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I haven’t bought a copy of The Spectator since Charles Moore was its editor, about 30 years ago, and the odd piece reaching me through Facebook vindicates the wisdom of such abstinence.

The most recent one was last week’s article Utterly Betrayed: Britain’s Jews Are Now Politically Homeless by Tanya Gold.

To begin with, Miss Gold is such a shockingly bad writer that at times one struggles to understand what she’s trying to say. However, as far as I can surmise, her general point is that British Jews are facing a political Hobson’s choice: vote Labour or not at all.

And, since Labour is anti-Semitic, not at all becomes the only option. British Jews will never vote Tory, will they? As far as Miss Gold is concerned, the question is rhetorical.

One wonders on what basis she feels authorised to speak on behalf of all British Jews in this matter. It can’t be statistical evidence: 63 per cent of them voted Tory in 2017. And this percentage is likely to go up in December because, as Miss Gold herself states, only seven per cent of British Jews plan to vote Labour.

Hence the honest title to the article would have been As a British Jew, I Feel Politically Homeless. However, one can’t discount the possibility that Miss Gold’s mind isn’t attuned to such nuances.

Trying to hack my way through the impassable thicket of her prose, I can deduce that British Jews, that is she, can’t possibly vote Tory because she doesn’t like the look on Jacob Rees-Mogg’s face.

At least that’s my inference from the incoherent paragraph below. Conceivably Miss Gold meant something else and, if so, please help me figure out exactly what:

“That they made us choose makes me weep, for I have not considered voting Conservative before. But I won’t. There is a respectable strain of Conservatism, but this is not it, not for me – one glance at Jacob Rees-Mogg’s face is enough; and all racism thrives under inequality. The Tories cannot save us; that is a laughable sentence. That Labour call themselves progressives, and yet are imbued with the infection of ancient Christian Jew-hatred – the murder of God was our original sin – is equally laughable. We have returned to our settled place; too proud, in every sense, to assimilate; rather, we drift across the world to where we feel safe: the Syrian border for some; Muswell Hill for others.”

Miss Gold must be endowed with psychic powers to grasp the rotten core of conservatism with “one glance at Jacob Rees-Mogg’s face”. Being myself less perceptive, I can’t for the life of me detect the mark of racist Cain on that rather pleasant and intelligent visage, but it must be there if Miss Gold says so.

If I understand her correctly, she ascribes Labour anti-Semitism to “Christian Jew-hatred”. This is certainly one of the tributaries feeding the anti-Semitic stream, but somehow one doubts it flows mighty within Labour ranks.

The Labour Party is leftist and therefore doctrinally atheist. A strain of Christian socialism exists there, but it’s a tiny one, and one doubts it contributes much to the anti-Semitism of today’s Labour Party.

At the heart of this phenomenon lie the Marxist roots of today’s Labour. Marx either sublimated his virulent anti-Semitism into the hatred of blood-sucking, profit-grabbing capitalists or it might have been the other way around.

By whatever route he arrived at that destination, the equal sign between Jew and capitalist permeated his whole being and much of his writing. That chiselled in stone the lapidary equation of socialism: the more socialist, the more anti-capitalist and therefore anti-Semitic.

That’s why by far the worst modern atrocities against the Jews were committed neither by conservatives nor by Christians nor by Christian conservatives but by godless socialists of either the red or brown hue. It’s in that tradition that the most toxic varieties of anti-Semitism are to be found in today’s Labour Party, which is Marxist through and through.

This isn’t to say that no anti-Semitism can be found within the ranks of the Tory Party. But both its roots and therefore its virulence are different.

Part of it is indeed Christian resentment of those who rejected Christ. These days, however, it’s rather rare, what with Christianity no longer being a major cultural and social force. When it does occur, this sub-emotion mostly haunts the lower intellectual layers of the Tories, Christian or otherwise.

Much more widespread is the kind of Tory anti-Semitism that goes back to the modern party’s Victorian roots, when it was still the party of aristocracy. It’s a form of snobbery and contempt for the upstart, which is closely related to the wider disdain for all nouveaux riches in general.

The same Tories who felt that way about Jews also petitioned their children’s public school to stem the influx of pupils from ‘trade’. The two phenomena are related, although their temperature may vary.

The Conservative Party has long since ceased being either aristocratic or indeed conservative. But the survivals of snobbish anti-Semitism persist, no doubt about that.

Yet there’s a major difference between that and Marxist anti-Semitism. A Tory thus inclined would like to keep Jews out of some Pall Mall clubs (although the roster of the Tory Carlton club includes many Jews). A Marxist would like to kill them.

That anti-Semitism is more prevalent among Labour hasn’t escaped Miss Gold’s attention. Yet she brands Rees-Mogg as a physiognomic Jew-baiter, while still insisting that “all racism thrives under inequality”.

Then how come the party doctrinally committed to equality, understood in the pernicious Enlightenment sense, is beset with anti-Semitism, while the party personified by Mr Rees-Mogg’s Savile Row suits and patrician accent isn’t?

Sorry, I realise how tactless it is to put such questions to the mentally challenged who still deserve their rightful place in society. And, by the looks of it, on the pages of our formerly conservative magazine.

One wonders if Miss Gold realises that, in the passage cited above, she repeats the worst anti-Semitic rhetoric one hears these days. The British Jews aren’t really British; they “are too proud to assimilate”; they feel more at home in Israel or, which is worse, Muswell Hill.

Speak for yourself, dear. Many of my friends are British Jews who are British first and Jews a very distant second. But then they are intelligent people who think before speaking or just think in general.

Anyway, I can’t promise to desist from buying The Spectator for another 30 years, but only for purely biological reasons. Barring those, I would.

“Communism thrives in our moral vacuum,” writes my friend Melanie Phillips, one of our most lucid and perceptive columnists.

As is her infuriating habit, she’s absolutely right yet again: we do have a moral vacuum and communism does thrive in it, especially among the young who may yet saddle Britain with a communist government.

In fact, I agree with every sentence in her article, except one: “It is part of an assault on the liberal values of the Enlightenment, such as truth and reason.”

Now, the number of times I’ve disagreed with Miss Phillips can be counted on the thumbs of two hands. Hence my experience in this endeavour is so scant that I’ll have to tread very carefully.

What exacerbates matters is that she then cites with disapproval Theodor Adorno’s view that “the pursuit of rational enlightenment led directly to the extermination camps”. It would take even fewer digits to count the number of times I’ve agreed with Marxists, especially those as dangerous as Adorno, but I’m afraid this is one of them.

First, a general statement: no content can exist without form. The most obvious example is a glass of wine. Remove the glass, and, however redolent the wine’s nose, long its legs or rich its bouquet, it’ll become an annoying puddle on the tablecloth.

Extrapolating from there, however mellifluous its sonorities and catchy its melodies, music can’t exist without a rigid structure. Remove that, and you’ll get cacophany.

Thought too depends on structural integrity. History’s greatest thinkers, from Plato and Aristotle onwards, devoted much effort to developing the structural forms into which ideas could then flow. Remove the formal basics of logic and rhetoric, and you’ll get Richard Dawkins.

Society without structure is chaos, liberty without discipline is anarchy, religion without its framework of dogma and doctrine is a shamanistic cult – and so on.

Everything people do, create or think relies on morphology. And the morphology of vast, intricate entities such as society, with its ethos and institutions, takes centuries to develop.

Destroying it, however, can be done, in historical terms, overnight. This isn’t always a bad thing: as Schumpeter showed, some destruction can be creative. That happens when the destroyed forms are instantly replaced with other, better ones.

More often than not, however, that task proves impossible. What takes centuries to build can’t be rebuilt quickly with the best of creative intentions – and not at all when the intentions are mainly destructive.

This brings us to the “truth and reason” of the Enlightenment, signposted by outbursts of diabolical violence. Its objective, both implicit and explicit, was above all to destroy every traditional form wherever it could be found: politics, social organisation, morality, thought, aesthetics.

All of them in the West had at least to some extent grown out of Christianity, and the ‘Enlighteners’ hated that tree root and branch. Hence they pulled it up and tried to plant a more luxuriant tree in its place. That proved impossible.

Both morality and thought depend on the acceptance of the absolute as the measure of all things – it was the absolute that prevented society from becoming an amorphous, deracinated mass devoid of high morality, noble principles and profound intellect.

Dostoyevsky’s message that without God everything is permissible was moral in nature, but it also applies to thought. Western thought, in order to remain both Western and thoughtful, has to be teleological: it’s a pathway to absolute truth.

To embark on that path, a thinker must as a minimum believe that absolute truth exists. That belief shapes his thought, gives it a form within which it can acquire not only real power but also real freedom.

Replacing the absolute with an endless supply of puny relativities has the opposite effect: it shallows out the thought and turns freedom into chaos. That’s why the West relegated pursuits requiring feats of real intellect and imagination to the status of quaint hobbies.

Coming to the fore instead was THE FACT, that is knowledge of the physical world acquired through the five senses. Intellectually, the Enlightenment was a step from the sublime to the sensory.

Faith in God was replaced with faith in science, accompanied by widely encouraged hostility to things beyond science’s reach. Physics triumphed over metaphysics, which is another way of saying that sublime aristocratic thought was ousted by turgid philistine musings – in the same way as the aristocrat was ousted by the bourgeois as the hub of social life.

This delivered a materialist world, whose principal characteristic was the philistine’s self-righteous smugness. The picture of the world lost its formal structure: it became a kaleidoscope of rapidly changing half- and quarter-truths, all dealing with things material.

By losing the absolute, the world also lost mystery: the vanquishing philistine had enough conceit to believe that his own resources were ample to solve every little puzzle of life in due course.

In the same way he felt that, in the absence of absolute morality, his own understanding of right and wrong was absolute – for the time being at least, until he replaced one quasi-absolute with another.

Materialism, which is a child of the Enlightenment, is as morally defunct as it is intellectually feeble. It’s also socially divisive and therefore sooner or later politically tyrannical.

By empowering the common man politically, materialism in due course enriched him economically. It replaced the traditional hierarchical structure based on high birth or high achievement with another, one based on wealth.

However, it turned out that, while the erstwhile inequality of status was tolerable, the new inequality of wealth was much less so. The pre-Enlightenment West promised people solace in the higher things in life and it kept its promise: such things were equally available to all, if not equally appreciated by all.

The post-Enlightenment modernity, on the other hand, promised people something more tangible and immediately desirable: material well-being. That too was equally appreciated by all – but alas not equally available to all.

A man who at the end of his day’s work gets down on his knees and prays to God is freer from envy, resentment and hate than a man who checks his bank balance and finds it smaller than his neighbour’s.

Such a man is likely to feel that somehow the world is in default of its promise, and it’s scant consolation that he’s much better-off compared to his great-grandparents, and infinitely richer than their great-grandparents. As far as he’s concerned, he is the poor man at the door of the rich man’s castle, which – in a world ruled by philistine materialist concerns – is terribly unfair.

In the post-Enlightenment world, social tranquillity is always short-lived. For evil demagogues preaching seductive messages are never short of grassroots resentments to exploit, nor of underdeveloped minds to dupe. 

Having lost both high reason and high morality, people can instantly turn into rabble inspired by slogans that in the past would have been dismissed as the gobbledegook mouthed by a madman.

Transparent charlatans like Marx and Darwin became the intellectual leaders of the amorphous post-Enlightenment mob, and their political counterparts are seldom far behind.

The Enlightenment has turned people deaf to both truth and reason, while giving their hearing bat-like acuity to voices promising some kind of redress for perceived injustices. Those they can hear in every tonal detail.

Their formless minds and shapeless emotions become moulding clay in evil hands. What the people’s grievances are and what kind of recompense is promised doesn’t really matter.

It could be taking from the rich and giving to the poor – that is, to you, Mr Disgruntled Philistine. Or else elevating your race or class, Mr Disgruntled Philistine, above all others. Or even simply taxing the rich so much that they won’t be any richer than you, Mr Disgruntled Philistine.

What rose out of the ashes of Christendom wasn’t the Phoenix of “truth and reason”, but the carrion of falsehoods, pent-up resentments and small thoughts.

That’s why both Soviet and Nazi extermination camps are indeed direct consequences of the Enlightenment. That’s why the first century completely cleansed of Christendom, the 20^th, produced more victims of institutional violence than all the preceding centuries combined.

And that’s why the world is indeed in danger of extinction – not from aerosols, but from certain scientific discoveries put into the hands of the evil by the silly, immoral and gullible.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki is cross with Netflix. His specific gripe is with the documentary series The Devil Next Door about John Demjanjuk, accused of being an infamous guard in a Nazi death camp.

According to Mr Morwiecki, the series features a map that “falsely places several German Nazi concentration camps within modern-day Poland’s borders… As my country did not even exist at that time as an independent state, and millions of Poles were murdered at these sites, this element of The Devil Next Door is nothing short of rewriting history.”

I sat down to pour some salt on Mr Morawiecki’s wounded national pride. But then by chance I stumbled on an article I wrote in January, 2018, where all my possible arguments were made.

Since they are as relevant today as they were then, and since I’m congenitally lazy, and since I believe in responsible recycling, I’m hereby republishing much of that piece:

The Soviets left Lwów on 29 June, 1941, and the Nazis occupied it a day later. During that interregnum, the Poles and Ukrainians inhabiting the city were left to their own devices – and vices.

One such vice was the almost universal hatred of their 200,000 Jewish neighbours. The glowing embers of that unenviable sentiment were fanned into a violent flame when the locals broke into the three NKVD prisons, only to find out that their 8,000 inmates had been massacred by the Soviets before their retreat.

The mob blamed the Jews, even though many of the victims were themselves Jewish. However, when the heart speaks, reason falls silent – especially when people renounce their individuality to join a herd.

That particular herd went on a stampede, and, when the Germans entered the city, they found out that much of their work had already been done. Some 10,000 Jews had been murdered by their gentile neighbours in ways that must have made the victims beg to be simply shot.

But the job wasn’t finished yet. Einsatzengruppen and the local collaborators began to round up and shoot Jews. Most of the firing squads didn’t include a single German – there was no shortage of local volunteers. By the end of the war, only a couple of hundred Lwów Jews were still alive.

Thus three times the number of Jews were killed in that one city than in the whole of occupied France, where local enthusiasm wasn’t exactly in short supply either. Why such disparity? What made Lwów so much more efficient?

Actually, it wasn’t just Lwów. Simply compare the numbers of massacred Jews relative to their overall numbers in a small sample of European countries.

Western Europe: Germany, 142,000 out of 565,000; Austria, 50,000 out of 185,000; Denmark, 60 out of 8,000; Finland, 7 out of 2,000; Italy, 7,500 out of 44,500; France, 77,000 out of 250,000.

Eastern Europe: Greece, 65,000 out of 75,000; Hungary, 550,000 out of 825,000; Latvia, 70,000 out of 91,500; Lithuania, 140,000 out of 168,000; Czechoslovakia, 78,000 out of 118,000; Poland, 3,000,000 out of 3,300,000.

You’ll notice that a much higher percentage of Jews were killed in Eastern Europe than even in Germany, which after all initiated the Holocaust and built the death camps.

Why? I can think of only one answer: Eastern Europeans didn’t mind the Holocaust as much, and were more than willing to lend the Germans a helping hand.

Another question: why did the Nazis set up all the extermination (as opposed to concentration) camps in Poland? Auschwitz, Belzec, Chełmno, Jasenovac, Majdanek, Maly Trostenets, Sobibor and Treblinka were all there.

To some extent, it must have been a matter of logistics: most of Europe’s Jewish population lived there or thereabouts, in what used to be the Pale of Settlement.

But it couldn’t have been just logistics. After all, the Nazis didn’t mind using hundreds of trains badly needed for military freight to transport Jews from, say, France all the way to Poland. It would have been more efficient to kill them in situ.

Also in the back of the Nazis’ mind must have been the issue of post-war deniability for the Germans. Had those crematorium chimneys been spewing clouds of black smoke in, say, Hamburg, it would have been hard for its denizens to claim they didn’t know.

As it was, such claims weren’t all that credible anyhow, as Daniel Goldhagen demonstrates convincingly in his instructive book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. But he also shows that the Nazis were wary of a potential backlash from the Germans had they had to watch mass murder committed on their own doorstep. No such fears in Poland.

This is the backdrop to the bill recently ratified by the Polish parliament that will outlaw any public association of “the Polish nation” with crimes committed by the Germans. In other words, had a Pole written the previous paragraphs, he could get three years in prison – the kind of literary prize that’s rapidly gaining popularity in the low-rent part of Europe.

Poland’s president Andrzej Duda navigated the perilous undercurrents with laudable celerity. Yes, he admitted magnanimously, some individual Poles did do “wicked” things to their Jewish neighbours (like burning them alive or hacking them to death with shovels, but the president didn’t go into such graphic detail). But there was no institutional Polish participation in the Holocaust.

Actually, as far as I know, no one has ever suggested that the Polish government in exile issued an order to kill Jews. So Mr Duda is on safe grounds there.

But he then went on to bemoan that Poles are being “vilified” with “false accusations”. I suppose Mr Duda believes that any accusations against Poles ipso facto constitute unfounded vilification.

He also objects to the death camps being referred to as ‘Polish’. I agree that ‘German camps in Poland’ would be more accurate. But those camps wouldn’t have been in Poland if the locals had detested them.

They didn’t. At best, they shrugged their shoulders with indifferent acquiescence. At worst, tens of thousands of them took an active part in the atrocities. And those who deny these facts are the murderers’ accomplices after the fact.

The Poles are Catholics, so perhaps they should begin to act accordingly in this painful matter. Redemption won’t come from denying their sins – it can only come from confession and repentance. Especially since history lays their sins bare for all to see.

From time to time, I point out the lamentable ignorance of the Russian liberal opposition to Putin (most recently, in http://www.alexanderboot.com/why-russia-has-no-chance/). Their hearts are in the right place, but their minds haven’t been trained to run things they say and write through a rigorous inner test.

However, Vladimir Abarinov stands out even against that dim background. Today’s Grani, one of the online magazines blocked within Russia, runs his article about Russian meddling in the British general election, where he refers to Dominic Cummings as “Norman Stone’s classmate at Oxford”.

Well, Cummings was born in 1971, when my late friend Norman (b. 1941) was a fellow at Cambridge. He got his undergraduate degree not from Oxford but from Cambridge, and he did so in 1962, when Cummings wasn’t even a twinkle in his daddy’s eye.

If Mr Abarinov is aware of some mysterious educational establishment in Oxford where Norman and Dominic cribbed from each other, he should by all means reveal that information. Barring that, he ought to seek treatment for the traditional Russian disease of speaking with an air of authority on subjects about which he knows next to nothing.

I can only repeat what I said in the article mentioned above, that, just as the world began with the Word, a successful opposition must start with a great idea, which itself has to be a product of informed and enlightened thought. That’s not in evidence among the Russian opponents to Putin, which is why the world won’t be spared his malevolent presence for a while yet.

The news that a Petersburg professor of history killed his mistress in a rather Baroque manner didn’t really surprise me.

Over the past century, Russian universities, at least their humanities departments, have been acting as conduits of the dominant political ethos. Since today it has a distinctly thuggish tint, it’s no wonder that thugs are in a position to shape young minds and, on this evidence, dismember young bodies.

Putin and his flunkeys express themselves in the argot of crime-infested slums, which is par for the course considering their background (“I was a common Leningrad thug,” boasted Putin once). That mentality now pervades even academic institutions, especially Putin’s own alma mater, Petersburg University, the hatchery of the ruling kleptofascist gang.

Enter Oleg Sokolov, 63, associate professor at that university, historian of Napoleonic wars, member of the Russian Society for Military History, confidant of Culture Minister Medinsky (himself Putin’s confidant), lecturer at ISSEP (Lyon’s political institute founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s granddaughter and reflecting the family’s values), recipient of the Légion d’honneur.

Yet one couldn’t complete the list of Prof. Sokolov’s credentials without mentioning his little eccentricities: he’s a brute and a murderer.

Those aspects of his personality first came to light in 2008, when his student mistress presented at a police station with her face beaten to a bloody pulp. According to her testimony, when she tried to leave Sokolov, he tied her to a chair, beat her up and threatened to kill her:

“…When the iron got red-hot, he held it so close to my face that I could feel the heat and threatened to disfigure me for life. After that he began to punch me metronomically in the face, also hitting me in the chest and stomach. In response to my pleas to stop, he hit me even harder and then threatened to kill me and bury the corpse at a nearby building site where it would never be found.”

Sokolov was in trouble, but not for long. Putin’s jurisprudence operates on two tiers: one for his own people, the other for everybody else. Loyalty and typological affinity are the principal criteria of guilt or innocence, and by such standards Sokolov was pristine.

That little pugilistic escapade didn’t even damage his academic career, as it would have done at any other university in the world: academic authorities may overlook affairs with students, but not using love interests for punching bags.

Yet Sokolov never missed a beat, as it were. He continued to pontificate to students about 1812, sometimes sporting costumes from that epoch for the sake of verisimilitude. Alas, he tended to borrow not only his ancestors’ clobber but also his colleagues’ work.

Last year another historian of Napoleonic wars, Evgeniy Panasenkov, sued Sokolov for plagiarism, alleging, with ample justification, that the latter had ripped off Panasenkov’s theory of that period.

Although the claim was obviously true, the court found for the defendant, thereby upholding the sacred principles of Putin’s legality. The judge could have cited a precedent: Medinsky, Sokolov’s patron, put someone else’s work in his doctoral dissertation. But then a culture minister is too busy with the affairs of state to waste time on such trivia as academic work.

A little later, as Sokolov was delivering a lecture in the university auditorium, a student got up, pointed out indisputable instances of plagiarism in Sokolov’s work and asked him how he felt about it. The intrepid youngster got an instant reply.

Turning up the volume of his proletarian voice, the academic screamed: “Get lost!”. When the pedantic student balked at following that advice, the recipient of the Légion d’honneur ordered his loyal retainers to “explain to the young man what’s what.”

That they did, by punching the student and bodily dragging him along with his classmate out of the auditorium. “Like priest, like parish”, as the Russians say. (For those who are interested, the incident appears on YouTube.)

Then the libidinous scholar embarked on another affair with a student, Anastasia Yeshchenko, 40 years his junior. On 7 November, the couple celebrated the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, and the festivities turned sour – possibly because Anastasia hadn’t learned the lesson of her predecessor and announced her decision to leave.

The scorned scholar then shot her dead with a sawn-off shotgun, as one does. Quite apart from anything else, that’s not a weapon widely used in academic circles, but this is Putin’s alma mater we’re talking about.

Sokolov then hid the body in his flat and the next day resumed the celebrations, this time with more loyal friends. Once the binge was over, on 9 November he decided to dispose of the body, which had begun to smell bad.

Not being a DIY fanatic, Sokolov didn’t have the necessary tools at home, so he had to go out and buy a hacksaw. Using that implement, he carved up the corpse, sawing off the head and the limbs.

Since he was unused to that type of work, Sokolov had to fight nausea by drinking steadily and eventually getting drunk. Leaving the unused portion of the body at home, he put the other parts into a backpack and went out to the Moyka embankment.

When I told Penelope about this, she quipped, “A man of many parts,” thereby reenergising our marriage. Anyway, proceeding methodically, as befits a researcher, Sokolov then threw the girl’s legs in the river.

But then the booze caught up with him and, still holding the backpack with Anastasia’s arms, he fell into the ice-cold water. By chance, somebody fished him out and delivered him to hospital where Sokolov almost died of hypothermia.

Speaking to the police, he explained he had killed Anastasia because she disliked his two daughters. Oh well, that’s all right then.

You might say that deranged murderers can be found anywhere, including any university. That’s true. However, much as I despise our own academic life, somehow I doubt that a chap with Sokolov’s previous would continue his profitable career at, say, Oxbridge or for that matter Sciences Po.

Do you sometimes feel we’re missing out on the academic freedom of Petersburg University and ISSEP? Well, by the looks of it, there’s now an opening at both institutions — although with Putin’s courts one never knows.

London’s flagship theatre, the National, is starting a run of a modern, multi-culti – RELEVANT! – version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters with an all-black cast.

As you recall, the play is about three women from a gentry family who grew up in Moscow, but are now stuck in a provincial town. Though they live more than comfortably and enjoy a brisk social (and other) life with the officers garrisoned there, they desperately want to return to Moscow, with its brisk cultural (and other) life.

The leitmotiv of the play is the recurrent phrase “To Moscow, to Moscow!” repeated in variably febrile tones. In fact, the great poet Osip Mandelstam once quipped: “Someone ought to have given those girls three rail tickets for Moscow at the beginning of Act I.”

Three Sisters is quintessentially Russian in a way in which, say, Shakespeare’s plays aren’t quintessentially English or Ibsen’s quintessentially Norwegian. It reflected the general contempt cultured Russians felt for country life, and still do.

Having to live anywhere other than Moscow or St Petersburg was seen as cruel exile, no matter how luxurious the exiles’ country estates, or how stimulating the company of their similarly confined neighbours.

That’s why British (though not French) audiences often respond to Three Sisters with consternation. Their desire to get away from Moscow, for which read London, is at least as widespread as the craving vectored in the opposite direction. Give a Londoner a mansion with a large park somewhere in Gloucestershire, and he’ll happily leave behind his chicken coop of a flat somewhere in Chelsea.

Yet somehow London audiences make the requisite leap of imagination, and Three Sisters seldom stays off West End stages for long. In my 30-odd years here I’ve seen various productions so many times that, as far as I’m concerned, the play should be renamed Thirty Sisters. 

Now call me a racist, a snob or a stick-in-the-mud, but I’m unlikely to see this one: my imagination just can’t leap that far.

From what one can glean reading the previews, the play is now set in a 1967 Nigeria just before the Biafran Civil War. Hence, rather than Olga, Masha and Irina, the eponymous, chromatically different sisters are named Lolo, Nne Chukwu and Udo.

To be culturally consistent, I’d think the ubiquitous battle cry must now be “To Lagos, to Lagos!”: portraying Moscow as the object of geographical craving would require one’s imagination to break every conceivable long jump record.

This attempt to attune classical plays to modern cultural and political sensibilities is by no means unique to this production. Nowadays just about every Shakespeare production features modern dress, modern music and modern accoutrements, such as computers, planes and tanks.

To be entirely up to date, many cast black actors playing white roles, women playing men and men playing women. Sometimes, as in the recent production of Richard II, the same actors play both female and male characters in the same play — confusing the hell out of the audience (well, me).

When I first saw Ophelia wearing torn jeans and gyrating on her bed to the sound of a boombox, I suffered a shock from which I still haven’t recovered – especially since it has been exacerbated by many subsequent atrocities in the same vein.

The problem with applying such a makeover to Shakespeare is that all those transvestite transculturalists continue to deliver Elizabethan lines, albeit as a rule not very distinctly. Surely any director, no matter how hubristic, should be put off by the tasteless dissonance? Fat chance.

Today’s directors worship in the temple of modernity, not art. The word ‘vandalism’ never crosses their minds – they don’t care what kind of aesthetic atrocities they perpetrate by catering to the warped tastes of today’s audiences and, especially, critics.

Reading the previews of the Nigerian Three Sisters, I recalled a crude but accurate Russian joke about a modernist production of the same play.

The dress rehearsal is under way. Forestage is Masha, fellating her love interest Vershinin. The director, sitting in the front row with a notepad in his lap and a pained expression on his face, winces. “Tania!” he shouts at the actress. “Stop champing! This is Chekhov!”

I’ve tried the same joke on my English friends, replacing Masha with Ophelia and Vershinin with Hamlet. They always laugh ruefully: the joke works because it’s only a slightly grotesque take on gruesome reality.

I’d be curious to hear the actresses in the upcoming production shout “To Lagos, to Lagos” in Nigerian accents. But £150 for two tickets is too much to pay for satisfying perverse curiosity.

As the last two millennia show, Christianity can survive heresy, agnosticism and atheism. I’m not so sure about its ability to resist systematic vulgarisation within itself.

This melancholy thought was brought on by the poster outside St Martin-in-the-Fields, one of London’s most central churches. “We understand…,” it begins.

The first part of the sentence is dubious theology; the second, pernicious politics. Both are so irredeemably vulgar that I’d almost prefer a message saying that the rector of that venerable institution doubts the existence of God.

Since the poster’s first statement is theological, it can only be discussed in theological terms. Being the supreme science, theology is the epitome of reason in that it’s impeccably logical. Yet the poster takes the ‘logical’ out of ‘theological’.

The cliché of everyone being equal in the eyes of God is the curate’s egg: good in parts. But those parts are much smaller than those where it’s wrong.

Is one to assume that, say, Adolf Hitler and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (the pastor killed in a Nazi concentration camp) are equal in the eyes of God? Or, say, Lenin and the thousands of priests murdered on his orders? Or St John Newman and Jack the Ripper?

If they were, one would find it hard to justify the Christian doctrine of heaven and hell. Surely God displays the ultimate discrimination by consigning bad people to one destination and good ones to the other? Verily I say unto you, on that evidence alone it’s hard to claim God to egalitarianism.

Equality before God exists to begin with, but it expires some time after a person leaves infancy behind and starts to make free choices between good and evil, virtue and sin, right and wrong.

Mankind’s ability to exercise free will in that fashion is God’s great gift, and one struggles to understand why he’d bother to give it to us if we had nothing to gain from good choices, nor nothing to lose from bad ones.

I don’t know what God’s ledger sheet looks like, but I do know that some people are more good than bad, some the other way around, and some have no discernible good traits at all. To claim equality among them all is tantamount to claiming equality among the choices they’ve made, which strikes me as illogical.

The poster would have been theologically unassailable had it said that God loves us all. But that would only mean ensuing equality if we all loved God in return and tried not to transgress against his commandments too much.

Since that’s demonstrably not the case, the unqualified egalitarian claim collapses – but not as loudly as the second, secular part of the poster about everybody being equal in the eyes of humanity.

What does it even mean? Clearly the chaps who displayed that bunkum hadn’t asked themselves that question before putting pen to paper.

Since, not being myself divine, I can’t vouch for God, I can only rely on prayer, doctrinal sources and my own reasonable conjecture to grasp his feelings. But – and I know some may disagree – I do see myself as fully human.

Moreover, in the course of a long life I’ve met thousands of people who could make the same claim with equal validity. Yet neither I nor anyone I know has ever regarded everybody as equal in our eyes.

Murderers and their victims? Savants and ignoramuses? Geniuses and hacks? Statesmen and spivs? Athletes and weaklings? Hard workers and parasitic idlers? Everywhere we look, people are unequal in our eyes, morally, intellectually, physically – you name it.

None of us can claim equality of outcome. And, since we are all born with different genes and to different families, we can’t even claim equality of opportunity. If at birth we are indeed equal in the eyes of God, we can’t claim even such short-lived equality in the eyes of humanity.

I try – with variable success, it has to be said – using my free will to stay in God’s good graces. But, at 5’7’’, I’ve never had a shot at playing goalie for a Premiership team, and no amount of effort would ever have addressed this glaring inequality.

By the same token, I doubt that any degree of application would enable many Premiership goalies to do what I do, so where’s the equality in that?

In other words, if the first part of the poster is highly debatable, the second part is simply idiotic – and ideologically idiotic at that. But it would be wrong to think the two parts aren’t connected.

The key message, one that the authors really wanted to convey, is the political statement of secular equality. The preceding nod in God’s direction is there merely to add verisimilitude to the subsequent deep bow in the direction of left-wing politics.

I don’t know what sort of liturgy, if any, St Martin-in-the-Fields uses, but I suspect its clergy probably think that 1642 is a PIN code, and I’m sure the female Bishop of London doesn’t mind.

If the Anglican Church used to be called the Tory Party at prayer, it has certainly changed not only its prayers, but also its political allegiance. On the plus side, Anglican churches are emptying so fast that not many parishioners will be affected.

Thank God for small favours.

I’ve taken the liberty to compile into a single article a few quotations from the man whose spirit still animates the European Union.

If you don’t recognise his photograph, try to guess his identity – and no peeking into the last two paragraphs where all is revealed. I’ll give you a clue: the writer inspired not only the EU but also Jeremy Corbyn.

The world economic and political development tends to gravitate toward a unified world economy, with its degree of centralisation dependent upon the existing technological level.

The economic and political unification of Europe is the necessary prerequisite for the very possibility of national self-determination.

On the all-European scale, the principle of the “right” to self-determination can be invested with flesh and blood only under the conditions of a European Federative Republic.

The United States of Europe – without monarchies, standing armies and secret diplomacy – is the most important integral part of the peace programme.

It would truly be a miserable petty-bourgeois utopianism… to think that the fate of development in Europe and the entire world will finally be secured if the state map of Europe is brought into correspondence with the map of nationality, and if Europe is split into more or less complete nation-state cells ignoring geographic conditions and economic ties.

The task is to combine the claims to autonomy on the part of nations with the centralising requirements of economic development.

Europe is not a geographical term; Europe is an economic term, something incomparably more concrete than the world market. Now the time has arrived for stating definitely and clearly that federation is essential for Balkanised Europe.

The national community, arising from the needs of cultural development, will not only not be destroyed by this but, to the contrary, it is only on the basis of a republican federation of the leading countries that it will be able to find its full completion.

Recognition of every nation’s right to self-determination must be supplemented by the slogan of a democratic federation of all the leading nations, by the slogan of a United States of Europe.

The necessary conditions for this presuppose emancipation of the limits of the nation from those of the economy and vice versa. The economy will be organised in the broad arena of a European United States as the core of a worldwide organisation. The political form can only be a republican federation, within whose flexible and elastic bounds every nation will be able to develop its cultural forces with the greatest freedom.

The capitalist forces of production had outgrown the framework of European national states.

What is perfectly obvious is that the customs barriers must be thrown down. The peoples of Europe must regard Europe as a field for a unified and increasingly planned economic life.

Germany had set herself the task of “organising” Europe, i.e., of uniting economically the European continent under her own control…

But France cannot stand aloof from Germany, nor can Germany stand aloof from France. Therein lies the crux, and therein lies the solution, of the European problem. Everything else is incidental.

Of course, the United States of Europe will be only one of the two axes of the world organisation of economy. The United States of America will constitute the other.

It must not be overlooked that the very danger arising from the United States of America (which is spurring the destruction of Europe, and is ready to step in subsequently as Europe’s master) furnishes a very substantial bond for uniting the peoples of Europe.

I shan’t keep you on tenterhooks any longer. The author is Leon Trotsky, born on this day 140 years ago.

Happy birthday, Leon! Thank you for your inspirational insights – and sorry you can’t be with us today. But fear not: as you Bolsheviks used to say, our comrade is dead, but his cause lives on. Your legacy is in safe hands, your prophecies are coming true, and your disciple may well be Britain’s next prime minister.

Her Majesty, God bless her, has taken bad advice and, as her loyal subject, I’m sorry about that.

The palace has announced that the Queen’s new garments will henceforth use only fake fur. Yet Her Majesty will continue to wear her existing fur outfits, of which one suspects she has a lifelong supply.

That has encouraged some columnists to reassure the few remaining conservatives out there that the gesture was merely symbolic. That’s true – but it’s the wrong kind of symbolism.

The argument against furs, meat, leather, hunting and so forth is merely symbolic too. Few New Agers shed any other than crocodile tears at the plight of minks: their rancour resides not in the text but in the subtext, in connotation rather than denotation.

At base, this is the sartorial extension of class war. It’s not that they love furry animals; it’s that they hate people who wear their pelts to keep warm and look good.

More broadly, they hate the civilisation that historically worships God, not animals, one weaned on the Genesis belief that all living creatures were created to serve man – and only for that purpose.

Arguing against New Age savages logically is pointless. Logic is helpless against statements emanating not from reason, but from the putrid swamp of sinister emotions.

Logically, the argument against furs doesn’t hold water for a second. To inject a modicum of sense into it, one would have to explain why wearing a coat made of ewe’s skin is wrong, while wearing shoes made of the same material or eating meat from the same animal is acceptable.

Pretending to be reasonable, some New Agers make the next step and also denounce both the shoes and the meat, which idiocy is lamentably acquiring some following. But that next step is a giant leap into neo-paganism: worshiping animals and even claiming they aren’t qualitatively different from man.

Whenever I hear this, I praise the New Agers for their ability to judge themselves so realistically. What’s important to remember is that this lot are typological equivalents of all anti-Western fanatics, whatever their ostensible cause. As often as not they are the same people.

Whether they demonstrate against furs, meat, nuclear power, capitalism or fossil fuels, in their viscera they are screaming hatred of our civilisation and its religious, intellectual, moral and legal underpinnings. All those things, in other words, that Her Majesty has undertaken to uphold.

Lest we forget, she’s not only the head of our state but also the Supreme Governor of our established church, which, for all its oil-trading hierarchs, female bishops, bouncy castles and increasingly demotic liturgy, remains residually Christian.

It’s possible that the Queen is our last monarch to accept the traditional title of defensor fidei, Defender of the Faith. But accept it she did and, from what one hears, sincerely.

That’s why it’s her sacred duty to defend not only the faith itself, but also the culture and civilisation based on the faith. And, while Genesis is unequivocal on the role of animals, I struggle to find anywhere in the West’s historical, religious and philosophical sources an injunction against wearing furs, eating meat or wearing leather shoes.

‘Western’ is the operative word because other civilisations encourage the worship of animals, such as cats or cows, and even some insects. That’s their privilege, and I’m not going to be my usual cultural supremacist self and claim that their creeds are inferior to ours. Suffice it to say in this context that they are alien and frequently hostile to ours.

Western civilisation has existed for about 3,000 years, yet only in the past few decades has enmity to furs begun to claim a high moral ground.

The underlying assumption seems to be that modern people, who managed to kill the better part of 300 million people in just one century, more than in all other centuries combined, have raised morality to a dizzying height their predecessors were unable to scale.

Our monarchy’s remit is to act as the bulwark against deadly neo-pagan perversions, not as their conduit and endorser. Defaulting on that duty, in matters big or small, jeopardises the very existence of the monarchy.

If, as is possible, our next government will be fervently atheist, anti-monarchy and borderline communist, our royalty will have their work cut out anyway. Any sign of weakness, and the savages will pounce – more than they’ve already been pouncing.

I’m sure Her Majesty had her arm twisted to sign her name to that New Age nonsense. One wonders if there’s still enough spunk left among the British to untwist it.

P.S. Speaking of our borderline-communist government to come, perhaps ‘borderline’ is superfluous. While the papers attack Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings for being an extremist bully, his Labour counterpart, Corbyn’s top man Seaumas Milne, was a member of the Communist party until 2016, when his boss had already been Labour leader for a year.

This is how Milne feels about communism: “For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment… .”

Be afraid.

A general observation first: an intelligent villain can do more damage than a stupid one. Stupid villains kill old women for their pension money. Clever ones murder millions.

Just look at the greatest evildoers of the 20^th century, which is to say in history: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot et al – not an idiot in the bunch. It’s only because they combined wickedness with intelligence that they were collectively able to murder hundreds of millions.

The evil of our aspiring prime minister is beyond doubt for anyone who knows anything at all about Comrade Jeremy. I shan’t bore you with a long list of evidence for this assertion – you could probably compile one yourself.

On the off-chance that you can’t, just Google CORBYN in combination with words like TROTSKY, MARXISM, VENEZUELA, MADURO, IRA, ANTISEMITISM, HAMAZ, HEZBOLLAH, HARD LEFT, TERRORISM – take your pick.

Once you’ve taken it, think of the damage this creature could cause given half the chance. But then heave a sigh of relief and thank your stars that his evil doesn’t come packaged with intelligence. Give us a stupid enemy over a clever one any day.

If you wish to contest this assessment of Comrade Jeremy’s mental faculties, I can recommend cranking up your trusted Google again to search for a compendium of inanities Corbyn has uttered in the course of his undistinguished career.

Actually, you don’t need a compendium. Just his current tweet should make a sufficient case for the prosecution. Here it is:

“There are 150 billionaires in the UK while 14 million people live in poverty. In a fair society there would be no billionaires and no one would live in poverty.”

The first sentence implies a causative relationship. Comrade Jeremy clearly believes that it’s the 150 billionaires who consign 14 million people to poverty. Now I realise I may be overusing the word, but this is, well, stupid.

Corbyn subscribes to the zero sum view of economics, which even anyone studying the subject in secondary school knows for the nonsense it is.

Zero-summers see the economy as a pie whose size is constant. Hence anyone having a big slice means someone else having a small one. Except that this assumption is demonstrably false.

Western economies constantly grow, the odd slump notwithstanding. All major share indexes are now 10 to 15 times as high as they were when I first cursed the West with my presence in 1973, meaning that some serious dough has been added to the pie to make it rise.

Then of course there’s the issue of how those 150 despicable vultures got their billions and what they do with them. Let’s just look at one of them, Sir James Dyson, of the vacuum cleaners fame.

Sir James made his billions by giving millions of households a better version of the essential appliance. He currently employs about 7,000 people in the UK, all of them on decent incomes and benefits. I don’t know how much they contribute to the Exchequer but, in round numbers, it must be a hell of a lot.

Hence, rather than increasing the number of the poor, Sir James actually reduces it. The same can be said about all the 150, even those who use their money only to make more money, which to Comrade Jeremy brands them as blood-suckers or, which is the same thing, Jews.

Yet even such reprobates increase not only their own wealth but also that of the whole nation. They are the ones who provide essential investment for the Dysons of this world, vicariously creating prosperity and keeping millions of people employed – including many in the financial industry that provides a quarter of our GDP.

Jeremy’s bogeymen also surround themselves with a vast cocoon of service industry: restaurants, hotels, shops, dry cleaners, hairdressers, designers, tailors, florists, shoemakers, builders, drivers, decorators, pilots, accountants, lawyers, travel agents – millions of people who otherwise could be among the putative 14 million poor.

Corbyn’s second sentence is equally moronic. The implication is that some people being richer than others testifies to society’s unfairness.

Now, fairness means everybody getting his just deserts. Hence Corbyn is in effect saying that Dyson doesn’t deserve to be rich and the poor don’t deserve to be poor.

That this is untrue ought to be clear to anyone with an IQ above that of a courgette. Most of those 150 pernicious billionaires didn’t inherit their wealth, but earned and multiplied it by their talent, application and commitment.

Since such qualities aren’t immediately associated with most of the poor, by and large both groups get what they deserve. Hence a society that takes on the impossible task of eliminating both the rich and the poor may be all sorts of things, good or bad depending on one’s priorities. One thing it can’t be is fair.

What it absolutely has to be is tyrannical, using fiat to put a lid on ambition, talent and enterprise, while drawing its support from a growing parasitic mob. That’s Corbyn’s ideal of fairness, and it has been gloriously achieved in Maduro’s Venezuela that Comrade Jeremy openly admires.

Since Corbyn is manifestly stupid, only stupid people support him. That doesn’t necessarily mean they have no intelligence – only that they don’t use it to vote.

I know some perfectly competent individuals who support left-wing parties for all sorts of spurious reasons that reason knows not of, to use Pascal’s phrase. Coming to the fore instead are things like ideology, resentments, envy – or simply inertia and mental torpor.

The rest of us hope that Corbyn will be too stupid to mobilise the national reserves of stupidity to drive him into Downing Street. And that the Labour Party is stupid enough to let this creature lead it into the general election.