is 30 to 40 minutes. As you can see on the photograph above, the social distancing in the crowd outside is somewhat less than the requisite two metres.

That way a single carrier of Covid-19 can infect hundreds before catching his train, thereby striking a most satisfying blow for population control. And that’s not all.

Those Muscovites who have their own cars naturally turn to them as a healthier form of transport. If in my day such lucky individuals were about as rare as private jet owners are in London, today’s Moscow boasts some 3.5 million privately owned cars.

Since the city is ill-equipped to handle such volume of vehicular traffic, even some billionaires prefer to travel on the plebeian tube: the social cachet isn’t quite the same, but at least one gets to one’s destination quickly.

Now what do you reckon happens to traffic when even the plebs have to turn to their cars? Correct. It gets much worse.

In fact, one can easily spend an hour in traffic jams anywhere in Moscow. That’s bad enough even for regular drivers, but all they risk is tardiness and perhaps some hypertension. Alas, some of the vehicles stuck next to them are ambulances, and for them an hour’s delay may well be a matter of life or death.

That’s a population-control double whammy: Muscovites catch the virus at the entrance to the tube. Then those who find themselves in ambulances can’t get to hospital. Job done.

So spare a thought for them next time you bitch about the way coronavirus is handled in London, Paris or New York. Thing can be a hell of a lot worse.

As an EU fanatic, Manny Macron is bound to despise even representative democracy, never mind the direct kind.

But, to paraphrase ever so slightly, Manny proposes and gilets jaunes dispose. A few months of riots, threatening to become a full-blown revolution, thrust some direct democracy down Manny’s throat, constricted as it was by fear.

You don’t like my way of saving the planet from warm weather? he finally asked the rebellious, yellow-clad populace. Fine, do it yourselves, see if I care.

The mission of saving the planet was thus delegated to a panel of 150 members of the public called the Citizens’ Convention for the Climate. Chosen at random, said Citizens were promised that their proposals would be either implemented or at least put to parliamentary vote.

Predictably, the Citizens came up with ideas that, if put into action, would neatly dovetail with coronavirus to put France’s economy six feet under. The carbon emission limits they demanded would effectively ban most cars; all out-of-town hypermarkets, the mainstay of French shopping outside major cities, would be closed; advertising of products with high carbon emissions would be banned.

Even though Manny doesn’t have to drive to hypermarkets, he knows how deleterious such measures would be. But he has painted himself into a corner. He now has to backtrack on his promises and risk another wave of rioting, or else deliver more blows to an economy already knocked down by coronavirus.

This proves yet again, if any further proof is necessary, that direct democracy doesn’t work. Neither does representative democracy. Neither does monarchy. Neither does any political system – in the abstract.

Any system, no matter how sound it looks on paper, is only as good as the people who operate it. Thus democracy lives or dies by the quality of the electorate. A morally and intellectually corrupt electorate will elect a corrupt government or, if encouraged to govern without mediation, make corrupt policies.

The Greeks, to whom we owe both the theory and first experience of democracy, knew this. That’s why voter education was their main concern as a factor of political virtue.

Much is made of Plato’s yearning for philosopher kings, but both he and Aristotle believed that a democracy could only be virtuous if not just the kings but also the voters were philosophers, after a fashion.

No, they didn’t envisage an electorate made up of philosophers who composed long tracts. Plato and Aristotle only made an unassailable point: to take part in affairs of the state by voting responsibly, an elector has to have a sufficient grounding in the disciplines involved, and there are many.

Thus democracy can’t serve common good in the absence of an educational system that can train most of the electorate in political theory, moral philosophy, epistemology, rhetoric, logic, not to mention the specific disciplines in the forefront of current public debate.

Such a system has never existed anywhere in history – and it’s not even remotely approached in any modern country. That stands to reason: people able to absorb and process recondite knowledge can’t possibly constitute a majority, nor even a significant minority.

Even in Athens there were only 30,000 fully enfranchised citizens (out of the population of about a quarter of a million at its peak), with 5,000-6,000 constituting the quorum. In fact, Plato suggested that this wasn’t only the minimum acceptable but also the maximum desirable number of active participants in a democracy. Going over that cut-off point, he warned, would result in mob rule.

Edmund Burke (d. 1797) was even less generous, but then he had to deal with greater numbers. According to him, there were about 400,000 Britons qualified to vote responsibly, out of the contemporaneous population of about 10 million.

A similar proportion today would produce an electorate of about 2.5 million – not the 48 million it actually is. One can’t help thinking that the requirement for responsible voting has been dropped somewhere along the line.

Public education in France is still better than in Britain, but only marginally so. And the gap is closing.

Hence neither country can be governed by its demos because the demos lacks the requisite intellectual and moral qualifications. Even if we were able to improve our education no end (and nothing suggests we are moving in that direction, quite the opposite), it’s unrealistic to expect that tens of millions of people would reach the necessary plateau.

If true democracy isn’t possible, what is? A sham one. That is, effectively an oligarchy made up of a few thousand demagogues who aren’t particularly well-versed in the art of government either, but who are experts at crowd manipulation and bare-knuckled political infighting.

However, as Manny is finding out, sometimes people rebel at being manipulated. They demand direct, if limited, democracy, believing they could do better. Well, they can’t.

All they can do is create mayhem, chaos and anarchy. And of course, given half the chance, an economic disaster.

That closes the vicious political circle of modernity, a point coronavirus is hammering home with devastating effect – while, in France, direct democracy is trying to add some more power to the falling hammer.

P.S. Two epidemics of Asian flu (both, incidentally, originating in China) in 1957 and 1968 killed about three million people worldwide, at a time when the world’s population was half of today’s. Yet nothing like today’s hysteria materialised, and we’ve only seen some 120,000 coronavirus deaths so far. Tempora mutantur… and all that.

Fundamentalist sectarians are claiming that coronavirus is God’s punishment. Sodom usually comes up in that context, although the Bible offers plenty of other punishable offences as well.

Since my religion is as mainstream as they come, I feel uneasy about biblical literalism, and uneasier still about drawing too many parallels. However, if I weren’t so prejudiced, perhaps I’d see their point.

If you recall, God punished Sodom for the sin that has since borne its name. To be fair, God didn’t mete out his punishment arbitrarily, on Abraham’s say-so.

Following proper forensic procedure, he sent two angels to investigate the patriarch’s accusations. Abraham’s nephew Lot put the detectives up for the night and gave them supper.

However, before the comely angels lay down, the denizens of Sodom besieged Lot’s house and demanded that he deliver the angels into their hands so they might ‘know’ them.

Trying to mollify the libidinous Sodomites without violating the sacred law of hospitality, Lot offered them his two virginal daughters instead. But the men wouldn’t swap the real thing for palliatives.

The daughters must have been bitterly disappointed about that delay in their sexual initiation. Hence, when the family escaped Sodom, leaving behind Lot’s wife in her saline incarnation, the first thing those minxes did was get their father drunk and ‘know’ him on two consecutive nights.

That, however, is a separate story. The real point is that, compared to today’s world, Sodom is an exemplar of sanity and probity. So fine, some chaps wanted to practise an alternative lifestyle with two angels, whom they supposedly mistook for young men.

But were they? After all, angels are heavenly, rather than earthly creatures. Since only the latter were designed to procreate, angels are androgynous. However, depending on their mission, they can appear to be either male or female. It’s possible therefore that Sodomites mistook them for girls, which absolves them of that particular sin, if not of attempted rape.

Here we reach the kernel of our story, which turns the tale of Sodom into a ganglion of prophesies.

For, according to Rory Stewart, Tory ex-minister, women’s prisons are housing 1,500 ‘male-bodied’ inmates who self-identify as women. In other words, their male bits are in working order.

Hence they resemble angels in their ability to switch effortlessly from one sex to the other. Alas, when they do find themselves in women’s prisons, their behaviour isn’t exactly angelic.

Says Mr Stewart: “When I was Prisons Minister, we had situations of male prisoners self-identifying as females, then raping staff in prison.”

That’s where the Biblical parallel ends. Rather than suffering sexual violence, it’s the gender-bender angels who do the raping. And it’s not just the female warders who get that treatment. Other inmates suffer it too.

For example, in 2018 a convicted male rapist self-identifying as a woman found himself as a tomcat among the pigeons in a female prison. There he promptly raped several women, using the traditional male technique.

Government and prison officials swear they’ll do everything humanly possible to protect female warders and inmates from those feral ‘women’. I’m sure they will, but that’s not the point.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that God’s patience sometimes wears thin. When a place becomes too insane for his liking, he expresses his wrath with fire and brimstone or equivalents.

Have you made that assumption? Good. Now compare Sodom with a world where the stories I’ve just told are not merely possible but increasingly commonplace.

A world where the sin of Sodom is no longer a sin, but an alternative, in some ways preferable, ‘lifestyle’. Where demonic freaks can emulate angels by claiming to be women while remaining predatory men. And where the few remaining sane people can’t cry havoc and let slip… well, they have no one to let slip.

You must agree that the comparison isn’t in our favour. So we should get down on our knees and thank God that he only punished us with coronavirus and not, say, bubonic plague.

Then of course we don’t believe in God and his punishment. We believe in… I’m sure you can complete the sentence on your own. There’s got to be something we believe in.

At Easter a few years ago I found myself at an Orthodox church in France. The liturgy was bilingual in Russian and French, but the key words were delivered in every language represented in the congregation, and there were some 20 of them.

Every time those key words sounded, all the priests laughed. It was laughter of joy, not mirth. For Easter Sunday is indeed the most joyous day of the year – even of this year, marked as it is by tragedy.

On this day those who believe celebrate a sinful world saved; those who don’t believe celebrate a great civilisation born. On this day, life defeats death.

Easter gave man a vision of eternity, and it wasn’t a beautiful mirage. It was a reality one could see, hear, touch.

The new reality was so vast it engulfed the world, and the world emerged transfigured for ever. It acquired a new face, a new soul, a new life.

This is the life we celebrate today. And again those rousing words sound all over the world in every language, just as they did in that French church – just as they did two millennia ago. On this one day at least, the world turns into a church.

Christ is risen!

Le Christ est ressuscité!

Christus ist auferstanden!

Cristo ha resucitado!

Cristo è risorto!

Kristus on üles tõusnud!

Kristus er oppstanden!

Xристос воскрес!

Chrystus zmartwychwstał!

Kristus vstal z mrtvých!

Cristo ressuscitou!

Kristus ir augšāmcēlies!

Christus is verrezen!

Χριστὸς ἀνέστη!

Krisztus feltámadt!

Kristus är uppstånden!

Kristus prisikėlė!

Kristus nousi kuolleista!

Hristos a înviat!

INDEED HE IS RISEN! HAPPY EASTER!