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Hatred of Jews makes for natural bedfellows. It’s that common denominator to which all the scum of the world is reduced – as new accolades for Jeremy show.

We all like to have our innermost thoughts endorsed by intelligent and accomplished people. Hence, when publishers submit my books to peer review, I only pretend to protest (“I’m peerless” is the usual tongue-in-cheek line).

I did protest for real, however, when a publisher wanted to have my book peer-reviewed by the Stalinist historian Eric Hobsbawm. “I wouldn’t shake his hand,” I said, “and I certainly don’t value his judgement.”

That’s why I sympathise with Jeremy, whose heart-felt sentiments about the Jews have been warmly endorsed by such authorities on the subject as David Duke, ex-Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and Nick Griffin, former head of the British National Party, both convicted felons.

I can just see Jeremy mutter “With friends like these…” Indeed, in any normal political environment, an endorsement from such odious figures would spell a kiss of death, although I’m not sure a) how normal our political environment is and b) to what extent Comrade Jeremy appreciates such niceties.

Jeremy won those plaudits for his 2013 speech in which he, in common with most virulent anti-Semites, used the words ‘Zionists’ and ‘Jews’ interchangeably, the trick I remember well from the Soviet papers of my youth.

Now I know Jews who aren’t Zionists and Zionists who aren’t Jews. I’m sure so does Jeremy, but he doesn’t let empirical evidence interfere with the call of his heart.

Then again, unlike Jeremy and his peers, most people believe that the Holocaust did happen. That being the case, even chaps who can’t contain their anti-Semitism in public stop short of denouncing Jews qua Jews, correctly perceiving that this would be in rather poor taste.

However, referring to Jews as Zionists opens the floodgates: Zionism is an ideology, and therefore open to criticism. Yet it’s not, in civilised society, open to suggestions that Zionists drink the blood of Christian babies as their beverage of choice. I know it’s a fine line, Jeremy, but it shouldn’t be crossed.

Now that we’ve established that anti-Semitism is impervious to empirical evidence, let’s also agree that it’s equally immune to reason. Jeremy, who, truth to tell, isn’t the brightest spark on any subject, proved that by explaining what’s wrong with Jews… sorry, Zionists.

The trouble with Zionists, aka Jews, explained Jeremy, is that “they don’t study history and, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony”.

Even Jeremy would have realised how stupid that sounded had he given himself the trouble to think about it for a second. After all, Jewish scripture, which we call the Old Testament, is to a large extent an account of Jewish history.

Hence one can say that Jews are perhaps the only people who are doctrinally obligated to study ancient history. And, having acquired that habit in childhood, they naturally segue into indulging an interest in more modern history as well.

Jeremy’s other charge is just as idiotic – or would be if his brain, rather than his viscera, had been engaged. For Jews are more capable of irony, including self-irony, than just about anyone else in the world – with the possible exception of the English, who could claim parity.

That’s why the stand-up comedy scene in the US is dominated by Jews, and, though that’s not quite the case in Britain, here too Jews are disproportionately represented among comedians.

Off the top, one could mention such illustrious practitioners of the genre as Bernie Manning, Ron Moody, Peter Sellers, Marty Feldman, Alexei Sayle, Sacha Baron Cohen, Matt Lucas, David Baddiel – just tell me when to stop.

If anything, one could more readily accuse Jews of overusing irony, but that’s a normal defence mechanism for people who used to live in countries where the attitudes now championed by Messrs Duke, Griffin and Corbyn were the norm.

When Jeremy made those incisive comments, he was sharing the podium with a Palestinian terrorist, whose sense of irony Jeremy contrasted favourably with anything Jews could muster – and that’s even though English wasn’t his first language.

Not having had the pleasure of meeting that gentleman, I’m in no position to dispute Jeremy’s assessment of his talent for irony. On general principle, however, one suspects that the most ironical statements he has ever uttered are “Death to America!”, “Kill all Jews!” and “Allahu akbar!”. But I may be wrong.

Unlike, in Mr Duke’s expert opinion, Jeremy. Commenting on Jeremy’s proposals to end what he called the “stranglehold of elite power and billionaire [Jewish, if you require a translation] domination over large parts of our media”, Mr Duke tweeted: “He’s right, you know.”

Mr Griffin added his penny’s worth of encouragement too: “Go Jezza!” He will, Nick, take my word for it. No antidote for the venom of anti-Semitism exists, especially when it’s coming out of a man’s ears.

I may be maligning my friend Jeremy. Rather than being a cretinous bigot, he just may be the smartest political operator out there.

His anti-Semitism may be a clever ploy to deflect public attention from his economic policies, which, if enacted, would beggar Britain in a matter of weeks. Actually, scratch that.

If Jeremy is ever elected PM, Britain would be beggared even before he moved his cherished Trotsky portrait to 10 Downing Street. Foreign investors would all leave instantly, fearing likely nationalisation.

Perhaps, having analysed the situation with the benefit of his gigantic intellect, Jeremy decided that it would be better if his detractors spent their slings and arrows on his anti-Semitism. This would act as a useful smokescreen for his other ideas, which otherwise wouldn’t stand a moment’s scrutiny.

As an aside, it’s interesting that Jeremy’s new friends David and Nick are described as far right. Yet Jeremy, as even his friends would agree, is undeniably far left.

There’s something terribly wrong with our political taxonomy if they are seen as occupying opposite ends of the spectrum. But that’s a separate subject.

People like anniversaries, so here’s another one: 50 years ago this week Soviet tanks drove into Prague.

Their tracks stamped into dirt the human face the Czechs wanted to put on communism (the official term was ‘socialism’, but ‘communism’ was what the Russians and their satellites meant).

The attempt was doomed to failure: human and communism just don’t belong in the same sentence. However, the Czechs felt they as sovereign people had a right to find that out for themselves.

It took 200,000 Soviet soldiers and 2,000 tanks to explain the error of their ways. Considering that in June, 1941, the Nazis managed to rout the Red Army with only about 3,000 tanks, and that the Czech army had been ordered not to resist, the Soviets took the threat to their supremacy seriously.

I was a young student in Moscow at the time, and I still remember the shock, not that I had any illusions about the kind of country I lived in.

The Soviets had form in that sort of thing. In 1953, they crushed an uprising in East Germany. And in 1956, at the height of Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, they staged a repeat performance in Poland and – most spectacularly – in Hungary, where they drowned a popular revolution in blood.

But I was a child then, and so was post-Stalin Russia. We had the credulity of children, and it made sense to us that, as Pravda explained, the Soviet Army had only just beaten NATO to it, what with NATO (especially German!) troops poised at the Hungarian border ready to pounce.

Soviet propaganda repeated the same lines in 1968, but that time no one believed them, at least no one I knew. Even though the ‘thaw’ was a distant memory by then, we had tasted a tiny sip of freedom and got intoxicated on the heady liquor.

Everyone detested what the Soviets had done. Everyone admired the five heroes, who staged a pro-Czech demonstration in Red Square, carrying posters “Freedom to you, freedom to us”. Everyone lied about regretting not having been there with them.

It’s hard to recall such unanimity among the normally fractious and argumentative Russian intelligentsia.

Our customary disdain for the Soviets was replaced by passionate hatred, and there was no going back. After 1968 anyone expressing sympathy for the invasion, or indeed for the regime in general, would have suffered social ostracism.

Half a century has passed, and the Soviet Union is no more, at least not its nomenclature. Yet the present government has exhumed its remains and is trying to perform the miracle of resurrection.

Putin’s criminality is different from the Soviet kind, but just as flagrant, perhaps even more so. One could argue it’s more dangerous for being more perfidious and better equipped technically.

Putin’s state is history’s unique blend of secret police and organised crime, morphed into one another. It’s the only truly gangster state in that, with a single-minded focus, it pursues globally the ends regular gangsters pursue locally.

This state has no real ideology as such, but it desperately needs to sow chaos and discord in the West, creating troubled waters in which the global mafia can then profitably fish.

At the same time Putin’s junta needs to consolidate its home support, and that’s a challenging task in a pauperised country most of which lives below third-world standards.

As part of that two-prong strategy, Putin is reviving the imperial idea made up in equal parts of its tsarist and Stalinist constituents. This has been the hallmark of Putin’s 18 years in power, and the volume of propaganda to that effect outdoes by a huge margin everything I remember from the ‘60s.

It’s only in that context that the latest statistics released by Levada-Centre may be understood. The question put to the casualties of Putin’s propaganda war was simple: How do you feel about the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia?

The first finding is quite interesting: only 32 per cent of Russians have ever heard of the event.

Selective teaching of history is nothing new in those parts, but one is still amazed at the collective numbness of curiosity. A leisurely stroll through the net would have been most enlightening, but enlightenment doesn’t seem to figure prominently on the Russians’ list of priorities.

Of those educational overachievers who’ve heard of that monstrous event, those who approve of it outnumber those who disapprove by a margin of almost two to one (36 to 19 per cent), while 45 per cent don’t know one way or the other.

Remarkable though such statistics are in absolute terms, they are even more instructive comparatively. For the same question was put to the Russians in 2003, just three years into Putin’s tenure.

At that time 32 per cent of respondents condemned the invasion, as opposed to a mere 19 per cent today. The tendency is unmistakable: more and more Russians feel their country is entitled to use tanks as a means of controlling the post-Soviet space.

Those who live in that space tend to hold a different view, which is why Eastern European countries rushed to join NATO and the EU the moment the door was cracked ajar. My guess is that they’d have happily joined the Ku-Klux-Klan if that had kept the Russians at bay.

Yet Putin’s hybrid war, one of those rare wars fought by one side only, is a juggernaut trampling over Europe, and the rest of the West too, come to that.

Current leaders of some Eastern European countries, such as Hungary’s Orban and Czechia’s Zeman are Putin’s agents in all but name – if they aren’t, it’s hard to imagine how differently they’d act if they were.

And, much more dangerously, President Trump seems to recognise at least tacitly that the post-Soviet space is Russia’s natural sphere of influence.

Whenever he takes time off from training for gurning competitions, Trump drops broad hints that he wouldn’t mind giving his role model Putin a free hand there, in exchange for some nebulous considerations.

He ought to chat to those who lived in Prague during that August 50 years ago. Talking to Hungarians who remember 1956 wouldn’t go amiss either, but their number is dwindling.

We live in dangerous times, and the sooner we recognise that, the better. And – with all the deference towards those who rightly deplore Islamic crimes and geopolitical spread – the main source of danger sits in the Kremlin.

That’s a good thing to realise when remembering the awful fiftieth anniversary of the Prague Spring invasion – and how it’s seen in Moscow this summer.

The president’s lawyer Michael Cohen is about to go to prison for fiscal crimes committed while paying off Trump’s whores.

That seems to be the female type the leader of the free world favours both on a one-off basis and in more permanent arrangements.

However, I hasten to reassure Trump fans, preference for ladies of easy virtue, or bad taste in general, doesn’t constitute a criminal offence. If it did, the length of Trump’s ties and his tendency of topping a business suit with a baseball cap would put him in prison for life.

(America seems to be peculiar in that many scions of rich families, born with a silver spoon stuck into various orifices and then getting the best education money can buy, can still emerge with the manners, tastes and grammar of a lout. Trump is far from unique in that respect – there’s evidently a social premium attached to being prolier-than-thou there.)

By itself, the whore incident falls into the ‘boys will be boys’ category – a billionaire businessman, especially one running for president, isn’t going to do his own dirty work. If some talkative slut needs shutting up, one of his flunkies will happily act as an intermediary.

Alas, the incident doesn’t stand by itself. Cohen testified that Trump had instructed him to pay off the ladies specifically to affect the outcome of the presidential election. Moreover, the pay-off had violated campaign funding laws, which is undeniably a crime.

However, wonders Cohen’s lawyer Lanny Davis, “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?” Exactly. And I’m sure he isn’t the only one asking that question.

However, it’s what Davis said next that may well make Trump revise his teetotalism and break out a bottle of cheap bourbon (I assume his taste in food and drink parallels his taste in women):

“Mr Cohen has knowledge on certain subjects that should be of interest to the special counsel and is more than happy to tell the special counsel all that he knows.”

That suggests that part of the plea bargain deal Cohen struck included his willingness to cooperate with the Mueller investigation into the links between the Trump campaign and Putin’s junta.

Those links, continued the lawyer, were “not just about the obvious possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election, which the Trump Tower meeting was all about, but also knowledge about the computer crime of hacking and whether or not Mr Trump knew ahead of time about that crime and even cheered it on.”

Trump is so thoroughly surrounded by a sea of dirt that it’s impossible for him to remain pristinely clean. The sea is engulfing one of his associates after another.

Michael Flynn, his first National Security Adviser, has admitted to lying to special investigators about his conversations with a Russian ambassador in December 2016. He’s cooperating with the special counsel.

Trump’s foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos, who has pleaded guilty to a similar charge, is also cooperating.

Altogether, some 30 American and Western nationals have been indicted during the course of the Mueller investigation – on top of 25 Russians, who make up the numbers nicely, even though they’ll never be extradited by Putin.

Some of the Trump entourage may not have been charged with the specific offence of election tampering, but they are still Putin’s agents in all but name.

Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, has been found guilty of a whole raft of pecuniary crimes, all of them springing from his efforts either to launder the payments he received from Russian gangsters, such as Yanukovych and Deripaska, or to evade paying taxes on them.

(Manafort, incidentally, spent some of his loot on buying things like python coats and ostrich jackets – exactly the sort of garments favoured by Russian nouveaux riches gangsters. Though Trump displays his rotten taste differently, I wonder if he chose Manafort because he detected a kindred spirit.)

Trump’s reaction to the simultaneous convictions of Manafort and Cohen resembled a needle stuck in a rut of a broken LP: “Where is the collusion? You know, they’re still looking for collusion! Where is the collusion? Find some collusion. We want to find the collusion.”

Well, give it time. Seek and ye shall find, says the good book, and Mueller is certainly seeking. He has already found the second best thing: the intimate links of Trump’s confidants and family members with the Russians.

So far he hasn’t subpoenaed Trump himself, and the president is in no rush to testify. In that connection, his personal lawyer Rudi Giuliani, made several astonishing statements.

Trump, he said, shouldn’t testify because he might be “trapped into perjury”. The interviewer suggested that the best way to sidestep that trap is to tell the truth, but Mr Giuliani disagreed.

“Truth”, he said, “isn’t truth”. That statement sounds positively Orwellian, but Mr Giuliani didn’t mean it that way.

It’s just that, according to him, former FBI director James Comey may say one thing, Trump another and, if Mueller chooses to believe the former, there’s the president, done for perjury.

I find it astounding that a US President and his counsel may have such little faith in the American legal system. Surely it takes more than one word against another to convict anyone of perjury?

Such charges won’t stick unless supported by evidence and testimony of multiple witnesses. Hence Trump’s fear of persecution is one step removed from taking the Fifth, which isn’t an option a president can exercise with political impunity.

Truth, Mr Giuliani, is truth, and it will out. Trump may avoid criminal charges, but I’d be surprised if he served out his term. As Richard Nixon could have told him, it’s hard to withstand a congressional investigation backed up by near-unanimity in the press.

If Trump is guilty, he should go, though I for one would be sorry if that were to happen. The American, and Western in general, political establishment needs shaking up, and Trump is doing just that.

However, if one-tenth of the allegations made in Chris Unger’s book House of Trump, House of Putin are true, our hero isn’t fit to occupy a political office. Even his fitness to remain at large is in doubt.

The president is screaming “witch hunt” at an ever-increasing pitch. Then again, who but the witches would shout that the loudest?

Ban them all – and I’m petitioning the government to that effect. You’ll definitely join in once you’ve learned these harrowing facts.

But first a fact to be proud of. As a passionate Londoner, I take pleasure in every achievement of my city, even those that might strike some as dubious.

Thus I’ve long found it annoying that, though London has for years led New York in most crime categories, those brash New Yorkers could still boast a higher murder rate.

I’m happy to report that this is no longer the case. Ever since handguns were banned in 1996, the murder rate in London has been climbing steadily, until our capital has finally pulled ahead of New York.

We now have Johannesburg in our sights, so those South Africans don’t have long to rest on the laurels of their wreaths. The murder rate in London is growing at 12 per cent a year – take that, New York and J’burg.

Now that getting a firearm has become harder (though buying a South London barman a pint is a good start), knives have moved to the forefront of killing implements.

In the year to March 2018, 40,147 people were stabbed in Britain. Cold steel has thus replaced firearms as a means of controlling inordinate population growth. And there I was, thinking that banning handguns would enable every Briton to die a natural death.

One’s pride in such achievements is slightly dampened by the realisation that shivs are rather old hat. People have been using them since time immemorial, at least since Abraham pulled a knife on his son.

On the other hand, disfiguring attacks with household detergents, such as lyes and acids, are rather new, at least when launched on the present British scale.

Britain comfortably leads the rest of the world in the rate of acid attacks and, much as one sympathises with the plight of the mutilated victims, this is yet another glorious achievement.

Many of such attacks are launched from motorcycles. Ride-by splash-ups have become popular, which is good news for the manufacturers of both motorcycles and domestic cleansers.

The rest of us, however, may regard such statistics as lamentable – that is, once we’ve contained our pride in our country’s accomplishments. For it’s sometimes disconcerting to see so many people disfigured with chemical compounds, stabbed, slashed or disembowelled.

One might think we have a bit of a social problem there, further augmented by a lamentable failure of our law enforcement.

If so, how do we solve such problems? The short answer is, we can’t.

The longer answer is that any attempt to do so would run into the stonewall of accusations of racism, xenophobia, elitism and possibly even Islamophobia (I’m not sure where homophobia fits in, but it must somehow).

For, it pains me to report, such acts aren’t typically committed by tweedy, clubbable gentlemen. Most of them are perpetrated by young chaps securely protected by the above-mentioned stonewall.

Hence the solution offers itself: ban the items in the title. Admittedly, there will be some practical hitches to overcome, but that’s nothing that British ingenuity, honed by decades of progressive legislation, can’t handle.

How, I hear you ask, will it be possible to cook without easy access to knives? I had to think about this long and hard, but then – Archimedes in his bath, Newton with his apple – the solution came to me in a flash.

The purchase of kitchen knives must require a professional licence, only available to purveyors of food: chefs, butchers and fishmongers. Knives not in use must be kept in padlocked cabinets.

When buying a piece of silverside at, say, Tesco’s, a customer can tell the butcher how the meat will be cooked. The licensed professional will then cut up the beef to the specified requirements. The resulting meal may then be consumed using plastic cutlery or, better still, fingers.

How, I also hear you ask, will people be able to clean their floors and other dirty surfaces if household detergents are banned? By posing this question you’ve instantly branded yourself as a hater of tradition.

For the answer is: the same way your grandmother (okay, great-grandmother) did it: tucking the hem of her skirt into her belt, getting down on her hands and knees in front of a bucket of soaped water and scrubbing the floor. Then getting up and using the same liquid to clean the kitchen counter and, while at it, house pets.

As to motorcycles, banning them is even easier. Who needs personal transportation anyway when Britain boasts such an advanced system of public transport?

Our trains, for example, are justly famous for encouraging a relaxed attitude to getting to work on time, while our buses vindicate the Roman injunction festina lente (make haste slowly).

Obsession with punctuality is a major source of stress, and curing this problem is yet another area in which Britain excels.

The aforementioned petition is available on the website of The Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism, of which I’m the founder, president and so far the only member. Or rather it will be available there once I’ve got around to registering the website.

The death toll of the collapsed motorway bridge now stands at 41 and counting, with recriminations flying all over the place.

I’m following the story with particular attention, for I myself must have driven on that bridge a dozen times. That adds an element of personal frisson, accompanied by a sigh of relief: it could have been me.

Then of course one’s imagination kicks in with a cringing effect: fancy driving through beautiful Liguria when suddenly the bridge collapses in front of you.

You hit the brakes with ankle-breaking force, but it’s too late: the car tumbles over the edge and here you are, falling 300 feet to your death, the ochre, pink and tawny colours of Genoa flashing before your eyes…

Who’s to blame? This question is vital, if only to have a chance of preventing such tragedies in the future.

For Matteo Salvini, Italy’s new Interior Minister, the answer is clear: the culprit is the EU, with its miserly subsidies and suffocating restrictions on budget deficits.

Now Mr Salvini isn’t a huge admirer of the EU, and I sense a kindred spirit there. The EU does attract strong emotions, one way or the other.

Hence those who, like Mr Salvini and me, detest that wicked Leviathan may be tempted to blame the EU for all the world’s ills. Yet we ought to be aware of this natural tendency and keep it in check.

The EU can indeed be blamed for a lot – but not for everything. I don’t blame it for my bad health, too much weight or shortish stature. And Mr Salvini shouldn’t blame it for the Genoa catastrophe.

This is what he actually said: “If external constraints prevent us from spending to have safe roads and schools, then it really calls into question whether it makes sense to follow these rules. There can be no trade-off between fiscal rules and the safety of Italians.”

His second sentence rings true, but with one minor amendment: replace ‘fiscal rules’ with ‘budgets’. Yes, a civilised country should never use shortage of money as an excuse for putting people’s lives at risk.

The full stop at the end of this statement means that there’s no need to go into the details of Italy’s financial dealings with the EU, such as what kind of infrastructure subsidies she receives or whether or not she’s a net contributor to the EU budget (opinions and calculations vary).

It simply doesn’t matter. Europe’s fourth largest economy must find the money to keep its motorway bridges from killing people.

Looking at the published photographs of the Genoa bridge a month before the disaster, one doesn’t have to be a structural engineer to see that a collapse is imminent.

The whole central section had lost much of its underside, with rebar, no longer covered with cement, sticking out. Any civilised country, a word combination I insist on using, would have condemned that bridge years ago.

Italy didn’t, which brings into question the extent to which she’s civilised – now, not in Roman times. The blood of those 41 victims (and counting) is on the hands of whatever Italian authorities, local or central, are responsible for maintaining infrastructure.

As to the budgetary constraints, Mr Salvini should take his cue from Adam Smith, whose advice would have prevented the tragedy: “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”

In other words, a country should run its budget on the same principles as families run theirs. The principles are simple: unless a family is so rich that money is no object, it prioritises its outgoings.

Junior wants his own car? Sorry, no money for that. Yes, a five-star hotel would be nice, but we can only afford a B&B. And yes, dear, you’d look smashing in a Savile Row suit, but our budget doesn’t stretch beyond M&S.

But – critically – if Junior needs an operation, and the NHS has a two-year waiting list, then money must be found somehow. Mum going back to work, Dad doing night shifts, the house re-mortgaged, the car sold – whatever it takes. The boy needs urgent help.

Without looking at Italy’s budget in any detail, one can state with absolute certainty that many of its items are less important than keeping motorway bridges from becoming death traps.

In fact, I’d be happy to lend Mr Salvini a helping hand pro bono publico and suggest areas where savings could be made. At a guess, reducing the number of immigrants would be a good start, and I bet my euros to his cannoli that the welfare budget could stand some squeezing.

Yet come to think of it, I too blame the EU – for providing a ready excuse to the likes of Mr Salvini, a way of abrogating their own responsibility.

If the new Italian government detests the EU as much as it claims, it should do the honourable thing, get out – and take care of its own motorway bridges.

If the EU collapses as a result, it’s no big deal. No one will die.

Watergate was in full swing when I landed in New York 45 years ago. President Nixon had just fired Archibald Cox, a special prosecutor in charge of the investigation.

Walking down Broadway, I saw a bumper sticker saying ‘Impeach the Cox sacker’ and laughed out loud, the pitch of my mirth heightened by a foreigner’s pride in having understood the crude pun.

The Cox straw fell on the camel’s back with such a thud that the resulting resonance sent destructive waves all over the Nixon presidency. Its end became a matter of when, not whether.

The president had to go on television to assure Americans that “I am not a crook”. A few months later he resigned, half a step ahead of impeachment.

Those events came back to me the other day, when President Trump revoked John Brennan’s security clearance, vindictively punishing the former CIA director for his outspoken criticism of Trump’s links with Russia.

The White House press secretary explained the action by Brennan’s “erratic conduct and behaviour”. Brennan, she claimed, “has a history that calls into question his objectivity and credibility”.

She also referred to the need for “protecting classified information”, however without proffering a single example of Brennan’s misusing such information either during or after his CIA stint.

Moreover, she named nine other former colleagues of Brennan whose security clearances are also in jeopardy. Among them are former FBI Director James Comey, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former NSA Director Michael Hayden and former National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

All of them are fierce critics of Trump’s links with Putin. Moreover, the nature of their jobs was such that they had all the relevant information at their fingertips. And the information was, and remains, damning.

I’m writing as someone who has no ideological issues with the president – in fact, as I’ve mentioned on several occasions, much as I find him personally hideous, I like most of his domestic initiatives, and many of his international ones.

Some aspects of his foreign policy, alas, can easily be construed as designed to benefit Putin’s, rather than American, interests. One example is Trump’s understated commitment to the Atlantic alliance, especially Article 5 of the NATO charter, according to which an attack on one member is seen as an attack on all.

During his campaign, Trump made noises about leaving NATO altogether, which tune he later changed for the perfectly legitimate demand that European countries contribute more to their defence. However, underneath it all one detects a willingness to let Putin treat the post-Soviet space as his sphere of influence.

Sen. Newt Gingrich, a Trump insider, enunciated that attitude in so many words, issuing an open invitation to Putin. Estonia, he said, is but a suburb of Petersburg, and we wouldn’t to go to war over it.

More grist is added to the mill by Trump’s sycophantic courtship of Putin during the recent Helsinki summit – and indeed by the entire history of their relationship.

All the recent anti-Putin measures, such as the new batch of sanctions, have been taken over Trump’s objections and threats of veto. That has had a unifying effect on Congress, where a large enough bipartisan majority has been built to override any such veto. Yet  Trump has managed to slow down the implementation of sanctions to a snail’s pace.

Such inexplicable loyalty to Putin has given rise to speculation about the possible pull Putin has on Trump, in the shape of a dossier of compromising material (kompromat in Russian). Actually, I’d be amazed if such a dossier didn’t exist.

Before he announced his candidature for the presidency, Trump had had dubious business links with Putin’s Mafioso junta, which – to anyone who knows how big business is done in Russia – means with Putin himself.

For at least five years Trump was trying to secure a contract to adorn the Moscow skyline with a tower bearing his name. Acting through such prominent organised crime figures as Agalarov and Deripaska (also a good friend to our own Peter Mandelson and George Osborne), Putin kept dangling that carrot in front of Trump, but nothing came of it.

The most Trump managed to get – officially – was an invitation to use Moscow as a site for his travelling bordello, otherwise known as the Miss Universe pageant. That 2013 event is claimed to have produced kompromat of a sexual nature, which I find credible. After all, Trump’s propensity to consort with ladies of easy virtue is amply documented.

More damaging would be financial kompromat, and Trump’s sons Donald and Eric did acknowledge that the Russians were Trump’s major source of financing (Eric) and revenue (Donald). Doing such business with criminal organisations makes it impossible to keep one’s hands clean.

Trump has never stopped expressing his admiration for Putin’s ‘strong leadership’, dismissing or downplaying the crimes committed by the KGB junta – from murdering political opponents to earning the distinction of becoming the first European country after 1945 to annex another country’s territory by force.

Also, one has to be a fanatical worshipper of Trump not to wonder why his campaign and subsequently cabinet were densely packed with men whose links with Putin and his acolytes have since landed them in deep trouble.

Page, Papadopulos, Flynn, Manafort, Cohen, Tillerson – the list is long. Such concentration of Putin’s friends among Trump’s appointees would be suspicious even in the absence of any compromising information. Alas, such information is plentiful.

Trump originally intended to appoint his Republican rival Mitt Romney to the top government post of Secretary of State. At the last moment, however, Romney – an implacable critic of Putin – was shunted aside and replaced with Rex Tillerson, seen as a Putin-friendly character.

Now Tillerson had no qualifications for that position whatsoever, having had no diplomatic or indeed government experience. But, in his previous capacity as CEO of ExxonMobil he had been an associate of Putin and a close friend of Igor Sechin, widely regarded in Russia as Putin’s de facto deputy.

In recognition of his services to Russia, Tillerson received the Order of Friendship, while whatever services he had rendered America had until his appointment gone unrecognised. Trump’s brief to him, by Tillerson’s own admission, was to “stabilise the relationship with Russia and build trust.”

Tillerson’s appointment caused a spate of resignations in the State Department, and his tenure lasted less than a year. The other top foreign relations job, that of National Security Adviser, went to Michael Flynn, another friend of Putin, who lasted even less time.

In December last year, that paid participant in Putin’s propaganda extravaganzas pleaded guilty to a felony: lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian government during the Trump presidential campaign. That was a reduced charge, in return for which Flynn is now providing government evidence.

The chairman of Trump’s campaign, Paul Manafort, is now on trial for his life, charged with all sorts of financial crimes, including money laundering on behalf of Putin’s Ukrainian puppet Yanukovych. Manafort too was intimately connected with Deripaska, at that time already sanctioned in the US.

Such a concentration of Putin’s agents, witting or unwitting, among Trump’s entourage is hard to explain. The most benign explanation would be extremely poor judgement and lamentable failure to conduct most elementary due diligence.

Less benign judgements come to mind more easily, especially considering Putin’s own admission that he wanted Trump to win. That wasn’t just cheering from the sidelines: Russia’s vast resources were dedicated to destroying Hillary Clinton’s candidature (an awful one, it has to be said).

That was part of the hybrid war Russia declared on America, and the West in general. Propaganda and electronic offensives are the essential ingredients of the hybrid, and disruption its primary aim.

The Russians set up trolling and hacking factories, whose role was to swing the election Trump’s way. Never in US history has a foreign government attempted to exert such a direct influence on elections.

To that end, Russian trolls bombarded America with 1.4 million pro-Trump, anti-Clinton tweets that received 288 million hits. The Russians also hacked into the e-mail servers of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton herself. Compared to that massive theft of documents, the Watergate break-in looks like a little childish prank.

That both the DNC and Clinton were criminally negligent is as true as it’s beside the point. Putin’s intelligence services pursued a specific aim, that of helping Trump. This they did by feeding their loot to Assange’s WikiLeaks.

Whenever Clinton’s lead in the polls grew, new batches of hacked e-mails were released, with the clear intent of counteracting her gains. This was accompanied by a steady barrage of fake news and trolls generated by Putin’s bots.

All this is beyond doubt. What’s open to discussion is whether that hostile campaign actually affected the outcome, and whether Trump and his men were in cahoots with Putin.

The election was extremely close, with Clinton actually getting three million more votes. But Trump carried the Electoral College by winning the slenderest of majorities in three swing states. A turnaround of just 77,000 votes in those states would have put Clinton into the White House.

It’s impossible to assess the effect of Putin’s trolls and hackers, but it’s likely that they did have an effect. As to the other debatable point, we do know that key members of Trump’s campaign, including his son and son-in-law, had contacts with Putin’s agents throughout the campaign – which is to say they were requesting or at least accepting help from a hostile power.

After many denials, Trump finally admitted that he knew about those contacts, which is to say he authorised them. He claims this is perfectly legal, and he may be proved right – although that would surprise me.

I doubt Trump specifically requested help from Putin, or actively conspired with him, which would have been a heinous crime. But his overall demeanour certainly does little to dispel suspicions that Trump is Putin’s man. If that’s indeed the case, then Brennan was right when describing Trump’s behaviour as “nothing short of treasonous”.

The president could quash all such ugly suspicions by making unequivocal statements about the criminal nature of Putin’s regime and his hybrid war on America. He could then initiate new punitive measures or at least expedite those initiated by Congress.

Instead he seems to be doing a Nixon: attacking the press, singling his critics out for punishment or at least trying to silence them. He may get away with that. Nixon didn’t.

Whatever the subject under discussion, we should always listen to experts. Yet we must make sure that their expertise is current.

Enter V.I. Lenin, who knew a thing or two about terrorism.

This although, as every Soviet schoolchild was taught, Lenin was opposed to individual terror. But the teachers never stressed the word ‘individual’, as they should have done.

For the great humanist only questioned the efficacy of the piecemeal murder of government officials. What he had no doubt about is the wholesale massacre of millions – that sort of thing worked like a dream, as far as Lenin was concerned.

True enough, when terrorism claims millions of victims, it does terrorise. But when a Sudanese Muslim drives a car through some cyclists, no one other than the cyclists themselves is really terrorised.

(A contortionist slap on my own back: didn’t I figure out the driver’s religion perfectly yesterday? Just kidding: everybody knew he had to be a Muslim.)

Even the odd explosion doesn’t change our lives much. A year ago a bomb went off at my local tube station, and I haven’t noticed any subsequent reduction in the size of crowds on the platforms.

So the pronouncement attributed to the past master of mass murder has a distinctly archaic ring to it. The purpose of terrorism isn’t to terrorise, certainly not just that.

But this doesn’t mean modern terrorism serves no purpose at all. It does, but the purpose is subtler than scaring a lot of people out of their wits.

The real purpose of terrorism is to disrupt, to subvert the normal course of life. And that purpose is achieved not by scaring the man in the street into changing his daily patterns, but by goading the government into precipitate action.

Take yesterday’s event, for example, which is trivial by the usual standards of Islamic terrorism: no one was killed, only two people were injured.

Yet both our national government and the London mayor Sadiq Khan have already announced they’re considering closing Parliament Square and all the streets around it to traffic.

Now, as a Londoner and a driver, I can anticipate the disaster that’ll befall London traffic if the proposed pedestrianisation goes into effect.

The Embankment is by far the most important thoroughfare linking southwest London, where millions of people live, with the rest of the city. Having it run into a dead end will wreak havoc on traffic, which is already diabolical.

If that happens, the act perpetrated by the Sudanese chap will have succeeded: life in the city will be disrupted, albeit in a rather trivial way.

Other forms of disruption are far from trivial. For the threat of terrorism makes Western governments act in decidedly un-, not to say anti-, Western ways.

In politics, Western ways are defined by the balance of power between the state and the individual: the more it tips in favour of the individual, the more Western the country is – and vice versa.

Every modern state seeks to empower itself at the expense of the individual, but in the West the state can’t just put its foot down at will. Traditional checks on state power can be eroded, but they can’t be discarded offhand.

And even erosion won’t proceed by itself – every time the state diminishes the power of the individual it has to come up with a credible excuse.

That’s why states and the people tend to feel about war differently: most people don’t like it, but most states do.

For war provides a ready-made excuse for the state to suspend or reduce some civil liberties: at a time of emergency the collective has to take precedence over the personal. Few people notice that, after the hostilities end, the state gets to keep some, if not all, of its supposedly temporary powers.

Although it’s conducted on a smaller scale, terrorism is like any war. It provides an easy excuse for the state to claim greater control over people’s lives. That’s by far the greatest outrage caused by terrorist acts, even those as seemingly insignificant as yesterday’s drive over bicycles.

Fighting terrorism is the pretext the state uses for empowering itself to monitor our movements, correspondence, phone calls, e-mails. It’s supposedly because of terrorism that Britain has more CCTV cameras than the rest of the world combined.

When some of us demur, we’re put to shame. Photographs of terrorism victims, their assorted body parts and weeping mothers are produced to condemn our crass insensitivity.

So what if CCTV catches an average Briton 70 times a day? Just think of those poor children blown to bits.

Rational arguments needn’t apply. Other methods of preventing terrorism, such as reducing the number of Muslim immigrants rather than increasing the number of spying devices, aren’t even mooted for fear of being accused of racism.

Racism, you understand, is no longer a crime against common decency or even a particular race. It’s now a crime against the state. Everyone is a racist (homophobe, misogynist, xenophobe, you name it) if the state says so – and the state says so if it senses even a minuscule threat to its power.

Fighting terrorism is a convenient pretext for the misconduct of foreign policy as well. Rather than facing up to foreign tyrants, our governments cravenly kowtow to them because this is supposed to be the only way of enlisting their help in the fight against terrorism.

The very terrorism, incidentally, that those tyrants sponsor. That’s like co-opting arsonists to fight fires, but our governments don’t mind.

In that spirit, successive US administrations have chosen to ignore that 15 out of the 19 Twin Towers terrorists were Saudis – God forbid the Saudis take offence and withdraw their anti-terrorist help.

One has to admit that terrorism achieves its real purpose, that of subverting Western ways by encouraging Western governments to act tyrannically at home and gutlessly abroad.

Just terrorising is sooooo yesterday. We live in a different world now, Comrade Lenin.

Yet another car was driven this morning into the security barriers protecting the Houses of Parliament.

Before swerving into the barriers, the driver negotiated a path that took him through a crowd of cyclists, most of whom must be blessed with lightning-quick reflexes and managed to jump out of the way.

Only this can explain why, of the 10 cyclists hit, only two victims ended up in hospital, presumably St Thomas’s just across the river. However, this assumption isn’t entirely safe: knowing how the NHS operates, they might as easily have taken the victims to a hospital in Muswell Hill or Richmond.

The police say their minds are open, which is a good thing – provided their brains don’t fall out. They didn’t specify what it was that their minds were open to, considering that every eyewitness stated unequivocally that the act was deliberate.

Those familiar with the geography of the area will know that there’s so little room in which to swerve at 50 mph that such a manoeuvre couldn’t possibly have  been executed accidentally – especially since the driver was only conning a Ford Fiesta, hardly the most powerful car out there.

Are the officers’ minds open to the perpetrator’s identity? That’s highly unlikely, considering that they arrested him on the spot. Ask him nicely, and he’ll be only too pleased to introduce himself, thereby closing all those inquisitive minds.

However, even if the police know who drove that Fiesta, we don’t, not at the time of writing. We do know the car wasn’t a self-drive vehicle. One newspaper mentioned in passing that the driver was black; the others didn’t volunteer any information at all.

And we still have no inkling why that black gentleman chose to write off his car in such a spectacular fashion. It couldn’t have been insurance fraud because he made no attempt at subterfuge. Nor was it a suicide attempt, for otherwise he could have simply driven the car off the cliff somewhere upcountry.

As always, police reticence under such circumstances leaves the door wide-open for speculation. And here we must decide which great English mind we should look to for inspiration: Bertie Russell or Sherlock Holmes.

Russell believed that, no matter how regularly and for how long the same event has been happening, there’s no guarantee it’ll happen again. The sun may have risen every morning as far back as anyone can remember, he said, but we can’t infer on that basis that it’ll rise again tomorrow morning.

His near contemporary Sherlock Holmes would have disagreed vehemently. Abstractions aside, he’d say, in a world of solving practical problems, when something has always happened for a certain reason, one can confidently predict it’ll happen again and for the same reason.

This morning’s incident at Westminster definitely falls into Mr Holmes’s area of expertise, rather than Prof. Russell’s. And it’s Sherlock Holmes’s practical approach to such matters that can help us come up with a credible hypothesis on the nature of the Fiesta fiasco.

Mr Holmes himself would have had it all figured out before even arriving at the scene. He’d dismiss out of hand as utterly improbable any motive other than vehicular terrorism.

And he’d make a mental note that so far every such incident involved a Muslim perpetrator – including the attack on the same target 17 months ago that left five dead.

Ergo, the great detective would explain to his hapless sidekick, Dr Watson, the black driver of that Fiesta is a Muslim, doing what he did because he’s a Muslim. Elementary. (Speaking today, Holmes would probably say something like “Sor’ed” instead – tempora mutantur, and usually for the worse.)

After an earlier such incident I proposed that every Muslim driver should be made to take a remedial course in keeping the car on the road.

If you want to hit a cyclist, Ahmed, get out of the car – most of us other drivers would cheer you on, what with cyclists tending to be sanctimonious pests. I for one have lost my voice on several occasions, screaming irate obscenities at those road menaces.

And Ahmed? Think twice before driving at full pelt into a concrete and steel barrier: in that crash there can only be one winner. Get yourself a Challenger 2 battle tank if you want to take a security barrier on.

Building on that didactic initiative, I’d suggest every Muslim car owner display on his rear window two stickers: ‘Muslim on board’ and ‘Learner terrorist’.

(I realise that most Muslim drivers aren’t going to use their vehicle for the purpose of terrorism. By the same token, most Rottweilers aren’t going to attack a pedestrian. However, they’re all muzzled in the street just the same: better safe than sorry, what?)

You may think that two such messages would be redundant, and either one would do the same job because they are interchangeable.

Well, this is up for discussion. My mind is open too, even though I’m not a cop.

As a fellow socialist, nay Marxist, nay Trotskyist, I deplore the vituperative attacks on my friend Jeremy in every conceivable medium.

Accusing Jeremy of anti-Semitism is like accusing his girlfriend Diane Abbott of being fat… or is it a wrong simile?

Must be, for she’s indeed fat, while Jeremy doesn’t have an anti-Semitic bone in his body. My writing is getting sloppy in my dotage.

Anyway, you know what I mean. Not an anti-Semitic bone in his body – that’s exactly what Jeremy said in reply to my question when I rang him last night.

“Listen, Comrade, those hyenas of journalism, those hirelings of world capital and specifically of the City and Wall Street don’t even understand the words they use,” complained Jeremy.

“First they run all those ridiculous, if true, stories about my support for the Palestinians’ just cause.

“Then they publish photographs of my kissing and hugging dozens of freedom fighters from the PLO, Hamas or what have you – and then they have the stupidity and gall to say I’m an anti-Semite.

“I looked it up: Arabs are Semites. Right, Comrade? I love Arabs, so how does that make me an anti-Semite? I’m a philo-Semite if anything.”

“Well, that’s not quite what those hangers-on, renegades and lackeys mean,” I interjected gently. “They mean you hate Jews.”

“Hate Jews?” Jeremy sounded genuinely surprised. “Nothing can be further from the truth. Why, some of my best friends are ki… I mean Christ-killers.”

“Of course, Jeremy, of course. I know that, you know that, but those pawns in the hands of world capital don’t know it.

“They keep banging on about Tunis,” I explained, “that wreath you laid in 2014 at the tomb of those terrorists who tortured and slaughtered 11 Israeli athletes in Munich…”

“Terrorists? Et tu, Boot? Freedom bloody fighters, not terrorists, Comrade. And anyway, I just dropped a wreath at that tomb on my way to another tomb, of those PLO hero-martyrs killed by Israeli imperialist colonialists in an air strike.”

“Yes, Jeremy, but those media stooges to the Jewish conspiracy will say that the PLO was terrorist too…”

“Are you kidding me, Comrade? That’s like describing as terrorists those fighters for the liberation of Ireland from British imperialism and colonialism.”

“Yes, Jeremy, but the Jews…”

“Don’t talk to me about the Yids, Comrade,” objected Jeremy rather forcefully. “I love them and all, but sometimes they get too uppity for words. First, they genocide millions of Palestinians…”

“Are you sure about that number, Jeremy?” Sometimes my pedantic side is hard to contain.

“Millions, Comrade! They’re worse than the Nazis! And then they moan about those 11 athletes. In the general scheme of things, what’s 11 athletes more or less?

“Those Israeli Jewboys whinge they’ve been at war non-stop for 70 years, and then they bitch about 11 casualties. They’re just sore losers, if you ask me. When you chop wood, chips will fly, as Trotsky said.”

“Do me a favour, Jeremy,” I pleaded. “Quote someone else from now on, until after the next general election at least. Those jackals of Fleet Street will eat you alive…”

“Jews’ flunkeys, every one of them,” interrupted Jeremy. “Not that I have anything against Jews.”

“Of course not,” I agreed hastily. “But listen, Jeremy, I’ll be in London around the second week in September. Perhaps we could grab a beer and talk about your PR?”

“Can’t do that week, Comrade. I’ll be in Saudi then, laying a wreath at the memorial to those 19 heroes of 9/11. Maybe later in the month.”

“Fine, Jeremy, later in the month it is,” I said. “But until then, take it easy, will you, for Marx’s sake? Keep shtum about the Jews, Hamas, the Holocaust…”

“The what?”

“Well, you know, the Holocaust. It did happen, didn’t it?”

“No, it didn’t,” said my friend Jeremy firmly. “But it will.”

There’s no difference between wearing a burqa or a crucifix. Both should be defended, says Ruth Davidson, reinforcing thereby her claim to future Tory leadership.

This airtight analogy was drawn in the midst of the knock-down, drag-out controversy I wrote about the other day: that nasty Boris Johnson sounding dismissive about the burqa, though stopping short of calling for a ban.

That is, when I wrote about that I didn’t realise there would be so much brouhaha about it. But the madness is now upon us, complete with calls for Johnson to be investigated, though not yet stoned or mutilated.

Fair enough, the opportunity was too good to miss. By castigating Mr Johnson and upholding multi-culti virtue, politicians can tick all the rubrics essential for a front-bench career.

Ruth’s ticks, however, are bigger and fatter than anyone else’s. Thus spake our PM a couple of elections down the road – and certainly the Conservative leader in the near future.

Miss Davidson’s credentials are unassailable.

First, she’s a shrewd political operator, which she demonstrated in 2016 by making the Tories the second-largest party in Scotland.

For Tories to come in ahead of Labour in Scotland is like a neo-Nazi party coming in ahead of Labour in Israel. So that electoral coup must have caught the eye of Tory mandarins and other fruits.

Then Miss Davidson is a member of four (!) oppressed minorities. A membership in at least one now provides a strong boost to a political career, and is well on its way to becoming an ironclad requirement.

First, Miss Davidson is a Scot and therefore a long-suffering victim of brutal English colonialism, as conclusively proved by any number of Hollywood films, all starring Mel Gibson.

Second, she’s a woman, which group is both oppressed and a minority – in the existential sense that transcends arithmetic. And women deserve political prominence as compensation for millennia of abject subjugation.

This isn’t specific to the UK. The American Republican Party, for example, has proudly announced its intention to nominate women as at least half of their congressional candidates. ‘Irrespective of any other qualifications’ was the implicit yet inevitable refrain.

Third, Miss Davison is a lesbian, who’s currently having an IVF baby with another woman. And if sexual deviancy can’t earn a person a place on the modern political Olympus, I don’t know what can. That too is fast approaching the status of a necessary (and sufficient?) job qualification.

In fact, I’m hereby starting a campaign to replace the outdated aphorism ‘divide and rule’ (divide et impera) with ‘deviate and rule’ (deviat et impera).

Fourth, Miss Davidson goes even further by belonging to an oppressed minority within an oppressed minority – and I know you’ll find this as surprising as I did a few days ago.

My eye opener came in a morning issue of Sky News, which featured in one of its top segments a lesbian woman complaining bitterly of the ‘T’ in the LGBT pushing the ‘L’ to an inferior status.

I’m a lesbian, explained the interviewee, meaning I’m a woman who likes other women. Those bloody ‘Ts’, however, aren’t real women but, because they capture public imagination to such a degree, they impose their own agenda on the ‘Ls’, depriving them of their God-given freedom of speech.

I’m not sure I followed every argument but, as a progressivist of long standing, I wholeheartedly agreed that the plight of lesbians within the LGBT ‘community’ qualifies them as a martyred minority.

Given her membership in four oppressed minorities, I’m surprised Miss Davidson felt the need to beef up her CV, but beef it up she did.

These days any candidate aspiring to lead our true-blue Conservatives must demonstrate total ignorance of (and ideally contempt for) British history, civilisation, culture and – most critical – constitution.

By equating the Cross and the burqa, Miss Davidson succeeded in doing just that, which turns her candidature into an unstoppable juggernaut. And this vehicle is further souped up by her general ignorance.

As Boris Johnson and that Oxford imam, whose name escapes me, correctly stated, the burqa has no scriptural justification in Islam. Therefore it’s not a religious symbol, but an ethnic and cultural one.

The Cross, however, isn’t just any old religious symbol, but one in whose name our civilisation was created. This isn’t an expression of faith but simply a statement of historical truth.

The Cross, furthermore, was the inspiration behind every successful effort to stop Islamic aggression in Europe, perpetrated by the very people who then decided to hide their womenfolk behind hideous garments.

Do the dates 732, 1571 and 1683 mean anything to Miss Davidson? I suspect not, which is most unfortunate.

Granted, Miss Davidson is entitled to her own opinions and her own faith – but she isn’t entitled to her own facts.

She is, however, entitled to ignorance, especially of the religious foundations of the West and hence Britain. But it wouldn’t hurt a professional politician to know the kind of basic information about the British political system that goes (or should go) into the citizenship test.

One datum that seems to have gone by Miss Davidson is that Britain is a monarchy and the Queen is its head of state. A related datum is that in Britain the church isn’t separated from the state, as it is, say, in the USA or France.

The existence of an established church makes Britain a Christian commonwealth not just historically and culturally, but statutorily. This was re-confirmed 64 years ago, during the coronation ceremony of Her Majesty, as this exchange shows:

“Archbishop. Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law?…”

Queen. All this I promise to do.”

Miss Davidson may bemoan the fact that Britain is a Christian commonwealth rather than a Muslim caliphate (where she’d probably be tossed off a tall building, but that’s beside the point), but that is indeed a fact.

In view of that fact, equating the Cross with the burqa makes Miss Davidson an ignorant, cynical opportunist. And an ideal candidate for Tory leadership.