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Talent, wrote Schopenhauer, hits targets no one else can hit; genius hits targets no one else can see. He didn’t add that such marksmanship puts genius in direct conflict with philistines.

For one defining characteristic of philistines is smugness, unshakeable belief in their being the apex of creation. Anyone who isn’t like them is therefore automatically suspect – especially a genius hitting targets the philistine can’t even see.

This serves as an unwelcome reminder that the philistine isn’t really the apex of creation. There exist human genera that are superior to him in every respect.

That’s especially intolerable now, when the philistine’s congenital smugness is reinforced by ideological egalitarianism. Nowhere is this tendency more glaring than in the philistine’s response to music, both its composition and especially performance.

What the philistine really wants to hear is the kind of music he himself would compose and play if he knew how. Many are amateur musicians or simply concert goers who dismiss true genius because it’s outside their ken.

JS Bach suffered that fate throughout the 18^th century and beyond. In fact, his sons, good composers who nonetheless weren’t fit to copy their father’s scores, were universally regarded as his superiors.

Following Mendelsohn’s 1829 revival of St Matthew’s Passion, Bach’s music got to be played more often, and he began to be treated with begrudging respect (mostly for the technical aspects of his work) if little appreciation for the ineffable genius he was.

In fact, I know many Englishmen today, even some who have had musical training, who rate Handel’s music higher than Bach’s. The rather pompous and banal Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah is much preferred to the sublime finales of Bach’s two Passions.

That’s understandable. Handel, though a great composer in his own right, doesn’t assail the philistine’s self-perception the way Bach does. A Handel oratorio is an excellent prelude to a post-concert supper, whereas a Bach cantata is much too demanding to get the gastric juices flowing.

Glenn Gould, the greatest interpreter of Bach (and just about everything else he played), also yanked the philistine out of his comfort zone. He wasn’t the only instrumentalist who ever saw targets no one else did, he just saw more of them.

Gould is the only pianist, or instrumentalist in general, I’ve ever heard whose genius approaches that of the composers whose music he played. He could soar above a work until he got a bird’s eye view of it. That enabled him to see how all the elements fit together into cohesive architecture. And Gould’s unparalleled structural integrity allowed him to take any number of liberties with details – he was confident that nothing he did would make the structure totter.

While popularly known as an interpreter of Bach, Gould also regaled posterity with profound insights into the music of other composers, from Byrd and Gibbons to Mozart and Beethoven to Brahms and Strauss to Schoenberg and Hindemith.

Originally trained on the organ, he left recordings on that instrument too, but his piano technique shows no signs of a neophyte. Every note Gould played was poignantly expressive, something few other Bach players have ever been able to combine with architectural vision.

Obviously, a man who hit targets no one else, and especially no critics, could see wasn’t allowed to get away with it. A whole school of anti-Gould criticism appeared, and his performances were described as interesting but frivolous curiosities. The adjective ‘eccentric’ was permanently attached to his name – he would have been justified in changing his name to Glenn Eccentric Gould.

Eventually Gould, a deeply sensitive and indeed eccentric man (as opposed to an eccentric performer) was hounded off the concert platform. He retreated to the recording studio and kept producing one masterpiece after another, much to the delight of those who not only like but also understand music.

This is the context in which The Times critic Richard Morrison produced a review of Angela Hewitt’s Bach recital. Miss Hewitt, a Canadian like Gould, has made a career of playing mostly Bach, one of the few pianists who have ever done that.

That the review is laudatory goes without saying: Hewitt is one of the newly canonised performers who wouldn’t get a bad review even if they had an off day technically.

Yet to someone who has spent a lifetime listening to great playing, she is a well-meaning pianist capable of playing all the notes in the right sequence without causing too much offence. In other words, she plays Bach the way a typical philistine would if he had the fingers. If there is any true inspiration in her playing, I haven’t yet been able to discern it.

But fair enough, Morrison may look for other things in music, and, if he finds them in Hewitt, more power to him. Some people seem to prefer boring performances.

However, a philistine will out sooner or later; this isn’t a trait that can be concealed for long. Hewitt, writes Morrison, plays an instrument “that Bach wouldn’t have recognised, and utilises a range of expressive devices that simply weren’t available on the keyboards of his day”.

At the risk of sounding reactionary, I’d suggest that Bach knew more about musical instruments than either Hewitt or even Morrison. His genius was such that he could foresee where keyboard instruments were going – and write for the future.

In fact, when he taught his most talented son, Wilhelm Friedemann, to play the clavichord, Bach stressed the need for cantabile, the singing tone the harpsichord couldn’t produce and the clavichord could only to some extent.

In general, Bach saw beyond specific instruments. He would often transcribe the same pieces for keyboard today, violin tomorrow, flute the day after. And his crowning achievement, The Art of Fugue, the only work in which he encoded his own name B-A-C-H, mysteriously was written for no instrument in particular, being playable by a string quartet, orchestra, organ, harpsichord or piano.

Having praised Hewitt for finding expressive means Bach couldn’t even imagine, Morrison then compares her, by implication favourably, to Gould, “her eccentric compatriot… whom she resembles in no other respect”.

That magic ‘e’ word again – Gould has been dead for 38 years, but the philistines still have to kick him posthumously, if surreptitiously.

It’s aesthetic, and I dare say moral, sacrilege to mention Hewitt and Gould in the same sentence, especially when presenting them as comparable figures. That’s like comparing Shakespeare to Webster or, closer to this field, Wilhelm Furtwängler to Simon Rattle.

Still, if Hewitt differs from Gould in most respects, what would they be? One assumes that Morrison implies that none of the superlatives he attaches to Hewitt’s playing would apply to Gould’s.

I’ll just cite a few attributes singled out and praised by Morrison: “taste, technique and insight”, “energy and wit aplenty”, “her instinct is always to make sense of the music”, “awe-inspiring”, “she isn’t afraid to use the pianistic techniques of the romantic era to bring out the music’s shapes and patterns”.

Right. Hewitt has all those things and Gould didn’t. His instinct was just to be eccentric.

I remember talking about Bach to the dean of one of our major cathedrals. “Gould,” he delivered the mantra, “is eccentric”. “It’s not Gould who’s eccentric,” I replied. “It’s Bach.”

That exchange was par for the course. To a philistine, a target he doesn’t see just doesn’t exist. Hence a genius who hits it appears to have missed the centre, the bull’s eye. That indeed is eccentric.

When Jean-Claude Juncker was still President of the European Commission, I was often beastly to him.

I made fun of his drunkenness and variable ability to stay upright, I castigated his euro fanaticism, I found logical faults in his arguments – and I’m now sorry about all that.

For I’ve just come across a spiffy aphorism Jean-Claude made long before his ascent to the top of the EU Olympus. The year was 2007, when he was still finance minister at that European powerhouse, Luxemburg.

Speaking on economic reform, my new friend Jean-Claude made a statement of astonishing wit and depth: “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.”

I don’t know if he was fully aware of the profound implications of that statement. But one way or the other, the truth of that aphorism is enough to restore Jean-Claude in my good graces.

Seldom in the history of rhetoric has so much been said in so few words. For that statement lays bare in one fell swoop everything that’s wrong with modern politics and politicians.

The aphorism deserves painstaking exegesis before its meaning is fully grasped. First, one can infer that politicians’ manifest failure to do the right things testifies to a failure of character, not just of intellect.

Surely representative democracy, the predominant political method in the West, depends on elected representatives doing the right things, ideally every time.

Granted, some politicians may not know what the right things are, in which case their failure to do them is understandable, if not necessarily forgivable. Yet my new friend stipulates this isn’t the case: “We all know what to do…”.

Then why don’t they do it? Because, explains Jean-Claude, doing the right things would scupper a politician’s chances of staying in power. Hence one infers that politicians neglect bono publico for their own bono, and the public be damned.

This to me constitutes betrayal of trust and an appalling failure of character. Elected representatives may be in a position to demand that thousands of young people sacrifice their lives for their country. Yet they themselves refuse to sacrifice even their careers. I smell a certain deficit of moral legitimacy there.

We can proceed from the specific to the general and look at wider implications. For, when a political system fails to elevate to power those who can selflessly work towards public good, there’s something wrong with the system, not just the individuals.

Such a situation means that voters aren’t fit to vote. After all, our unchecked democracy run riot effectively involves everybody in the business of government. The only qualification necessary is that of age, which gets younger and younger.

More sweeping generalisations are in order. Such as that those who know what the right things are and are capable of doing them are unlikely to get elected.

Moreover – and this is the most damning part of Juncker’s epigram – if politicians decide to act out of character and actually do the right things, the voting public will throw them out at the next election.

That means the voting public emphatically doesn’t want the right things done, and it will punish mercilessly those who disobey its diktat. The question is, why?

Surely people would stand to benefit from sage government? Surely a government that doesn’t do what it knows is right hurts everybody? Here we are entering the inner circles of politics, and they are vicious.

The voting masses by definition possess no intellectual tools to decide what the right things are. The business of government is more intricate than just about any other, involving as it does at least some understanding of such disciplines as political science, economics, history, philosophy, jurisprudence, rhetoric, logic and so forth.

Since no electorate in the world can boast such collective understanding, they all differ from a herd of livestock only on physiological and, if you will, theological technicalities, not in their ability to cast a vote intelligently and responsibly.

Public education everywhere in the West and certainly in Britain provides no help. The disciplines mentioned above are taught badly or, typically, not at all. On the contrary, our educators actively corrupt their pupils by pumping their heads full of idiotic, subversive and immoral rubbish.

British pupils are taught how to use condoms, not their heads. At an age when youngsters of yore still thought of such matters in terms of storks and cabbage patches, today’s lot are taught advanced sexual techniques and the amoral nature of sex and gender-bending. Considering that many graduates of our comprehensive schools can’t even read properly, one gets the distinct impression they are taught nothing else.

It gets worse. For our young are raised in a culture of despair, with the future uncertain or – given the canonical status of the global warming hoax – nonexistent. Therefore, since most of them are also taught atheism, they can’t conceive of a good greater than their own immediate benefit.

This combination of moral and intellectual shabbiness makes them vulnerable to demagogic slogans – and unreceptive to reasoned arguments. That’s why politicians who wish to get elected and re-elected have to communicate with the electorate in five-second soundbites, each containing a simple solution to what really is a complicated problem.

Alas, complicated problems hardly ever lend themselves to simple solutions. They require serious thought and reasoned arguments. Unfortunately, as Swift once wrote (I’m quoting from memory), you can’t reason people out of something they didn’t reason into.

Hence, a politician proposing a serious, rational policy will only succeed in scaring away voters weaned on a steady diet of simplistically primitive messages. Such a politician had better start retraining for a different career.

This hidden depth of Juncker’s aphorism makes me feel sorry about all my past scathing attacks on his person. Well done, Jean-Claude, didn’t know you had it in you.

Which cowboy built this economy then? No way, gov, can’t pin this one on me. It’s all corona, like, djahmean?

But that’s cool, Boris the Erector will take care of you. Anything I erect you respect, djamean? You’re like, Boris, erect me a tower block or a dam or an airport or a sky bleedin’ scraper, and I’m like, right you are, gov. I erect, you inspect, no defect, I collect – sorted. Boris me name, erection me game, djahmean?

But lately me erections are way down on account of that bleedin’ corona. Blighters don’t want to work, don’t want to build, don’t want nothing. So me firm is well wobbly, high overhead and all. Then I get this idea, sudden like.

The other day I’m having me cuppa Rosie with me trouble Carrie, all quiet like. Then me nipper cries and it sounds like Dom, Dom, Dom. Dom’s me mate, does scaffolding for me. Any booger needs shoring up or sorting out, Dom’s your man, djahmean?

So me nipper must be on to something. I say to myself, give Dom a bell on the bone. Ain’t nothing Dom can’t shore up. So I ring Dom and I’m like, giza hand mate. Can’t get a single erection up, this bloody corona well buggers me firm up.

So Dom me mate says, Boris, your erections must pick up, me old china. No erections, you lose elections, djahmean? Got to build, mate. But no more Austerity scaffolding for you. There’s other brands, like New Deal. Well popular, that.

And I’m like, Dom, I feel you. But who’s gonna pay? Where’s the dosh going to come from?

And Dom’s like, Boris you’re well daft, he says. When you want to get food you go to a food market, right? And when you want to get money, you go to a money market. Get as much as you want, don’t worry about a thing. There’s more where that came from. You feel me?

I feel you, mate, I say. But you have to pay at the market. Sooner or later, like.

You said it, mate, says Dom. Except you said it wrong: it’s got to be later not sooner. Off you go to the money market like a goodun, get all the dosh you want, that’s a right doddle, mate. And then you just pay interest – let the other lot worry about the principal.

What other lot, Dom? I ask. And he’s like, you know, your competitors, the Labour Destruction Company. When all your erections fall down, they’ll step in, get the contract and bugger it up even worse. But that won’t be your problem, right?

So down the pub I go, to have a swift pint of Bolli wifebeater with Rish, me accountant. I’m like Rish, we don’t build I’m out of a job, but you first, djahmean? So we gotta build, build, build. Power to the people, mate, and you, me and Dom are the people.

And Rish, he a good bloke in spite of being, well, Rish, goes right you are, gov. I’ll sort it out. You build, all problems killed.

Next day I ring my customers on conference call, saying me erections are back, and we’ll build, build, build. We’ll build, you’re thrilled, skilled or unskilled. And I’m like, you know what the best thing is? Nobody has to pay for nothing. Except, you, know, your little ones when they’re well big.

Sorted.  

Boris Johnson clearly has a firmer grasp of ancient than modern history. Otherwise he wouldn’t be so keen to compare his ruinous and economically illiterate plans with FDR’s New Deal:

“It [Johnson’s proposed programme] sounds positively Rooseveltian. It sounds like a New Deal. All I can say is that if so, then that is how it is meant to sound and to be, because that is what the times demand – a government that is powerful and determined and that puts its arms around people at a time of crisis.”

When a government puts its arms around people, sooner or later it’ll have its hands on their throats. The more a government does for the people, the more it’ll be able to do to them – to this law there are no known exceptions.

Roosevelt’s New Deal, so beloved of Mr Johnson, increased no end state control over the economy – so much in fact that it was barely distinguishable from Hitler’s Four-Year Plan, devised at roughly the same time (and by more or less the same people). It wasn’t for nothing that Herbert Hoover described the New Deal as a “fascist measure”.

When he became President in 1933, Roosevelt knew of course that, just as statism had been largely responsible for converting recession into depression, so had the subsequent interventionist measures made things much worse. But ideology always trumps reason.

Predictably, Roosevelt’s answer was to fight statism with more statism. The situation was ideally suited to the kind of social meddling for which his power-hungry loins ached.

Roosevelt responded to the challenge fiscally by borrowing almost as much as all previous presidents put together. He also responded to it rhetorically, by launching vituperative attacks against big business that, he claimed, was solely responsible for the crisis.

As a result, a wave of strikes, tacitly encouraged by the government, shook the country and the rest of the Western world (apart from Germany and Italy, whose governments tended to discourage industrial action, and not just tacitly).

The battle was raging, but Roosevelt, waving the megalomaniac Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in one hand and the National Relief Administration (NRA) in the other, rode in on his white steed and saved the day. Or at least that’s what many thought.

They were wrong though. After Roosevelt’s ill-advised measures had run out of steam, trouble came back in force. By 1938 unemployment was again nearing 20 per cent, recession returned, and suddenly even the intellectually challenged realised that the depression hadn’t really gone away. It had merely been camouflaged, and confirmation of this came from unexpected quarters.

Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary and one of the principal architects of the New Deal, admitted before the House Ways and Means Committee that the New Deal had failed:

“We have tried spending money,” he commiserated. “We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!”  

Roosevelt’s response was again characteristic. Rather than admitting that it had been raids on private enterprise and free trade that were at the root of the problem, he exacerbated the problem by stepping up the attacks.

In parallel he abandoned his halfhearted efforts to balance the budget and launched an even bigger spending programme, trying, in the language that has become so familiar to us, to spend his way out of trouble. Having dug himself into a hole, he spurned conventional wisdom and went on digging.

The printing presses went into high gear, government expenditure, as a percentage of GDP, tripled compared to the 1929 level. But it was all in vain – or rather it would have been all in vain, but for one widely publicised event. The Second World War.

It was a global carnage, not socialist programmes, that turned America into an economic powerhouse by the late 1940s. The country’s GDP increased 2.5 times during the war, unemployment became a thing of the past, the dollar took over as the world’s reserve currency, and the US has been propelled by that momentum ever since.

Such are the lessons of the New Deal, but Mr Johnson clearly played truant when they were taught. Or else one wonders whether he anticipates the saving grace of another world war by the time his socialist programmes have succeeded in beggaring the country.

However, given the apocalyptic nature of today’s weaponry, that treatment may be worse than the disease. So perhaps it would be better if Boris stopped playing demagogic politics for a while and took a crash course in economics and modern history.

Then he’d find that an economy can only work, not spend, itself out of trouble. Socialist measures may relieve some pain in the short run, but they are bound to make the underlying disease much worse.

The state can only affect the economy positively by not affecting it negatively. Rather than taking his lessons from Roosevelt, Johnson should take them from Burke: “The moment that Government appears at market, all the principles of market will be subverted.”

P.S. Looking on the bright side of coronavirus, now is the only time in my memory that a masked man can walk into a bank without arousing suspicion.

You can see such signs all over Britain – posters, windows, pavements, TV commercials, newspaper ads all combine to make this the widest expression of gratitude I’ve ever seen.

Crowded out for a while by ‘Black Lives Matter’, ‘Thank You NHS’ has regained its top position in the popularity stakes. And after we’ve finished thanking NHS, we must all thank God, our lucky stars and above all our munificent state for the great gift of a socialist health service.

However, once the warmth of the initial response has worn off, one wonders if nursing home residents share our mandated mass thankfulness. After all, more of them died of Covid-19 in Britain than in any other European country – at a rate that’s twice France’s and 13 times greater than Germany’s.

The comparison is valid for the three countries are similar in most other markers of quality of life. The only major difference is that their medical care is only partly, as opposed to our totally, nationalised.

The preponderance of thankful slogans testifies to the success of socialist propaganda in scouring people’s minds clean of any ability to think for themselves.

The British are beginning to resemble more and more Soviet children, housetrained to chant “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood” at a time when most of the population went hungry and 10 per cent of it were in concentration camps. Mutatis mutandis and all that, but the propaganda mechanisms are the same.

People are conditioned by Pavlovian techniques to separate their feeling from thoughts, and thoughts from facts. Otherwise they’d know that, contrary to its claim of being the best healthcare system in the West, the NHS is just about the worst.

This isn’t to say NHS doctors and nurses don’t deserve our gratitude. They do. And those 300 of them who gave their lives fighting coronavirus are heroes.

But then so are soldiers killed in an ill-conceived, ineptly led, badly supplied suicide attack doomed to failure. They should be decorated posthumously and celebrated together with their surviving comrades. But those who deployed them ought to be court-martialled, and the whole military doctrine questioned.

It’s not just the NHS either. People are expected to react by kneejerk reflex to any number of messages emanating from either the state or various pressure groups.

Messages designed to elicit unthinking public enthusiasm are all divorced from reason and therefore subversive. If they weren’t, there would be no need to crank up propaganda machines – a quiet explanation would do, if at all necessary.

Generally speaking, any secular message communicated by a slogan is mendacious and pernicious. Such messages, be that BLM, MeToo, global warming or whatever, wouldn’t survive 10 minutes of serious, factual debate. That’s why they don’t get the benefit of it.

Even when such campaigns don’t start with the government, it unfailingly chimes in eventually, if not straight away. A Tory government may sometimes play hard to get for a short while, but it’ll put out soon enough.

This works in a time-proven way: pressure groups unleash a shrill campaign designed to elicit reflexive response from grex venalium; after sufficient exposure grex venalium responds on cue; pressure groups use every medium to portray this response as valid public opinion; the government acts for fear of losing the next election.

Repeat this sequence many times over many years, and effective government becomes impossible even in theory (this irrespective of its party affiliation). In its place we get a group of self-serving spivs sensitive to every turn of the wokish weathervane.

But look on the bright side. Our children still aren’t ordered to chant “Thank you, Mr Johnson, for our happy childhood”. There’s a way to go yet.

The forthcoming orgy of vandalism at Canterbury Cathedral is easy to blame on Archbishop Welby, and I do. Yet a great deal of the problem is inherent to the established status of the Church of England as a state religion.

In any country where a state religion exists, the sins of the state will be visited upon it. Sooner or later its prelates will become government officials in cassocks, toeing the line drawn by the state.

And the line our anomic and anaemic state has drawn leaves reason, integrity and indeed sanity outside. Hence, if the state meekly surrenders to the diktats of the mob, so will the church.

Having said that, it’s possible even for a prelate of a state church to show more fortitude and intelligence than Justin Welby evinces. I don’t know how qualified he was in his previous job as oil trader, but in his present position he gives every sign of someone who has no clue.

The latest sign was flashed in his remarks on the future of the statues adorning Canterbury Cathedral. And there are quite a few of them – 55 just on the western façade.

Cathedral sculptures all over Europe have of course had their share of vandalism over the centuries. Many of the niches in the façades of great French cathedrals show headless statues as a result of the mob’s preferred method of art criticism.

Calvinists had a go first, then revolutionaries had a field day – and continued to have it throughout the 19^th century. This proves yet again that iconoclasm survives long after the icons have been smashed.

English Calvinists, otherwise known as Puritans, also took a particular delight in toppling and decapitating statues. However, I can’t recall offhand many examples of high clergy in the defaced and desecrated churches not only going along with the vandals but actually inviting them over.

In that sense Justin Welby is a pioneer. He actually announced on TV that: “We’re going to be looking very carefully and putting them [the statues] in context and seeing if they all should be there.”

What context would that be, Your Grace? Historical? Ecclesiastic? Doctrinal? Biblical? No, of course not. The Archbishop has specifically identified the BLM movement as the context in which the history of England and her church must be viewed.

Looking at the Canterbury statues, I wonder which ones will be slated for destruction. St Augustine? St Anselm? Thomas Cranmer? St Gregory the Great? The Conqueror? Edward the Confessor? Thomas Becket? Elizabeth I or II? All of them?

Even assuming that some of the great people honoured with Canterbury statues fall short of the exacting moral standards of modernity, judging, say, medieval figures by such standards goes beyond idiotic – it enters the domain of psychiatry.

Some of the statue models never saw a black person in their lives; I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that some didn’t even know that black people existed. Their behaviour can only be judged by absolute moral standards, and perhaps also by the ethics of their time.

These statues commemorate the people who made England. They signposted English history and guided it into the conduits appropriate for their time. Let’s forgive them, shall we, their lack of foresight in not having anticipated the arrival of modern times, with their wars of total annihilation, concentration camps, genocides – and staggeringly sanctimonious self-righteousness.

The good Archbishop tried to explain himself with his usual eloquence: “Some names will have to change. I mean, the church, goodness me, you know, you just go around Canterbury Cathedral, there’s monuments everywhere, or Westminster Abbey, and we’re looking at all that, and some will have to come down.”

He then went on to expand my English vocabulary, a service for which I’m always grateful: “But yes, there can be forgiveness, I hope and pray as we come together, but only if there’s justice.” I get it: justice is the modern for vandalism.

Then of course there are all those offensive portraits of Jesus as a white man. Can’t have those, can we?

Here at least the Archbishop makes an accurate observation. When you travel the world, he said, “You see a black Jesus, a Chinese Jesus, a Middle Eastern Jesus – which is of course the most accurate – you see a Fijian Jesus.”

Truer words have never been spoken: indeed you do. And when you travel in the West, you see a white Jesus, right? Fair is fair and all that.

Yet by some twist of his already pre-twisted mind, the Archbishop seems to believe that a white Jesus is out of ‘context’. I must admit I don’t quite follow the logic.

Christians around the world are taught to believe that they are made in the image and likeness of God. Thanks to the Incarnation, this image can be depicted pictorially. In the era before jet travel, people would cast a look at their neighbourhood, see those around them and infer that they all reflected the image of God. Hence they painted God as they saw the people they knew: black, Chinese, whatever.

On what basis should European artists have been denied the same privilege? To paraphrase Pascal, Welby has his reasons that reason knows not of.

I think that even our state church could do better than Welby. In fact I know it can, if some Anglican clergymen among my friends are any indication.  

If there is any such thing as a work that should end all debates on a subject, Heaven and Earth by Ian Plimer, emeritus professor of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne, is it.

Plimer’s brilliant book shows the global warming activism for the politicised scam it really is. Densely packed with analysis of multiple disciplines, the book proves the nonexistent scientific basis for just about every faddish claim, certainly one about the vital role of carbon dioxide as a driver of climate change.

However, my admiration for the book is diminished by Prof Plimer’s forays into areas outside his vast expertise. One of them is economics, where the author attaches too much importance to his speciality.

It’s true that there may be an historical correlation between warm interglacial periods and prosperity. However, as Prof Plimer himself states often and correctly, correlation doesn’t mean causality.

It’s not only earth scientists but also economists who must draw on a raft of diverse data to be entirely credible. Overstressing just one factor, in this case climate, at the expense of others, is as unsound in economics as singling out carbon dioxide is unsound in Prof Plimer’s chosen field.

That, however, is a minor gripe. The major one involves Prof. Plimer describing global warming as a secular, atheist religion.

By itself, this comparison is unobjectionable, provided it’s made casually and left at that. Alas, Prof Plimer doesn’t leave it at that. He uses the parallel to bring up that old chestnut about science and religion being incompatible.

When I got to those passages, and there are many of them, I felt sad, even though Prof. Plimer thereby confirmed my lifelong observation that, whenever even extremely intelligent atheists start talking about religion, they can’t avoid sounding silly, ignorant or both.

Entering this field, Prof. Plimer displays all the same failings for which he so convincingly lacerates global warming fanatics: negligent treatment of facts, ignoring information that contradicts one’s pet beliefs, barely concealed emotional afflatus.

Someone who wishes to malign the Church as a mortal enemy of science, has to drag in some putative martyrs. Giordano Bruno has to lead the way, what with the secure niche he has carved for himself in atheist mythology.

Hence Prof Plimer writes: “In 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for supporting the Copernican theory of a Sun-centred universe.” One wishes he had brought to this topic the same analytical acuteness and breadth of knowledge he so amply displays throughout the book.

For Bruno wasn’t, nor could have been, immolated for that reason. In 1593-1600, the years of his lengthy trial, the Church had no official position on the heliocentric theory, and it was certainly not regarded as a heresy.

Bruno was indeed burned as a heretic, but that had nothing to do with Copernicus. In fact, both his heretical teachings and the arrogant, intolerant manner in which he preached them were eerily similar to those of Leo Tolstoy 300 years later.

Like Tolstoy, Bruno attacked, viciously and rudely, not only the Catholic Church, but every Christian doctrine, without which Christianity simply wouldn’t have existed.

Bruno denied the divinity of Christ, the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity. He rejected both Transubstantiation and the Eucharist. Christ to Bruno wasn’t God but simply a clever magician. He mocked the virginity of Mary, although he stopped short of Tolstoy’s claim that she conceived her son in an adulterous relationship.

Bruno’s theology tended towards Hermeticism, Gnosticism and pantheism, with a good dollop of vaguely Eastern beliefs, such as metempsychosis, transmigration of the soul into a new body of the same or different species. Tolstoy, in common with many Western atheists, also gravitated towards Eastern tenets, although not all the same ones.

Unlike Tolstoy, however, Bruno wasn’t a writer of genius. In his book The Torchbearer he attempted a satire but achieved nothing but obscenity. Hence, also unlike Tolstoy, he didn’t enjoy the protective cocoon of worldwide renown.

Therefore, if Tolstoy could get away with doctrinaire rudeness, obtuse dogmatism and violence towards those who dared disagree with him, Bruno couldn’t. That’s why, when he first left Italy in the 1580s, he failed to gain academic positions at a number of European universities, including Marburg and Oxford.

Having been rejected at the latter, Bruno wrote a vindictive pamphlet in which he claimed that Oxford professors knew more about beer than their academic fields. In this at least he showed prophetic powers, anticipating the developments of much later vintage.

In short, Bruno wasn’t the martyr of science he is often portrayed to be by atheists, including, alas, such otherwise brilliant ones as Prof Plimer. Bruno was an out-and-out heretic, much as Tolstoy was in his time.

That Bruno was burned at the stake, while Tolstoy got away with mere excommunication, had to do with the difference in their reputations, achievements (towering in Tolstoy’s case, negligible in Bruno’s) and above all their times.

In Bruno’s time the Church was reeling from the blows delivered first by Renaissance humanism and then by the Reformation. It had to stamp out heresy within its ranks if it was to survive, and so it tried.

In that the Church displayed much less murderous cruelty than is claimed by its enemies. The Spanish Inquisition, for example, was responsible for only about 3,000 executions during the 400 years it was in business – a trivial number by the standards of the enlightened 20^th century, even its average month.

Tolstoy, by contrast, lived at a time when secularism had vanquished and, according to Nietzsche, God had died – meaning that educated, or rather semi-educated, people no longer believed in him. Also, Tolstoy’s deserved popularity as a great writer and an undeserved one as a great thinker explain why the Russian (or for that matter any other) Church was in no position to impose a serious punishment for heresy.

I just hope that scientists who, like Prof Plimer, fight against global warming activism will go unpunished and indeed praised for their courage and integrity. I only wish he concentrated his formidable intellect in the areas of his expertise.  

Located in the south of London, Brixton is an area that’s rather… now what’s the acceptable word for it? I don’t wish to get in trouble for using an unacceptable one, PC propriety being one of my chief concerns.

Exotic? Diverse? Multicultural? Anyway, you get the gist. However, in spite of being all those things, Brixton isn’t usually as violent as the similar areas of New York I remember.

Once, for example, I found myself driving through Bedford-Stuyvesant as a result of misreading the road map. One look at the burnt-out shells of buildings with no window frames, doors replaced with holes cut in steel sheets, the people crawling out of the holes, and I prayed my car wouldn’t break down.

Brixton isn’t like that. It used to be a middle-class neighbourhood, which past has left much architectural legacy. And these days its diversity and multiculturalism are hardly ever expressed through riots and general mayhem.

Yet hardly ever is a far cry from never, which semantic point was made emphatically the other day. The fun started when two groups, the Montagues and the Capulets of Brixton, hundreds of them, fell out.

Before long, knives saw the light of day, blood flowed, and only the arrival of the cavalry could have saved the day. The cavalry, otherwise known as the Metropolitan Police, duly arrived, lights flashing, sirens blaring, tyres screeching.

The subsequent events vindicated the truth of the Russian proverb loosely translated as “Two square off, you f*** off” [Двое в драку, третий в сраку, for the Russophones among you]. For the warring parties abandoned their hostilities and joined forces in a coordinated counterattack against the blue-clad intruders.

The police were pelted with projectiles ranging from bottles and stones to bits and pieces of furniture, punched and clubbed. Both the Montagues and the Capulets jumped on police car bonnets, kicking the windscreens in.

The police suffered 22 wounded, walking or otherwise, and fled, with the multicultural crowd in hot pursuit, screaming “Run them out!” and other things I shan’t cite out of decorum.

The Battle of Brixton was lost. And, like the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD, this defeat has far-reaching implications. In that debacle, the real casualties went beyond the two Roman legions shredded by the ancestors of today’s Germans. In Brixton too, it was a civilisation that suffered yet another blow.

For the battle wasn’t lost in Brixton. It was lost earlier this year, when the police refused to arrest the ring leaders of the Extinction Rebellion horde. Or when they failed to save the statue of Churchill being defaced. Or, in the most emetic spectacle of all, when police officers ‘took the knee’ in front of the marauding BLM mob.

Or even earlier, when the aptonymic Cressida Dicks was appointed the Met Commissioner. Being a woman and a lesbian, she possesses two vital qualifications for the post, but hardly any other. Or when Sadiq Khan was elected mayor, bringing to the job his commitment to enforce only the laws of multi-culti political correctness.

Or even earlier than that, when the police were turned into an extension of social services rather than the staunch guardian of law and order. Or… well, I could backtrack to a more distant past, but there is really no need.

Let’s just say that protecting Her Majesty’s subjects from external and home-grown evildoers is the most – perhaps the only – indisputably legitimate function of the state. A state remiss in that area loses any claim to loyalty.

Anarchy, mob rule, war of all against all are a direct and inevitable result of this failure. In that sense the Battle of Brixton is the present-day Battle of Britain – and this time we are losing.

The PM delivered his usual violin-like performance: nice sounds, empty inside. “These were appalling scenes,” he said. “Violence against the police [as opposed to violence against civilians?] will not be tolerated. We have been clear that anyone who assaults the police or any members of the emergency services should face the full force of the law.”

That’s the whole problem, Mr Johnson: the full force of the law is puny, practically nonexistent. No politician, no police chief can instantly issue the order to fire tear gas at a riotous crowd, never mind firearms.

The sight of our self-righteously unarmed police officers running away from a feral mob serves a reminder of the hole into which we’ve sunk. How can the cops protect the public if they can’t even protect themselves? Law and ordure indeed.

People in the public eye routinely find themselves on the receiving end of love, hate, admiration, contempt – and jokes, some good-natured, some less so, some downright vicious.

That comes with the territory and overly sensitive people should protect their thin skin by steering clear of the territory. The best way of ducking the slings and arrows is to shun public life, keep a low profile and especially stay out of politics.

However, having plunged into elective politics headlong, one should learn how to respond to cutting or even vindictive humour. There are many acceptable ways of doing so.

The simplest one is to ignore the jokes altogether. Then of course it’s possible to laugh along, thereby showing an attractive capacity for self-deprecation. Or else one could joke back, although caution must be exercised: joking, especially off the cuff, may backfire easily.

One thing a politician absolutely mustn’t do is get angry. Such a reaction betokens one of the least attractive human qualities: humourless narcissism. And that, I’m afraid, is exactly the quality revealed by America’s First Lady on this occasion.

Now, when a wife boasts an adventurous sexual past, especially if her much older husband is no longer in the first or even second flush of youth, jokes about the paternity of the couple’s children practically make themselves. These are mostly tasteless, which makes them even harder to contain.

A few years ago, a British comedian was talking about the Christmas dinner at Buckingham Palace. “It was a small affair,” quipped the stand-up chap. “Just the immediate family – and Harry.” Since rumours of one of Diana’s lovers being Harry’s father abound, the joke hit a sensitive place.

Now the British tend to be much more protective about the Royal Family than the Americans are about presidents. And yet the joke caused no outcry, and certainly no comment from Buck House. Cabbages and kings: royals reign, people gossip, comedians jest – life is like that.

Melania Trump should take her cue from the Royal Family, and generally speaking she does. She keeps an unusually low profile for a First Lady and hardly ever speaks in public. Whether her uncertain command of English has something to do with that reticence is anybody’s guess.

Yet she broke her silence on Sunday, Father’s Day, after the comedian John Henson tweeted: “I hope Barron gets to spend today with whoever his dad is.”

The joke is moderately funny at best, and Mrs Trump should have just let it slide. Instead she responded like a lioness protecting her cub: “As with every other administration, a minor child should be off-limits and allowed to grow up with no judgment or hate from strangers and the media.” 

Melania should really lighten up. The Trumps are doubtless exposed to more than their fair share of judgement and hate, but a joke, funny or not, just doesn’t fall into either category.

One gets the impression that, rather than learning from our Royal Family, Melania has been taking lessons in morbid sensitivity from her egotistic husband. Who, judging by the photograph above, has stepped up his preparations for an impending gurning contest.

I’m no physiognomist, but I do sometimes wonder what kind of personality leaves such unusual imprints on a human face.

One pundit with a vested interest in proving the virtue of Putin’s regime, hailed its clean break with Russia’s Soviet past.

As proof of that welcome development, the hack who’ll go nameless (well, Peter Hitchens, if you insist) claimed that Lenin statues no longer adorn Russia’s landscape.

Actually, by latest count, 1,600 of such statues still tower over the country. And of course, in a lovingly maintained sinister ritual, Lenin’s mummy is still on display in that Babylonian ziggurat in Red Square.

But hey, what does one expect? Russians will be Russians, right? We in the West aren’t going to tolerate statues commemorating monsters – nor anyone else we don’t like for however spurious a reason.

In the US statues of the two opposing commanders in the Civil War, Ulysses Grant and Robert E Lee, are about to come down. These are to be followed by most signatories to the Declaration of Independence, including its author, Thomas Jefferson. And even poor old Teddy Roosevelt no longer rates commemoration.

In Britain, the same monsoon is about to sweep away Winston Churchill, Cecil Rhodes, General Hague, Field-Marshal Montgomery and countless others.

However, as the photograph above proves, just as some objectionable personages step down from their plinths, some secular saints are climbing up. Lest you might think that the newly erected statue of Lenin appears in Russia or some other post-communist space, rest assured that’s not the case.

The Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD) has been allowed to erect the statue in front of its headquarters in Gelsenkirchen, a city that’s in the heart of what used to be the Federal Republic, not the former GDR.

When city authorities tried to block the project, they were overruled by the courts. Pluralism and diversity were thus affirmed, paving, in my view, the way for some neo-Nazi party to decorate its headquarters with a statue of Hitler. Fair is fair, nicht wahr?

MLPD führer, Gabi Fechtner, is understandably jubilant. Lenin, she said, was “an ahead-of-his-time thinker of world-historical importance, an early fighter for freedom and democracy.”

I’ll buy the “ahead-of-his time thinker of world-historical importance”. Indeed, Lenin created a regime the likes of which had never existed before, but one that gave rise to numerous imitations. Not only Stalin’s USSR, but also China, Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, not to mention assorted African and Latin American countries, along with the entire Eastern Europe, can all testify to the great man’s forward thinking.

However, “an early fighter for freedom and democracy” gives me a spot of bother. Anyone who wishes to check Lenin’s record, which gives him a fair shot at being considered the most evil man in history, can do so on Google.

I, on the other hand, prefer to let the great democrat speak for himself, through his official correspondence, books and articles. Here’s a brief thesaurus:

“It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy…”

“Superb plan!… Pretending to be ‘greens’ (we’ll pin it on them later), we’ll penetrate 10-20 miles deep and hang kulaks, priests and landlords. Bonus: 100,000 roubles for each one hanged…”

“War to the death of the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intelligentsia… they must be punished for the slightest transgression… In one place we’ll put them in gaol, in another make them clean shithouses, in a third blacklist them after prison… in a fourth, shoot them on the spot… The more diverse, the better, the richer our common experience…”

“…In case of invasion, be prepared to burn all of Baku to the ground and announce this publicly…”

“Conduct merciless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and White Guard; if in doubt, lock them up in concentration camps outside city limits.”

“Comrades… this is our last and decisive battle against the kulaks. We must set an example: hang (definitely hang, for everyone to see) at least 100 known kulaks, fat cats and bloodsuckers; publish their names; take all their grain away; nominate hostages…; make sure that even 100 miles away everyone will see, tremble, know that bloodsucking kulaks are being strangled.”

“Suggest you appoint your own leaders and shoot both the hostages and doubters, without asking anyone’s permission and avoiding idiotic dithering.”

“I don’t think we should spare the city and put this off any longer, for merciless annihilation is vital…”

“As far as foreigners are concerned, no need to rush their expulsion. A concentration camp is better…”

“Every foreign citizen resident in Russia, aged 17 to 55, belonging to the bourgeoisie of the countries hostile to us, must be put into concentration camps…”

“Far from all peasants realise that free trade in grain is a crime against the state. ‘I grew the grain, it’s mine, I have a right to sell it,’ that’s how the peasant thinks, in the old way. But we’re saying this is a crime against the state.”

“I suggest all theatres be put into a coffin.”

“I’m reaching an indisputable conclusion that it’s precisely now that we must give a decisive and merciless battle to the Black Hundreds clergy, suppressing their resistance with such cruelty that they won’t forget it for several decades… The more reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we shoot while at it, the better.”

“…Punish Latvia and Estonia militarily (for example follow the Whites in a mile deep and hang 100-1,000 officials and fat cats).”

“Rather than stopping terror (promising this would be deception or self-deception), the courts must justify and legalise it unequivocally, clearly…”

Looks like the German courts have “unequivocally, clearly” legalised Genosse Lenin’s statue as a focus of public worship. Genosse Hitler, your turn next.