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No one doubts that energy supply has a significant political component. But some countries pretend not to realise it.

Like a patient who doesn’t really care who his kidney donor is, Westerners tend to overlook not only the internal ghastliness of some suppliers but even the strategic risk they present.

Thus it wouldn’t be stretching the limits of credulity to suggest that, say, America’s close alliance with Saudi Arabia isn’t really a case of two soul mates united in their sense of values and common pursuit of goodness.

Neither is it a secret that Russia has been using hydrocarbons as a geopolitical weapon for decades. The strategy has been two-fold.

First, the Russians encourage Europe to develop addiction to Russian gas mainlined into the veins of European economies. Second, they do all they can to prevent the West from becoming self-sufficient.

This explains the febrile campaign against nuclear power the Soviets instigated, financed and more or less ran, partly through their fronts, such as the CND. Nuclear mushrooms adorned Soviet and some Western newspapers every time another nuclear power station opened.

Characteristically, it was only the West that was supposed to be at risk of such a physically impossible calamity (the uranium grade used in power stations can’t produce an explosion).

Thus, while the communist state in East Germany was densely covering the country with nuclear plants, its offshoot, the Communist Party of West Germany, was organising massive rallies against a similar development west of the border.

The purpose was transparent: to increase Europe’s dependence on Russia and its client states. In other words, the Soviets were adding oil to the fire of the Cold War.

The global campaign against nuclear power invariably reached hysterical pitch whenever a nuclear accident occurred, and Western media, not always hostile to Soviet interests, were always ready to add a helping hand.

To this day the accidents at America’s Three Mile Island and Japan’s Fukushima are described as ‘nuclear disasters’, leaving one to wonder what word would be used to describe accidents in which people actually died.

So far the only murderous nuclear disasters have occurred at Soviet power stations, proving that nuclear power is only unsafe in the hands of technologically backward, morally irresponsible regimes that have scant regard for human lives.

But in our impressionable world perception is reality and, though nuclear energy is by far the safest of all that can actually provide our energy needs, it’s being phased out. Those bogus mushrooms have had a cumulative effect.

Britain and France, which derives 75 per cent of its energy from atomic plants, are rolling back, while Germany has proudly announced that all its nuclear power stations will be shut by 2022.

Moreover, Angie Merkel, deeply sensitive to planetary concerns, is also getting rid of all the coal-powered stations, which makes inquisitive minds ask where in that case energy is going to come from. (Britain, incidentally, plans to follow suit.)

One possible answer is shale gas, of which the world in general, and the US in particular, has practically unlimited supplies. Shale gas has already turned America into a net exporter of energy, and it’s expected to keep US and Canada warm and light for another century at least.

Problem solved? Not quite. Here we’d be well-advised to dust off that old anti-nuke LP, put it on and listen to the same familiar tune.

You see, extracting shale gas involves a technique called hydraulic fracturing, fracking for short.

This technique is supposed to offend some planetary sensibilities, even though its potential for causing earthquakes and other ecological nastiness is somewhat hypothetical. What’s real is that fracking makes it possible to generate electricity at half the CO2 emissions of coal.

But when it comes to energy sources that can make the West self-sufficient, no balance sheets of pluses and minuses are kept. Such sources are held down to zero-risk standards and, since these are unattainable by definition, anti-fracking hysteria is deafening.

Instead the West is expected to reverse half a millennium of technological progress and revert to producing energy by wind, sun and water. Should we then also ditch antibiotics, while we’re at it? They too have side effects.

The old song that’s being played all over Europe brings back the anti-nuke campaigns of yesteryear, with ‘fracking’ replacing ‘nuclear’ in the refrain. And the inspiration is exactly the same: to make the West dependent on evil regimes, ideally Russia or her allies.

Russia is the world’s biggest supplier of natural gas, accounting for 35 per cent of Europe’s consumption. Yet the distribution is uneven among various EU members.

Gazprom supplies 100 per cent of Finland’s and the Baltics’ gas, 83 per cent of Hungary’s, 62 per cent of Austria’s, 57 per cent of Poland’s, 45 per cent of Germany’s and so on.

What is already a dangerous dependency will become a toxic addiction when the next two lines of the pipeline Nord Stream-2 come on stream. The immediate consequence will be an inordinate growth of Russia’s power in Europe, especially its eastern part.

That worries all Scandinavian countries, Sweden in particular, and Eastern Europe, with the possible exception of Oban’s Hungary. But it doesn’t worry Angie Merkel, making one wonder if her relationship with Putin would withstand the same scrutiny as that to which Trump is subjected.

Speaking at this year’s Davos forum, Merkel explained that, since “natural gas will play an ever-increasing role for another several decades… we’ll continue to get it from Russia… because energy must be affordable.”

Alas, affordable energy may be dear at the price. And the price in this case will be Putin’s growing power to blackmail Europe into doing his bidding – as he’s already blackmailing the Ukraine and its neighbours.

Merkel’s statement was tantamount to admitting that she doesn’t mind such a development in the least. That puts another weapon into the hands of Europe’s most wicked regime, and this weapon may well prove scarier than nuclear missiles.

Writing about the controversy surrounding the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, the actor Mark Rylance comments:

“You have to ask, if the man from Stratford wrote the plays, how did he manage to leave not one trace during his lifetime that he was a writer or even attended school? Why has the evidence disappeared for the years he might have attended grammar school? Did the author of the Shakespeare works really never write or receive a letter? He has been subjected to the greatest literary inquiry of any author’s life, but there is nothing but the attribution of the First Folio to prove that he could write at all.”

These are all perfectly legitimate questions, and they’ve been asked even by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. In fact, I’ve read a small library of books arguing (rather convincingly) that Will Shakespeare of Stratford didn’t write the plays attributed to him and insisting on alternative candidates (somewhat less so).

Now Shakespeare is the only great writer of his time who gives rise to such speculation. Sydney, Bacon, Jonson, Marlowe, Webster – we know almost as much about them as we know about our own contemporaries.

And even if some biographical details may be uncertain, no one has ever disputed the authorship of their works. With Shakespeare, such doubts simply refuse to go away.

The reason, as the above passage shows, is that what we know about Shakespeare the man doesn’t really tally with what we know about Shakespeare the writer. The disharmony is so pronounced that researchers are compelled to delve deeper and longer into the minutiae of Shakespeare’s life and work.

Rylance, incidentally, has co-authored a book on this very subject that uses computerised textological analysis as a tool. I haven’t read the book yet, but apparently it shows strong indications of, as a minimum, collaboration between Shakespeare and Bacon, among others.

I don’t feel qualified to pass judgement on the substance of this thorny issue or especially to come down decisively on either side of the debate.

Nor can I vouch for the reliability of textological analysis in general. I do know of cases where it worked and of some others where it didn’t.

One way or another, some arguments against Shakespeare’s authorship strike me as persuasive, some less so, but all are sufficiently interesting to encourage further study.

Now regular readers of this space are familiar with my frequent lament about the all-pervasive politicisation of every aspect of life, including those that ostensibly have nothing to do with politics.

One would have hoped that a forensic effort aimed at establishing definitively the identity of probably history’s greatest playwright, and arguably its greatest writer tout court, would be spared political fisticuffs. Yet such a hope would be forlorn.

For Will Shakespeare, or whoever hid behind that pseudonym, has been recruited to man the barricades of class war. You see, the Stratfordian was a man of a rather modest social background, a glover’s son in a provincial town.

Hence, whenever anybody dares argue against his authorship, that reckless individual is instantly accused of class snobbery, a refusal to accept that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary achievement.

Such a vice shoves a stick into the wheel spokes of egalitarianism, which makes it impossible to assess the saboteur’s data and arguments on merit.

It doesn’t matter whether his case is made well or badly. What draws spittle-sputtering opprobrium is that the case should be made at all.

The old you-can’t-say-this ethos kicks in, albeit in the guise of reverential respect for an iconic personage of literary and theatrical history. The air gets thick with flying accusations of conspiracy theories, elitism, snobbery and what have you.

Such is the level of debate one observes in the academe and the press, where politicised invective and general ad hominems have become commissioned as weapons of mass instruction.

Considering the ideological bias in our universities, one isn’t particularly surprised. After all, attacking the opponent’s person rather than his ideas is a time-proven trick liberally employed by those whose own ideas can’t withstand scrutiny.

Now some 20 per cent of our faculties in the humanities self-identify as Marxists, and the likelihood is strong that another 70 per cent are so close to that end as to make no difference.

Hence, since most people professionally engaged in the humanities base their intellectual being on ideas as unsound as they are immoral, one shouldn’t be surprised that even such an innocuous subject veers into the morass of ideological nonsense.

So I’m not surprised. But I’m saddened. I suspect that Will Shakespeare, whoever he was, would be too.

After all: “Make the doors upon a woman’s wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that, and ‘twill out at the keyhole; stop that, ‘twill fly with smoke out at the chimney”. And in this case woman embraces man.

I don’t know how to explain to Trump’s critics something that shouldn’t need explaining.

So repeat after me: a bilateral treaty is only as good as bilateral compliance.

And if one side cheats, it’s to blame for the collapse of the treaty, not the other side that refuses to go on under such circumstances. Still not clear?

Fine, an analogy then. Suppose you’re playing poker against a chap who deals himself four aces from the bottom of the pack. If you then call him a cheat and walk away from the table, who’s to blame for it, you or him? Good. Glad we’ve sorted that out.

Extrapolating from there, one ought to praise President Trump for putting an end to the INF treaty banning the deployment of land-based intermediate-range missiles in Europe.

He and his Foreign Secretary Pompeo correctly point out that Russia is cheating because it has deployed just such a missile system. As a result, the US no longer considers itself bound by the terms of the INF treaty.

Unfortunate but unavoidable, I’d say. Nor can there be any conceivable doubt as to who’s to blame, right?

Well, if you think so, it means only two things. First, you have a logical mind. Second, you haven’t read the international outburst of attacks on Trump, ranging from hysterical to perfidious.

Skipping the first category, let’s focus on the second, as exemplified by Mark Almond, a regular and sympathetic guest on RT.

Writing in today’s Mail, he rues Trump’s decision that creates a situation “far scarier” than the Cold War. That’s regrettable, considering “the Kremlin’s relatively small number of mobile medium-range missiles”.

Relative to what? To the zero number of such missiles deployed by Nato? And how many of those systems does it take to wipe out every European capital, should the spirit move Putin? Well, exactly the same number Putin has already primed: relatively small.

“And in such uncertain times,” continues Dr Almond, “the proliferation of medium-range [the actual term is ‘intermediate-range’, the ‘I’ in INF, but who am I to point this out to the expert] nuclear missiles brings the risk of nuclear war that much closer…”

That’s cleverly done. Who in his right mind can possibly argue with the observation above? No one. Nor can anyone dispute the fact that the US has pulled out of INF.

But when the two statements appear side by side, they implant into the reader’s mind that it’s Trump who’s to blame for this situation. The fault lies with the player who catches the cardsharp by the hand, not with the cardsharp.

Incidentally, why is the present situation “far scarier” than the Cold War? Well, you see, “The Cold War was a neat divide between Washington and Moscow. Now there are other players in the game.”

Indeed there are, and that’s one of the truths that are so useful to throw a smokescreen over a lie. The impression one gets – is designed to get – is that the US amply justified action will encourage a free-for-all for the “other players”, such as China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and those are just the ones we know about.

But, since none of those countries is a signatory to the treaty, they are in no way constrained by its terms. Quite the opposite, by responding to Russia’s double dealing, Trump clearly hopes to replace the treaty Russia has abused with a multilateral arrangement that includes strict verification provisions.

This morning Russia made a song and dance of leaving INF too, in response to American war-mongering. However, Russia de facto left the treaty years ago by cheating – as it has cheated on every arms-limitation treaty before, SALT 1, SALT 2, you name it.

Until yesterday’s announcement, the US (and hence Nato) was the only country whose defence capability was limited by the treaty. Surely the president should be praised for trying to change that iniquity and, one hopes, make the world safer as a result?

Instead Dr Almond repeats, practically word for word, Putin’s mendacious response to the American action. But then he must have learned that language on RT.

The other day I fortuitously stumbled on a YouTube lecture by the neuroscientist Jordan Peterson and was sufficiently impressed to order a couple of his books.

Prof. Peterson has devoted his life to the study of the most impenetrable subject of all: human behaviour and factors affecting it. From what I’ve seen so far, he makes more sense – and displays more courage – than most of his colleagues.

So much more jarring it was to hear him make frequent references to Darwin, especially when using primates as a key to some aspects of human life.

There are two problems with such references: they are redundant in that they explain nothing that can’t be explained otherwise; and they are based on a defunct theory that would have been discarded at least a century ago if it weren’t so politically charged.

Prof. Peterson delivered a well-reasoned attack on tribalism that divides the world into two distinct and usually adversarial groups: us and them.

History indeed provides uncountable examples of an exaggerated sense of tribal affiliation causing no end of trouble. Clearly, mankind hasn’t heeded St Paul’s lesson on “neither Jew nor Greek”.

People seek group identification because few of us are sufficiently comfortable in our own spiritual skin. This applies to many variously pernicious groups, from the Nazis to supporters of Chelsea FC.

Prof. Peterson is amply qualified to elucidate this tendency, expressing it in the terms of his profession and drawing on reams of statistical analysis in support.

So why on earth does he need to draw a parallel between human and simian tribalism? He cites the research of the eminent primatologist Jane Goodall, who indeed provided many illuminating insights into apes and their instincts.

I have utmost respect for her work, but not when it’s used to seek insights into human behaviour. For, following St Augustine, I believe that the ape is but a ghastly caricature of a human being. (He described Satan as ‘the ape of God’.)

It’s a reminder of what will happen to us if we abuse our God-given humanity to live by nothing but instincts, however shameful, and appetites, however reprehensible. The ape, in other words, isn’t our past, but it may well be our future.

The difference on this subject between Prof. Peterson and me isn’t that I’m more intelligent (I don’t think I am) or better-educated in such matters (I know I’m not). It’s that I use a different cognitive methodology from his, and I’m prepared to argue that mine is more likely to make the world more intelligible.

In this case, he cites Jane Goodall’s finding on primate tribalism. Apparently, chimpanzees divide themselves into tribes and, should an intrepid outsider come anywhere near, they tear it to pieces.

I don’t remember Prof. Peterson’s exact words, but he used that interesting but, to me, irrelevant fact to comment on human tribalism, presumably as manifested by the Nazis and supporters of Chelsea FC (or some typological equivalent of the latter from his native Canada).

That misses the vital point. A chimpanzee’s behaviour is entirely predetermined by its biological makeup, while a man’s behaviour isn’t. A man is endowed with free will, enabling him to choose between good and evil, vice and virtue, beauty and ugliness.

In that sense a chimpanzee is closer to a plant, which too has no choice but to live out its life according to biological diktats. A man, however, may indeed choose to tear an outsider to pieces, but he may also welcome the outsider, offering him food, shelter and solace.

Yet if we accept that man is nothing but a confluence of molecules coming together over a long time as a result of some initial biochemical accident, then the parallel with chimps makes perfect sense.

It can be demonstrated that chimpanzees are microbiologically close to humans. The two share 99 per cent of their active genetic material, and the genetic distance between them is a mere 0.386.

If that were all there is to it, then chimps would be practically human, even though their intelligence demonstrably falls into the low end of the human range, the one inhabited by the likes of Jeremy Corbyn, Richard Dawkins and most supporters of Chelsea FC.

All I can say to such arguments is that it’s obviously the remaining one per cent that makes all the difference. It’s that one per cent that makes a man close to God and a chimp close to a fern.

That towering difference reduces all biological similarities between humans and apes to the level of petty atavisms of interest mainly to recondite specialists and trivia buffs.

One hopes Prof. Peterson will eventually ditch Darwin’s half-baked, long since discredited theory and its derivatives as an illustration of human behaviour. He has enough deep insights of his own not to need to venture outside Homo sapiens to explain the behaviour of Homo sapiens.

Such excursions are not only redundant and ill-advised, but they can also be harmful if politicised. And what isn’t politicised these days?

Thus we routinely talk about animal rights, forgetting the dialectical relationship between rights and duties. Since animals have no duties, they can have no rights by definition.

However, believing that man is but a more sophisticated animal makes all sorts of absurdities possible. Thus back in 1993 Princeton professor of ‘bioethics’ Peter Singer founded the GAP project, campaigning for apes to receive full human rights.

That project is still going strong, with the Spanish parliament having already acted on Singer’s prescriptions.

He himself displays the sexual power of his convictions by allowing that humans and animals can have “mutually satisfying” sexual relations because “we are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes.” Therefore such sex “ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.”

This proves yet again, if any further proof is necessary, that it’s possible to build a seemingly logical structure on a false premise. There can be no valid objection to Singer’s little predilection unless we reject his presupposition of the animal nature of man.

Much as it’s probably based on a frank self-assessment, this presupposition is wrong. That’s why I’m upset when real scientists like Prof. Peterson come so dangerously close to it.

King Solomon is rightly regarded as a wise man.

Bearing testimony to this reputation is his Book of Proverbs, in which he repeatedly stresses the perils of pride (in the sense of hubris, not self-respect), the seventh and the gravest of the deadly sins.

Thus: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”

This and many other similar adages teach a vital difference between intellect and wisdom. The former is usually part of the latter, but not necessarily the other way around.

Wisdom leavens intellect with a humble recognition of the limits of intellect. It thus acts as a safety valve of the mind, preventing it from too much folly and enabling it to be effective.

One wonders if European politicians ever dip into Scripture. I’m sure they don’t, for otherwise they would never have concocted an idea as unwise as the EU (or, for that matter, as criminal as communism, fascism and Nazism).

The problem goes deeper than just that awful contrivance. It also explains why England has had a much more successful political history than, say, Germany or France.

The English aren’t cleverer than the French or the Germans. But the English are wiser – they do appreciate the difference between wisdom and cleverness.

A widespread belief exists on the continent that a successful state can be built on a brilliant idea springing from the fecund minds of savants. Once that idea has taken shape, they feel, everything else will be a mere technicality.

Alas, the world seldom works that way, and politics never does. Organising and governing the life of a nation is a task with more facets than simple cogitation can ever fathom.

Brilliant men may knock their heads together and devise a perfect system for a perfect world. But no system can really be perfect because the world isn’t.

On the other hand, wise men, who may or may not be dazzlingly brilliant, know that people are fallible because they’re fallen.

Imperfect human nature will thus scupper any perfect political idea. Wise men realise that human agency can’t create heaven on earth. The best we can hope for is preventing hell on earth.

Germany and France, combined or perhaps even singly, might have produced as many or more brilliant statesmen than England. But they never produced as many wise ones – in fact, arguably they’ve hardly produced any.

Their statesmen have an exaggerated faith in both the power of the mind (especially their own) and the goodness of man. They really do take seriously Rousseau’s nonsense about man being perfect to begin with and ready to be tautologically perfected by clever teachers.

The noble sauvage, beautiful in its primordial virtue, is an idea that doesn’t stand up to even the most cursory empirical investigation. Solomon, on the other hand, knew that man has a good side and a bad one, and a wise government is one that encourages the former and discourages the latter.

A great mind has to construct a political picture of the world, one that makes it intelligible. But, if acting on its own power alone, it’ll fail every time. For this picture will paint the world not as it is, but as the brilliant mind wishes it to be.

Hubris takes over: a supremely intelligent man knows he’s cleverer than just about everyone he meets, individually. That leads him to the gross error of thinking that he understands something that mankind has never grasped, collectively.

He’s like a scientist who has so much faith in his hypothesis that he doesn’t care if it’s contradicted by empirical data.

The English political mind is the opposite of that. The English distrust the capacity of any man or small group, no matter how brilliant, to solve all the little problems of the world. No one but the English often use the word ‘clever’ pejoratively; no one else could have come up with the expression ‘too clever by half’.

The edifice of English government traditionally rested on what Burke described as prejudice, which is intuitive knowledge; prescription, which is truth passed on by previous generations; and presumption, which is inference from the common experience of mankind.

Thus the English have never organised their political life on the Damascene experience of any one man or group. It has always reflected a gradual and respectful accumulation of precedents – not only in law, but in every aspect of government.

A dispassionate, analytical look at what had worked over centuries and what hadn’t created the wisest and most stable government the world has ever known.

While seldom as fervently religious as most people on the continent used to be, the English borrowed from Scripture the notion of the sovereignty and intrinsic value of every individual, regardless of his wealth, status or intelligence.

Thus just government, as the English used to understand it, works from the bottom up, from low to high, from small to big. Its core unit is the individual and his immediate extension, his family.

It’s to this unit, and the local government built in its image, that wise governments devolve as much power as realistically possible. Localism, a maximum shortening of the distance between the governed and the government, is the essence of any just English government.

Centralism, the state assuming most power, is a profoundly un-English – and I dare say un-Western – way of running a country. That’s so not because it goes against the grain of some political theory, but because time and again it has been shown to be less effective and more tyrannical .

As the distance between the governed and the government increases, the former have less and less affinity for the latter, and the latter less and less affection for the former. Tectonic faults appear, and an earthquake may soon follow.

Empowering the state at the expense of the individual explains, more than anything else (such as more sophisticated killing technology), why more people were killed in the twentieth century than in all the previous centuries of recorded history combined.

While abandoning the founding tenets of our civilisation, modernity – even, alas, in England – has also discarded its political wisdom. Hence the modern tendency is to replace localism with centralism, which is to say replace the product of millennia’s worth of experience with an idea proved to be catastrophic.

The logical development of centralism is reductio ad absurdum: an urge to centralise political power within a supranational entity, thereby increasing even further the distance separating the government from the governed.

Hence the EU, a deeply flawed idea that lacks even the benefit of originality. For at least the past couple of centuries, clever Europeans have tried, in the words of T.S. Eliot, “to escape from the darkness outside and within by dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will have to be good.”

One such ‘perfect’ system is a supranational government that can dissolve all national identities, and therefore animosities, in a giant state ideally covering the whole world or just Europe to begin with.

Yet any attempt to come up with a United States of Europe will end up producing a Yugoslavia of Europe. Sooner or later individuals will realise they’re no longer sovereign, and even their national government isn’t.

A nationalist reaction is bound to follow, which may be violent and in any case will never be painless. The EU is thus a ship sailing for the rocks, with its skipper shouting “full speed ahead”.

Many clever continentals are capable of understanding this. But they won’t acknowledge it: their intellectual pride won’t let them. One doesn’t discern many Solomons in the European Commission.

When it comes to freedom of speech, the spectrum of opinion is demarcated by libertarians on the violet end and the post-modern brigade on the red one, with many gradations in between.

Libertarians are opposed to any restrictions on speech, no matter how much offence it gives to how many people.

Post-modernists support multiple restrictions on speech, no matter how little offence it gives to how few people.

The second group is easy to dismiss because their arguments just don’t make sense. Nor do they really try to argue; they simply want to put their jackbooted foot down.

Post-modernists see the world in binary terms, as an everlasting clash between the oppressors and the oppressed, with the second group to be protected from any insult to their delicate sensibilities.

The intellectual dilemma that gores these people with its horns has to do with definitions. They shoehorn mankind into prefabricated tribal groups, a few of which are supposed to oppress and most of which are deemed to be oppressed.

Their raison d’être demands an on-going expansion of the second group and the never-ending vilification of the first. Yet they can’t really define either with anything resembling intellectual rigour.

One example off the top: post-modernists regard women as an oppressed group, which logically makes men the oppressors. At the same time they see sex-change as a natural right. So, if an oppressed woman becomes a man, is she now an oppressor?

And what if a woman is a self-made or, worse still, hereditary billionaire? Does she then belong to the oppressed and oppressors at the same time? Does the same go for a black and/or homosexual company director? And what about a black, Muslim, lesbian fund manager?

The problem is that everybody, with the possible exception of maniacs, belongs not to one tribe but many. Should we all be protected from ‘hate speech’ in one capacity, but not the other?

This cat’s cradle is impossible to disentangle without losing every vestige of intellectual credibility.

Then how do you define ‘offensive’ or ‘hate’ speech? Does a joke making fun of some group qualify? For example, Jews come across as crafty in many jokes. Does this mean that anyone who tells them hates Jews?

Also, does anyone who refers to any tribe by a term other than the one this tribe favours at the moment hate every member of the tribe? No, I have it on good authority that some people who call the French froggie-woggies actually like them.

‘Offence’ is just as problematic. Let’s say I address a group of 300 and say something about it that one sourpuss finds offensive, while no one else does. Am I guilty of offending the whole group?

Our government, acting in the capacity of Solomon, solved that problem with the elegance characteristic of modern governments. An offence, it ruled, is anything the person on the receiving end perceives as such.

This legal definition strikes me as a tad too broad. That’s tantamount to saying that a crime is anything the government says it is, which concept of jurisprudence doesn’t sit well with the English Common Law.

And this is indeed a legal definition, with the weight of the state punitive power thrown behind it. A loyal subject of Her Majesty can be punished for saying something someone else deems offensive.

Actually, attacking this whole post-modern perversion complete with its political correctness is hardly sporting because it’s too easy. It’s a bit like angling with a stick of dynamite.

But the libertarian argument at the other end is harder to dismiss. There’s a strong internal logic to it.

Freedom of speech, say libertarians, only means something when it covers speech we dislike. After all, speech we like hardly needs protecting.

Some libertarians go so far as to insist that, say, libel and incitement to murder shouldn’t be illegal either, and even this specious argument is more buoyant than any PC nonsense mouthed by the post-modernists. But forgetting this extreme end, the bulk of the argument sounds reasonable.

There has to be an authority, say libertarians, that’s empowered to decide what constitutes ‘offensive’ or ‘hate’ speech. That authority can only be the state because it alone can enforce compliance.

Yet even cursory knowledge of history and human nature shows that a government empowered to ban speech we dislike will sooner or later start banning speech we like, including our own. Such a government has a green light on the road to tyranny – and one doesn’t have to be a card-carrying libertarian to deplore that.

So who decides? And if no one can, then isn’t any injunction against any kind of speech absurd?

Here I deviate from the libertarians, with whom I agree up to this point. For they proceed from a purely secular, which is to say anti-historic, premise and I don’t.

Both the post-modern brigade and their opponents preach, and try to impose, a certain system of moral coordinates. But no such system can succeed in earth unless it ultimately comes from heaven.

Hence injunctions against murder and theft are immutable in every civilised society precisely because they have divine antecedents. They fall into the category of malum in se – evil in itself.

Some other transgressions are malum prohibitum: they only transgress because they are arbitrarily banned. Thus a man driving without a seat belt commits a lesser offence than a man who steals the careless driver’s car.

I agree with the libertarians that no human authority should be trusted to decide what constitutes offensive speech. But ‘human’ is the operative word.

There has to be an authority that sits above human beings and is empowered to pass judgement on moral matters – including free speech. We used to have such an authority. It was called the Church, and for almost two millennia it applied divine law to sift human laws.

When it came to free speech, it proceeded from the legal principle laid down by the founder of our civilisation: “All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.”

That authority presupposed censorship, but it also allowed almost infinite latitude. After all, most of the great literature was produced when the Church kept a watchful eye on speech.

By contrast, since the West freed itself from the shackles imposed by that institution it has clearly put in place other, tighter tethers. If you don’t believe me, just look at the rubbish adorning the windows of today’s bookshops.

Freedom of anything will turn into chaos if not subjected to a rigid discipline. That’s why some discipline is always imposed – the questions are by whom, by what kind of authority and what kind of discipline.

What speech should be restricted? Well, certainly not the kind that upsets the PC crowd – but some. Hence my reply to my libertarian friends who put forth their sound arguments in defence of free speech is always the same: “Yes, but…”

One should always heed lessons taught by experts.

Ignoring them is a sign of arrogant hubris, something that makes real knowledge impossible.

Armed with this wisdom, we should listen closely to my friend Manny Macron when he tells us all he knows about social unrest, which is a lot.

I certainly hung on to his every word the other day, when he explained to me how the world works – or rather should work.

After every sentence, Manny would cast a quick glance at the First Foster Mother, to make certain she approved.

Brigitte, I have to say, looked particularly assertive in her man’s suit (Size 36 Regular). She sat there impassively, occasionally adjusting the cuffs of her shirt to make sure exactly a quarter-inch showed, and smiling indulgently each time she felt her pupil had done well.

Thus reassured, Manny pressed on.

It’s impossible for a society to maintain tranquillity in a country that finds herself outside the EU, he taught.

Thus, if Britain leaves the EU without the kind of exit deal that negates the exit, we must brace ourselves for disturbances, if not for an out-and-out popular uprising.

Every weekend for months our city centres will be gridlocked by hundreds of thousands of protesters wearing funny garments, banging on buckets to produce the mère of all ruckuses, building barricades, ripping cobbles out and using them as projectiles, looting shops, writing graffiti disrespectful of the government and doing all sorts of other disruptive things.

Our police will have to respond with tear gas, baton charges, mass arrests. That will incite the protesters even more and trouble will escalate.

The state of the economy won’t help, what with it constantly teetering at the very edge of recession and tipping over from time to time (de temps en temps). We’ll have to keep raising taxes on fuel and essential services, adding fuel taxes to the fire of riots, as it were.

Meanwhile, our industrial production will go down, as will the people’s living standards.

Heading fast in the opposite direction, however, will be unemployment, especially among the young. Manny could confidently predict it’ll reach 25 per cent, driving millions of young Britons into the ranks of rioters.

The only thing that can save us from such disasters is a continued membership in the EU, in whose loving care Britain will prosper as much as all the other members have. Just look at France and Greece, he said. Nary a protest in sight, with people really having nothing to protest against.

Social cohesion will reign supreme and, if the British ever feel like wearing lurid waistcoats, it’ll be to make a sartorial, rather than a political, statement. Cobbles will remain in the roadways, the police will have no need for tear gas and batons, no barricades will be built.

“Do you think you get zis?” asked Manny at the end. “Well then, make sure to convey zis message to les sales Anglais. EU – social cohesion; no EU – social unrest. And stop wearing zis silly yellow waistcoat, will you? It doesn’t become you.”

I shook hands with the royal, sorry, I mean presidential couple (Brigitte’s handshake was considerably firmer, went well with her suit) and rushed to my computer to do as ordered, sorry, I mean taught.

Along the way I stopped at a huge graffito that goes to show how the French fail to appreciate their regal saviour Manny and, by association, the EU. Bunching Macron together with the quasi-communist Mélenchon and the quasi-fascist Le Pen, it screamed: “Out with all of them!”.

Knowing that you won’t believe people can be so ungrateful after all that Manny has done to, sorry, I mean for them, I asked Penelope to snap the validating picture opposite. Really, there’s no understanding the French.

As Nicolás Maduro fights for survival with the help of 400 Russian ‘private military contractors’, Venezuela is rapidly turning into yet another flashpoint capable of conflagrating the world.

Venezuela has severed diplomatic relations with the US after the Trump administration recognised the opposition leader Juan Guaidó as interim president.

Both the US and Britain are trying to impound Venezuelan assets, and President Trump refuses to rule out military intervention. As far as America is concerned, the Monroe Doctrine has never been repealed.

Both Putin’s and Xi’s governments are rather unhappy about this. Putin threatened that any such interference would spell a “direct path to bloodshed”, and he didn’t just mean the odd shootout between his ‘private contractors’ and the 82nd Airborne.

But I don’t want to talk about such nasty things. I want to talk about love, especially of the type that can hurt.

Indeed, politicians like Putin, Xi, Tsipras, Mélenchon love Venezuela.So do ‘celebs’ like Sean Penn, Oliver Stone and Michael Moore.

Even Pope Francis harbours warm feelings about that country, although he doesn’t express them in the same forthright manner.

However, all these gentlemen have something good going for them. None of them can become the prime minister of Britain.

Jeremy Corbyn can, and in my gloomier moods I feel certain he will. That’s why his love of the regime begotten by Chávez and Maduro worries me.

It has to be said that Jeremy’s heart has a huge capacity for love, but not necessarily of the kind taught by Christ.

Jeremy has never seen a terrorist organisation he couldn’t adore. Hezbollah, Hamas, IRA, ETA, ISIS – you name it, Jeremy loves it. He does dislike Jews, but his multiple loves shine so much brighter against the backdrop of that darkish animosity.

Yet none of his love objects runs a country. But Chávez did and Maduro does.

Hence Jeremy’s love of their regime suggests that he sees it as a model he’d like to replicate in Britain, should he get the chance. I can’t take credit for this insight because he isn’t at all reticent about it.

Thus, when Jeremy was overcome with grief over Chávez’s death, he spoke from the heart:

“Thanks Hugo Chavez for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared. He made massive contributions to Venezuela and a very wide world.”

“In Chavez let’s remember someone who stood up, was counted, was inspiring, is inspiring, and in his death we will march on to that better, just, peaceful and hopeful world.”

“Chavez showed us that there is a different and a better way of doing things. It’s called socialism, it’s called social justice and it’s something that Venezuela has made a big step towards.”

Jeremy’s voluminous heart easily accommodates love of the poor, something he has in common with all socialists, including Messrs Chávez and Maduro. In fact, they love the poor so much, they make sure their numbers grow exponentially.

Just 20 years ago Venezuela was one of the world’s richest countries, with proven oil reserves 20 per cent greater than Saudi Arabia’s sloshing underfoot.

The country had a content, prosperous and reasonably well-educated population living in peace both internally and externally. And then Jeremy’s role models took over.

Following the economic principles they shared with Corbyn, they instantly pumped oil revenues into relieving poverty, including naturally their own. Blood-sucking capitalists were expropriated, just as Marx prescribed, and their industries nationalised.

All those measures were introduced overnight, with the exuberance so characteristic of the Latin temperament. And they worked the same way such measures always do.

In short order Venezuela became an economic basket case, with food disappearing from the supermarkets and people queuing for hours just to buy a handful of flour. Even the oil production steadily declined, from 3.5 million barrels a day in 1998 to 1.5 million barrels now.

To make matters worse, the government banned private plots and even fishing – the state had to enjoy a monopoly. Chavez’s goons roamed the coast, arresting fishermen and confiscating their catch.

Starving people looked for food anywhere they could find it, shooting wild creatures like flamingos and even raiding zoos to kill the animals. For it takes money to buy even flour, and that became a problem.

The bolivar, the national currency, was crushed by inflation. Quite a lot of it, actually: this year it’s expected to reach 10,000,000 per cent.

Given their subtle understanding of economics, Corbyn and his shadow chancellor McDonnell probably see this as an opportunity for enrichment. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every pound you own became ten million within a year?

Wouldn’t you like to drive a hundred-billion-pound car? I know I would.

Alas, Venezuelans didn’t quite see it that way. Hungry and desperate, they tried to take to the streets, which urge was nipped in the bud.

In the good socialist tradition, the democratic government quickly turned into a totalitarian dictatorship. Public protests were banned, dissidents thrown into prison, some quietly disposed of – well, you know how socialism operates in all its glory.

Unable to protest, Venezuelans  went on to vindicate the immutable law of history: when socialism comes in, people run away. Millions fled, mostly to the adjacent countries, creating a refugee crisis of their own.

What used to be a prosperous, peaceful country has become a hellhole ridden with poverty, disease and crime. Caracas’s murder rate is twice that of Cape Town and 80 times that of London. With a murder rate of 111 per 100,000, Venezuela puts to shame the US, by a factor of 25.

When the time came to pay lip service to democracy, Maduro’s gang rigged the 2018 elections without even bothering to throw a smokescreen around it.

Now Juan Guaidó, head of the National Assembly, is trying to depose Maduro’s gang, and his alternative government has already been recognised by the US, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Australia and most Latin American countries.

Yet Maduro has his champions too: Russia, China, Cuba, Iran, South Africa – and Jeremy, who may soon be given the chance to turn Britain into Venezuela in the name of socialism, social justice and love of any tyrants who hate the West as much as he does.

Those who say that Corbyn can’t possibly become PM or, even if he does, will be unable to destroy Britain to the Venezuelan blueprint, are much too complacent.

They don’t realise how brittle our institutions are, how wafer-thin is the partition separating every civilised country from institutionalised evil.

It takes insomniac vigilance to preserve our civilisation, whatever is left of it. Looking at our youths, who block city centres stampeding in their thousands to see a performance by a ‘genderless’ freak, one doubts such vigilance is top of their minds.

How will they vote next time around? I’m convinced that, unless Parliament passes an emergency decree raising the voting age to 30, we’ll have the British answer to Maduro at 10 Downing Street.

And then our only salvation could come from a latter-day Thomas Pride. Where are you, colonel, when we need you?

What’s the attraction of EU membership?

One has to pay membership fees at any club. Just take my word for it: I belong to two tennis clubs, one in London, the other in Burgundy, and both charge for the privilege.

Weighing the debits against the credits, I’m satisfied that the balance is in my favour. In return for the modest fees, I can have unlimited court time at both clubs, and there’s no shortage of other members to play with – and have a beer afterwards.

The EU is a larger club than either of mine, and it costs more to belong. The membership fees are partly denominated in pounds sterling, at least £10 billion a year net – and that’s the least costly part.

My tennis clubs don’t try to dictate how I live my life outside their grounds, and nor do they prevent me from joining other clubs. The EU is different.

It insists that Britain surrender her sovereignty, including the right to join other clubs.

About 60 per cent of the new laws by which Britain is governed come down from the EU, and this proportion will reach 100 per cent when the EU becomes a single state de jure, rather than just de facto.

I’d say that any club demanding such exorbitant fees must be able to offer the kind of service that offsets the outlay. Moreover, that service has to be unavailable elsewhere, certainly not for free.

What is it then?

It can’t be the cash: the very fact that we pay more than we get knocks that argument for six.

It can’t be the chance to trade with other European countries. That service is useful, but, since we’ve had it for free since God parted the Red Sea, we shouldn’t have to pay for it.

It can’t be the chance to travel to the continent – ditto.

It can’t be relying on stronger economies to pull ours out of the morass by the bootstraps. That argument might have had some merit back in the ’60s and ‘70s, when Germany was a powerhouse, France not far behind, and Britain was in the doldrums.

But not now, when both countries are slipping into a major recession, their industrial output dropping – hope you’ll forgive a crude simile – like a whore’s knickers, and their employment rate not even a patch on ours. As to other EU members, most of them are the European answer to Venezuela (with a revolutionary potential to match).

It can’t be collective defence. On the contrary, belonging to a single European army, presumably led by Angie as generalissimo and Manny as the chief of staff, is sure to compromise our position in NATO, proven to be a reliable guarantor of our security.

And so on, so forth. I’ve been asking numerous EU fans, both here and on the continent, that same question for years – and never once have I received an answer whose intellectual content would satisfy even a 10-year-old with learning difficulties.

And that’s not all.

What’s the problem with the referendum result?

Now I’m opposed to plebiscitary democracy on principle, but that’s neither here nor there. My feelings are demonstrably not shared by those who called the referendum, those who took part in it, and those who vowed to abide by the result.

So what’s the problem then? The people were asked to speak; they spoke; job done.

Now we’re told that the result is divisive. I agree: of course it is.

But I’ll let you in on a secret: I’ve now lived in the West for 46 years, and I’ve taken part in numerous elections at different levels.

Yet in all this time I’ve never seen a single election yielding a unanimous result. And most of them were decided by a few percentage points here or there.

Thus any democratic election is by definition divisive: it divides those in the majority from those in the minority. Those in the second group swear, grind their teeth and go along with the result – that’s what democracy is about, isn’t it?

The election of every president or PM in my lifetime has been divisive, as has been every referendum I know about. That being the case, the word ‘divisive’ has no meaning whatsoever.

Uttering it in justification for neglecting the referendum result is tantamount to arguing against the very notion of plebiscitary democracy, or for that matter any other.

If that’s the point, fine. I myself have strong reservations about one-man-one-vote democracy, and have argued against it in books, articles and beery chats at my tennis clubs.

Yet those who decry the divisive referendum profess unshakeable faith in majority voting. Frankly I don’t get this.

What on earth does ‘People’s Vote’ mean?

Those who are impervious to the oxymoronic contradiction I’ve pointed out are demanding that the referendum result be ignored and another referendum, which they call People’s Vote, be held.

This can only mean two possible things.

One, the people didn’t vote the first time around. But they did: 17.4 million of them voted to leave the EU, more than have ever voted for anything else.

Two, those who voted in the first referendum weren’t people. Rather than homo sapiens, they represent some other, presumably inferior, species. At the time the EU was conceived, the term Untermenschen was in vogue, so should we resurrect it now?

Implicitly only those who want to stay in the EU qualify as full-fledged human beings, which startling anthropological discovery hasn’t been sufficiently documented to my satisfaction.

That’s another thing I don’t get. There are still many others; just tell me where to stop.

What makes leaving the EU so complicated that we’d better forget about it?

This claim is made by the very people who have tirelessly worked for over two years to make it so complicated.

That again strikes me as specious. Someone who stabs a taxpayer just for the hell of it is in a weak position to complain about knife crime being rife, or am I missing a logical point?

Once the people (I’m using this term in its traditional meaning) voted to leave, and Parliament voted to invoke Article 50, the whole thing became, or rather should have done, as easy as leaving any other club.

However – I’ve already used one crude simile, so I might as well use another – the EU seems to be like a certain part of a dog’s anatomy. Once a member is in, it slams shut and there’s no getting out.

Democratically elected people join forces to defy democracy, thereby making the canine simile work. Really, I don’t get it. Can somebody help me out please?

The word ‘modern’ is seldom used in this space as a term of praise. So it pains me to have to apply it to our future king. But alas that’s what Prince William is, an utterly modern man.

He professes love for Aston Villa, and for the sake of our monarchy I hope he only professes it.

In his younger days, he used to be regularly photographed drunk in the wee hours, rolling out of the kind of nightclubs where a normal person wouldn’t be able to stay a minute.

He routinely uses demotic language, which I’ve lampooned a couple of times: http://www.alexanderboot.com/prince-williams-guide-to-talkin-proper/

And he blames the war generation’s stiff upper lip for what he sees as the nation’s mental health crisis.

Now, and I mean this with every bit of respect for the institution HRH represents, he’s a man of rather modest intellect. That by itself is no disqualifying trait for becoming a successful king, provided that deficit is offset by nobility, honour, a sense of duty – and the very quality of dignified restraint that HRH wishes to expunge.

I’m afraid Prince William doesn’t display such qualities as often as he shows a certain lack of mental acuity. To wit:

“Completely by accident they [his grandparents’ generation] passed that [emotional restraint] on to the next generation [that of his parents]… So the whole generation inherited that this is how we deal with problems – we don’t talk about them. Now there’s a generation realising this is not normal and we should talk about them.”

One doesn’t know where to begin. However, obeying the royal command, I’m prepared to talk about my problems – specifically the one I have with drivel like that.

To me, emotional restraint, refusal to shove one’s feelings under others’ noses, has to be the most endearing national trait of the English. Underpinning it are the qualities of delicacy, tact and respect that lie at the foundation of civility.

Sparing one’s interlocutor the burden of one’s problems comes from the understanding that, since he has many problems of his own, one should ease his burden, not add to it.

A problem shared is a problem doubled – this version of the proverb is closer to the truth than the original. “Pull yourself together and get on with it” ought to be inscribed on the royal coat of arms, next to Dieu et mon droit.

Prince William’s statement is ignorant on more levels than those possessed by the kind of buildings his father rightly despises.

Character traits aren’t passed on from generation to generation “completely by accident”. Has HRH heard about such things as heredity, gene pool, national character, culture and history?

Apparently not. But he has clearly heard the echoes of Freudian psychobabble reverberating through the more fashionable social circles and unfortunately bouncing on to the less fashionable.

Freud’s fraudulent theories have been thoroughly discredited, and in fact he never achieved a single clinical success in his lifetime, other than those falsified either by him or by his worshippers.

That, however, didn’t prevent Freud from spawning whole generations of therapeutic leeches sucking money out of the gullible. Being in therapy has become de rigueur for the kind of chaps who accessorise Armani suits with scarves rather than ties, or the sort of women who wear sunglasses on top of their heads even at night.

They set the trends, one of which is generational anomie: belief that the dial is reset in every new generation, and no ideas, principles or traits developed by previous generations are worthy of respect.

Another trend is an artificially cultivated emotional incontinence. Let it all hang out, seems to be today’s motto, like Prince William’s shirt used to hang out of his trousers at the end of those nightclub sessions.

Many English people go with the Zeitgeist and against their nature to wear their hearts on their sleeves – forgetting that before long that vital organ will be caked in grime.

For the English have to force themselves to do things that are innate to, say, Italians. A loud, wildly gesticulating Italian doesn’t irritate (not much, at any rate) because one realises he’s naturally acting in character. An Englishman doing the same things, or forcing himself to have loud, garrulous fun, looks ludicrous.

Also, if “there is now a generation realising [stiff upper lip] is not normal”, how is it that we’re plagued by a mental health crisis that upsets Prince William so?

First, I’d like to see the evidence testifying that a crisis exists. I suspect that such data, if they exist, are hugely inflated by classifying as mental illnesses things that Prince William’s grandparents would describe as sadness, worry or simply a rotten mood.

But if it’s indeed true that the emotionally incontinent generation is madder than the previous ones, this rather compromises the underlying supposition, doesn’t it?

And surely one could think of much more valid reasons for this pandemic than the inherited reluctance to pester all and sundry with one’s little problems?

The widespread use of drugs is one. I suspect Prince William has witnessed this activity more often than his paternal grandmother, God bless her. Yet he hasn’t discerned a link between that and madness.

However, any competent psychiatrist, as opposed to a Freudian quack, knows that cannabis, to say nothing of hard drugs, can produce mental disorders – even (especially?) among people who don’t bottle up their feelings.

And then there’s the major reason: the rapid depletion of mental, spiritual and moral resources, a problem that seems to be accelerating with each subsequent generation.

Our godless, ill-educated, deracinated young are left with little to look up to, so they’re encouraged to delve into their own psyche, in the hope of finding peace.

Yet all those homespun solipsists find there is a kaleidoscope of puny thoughts and base feelings – the sort of things that are indeed better off staying bottled up inside.

On balance, one wishes Prince William had inherited more from his paternal grandparents than from his mother. Alas, that’s not how heredity has worked out – and it’s no accident.