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Every conversation about coronavirus, including one with doctors, begins and ends with the same disclaimer: “We don’t really know…”

We don’t. We don’t know what caused the virus, though Putin’s media blame Britain, specifically those villainous Britons who poisoned Litvinenko with polonium and the Skripals with novichok.

President Trump, on the other hand, blames China and actually refers to COVID-19 as a ‘Chinese virus’. That intensifies Chairman Xi’s desire to smash the ‘dog head of American imperialism’, which under normal circumstances he keeps to himself for fear of losing US markets.

Much as I hate to lump Putin and Trump together, let’s just say that neither of them really knows, although Trump must be closer to the truth here.

We don’t know how fast the virus will spread. So far the rate has been well-nigh exponential, but there are signs it’s slowing down. Some epidemiologists believe the signs, some don’t. In either case, we don’t really know.

We don’t know whether people who survive the infection will develop immunity to it. Some experts are saying that, unless the virus is allowed to run its course, it may come back in a year or two. But they don’t really know.

Some things we do know. Most old people who contract the infection will die from it – with or without intensive care, ventilators, vital sign monitors and so on. The numerical value of ‘most’ depends on the underlying condition, age and general robustness or lack thereof. But most experts agree on the range between 85 and 95 per cent, with the lower level starting at 70+ and then growing towards and beyond 80.

Moreover, even those old people who get the virus and don’t die shouldn’t count themselves lucky. They are almost guaranteed to develop cognitive disorders, which is a polite way of saying ‘turn into vegetables’. Bad news all around, in other words.

Another thing we know with a fair degree of certainty is that the way governments have responded to coronavirus is guaranteed to cause a global economic disaster. Thousands of businesses, and not necessarily just small ones, will go to the wall; millions will lose jobs; financial markets will hit rock bottom and will take years to recover.

That situation, dire as it will be in itself, will also have far-reaching medical ramifications. It’s impossible to put a number on them, but many people will die – they always do when the economy takes a dive. How many, I don’t know.

This morning a friend of mine, who is both a writer and a medical doctor, was writing an article about coronavirus. He rang me to find out if I had any bright ideas, and was disappointed to find out I didn’t.

That gave me a start: normally, he doesn’t seek out my views before writing his pieces, especially on medical subjects. This time, however, he didn’t really know the answers any better than I did.

However, there’s knowledge and knowledge. Neither of us can come up with a rational panacea for the crisis – we just don’t know enough, and neither probably does anyone else.

Yet there’s also such a thing as intuition, and intuitively we both feel that governments are overreacting and therefore causing more damage than the virus would do on its own. Those who doubt government action can make things worse, should recall the 1939-1940 Phoney War, the period between the declaration of war and the first Luftwaffe raids.

Once war was declared, the British government immediately introduced blackouts throughout the country. As a result, 600 people died in road accidents before the first Soviet-made Nazi bombs fell on Britain.

The reasons for the blackout doubtless made sense, as do the measures currently being taken by HMG. However, those 600 people could have lived.

This isn’t a fool-proof analogy, only a reminder that governments can be ham-fisted when tackling problems. And when they are, they are perfectly capable of making the problems worse.

P.S. As lavatory paper is disappearing from our shops, I can offer an ingenious solution to the looming hygienic crisis. The Guardian should drastically increase its print run and start using a lighter stock.

Any crisis, financial, military or medical, is a test. The question posed can be paraphrased depending on the circumstances, but in essence it’s always the same:

Can our society and institutions survive as our society and institutions? Or will they transmogrify into something alien and unpleasant?

Judging by the plan put forth by Health Secretary Matt Hancock, our score on this test is near to failing. If Mr Hancock gets what he wants, within a couple of weeks everyone over 70 will be confined to house arrest, euphemistically called quarantine, and kept there for at least four months.

Any wrinklie venturing outdoors will be summarily arrested, confined to detention and fined some draconian amount. This, irrespective of the person showing the symptoms of any condition other than old age.

Now, fascism is an emotionally charged word bandied about by all and sundry, often with no taxonomic rigour. However, if understood as the state arbitrarily exercising despotic powers, the term fits Mr Hancock’s plan like a glove.

I’m not defending a libertarian rampart here. At a time of plague, it’s sensible to isolate as many carriers of the contagion as possible, even if that means suspending essential civil liberties. When the country is in danger, the interests of the many have to take precedence over the interests of the few. The utilitarian argument carries the day.

However, this isn’t the situation here. For the state isn’t out to protect many from few. It’s planning to impose tyrannical measures to protect the few from themselves. Rather than isolating the subjects of infection, those who spread it, the government is planning to isolate its objects, those on the receiving end.

There’s absolutely no evidence that the old spread the infection faster or wider than the young. On the contrary, the young are much more likely to carry the virus without showing any symptoms, whereas those whose immune system is weakened will be instantly identifiable as ill.

It’s true that the death rate is much higher among the old, and they should be made aware of the risks. However, that done, they should then make their own decisions on how best to protect themselves, and I’m sure most of them would welcome helpful advice.

The state’s function isn’t that of a strict but fair father spanking his wayward son for an imaginary transgression to the accompaniment of the ubiquitous mantra: “It’s for your own good, and it hurts me more than it hurts you.” A state that assumes that role thereby takes on a fascist trait – and where there’s one of them, there eventually will be many.

Amazingly, the little matter of civil liberties hasn’t had as much as a mention. Worked up as we are about the sacred right of women born as men to impregnate men born as women and then turn public lavatories into freak shows, we’re placidly lackadaisical about millions of Her Majesty’s subjects being locked up in solitary confinement on a whim.

One wonders how our powers that be see the ensuing practicalities. How will the new law be enforced?

Will the army move in, patrolling the streets, stopping everyone with grey hair and demanding at gunpoint to see proof of age? How will the virtual prisoners, millions of them, feed themselves? (And don’t tell me they could rely on delivery services – those are already failing to meet the still-moderate demand.)

Provided they display civil disobedience – as any self-respecting person must in the face of naked tyranny – do we have enough prisons, or hospitals converted to prisons, to hold all resisters in anything other than concentration camp conditions?

Slopes don’t get much slippier than that, nor tests much tougher. I hope we won’t let the bastards get away with this outrage.

P.S. Even at my decrepit age, I can still wipe the tennis court with our youthful PM, who fancies himself a player.

When it comes to coronavirus, I’ve got bad news and good news.

The bad news is that, at 6.6, we have fewer intensive care beds per 100,000 population than not only Germany (29.2) and France (11.6), but even such economic powerhouses as Cyprus (11.4) and Latvia (9.7).

Altogether Her Majesty’s realm possesses merely 4,250 such beds. Thus, should coronavirus claim more patients at the same time, doctors will have to claim God-like powers and decide who lives and who dies.

One suspects they aren’t going to assess the agglomerate of each person’s human qualities before drawing lots. Their decisions are more likely to be based on actuarial factors only, such as age, medical history, life expectancy and so on.

Hence we can confidently look forward to a wholesale cull of wrinklies, especially those in dodgy health. One suspects that people with deformities and learning difficulties also have much to fear.

But rejoice, for here’s the good news. We have the NHS, a fully socialised system of medical care that none of those other, backward countries can boast.

Hence we lead them by a wide margin in such vital job descriptions as directors of diversity, facilitators of optimisation, optimisers of facilitation, administrators, administrative assistants, multiculturalism consultants et al.

That’s why I have it on the good authority of popular mythology that all those foreigners, swarthy or otherwise, envy us something rotten. So far they’ve managed to contain such feelings enough not to imitate the NHS – but give them time.

Once they’ve seen how expertly all those directors of diversity usher old people towards the morgue, they’ll come round to our way of thinking. Isn’t the NHS grand?

It’s not just people who move freely within the EU. Infections have a field day too, imposing a stiff tax on borderless spaces.

It’s useful to remember that the two deadliest pandemics in European history occurred in the 14^th century, when national borders were nonexistent, and in 1918-1920, when they had been crumbled by a world war.

The first happened too far in the past for any useful parallels to be drawn, but the second occurred only a century ago, allowing comparison. And it’s telling.

No centralised, coordinated response was possible to the Spanish flu: Europe was in disarray, yesterday’s enemies were becoming today’s friends and vice versa, rancour was in the air, along with mutual resentments and recriminations.

No pan-European institutions existed, although there were movements under way clamouring for their founding. As always in the wake of internecine carnages, people sought order and were desperate about not getting it.

It’s in bad taste even to mention coronavirus in the same breath as that pandemic. The scale is smaller by orders of magnitude, and the virulence is nowhere near as high.

Moreover, isn’t most of continental Europe now one family, united in its craving for a single federated state offering to exchange protection for allegiance? In fact, the state craved for is already there to all intents and purposes, and it’s wisely guiding Europe through the crisis.

Right. And if you believe this, I have a couple of bridges across the Danube and the Meuse for sale. For all its bluster and grandiose claims, the EU is amply proving yet again that the bubble of ideology bursts when touched by real life.

Ursula von der Leyen, the better-looking and more sober answer to Juncker, is screaming herself hoarse, urging unity: “The European Union can withstand this shock. But each member state needs to live up to its full responsibility and the EU as a whole needs to be determined, coordinated and united.”

Quite. And I’d like to be young, tall, rich and out on a crowded date with all of Weinstein’s victims.

For, push come to shove, all European countries are acting unilaterally. Every land for itself, and the devil take the hindmost – along with the beautiful idea of European unity.

In this context, some of the claims routinely claimed by and for the EU are shown for the humbug they are. We no longer need Nato and the American nuclear umbrella, say the federalists. If Russian tanks sweep across the plains, all European states as one will close ranks and… well you know the rest.

Yet a few thousand old people dying across Europe is enough for EU members to start acting in their own selfish interests. Ursula can flap her wings all she wants about the detrimental and useless effects of travel bans – she’s widely and predictably ignored.

The Danes, Poles, Czechs, Italians, Spanish, Belgians have already closed their borders or as near as damn. Panic is spreading all over Europe like brushfire, and the EU is helpless to do anything substantive or encouraging about it.

Many European states are on the brink of open revolt against that impotent and pernicious organisation. They managed to feign some lukewarm affection for it as long as money kept coming in and things were more or less on an even keel.

Yet the first sign of pressure and out goes affection. In comes defiance, resentment and particularism.

All this was entirely predictable. In fact, it was predicted by everybody who understands that ideological contrivances are at best useless and at worst catastrophic. Yet no one can outshout an ideology, and no one can make it listen.

As you watch EU flags disappear from Westminster, give thanks.

In the fashionable spirit of openness, I have a confession to make: I dislike revolutions – and especially revolutionaries. And I’m always wary of single-issue activists, even if I happen to agree with the single issue.

For example, although I despise the EU, opposed joining it and did what I could to help us leave it, even in the heyday of the Leave campaign I shunned those who hung their entire worldview on the peg of that one issue.

This is in no way to denigrate good people whose energy promotes good causes. It’s just that there’s usually something about them that strikes me as off-centre and therefore unbalanced.

Such people’s efforts are essential to achieving immediate objectives, but, however worthy the goals, their unsmiling vulgarity can cause lasting damage. That’s why a conservative activist is an oxymoron: conservatism presupposes prudence, taste and an ability to see things in interconnection.

Activists possess an undepletable reservoir of bubbling energy that needs a constant outlet. Once they get what they want, the energy seeks another cause to animate.

Alas, even if the original cause might have been worthy, or at least widely perceived as such, the next one may be less so. That may explain the fate of those who perpetrated both the French and the Russian revolutions, for all their original, if short-lived, popularity.

The activists’ demonic ardour was essential to the success of their cause. However, once the revolutions triumphed, the revolutionaries’ erstwhile comrades put them down like rabid dogs.

Robespierre and Trotsky, Saint-Just and Zinoviev, Danton and Bukharin – all of them were killed by their colleagues. My guess is that, if syphilis hadn’t got Lenin, Stalin would have killed him too.

By way of illustration, take MeToo and modern feminism in general. Its roots go back to the militant suffragette movement of the early 20^th century, which, as the name suggests, championed women’s rights, especially the one to vote.

That I have a dim view of that cause is irrelevant to my theme here. However, the key personalities involved do elucidate my point nicely.

Mary Richardson (d.1961), Mary Allen (d. 1964) and Norah Elam (d. 1961) were all close associates of Emmeline Pankhurst and as such participated in the militant activities of the movement she had founded. Together with their disfranchised sisters, they smashed windows, tossed bombs and assaulted police officers.

While Pankhurst was in prison, Richardson slashed Velasquez’s painting known as the Rokeby Venus, in the National Gallery.

“I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history,” she explained, “as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history.” Opinions on that designation were, and still are, divided.

Mary Allen also made a career of smashing windows and then going on hunger strikes in prison. Some of the windows she smashed belonged to the Inland Revenue, which must have brought a smile on the face of many a respectable squire.

Norah Elam, a prominent member of the Women’s Social and Political Union, was thrice imprisoned for terrorist offensives inspired by her commitment to a wider suffrage. Like the other two, she presaged today’s obsession with dieting by going on hunger strikes. Unlike today’s dieters, she was sometimes force-fed.

To illustrate my point, the three ladies didn’t settle to a quiet life somewhere in the shires once women got their coveted vote. They transferred their red-hot consciences to the good offices of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and reached prominence within its ranks.

They admired Hitler, and Mary Allen even got the chance to discuss feminism with the führer in person. Since Hitler’s attitude to women was rather agricultural, similar to the feelings cow breeders have for pedigreed heifers, Allen’s enthusiasm might have seemed hard to explain.

Or would be, if we forgot that, whatever their pronounced aims, revolutionaries are energumens who reach out for any source of demonic energy, however sinister. Feminism yesterday, fascism today, animal rights tomorrow – it really doesn’t matter.

Thus, once the fascist cause was defeated, the three ladies in question (actually, Allen was indeed a questionable lady: she always wore men’s uniforms and liked to be known as ‘Robert’) became animal rights activists and militant anti-vivisectionists. If they were alive today, they’d doubtless be cheering the draconian sentence Harvey Weinstein received in a travesty of justice.

Having reached an age at which one can get away with offering avuncular advice, here’s mine: however you feel about a cause, beware of its fervent champions.

If you do, don’t. Judging by this government’s first budget, Labour scored a resounding victory.

No, not that, unelectable Labour. The victors were photogenic exponents of the same ideas lightly camouflaged with mock-Tory cant.

Today’s papers are full of encomiums for Chancellor Sunak’s budget speech. He’s praised for his brio, inspired (and phonetically demotic) rhetoric and Blairesque charisma. Mr Sunak is already talked about as Johnson’s successor – all on the basis of his one month in office and one rousing speech.

Personally, I’d prefer a droning delivery of sound economic policy to yesterday’s histrionic rendition of an economic suicide note. For, rather than offering, as he claimed, any new answers, Mr Sunak ignored all the answers provided and amply proved by the whole history of economics.

His speech had nothing to do with economics and all to do with politics. By enunciating socialist economic policies, his Labour Lite effectively defanged Labour Full Strength.

The Tory budget will increase our sovereign debt to at least £2 trillion by 2025. What’s Labour Full Strength going to offer now? Another trillion? Two?

The new budget is designed for immediate political effect, and in that sense it is indeed a masterstroke. A combination of runaway spending and promiscuous borrowing strikes an optimistic note at crisis time – it’s a fiscal feast in the time of plague. 

The rationale provided for this orgy of borrow-spend-tax is that borrowing is now cheap because the interest rates are at an all-time low. Now, unless Mr Sunak has a direct line to the god of money markets, how can he be sure that interest rates will stay that way?

Did he learn anything from the 2008 crisis, largely precipitated by a glut of cheap mortgages on subprime rates that all went into default when the interest rates edged up? Taking the economy with them? No, apparently not.

And even assuming that the rates do stay low for the lifetime of this parliament, the absolute sums of repayments are staggering. Taxes will have to go up, with the economy heading in the opposite direction, as it always does when squeezed by state extortion.

A great deal of the trillion-pound budget proposed by the government has to do with ‘investment’ in infrastructure. Effectively that means punitive taxation on the productive Peter in the economy and a transfer of the funds to the incompetent Paul.

For governmental meddling in the economy is incompetent by definition. “The moment that Government appears at market, all the principles of market will be subverted,” wrote Burke, and he has been vindicated by the subsequent 200-odd years of economic history the world over. A state doesn’t invest – it spends, and the money for this exercise is siphoned out of the economy.

If the chancellor is inspired by Roosevelt’s TVA and Hoover Dam or Hitler’s autobahns, he should analyse those vast ‘infrastructure investments’ more closely. He’ll find out that their ‘boosterism’ (today’s Tory neologism) spelled strictly short-termism.

No one will begrudge the chancellor the £30 billion, effectively a blank cheque, allocated to fighting the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. Desperate times, desperate measures and all that. At a time of national emergency, all hands ought to be on deck, not on the abacus.

It is, however, useful to remember that the modern state seldom relinquishes what it has claimed. Grabbing extra powers for itself in the time of war, economic crisis or murderous pandemic, it tends to keep hold of those powers after the situation improves.

The statist policies adopted by most Western states in the wake of the two world wars, the Great Depression or the Spanish flu pandemic persevered in the aftermath. The result has been a gradual but ineluctable transfer of power to the central state at the expense of local bodies and individuals.

That, if we ignore the attendant bien pensant waffle, is the essence of socialism. And, this side of concentration camps, its prime power tool is a tax-and-spend economy, diminishing individual enterprise and therefore increasing dependence on the state.

The claim that adding a few seconds to our broadband connections or subtracting an hour from a London-to-Manchester train ride would boost productivity is irrelevant if true.

Actually, I doubt it’s true because a highly educated and motivated workforce is a sine qua non for a marked rise in productivity. And such a force is created by education that educates, rather than providing an arena for social engineering.

That is demonstrably lacking in Britain. However, even assuming against logic and historical evidence that the government ‘investment’ does produce a 2-3 per cent increase in productivity, the effects will take a full generation to trickle down into the economic mainstream. By that time the economy, emaciated by Tory (or subsequent Labour) socialism will be a basket case.

So forgive me if I don’t add my voice to the chorus of panegyrics for Mr Sunak and his budget. It’s not so much an economic plan as a recipe for disaster.

We’ve all met some naturally funny people, those who make us laugh even when they aren’t trying to. Russia proves that countries can be like that too.

Three bits of news prove this rare talent. Moving from the ridiculous to the gor blime, the first involves two Russian pranksters nicknamed Vovan and Lexus, who ring foreign dignitaries, pass themselves for someone else (Putin, prime minister of Armenia et al.) and dupe their marks into saying ridiculous things.

The list of their victims includes Elton John, Boris Johnson, Erdogan, Bernie Sanders and many others. The pair are known to be the stand-up extension of the FSB, and the very fact that they easily get all those private phone numbers proves the connection.

This time it was Prince Harry’s turn. Vovan and Lexus, posing as Greta Thunberg and her father, had two long conversations with the prince, making him sound even dumber than God originally made him.

That Harry isn’t the sharpest chisel in the toolbox is seldom denied. But this time he outdid even himself.

Harry readily offered that, because President Trump’s commitment to saving ‘the planet’ is less febrile than Greta’s, he “has blood on his hands”. And the prince was delighted to hear the fake news that Greta is distantly related to the Swedish royal family and thus, at a few removes, to himself.

‘Greta’ then suggested that her cause could be advanced by a dynastic marriage. One candidate for such nuptials was Prince George, Harry’s nephew. Harry offered his help in making future arrangements with enough alacrity to suggest that perhaps starting a matchmaking service may be on his extensive list of business opportunities.

Now, I haven’t heard the tapes yet, so I can’t imagine how a thirtyish man can impersonate a teenaged girl, but they train them well at the FSB. Then again, Harry probably doesn’t take a lot of duping.

The next news items aren’t immediately funny, but there’s a comic payoff down the road, about which later.

First, a trial is under way in the Hague of four Putin thugs directly responsible for the 2014 downing of Malaysian Flight MH 17 over the Ukraine, which killed all 298 people onboard.

The trial is held in absentia, for the defendants neglected to turn up, as everyone knew they would. In an equally obvious but less widely predicted development, all the witnesses in the trial have to remain anonymous because there’s evidence that Putin’s death squads are trying to track them down.

That approach to legal procedure isn’t new, but traditionally it has been associated with crime syndicates both rather smaller than Putin’s Russia and lacking the firepower that only nuclear weapons can provide.

Now, unlike old soldiers, Mafia godfathers never fade away. They do die though, but until that demise they stay put. The next news item shows that in this too Putin follows the same pattern.

The Russian situation stipulates only so many presidential terms, and Putin’s last is set to expire in 2024. However, a few years ago parliamentary speaker Vyacheslav Volodin offered a simple formula making that highly undesirable.

“If there is Putin,” he said, “there’s Russia. No Putin, no Russia.” Hence it would be Russia expiring in 2024, not just Vlad’s tenure. And Putin himself once extended the formula by adding that if Russia goes so will the whole world.

In other words, a cataclysmic event with global implications is on the cards, and it has to be preempted at all cost. The solution came to the Duma by a serendipity reminiscent of Archimedes in his bath.

If the old constitution spells the end of Putin, Russia and the world, it should be replaced with a new one, thereby resetting the timer and giving Vlad two more terms to last until 2036, when he will be 83.

The actual eureka moment was provided by Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space and now an MP. “Comrades,” she said, “why are we tying ourselves in knots? Since we can’t survive without Putin, we must either remove all limitations on the number of presidential terms or to make it possible for the acting president to be re-elected in accordance with the new constitution.”

So moved, so voted – so to be rubber-stamped by the constitutional court. Russia has tossed aside the last pretence of democracy and appointed the KGB colonel the supreme ruler for life. That means that the malignant sore on the world’s body will continue to fester, with us teetering on the edge of deadly conflict for as long as Vlad lives, and he’s in rude health.

So what’s so funny about this, I hear you ask. Where’s the humour in any of the three items? Thought you’d want to know.

None of this is funny in itself, not even Harry’s idiocy so brutally exposed or rather confirmed. Not the Hague trial, where the gangster regime will get a mild slap at best and won’t admit its guilt. And certainly not the lifelong entrenchment of the world’s most dangerous dictator openly waging war on the West.

The comedy will be provided by the repulsive sight of Putin stooges in the West bending over backwards in their attempts to justify an evil that doesn’t even bother to justify itself any longer. As they surely will.

If it’s true that there’s an opportunity in every crisis, then there exists today the greatest opportunity in a decade. But not necessarily for you and me.

As stock markets register the biggest fall since 2008, pensioners, savers and small investors are getting hammered. That’s hardly surprising, considering that some of the world’s major markets, including China, are more or less in a lockdown.

As a result, the FTSE 100 has lost the better part of half a trillion pounds, £144 billion just yesterday, and none of the equivalent indices is doing better. The immediate reason for such plummeting is the global coronavirus hysteria, with people encouraged to run scared.

Markets respond by giving a new twist to the old Nietzschean adage. In this case, it could be paraphrased as “what doesn’t kill you will make you poorer”. And the virus has a much greater potential of causing the second calamity than the first.

After all, markets are more sensitive to the perception of reality than to reality itself. Thanks to today’s masses’ steady diet of mass media, the distinction between the two is blurred. Yet actual reality does exist, and it warrants caution rather than panic.

Coronavirus isn’t the Black Death that wiped out between a third and 60 per cent of Europe’s population in the 14^th century. Nor is it Spanish flu that killed between 17 and 100 million in 1918-1920.

By contrast, so far Covid-19 has claimed 3,584 victims worldwide. Comparing this with seasonal flu that kills between 291,000 and 646,000 every year ought to put things in perspective.

Unlike reality, perception can be manipulated, and some groups have a vested interest in doing so. The media are usually singled out as a culprit, and with good reason: panic sells papers and products advertised on TV.

Yet other, possibly more significant, culprits hardly get a mention. It’s market speculators who stand to earn trillions by short-selling and asset-stripping. In case you have more important things to worry about, short-selling benefits from shares falling.

A trader borrows a large number of declining shares at rock-bottom prices. Then, when the prices rise, he sells his position at the new high level and remits the cost of the borrowed cheap shares to the original owner. The profits can be staggering, and the greater the original fall, the greater the returns.

Asset-strippers are another genus of vultures circling around moribund companies. The moment a company’s market value plunges below its assets (in 2008, some firms were even worth less than their cash reserves), the asset-strippers pounce, buy the company, tear it up, sell off its assets and get richer.

Since I’ve seen no reports to that effect, this is purely conjecture on my part. But I’m certain that such vultures have a large role to play in the scale of the crisis.

Some of those creatures live in Russia, nesting in and close to the Kremlin. Prime among them is Igor Sechin, Putin’s former KGB colleague, seen as Russia’s sinister eminence grise.

As chairman of Rosneft, the world’s largest publicly traded company, he keeps his hand on what the Russians sardonically call their “oil needle”, hydrocarbons being the sustenance to which the country’s economy is addicted.

On 6 March, Sechin (with Putin’s blessing) instigated a move that looks incomprehensible outside the avian context I outlined above. Russia abruptly severed her agreement with OPEC about keeping crude production low.

Predictably Saudi Arabia responded by slashing prices and dramatically increasing production. As a result, Brent prices, already dropping due to the coronavirus crisis, went down 30 per cent, dealing a huge blow to the Russian economy.

Or so one would think, off the top. Yet Russian realities can’t be skimmed off the top; they reside at a greater depth.

Sechin’s official explanation for this seemingly crazy move evokes the cliché of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. The purpose, he explained, is to put US shale producers out of business: at prices below $40 a barrel, shale oil is produced at a loss.

Taking those greedy Yanks down a peg seems like a sufficient justification for impoverishing the already indigent Russians even further. Overnight the rouble lost 10 per cent of its value against the dollar.

Since everything worth buying in Russia is imported, and the cost of imports will grow, the people will bear the brunt of Sechin’s initiative. Yet this reminds me of an old Soviet story about a collective farmer attending the Party Congress in Moscow, presided over by the Politburo.

When he returns home, his friends ask him how things were in the Kremlin. “Lads,” says the farmer, “you wouldn’t believe it. Government of the people, by the people and for the people. And I saw those people!”

Mutatis mutandis, the same joke would work just as well nowadays. The Russian government runs solely for the benefit of those in and around it, Putin’s personal cronies, mainly from the KGB.

And what’s poison to the Russian people may well be meat to those people. Hence I don’t believe that Sechin’s attack on those shale Yanks has only an aesthetic value to him and his boss. One suspects a pecuniary motive at play as well.

Russian gangsters, otherwise known as oligarchs, have trillions in purloined cash sloshing in global offshore funds. This can be easily shown by comparing the oil revenues of Norway and Russia.

Russia’s oil production is about four times that of Norway. Yet the latter’s reserves of oil cash stand at $1.1 trillion – to Russia’s $100 billion, roughly one tenth of Norway’s. True, Russia pumps more of her oil revenues into the internal economy. Yet most of them go into those offshore accounts, and the populace be damned.

Having that much ready cash enables Russian traders-raiders to move in with ease on any flagging company and buy it at a deflated price. At this point they can either asset-strip it or simply wait for the share prices to go up. Some short-selling may come in handy as well, ultimately serving the same purpose.

It’s not just the Russians of course. Vultures breed in the West too, and they are just as ravenous.

But seldom do they act in the same blatant manner – our civilisational veneer still encourages some semblance of tact. Yet when it comes to Messrs Putin, Sechin et al., no such constraints exist.

This time every year, I vent my spleen on the subject of the International Women’s Day, and the amount of stuff to vent grows every year.

This communist holiday has now been thoroughly naturalised here, dovetailing neatly as it does into the burgeoning ethos of MeToo and other toxic movements. The Times, formerly a conservative paper, even ran a gushing editorial on it, producing a strong emetic effect in yours truly.

Being enfeebled by pneumonia, I can’t find anything to say on this subject that I haven’t said before. So here’s my last year’s piece, in case you missed it then.

First we had Mothering Sunday, a religious holiday Western Christians celebrate on the fourth Sunday of Lent.

Then, under the influence of the US, Mothering Sunday was largely replaced by Mother’s Day, a secular holiday with no religious overtones whatsoever. That’s understandable: our delicate sensibilities can no longer accommodate any Christian festivals other than Christmas Shopping.

Now that secular but basically unobjectionable holiday has been supplemented by International Women’s Day (IWD), celebrated by all progressive mankind on 8 March. Our delicate sensibilities aren’t offended at all.

Actually, though the portion of mankind that celebrates 8 March calls itself progressive, it isn’t really entitled to this modifier – unless one accepts the propensity for murdering millions just for the hell of it as an essential aspect of progress.

For, not to cut too fine a point, 8 March is a communist event, declared a national holiday by the Bolsheviks in 1917, immediately after they seized power and started killing people with the gusto and on a scale never before seen in history. A few wires were expertly pulled after the war, and IWD also got enshrined in Soviet satellites.

The event actually originated in America, where the Socialist Party arbitrarily chose that date to express solidarity with the 1909 strike of female textile workers. Yet the holiday didn’t catch on in the States, doubtless because the Socialist Party never did.

Outside the Soviet bloc, 8 March went uncelebrated, unrecognised and, until recently, unknown. I remember back in 1974, when I worked at NASA, visiting Soviet astronauts made a big show of wishing female American employees a happy 8 March, eliciting only consternation and the stock Texan response of “Say what?”

The event was big in the Soviet Union, with millions of men giving millions of women bunches of mimosas, boxes of chocolates – and, more important, refraining from giving them a black eye, a practice rather more widespread in Russia than in the West.

But not on 8 March. That was the day when men scoured their conscience clean by being effusively lovey-dovey – so that they could resume abusing women the very next day, on 9 March. For Russia was then, and still remains, out of reach for the fashionable ideas about women’s equality or indeed humanity. As the Russian proverb goes, “A chicken is no bird, a wench is no person.”

Much as one may be derisory about feminism, it’s hard to justify the antediluvian abuse, often physical, that’s par for the course in Russia, especially outside central Moscow or Petersburg. Proponents of the plus ça change philosophy of history would be well-advised to read Dostoyevsky on this subject.

In A Writer’s Diary Dostoyevsky describes in terrifying detail the characteristic savagery of a peasant taking a belt or a stick to his trussed-up wife, lashing at her, ignoring her pleas for mercy until, pounded into a bloody pulp, she stops pleading or moving. However, according to the writer, this in no way contradicted the brute’s inner spirituality, so superior to Western materialistic legalism. Ideology does work in mysterious ways.

The Russian village still has the same roads (typically none) as at the time that was written, and it still has the same way of treating womenfolk – but not on 8 March. On that day the Soviets were house-trained to express their solidarity with the oppressed women of the world, or rather specifically of the capitalist world.

As a conservative, I have my cockles warmed by the traditionalist way in which the Russians lovingly maintain Soviet traditions, including the odd bit of murder by the state, albeit so far on a smaller scale. Why we have adopted some of the same traditions, at a time when communism has supposedly collapsed, is rather harder to explain.

But why stop here? Many Britons, especially those of the Labour persuasion, already celebrate May Day, with red flags flying to symbolise the workers’ blood spilled by the ghastly capitalists. May Day is celebrated in Russia, so what better reason do we need? None at all. But why not spread the festivities more widely?

The Russians also celebrate 7 November, on which day in 1917 the Bolsheviks introduced social justice expressed in mass murder and universal slavery. I say we’ve been ignoring this glorious event far too long. And neither do we celebrate Red Army Day on 23 February – another shameful omission.

But at least we seem to be warming up to 8 March, an important communist event. At least we’re moving in the right direction.

A reader of mine suggested that those who celebrate IWD should perform the ballistically and metaphysically improbable act of inserting the holiday into a certain receptacle originally designed for exit only. While I don’t express myself quite so robustly in this space, I second the motion.

Cherie (Mrs Tony) Blair once predictably expressed her support for IWD, ending her letter to The Times with “Count me in”. Well, count me out.

A thoughtful reader asked this Nietzschean question, which would take a longish book on aesthetics to answer properly. Answering it in a shortish article is impossible, but one has to try one’s best.

There’s a corollary second question: Is a great artist beyond good and evil? And a third question coming out of the second: Can an evil man create great art?

Such difficult questions have simple answers within a cogent moral and intellectual system. As someone whose universe is mainly demarcated by Christian coordinates, I find it easy to say, no, nothing and nobody is beyond good and evil.

Yet there comes Nietzsche with his Übermensch, in effect a demiurge, who soars above such philistine or, worse still, religious precepts. The question is, who, other than Nietzsche himself, is the Superman in our midst?

Here Nietzsche’s fallacy naturally overlaps with the glorification of the artist omnipresent in the Romantic Age. God having been debunked, someone had to fill the vacancy thus formed. And, though the artist had no realistic hope of rising on the third day, he could at least take on some qualities of the Superman demiurge.

After all, he, the artist, was a god-like creator. He might not have created the universe, but at least he created a vision of reality more real than reality itself. And, since his audience no longer believed in God, the artist could claim the distinction of being the only creator around, a God surrogate.

That elevation provided a vantage point from which the writer could look down on the world and feel entitled to usurp another one of God’s functions: teaching what was good or evil, moral or immoral, beautiful or ugly.

Some, such as Tolstoy, took that hubristic tendency to a risible extreme, eventually abandoning their sublime art and beginning to pontificate on morality, philosophy, aesthetics, politics and economics with the self-confidence of a jumped-up ignoramus.

Such artists saw no contradiction in preaching one thing and doing another. As self-appointed demiurges, their earthly actions mattered nothing compared to their celestial pronouncements. Thus Tolstoy could happily combine a sermon of sexual teetotalism and the evil of property ownership with siring a platoon of illegitimate children by the serf girls on his baronial estate.

When the subject of art and morality comes up, another great Russian writer, Alexander Pushkin, inevitably makes an appearance. In his drama Mozart and Salieri, Pushkin makes Mozart say: “Genius and evil are two things incompatible.”

This betokens a belief that, far from being beyond morality, the artist forfeits a claim to genius when he transgresses against it.

Of the two incompatible things, evil is easier to define. A theologian will define it as merely the absence of good, a secular thinker as a propensity to perpetrate or at least vindicate evil acts, a philosopher as perhaps the advocacy of evil ideas.

But how is an artist of genius different from one of mere talent? Schopenhauer answered this question epigrammatically, as he often did: “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”

Accepting this brilliant aphorism as a working hypothesis, we can each compile our own lists of artistic geniuses. The lists may differ, but they’ll largely overlap. Everyone will probably agree, for example, that William Shakespeare was a playwright of genius, whereas Terence Rattigan was one of mere talent.

Now let’s backtrack to the original questions. Can an artist of genius be an evil man? If he is, can he keep his personal evil from his art? Does a work of art fly free of its creator, acquiring a life of its own, or is it stigmatised for ever with the scars of the artist’s personality?

That art has an essential moral dimension has been known since Hellenic antiquity. Thus, for example, Plato on music: “Music is a moral law… It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good, just and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and eternal form.”

By inference, music emanating from an evil man can also lead to all that is bad, unjust and ugly – let’s not forget that Plato also invented the concept of dialectics. One way or the other, music or art in general can’t be beyond good or evil by definition.

I find the view that art, once produced, is divorced from the artist to be simplistic, if superficially attractive. This notion became popular when modern critics, typically of the left, began to see works of art as mechanical reproductions of the artist’s ideology, class or race.

Hence it became fashionable to counter that the artist’s personality has little if any bearing on his work. He lives as one man and creates as another (Pushkin, incidentally, propagated this view in many of his poems – he wasn’t immune to the fashionable view of an artist as a demiurge).

That may be true superficially, but it’s false at a deeper level. The artist’s personality informs every aspect of his art, but it often does so in ways invisible to the naked eye.

Thus a discerning observer could deduce Wagner’s views from much of his music, including his rabid anti-Semitism that, contrary to a popular misapprehension, Nietzsche shared (as any reader of his pamphlet Der Antichrist will know).

In his philosophy, Wagner jumped backwards, leapfrogging Christendom and landing in the midst of German sylvan folklore replete with proto-Nietzschean – and proto-Nazi – visions of Teutonic titans rising above the masses. These motifs are clearly audible in Wagner’s work, and would be even if one were unfamiliar with his pamphlets.

Wagner was a great innovator, arguably one of the most influential composers in history. At its very best, his music approaches genius without, in my view, ever quite reaching it. Germany’s sylvan past could inspire much coarse sensuality and soupy emoting, but little subtlety of feeling and thought essential to Christian art.

Tolstoy’s person also often interferes with his art, seldom in a positive way. For as long as his artistic genius could keep his personal failings at bay, he remained an artist of genius, one who wrote about death and childbirth with a poignancy unmatched by anyone else.

But even his magnificent novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina creaked at times under the weight of his supposedly moral, in fact moralising, sermons and pseudo-philosophical asides. His artistic genius pulled through there, but his last big work, Resurrection, sank to the bottom of cheap philosophising.

Both he and Dostoyevsky failed to see how their commitment to preaching through their novels caused artistic damage. Thus both were prone to replacing sentiment with sentimentality, dragging in banal, beaten-to-death protagonists, such as the whore with a heart of gold first ruined and then saved. Their artistry couldn’t resist the toxic effects of their personalities.

If art can never cast away the moral and intellectual failings of its creator, nor can it rise above the morality governing the world in which the artist lives. Beyond good and evil? Absolutely not. Art can’t be; and if it tries it stops being art, never mind great art.