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When I say that today’s democracies are more tyrannical than any absolute monarchy of yesteryear, people display a touching concern for my mental health.

I then invite them to compare the power wielded by, say, Louis XIV and any of today’s presidents or prime ministers. Specifically, what would have happened to the Sun King had he extorted half of what his subjects earned?

My guess is that he would have lost his head a century before that fate befell his great-great-great grandson. And the same thing would have happened to him had he tried to conscript the entire male (and much of the female) population, which today’s democratic leaders can do overnight.

Or how do you think the French would have reacted had Louis mandated exactly where and how they should educate their children or where and by whom they had to be treated medically? Quite.

Once we’ve contemptuously tossed aside the slogans of modern politics, we’ll see that the essence of the post-Enlightenment state – regardless of whether it’s democratic, authoritarian or totalitarian – is the ad infinitum expansion of its power.

That, however, doesn’t mean they should all be lumped together. For, much as they’re all similar in their goal, they differ in the methods used to achieve it.

Totalitarian states rely on violent suppression of human liberties, a climate of fear, brainwashing propaganda, barring access to information and so forth. But their democratic counterparts have to rely on subtler means.

They can gnaw at the edges of individual liberties, and do so at an accelerating rate. But they can’t gobble them up in their entirety. Yet the inner imperative to grow their muscle is just as strong as in their totalitarian counterparts.

Yes, they can still indoctrinate their subjects by the cumulative effect of incessant propaganda. Since “ye shall know them by their fruits”, just observe how united the British are in believing that the NHS represents the utmost in human virtue.

Such uniformity doesn’t come about by itself. It takes decades of concerted nurturing through every medium known to man, for without it people would be able to trust the evidence before their own eyes. And successful propaganda doesn’t just skew debate; it stops it.

This, however, is small beer. Such propaganda may dumb down much of the population, but it won’t make the state omnipotent. Other, more tangible, levers of power are required, and in today’s democracies these are mostly economic.

The power of the state grows in direct proportion to the number of people dependent on it for their sustenance – and in inverse proportion to the number of those independent of it.

Hence the more loyal the state is to its post-Enlightenment imperatives, the more committed it will be to producing the right ratio. For example, in this country the socialist-lite Tories exercise more restraints than the socialist-full-strength Labour.

It’s in this context – or at least also in this context – that we should consider the Labour manifesto.

That their policies will instantly make us all poorer is a fact denied only by people with no grasp of elementary economics, or else by resentful fanatics out for revenge. But, more important, those policies will also make us infinitely less free.

How can people become independent of the state? The surest method is to acquire a few billion and park the money in offshore shelters. However, since the UK only numbers 54 billionaires, both this method and its practitioners can be safely discounted.

Other methods, however, are available to most of us. Such as self-employment, the option chosen by 4.8 million Britons. Many of them, perhaps most, choose it not out of greed, but because they seek independence not only from the state but also from large companies.

Hundreds of thousands of them make little money. The data published the other day show that hundreds of thousands survive on incomes less than £10,000 a year – something most of them could better by bartering their independence away.

Then there are savers, those who swap today’s comforts for tomorrow’s independence. For reasons I’ll mention later, their number is steadily dwindling away: 15 per cent of Britons and 53 per cent of 22-29-year-olds have no savings at all. And a third of those who do save have salted away less than £1,500.

By far the greatest number of Britons acquire financial independence through investments. One of them is pension funds, which in Britain are greater than in the rest of Europe combined.

Then there are various securities, second homes, buy-to-rent properties, antique cars, gold and precious stones. You’ll notice that physical assets are vastly more popular than financial operations or savings. Why?

We’ve had a period of relatively low inflation, which is why we lose sight of the historical perspective. And historically, the last 50 years of the 19^th century saw a negligible combined inflation of 10 per cent. That number increased somewhat in the last 50 years of the 20^th century – to a soul-destroying 2,000 per cent.

That’s why people don’t trust money: especially since over the past generation property inflation outpaced money inflation by a factor of ten. This shows that seemingly abstract indicators have a most concrete effect on people’s behaviour.

Everybody knows this – and so does our communist shadow chancellor John McDonnell. That’s why he has come up with policies that can drive people into state bondage without any – well, much – help from the more visible forms of oppression.

Some of those Labour politicians aren’t fools. They know that their government will be an economic disaster. But it will be more despotic than any other government in British history, which is the whole point.

Hence they plan to introduce punitive rates of tax on ‘high’ (in fact, moderately successful middle-class) earners; savings, pension funds, dividends, second homes, buy-to-rent properties, inheritance, capital gains, private schools, corporations – all against the background of run-away inflation of the money supply.

Big corporations and billionaires, Labour’s ostensible targets, aren’t particularly bothered. Unlike the rest of us, they have the freedom of simply upping their sticks.

In fact, it was announced this morning that the mere risk of a Corbyn government has made two major energy companies move all their assets offshore – this in addition to the £800 billion that already left.

They take their jobs with them, driving more people into the clutches of social services. The more such people there are, the more successful the state is on its own terms.

Socialists prefer poor slaves to financially independent freemen. They’ll do everything they can to achieve that goal, to the accompaniment of bleating about caring and sharing.

In one of my books I take a stab at some ideas for electoral reform. One of them is that anybody deriving more than 50 per cent of his income from the state – be it salary, hand-outs or income support – should be disfranchised.

If that were to happen, the likes of Corbyn and McDonnell, or perhaps even their Tory counterparts, wouldn’t be elected the proverbial dogcatcher. As it is, I brace myself for the worst while hoping for… well, not the best: that’s not on offer. So let’s say better and cross our fingers.

“A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre.

“Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

“Two things result from this fact: I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power. II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself…”

Oops, sorry, wrong document. I thought I was reprinting the 2019 Labour Manifesto written by Corbyn and McDonnell, but accidentally ran out the 1848 Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Engels.

The mistake is understandable: mutatis mutandis, the two documents are identical in spirit, if divergent in some insignificant details.

It’s the details that are filling today’s papers, while the spirit is mostly ignored. Clever commentators analyse Labour’s economic planks and confidently predict that out of these planks the coffin of the British economy will be made.

Most of them display unbridled optimism by expecting the economy to collapse over time. Actually, since only God operates outside time, they have a philosophical point. But if they mean a rather long time, say months or even years, they are wrong.

The collapse will be almost instant, with perhaps another trillion’s worth of investment getting out while the getting is good. That’s on top of about £800 billion that has already fled in joyous anticipation of a Labour victory.

Still, in this matter the optimists and the pessimists differ only in the exact timing of the catastrophe. Neither doubt it’ll happen.

It’s not surprising that in our materialist, philistine age everyone thinks of politics in economic terms. “It’s the economy, stupid” and all that.

Yet the slogan by which I live my secular life is rather different: “It’s the freedom, stupid.” Having grown up under the worst tyranny the world has ever known, I wish to live out my days in freedom – as much of it as possible.

And if the Labour Manifesto ever becomes government policy, Britain will no longer be a free country. She’ll lose even the rump of liberty still surviving the concerted century-old assault on it by all major parties.

The Labour Manifesto is socialist, communist as near as damn. Hence it shouldn’t be assessed merely from the standpoint of sovereign debts, tax hikes, promiscuous spending, nationalisation and what have you.

All those things are important, but they are derivatively important. They spring from the essence of socialism and its logical extension, communism. Alas, we sometimes forget what it is, confusing essence with slogans.

Anyone who takes socialist slogans at face value must also believe that choosing a certain brand of toothpaste would make him a sex god, or that his friends will consider him a genius if he keeps his money in one bank rather than another.

Since we none of us are so credulous, let’s forget all that clamour about share-care-be aware equalities and fairnesses inscribed on Labour’s red banners. They are just flatulence or, to be kind, means to an end.

And the end towards which socialism strives, its very essence, is the juxtaposition of omnipotent state and impotent individual, otherwise known as despotism. That’s all.

Economic redistribution that so upsets most commentators isn’t a malum in se. In itself it’s ill-advised and ruinous, but not necessarily evil. What’s evil is the end it’s designed to achieve: maximum empowerment of the state with the concomitant maximum enfeeblement of the individual.

Socialism thus represents an inversion of every certitude that lay at the foundation of our civilisation, based as it is on the sovereign value of each person made in image and likeness of God.

The two strikingly similar manifestos that I pretended to confuse transfer sovereign value to the state, turning people into an amorphous, faceless, bullied mass. For make no mistake about it: any attempt to act on the Labour Manifesto will be accompanied by burgeoning political tyranny.

Labour promises free everything, but one thing that won’t be free under its government is speech. That’s why they propose to nationalise the Internet, mirroring similar measures already taken in Russia and China.

Civil unrest is bound to follow within months of Labour’s ascent, and I’m being generous. The British don’t share the French affection for barricades, but they have never been pushed as far as Corbyn’s government will push them.

And socialist, borderline communist governments always respond to civil unrest by ratcheting up violence and oppression. Hence it’s not just the British economy that’ll be torn to tatters, but Britain herself.

Only fools or knaves can vote for this midnight terror. I pray that most Britons don’t fall under this description. Because if they do, I’ll end my days in prison.

The Church of England, expertly guided by Archbishop Welby, has offered its “repentance” for centuries of anti-Semitism that set up the Holocaust.

Repentance is of course the Christian thing to do, and we can’t have enough of it. Provided, of course, that it’s offered in good faith, as it were, and not for some spurious reason.

For example, nowhere this side of the confessional does one see as much repentance as at sentencing time in our criminal courts. However, one can be forgiven for harbouring suspicions that such noble acts are motivated by ignoble impulses.

In this case, the mea culpa is supposedly prompted by Christian teaching that provided “a fertile seedbed for murderous anti-Semitism”. Specifically: “Within living memory, such ideas contributed to fostering the passive acquiescence if not positive support of many Christians in actions that led to the Holocaust.”

That many Christians – including such remarkable men as Dostoyevsky (along with many other great Russian writers), Chesterton and Céline – have been virulent anti-Semites is God’s own truth. It’s also true that, like any other religion, Christianity condemns infidels.

Jews occupy a special place among the infidels because they had the first chance to reject Christ and took it with alacrity. However, they also carried Christ to the world: not only Jesus himself but also his apostles and the first 15 bishops of Jerusalem were circumcised Jews.

Getting closer to home, in 1290 England was indeed the first European country to expel the Jewish community – though not individual Jews who continued to practise their religion in private.

(This is why, incidentally, Portugal is regarded as Britain’s oldest ally. Expelled English Jews settled there but maintained their business ties with their friends and families staying behind.)

It’s also true that the 1290 expulsion followed a series of pogroms, of which the best-known is the York massacre of 150 Jews in Clifford’s Tower. And yes, there have been many Christians among avid readers of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other texts libellously accusing Jews of thirst for Christian blood.

Such people often committed violence towards Jews, blaming them not only for their dietary preferences, but also for such disasters as the Black Death. However, for the sake of balance, one should also remember that in 1348 Pope Clement VI issued two papal bulls condemning the violence. Those who blamed the Jews, he wrote, had been “seduced by the liar, the Devil.”

It can’t be gainsaid that Christians have always tried to convert Jews, although they aren’t the only group picked for Christian proselytism. Preaching that “the Kingdom of God is at hand” is after all what Christian doctrine obliges its followers to do.

That’s why Christian missionaries have always risked their lives trying to convert people on all continents. At least, unlike certain religions one could mention, they usually did so by peaceful sermon, not by force.

The 100-page report issued by the Anglican Church lists many injustices and crimes perpetrated by Christians against the Jews, although it correctly states that anti-Semitism actually predates Christianity.

My question is why it is specifically the Anglican Church that chose to offer its repentance, and why specifically at this time. One may get the impression that England is the worst and constantly re-offending culprit.

In particular, by accepting a share of the blame for the Holocaust, the Anglican Church seems to imply that England had the same lust for Jewish blood as some of our European partners.

However, I’m not aware of any pogroms occurring in England since Cromwell readmitted the Jewish community in 1656. I realise that historically the 363 elapsing years are but an instant. Yet during this instant anti-Semitic massacres continued apace in Europe, until Hitler mostly its eastern part (hence the Russian word pogrom).

Also during this instant, Jews have suffered economic and legal restrictions in a number of European countries, and isolated violent episodes in some – but not in England. Perpetrators of such acts were often Christians, and some of them committed vile acts because they were Christians, but such devout thugs were rare.

The report mentions in passing that in due course religious ant-Semitism segued into the racial kind. That’s indeed the case: the European revolutions adumbrating modernity emancipated Jews from religious discrimination, but not from the racial variety.

The same human types who used to hate Jews because they espoused a different religion began to hate them because their noses were of different shape. The question of whether or not the two types of anti-Semitism are the same, causatively related or different is hard to answer, and the report doesn’t attempt to do so.

What’s telling, however, is that it leaves out the third type, anti-Semitism based on class hatred, which is as widespread in modern times as the racist kind and much more so than the Christian variety.

The omitted genre of anti-Semitism is Marxist in origin, which is to say socialist. Mix that with ethnic hatred of Jews and you get the Holocaust perpetrated by national socialists, and severe anti-Jewish restrictions imposed by communist states.

But not by England, which again raises the questions posed earlier. What compelled Justin Welby et al. to repent in this particular place and at this particular time?

After all, these days the number of anti-Semitic incidents, violent or otherwise, in any European country is directly proportionate to the number of Muslims, not Christians, there. Yet one doesn’t hear many imams offering apologies.

The answer is that anti-Semitism is in the British news because today’s Labour Party, which may well form our next government, is anti-Semitic. However, there isn’t a word in the report about socialist anti-Semitism in general and Labour anti-Semitism in particular.

Nevertheless the reasons for the report are all current and secular. It’s part of New Age virtue-signalling, wherein the fashion for retrospective penance is de rigueur.

We’re supposed to apologise for our colonial past, being nasty to the Celtic fringe, General Dyer, the Industrial Revolution with its outstanding carbon debt and anything else required to mollify people who typically detest Christianity.

Fair enough, a case can be made that all three (not two) known types of anti-Semitism are but different facets of the same phenomenon.

However, let’s not forget that the Anglican Church (as distinct from the Christian Church in England) didn’t even exist when Jews were last killed in England – and that 600,000 Britons died fighting those responsible for the Holocaust.

Moreover, the Holocaust was perpetrated by socialists who hated Christianity almost as much as they hated Jews – and who murdered Jewish converts to Christianity alongside with religious and non-believing Jews.

Instead of apologising for the nasty things done during the reign of Richard I and Edward I, the Anglican Church ought to apologise for haemorrhaging communicants, vulgarising the liturgy, desecrating cathedrals with fairground attractions, raves and pop music, and other blows raining on Christianity in England.

But we can’t expect its oil-trading hierarchs to do that, can we? It’s so much easier to strike fashionable poses and toe the New Age line.  

Sacred cows can be milked, but they can’t be slaughtered – such is the pitiful nature of today’s political discourse.

One of those bovine creatures is the NHS: one can bemoan its difficulties, lack of funds, shortage of qualified medical staff, overlong waiting times – whatever. But, on pain of hitting the career buffers, one can’t say there’s something wrong with the very idea of socialised medicine.

The NHS thus leaves the domain of serious discussion and enters one of totemistic worship, with reason excommunicated.

That was evident in yesterday’s debate. Every time Corbyn accused Johnson of planning to do awful things to the NHS, the PM reacted the way St Athanasius would have reacted to charges of Arianism.

The same goes for democracy. You can point out all sorts of symptomatic problems, but never the underlying systemic one. Finding anything wrong with the very notion of indiscriminate, unqualified, universal suffrage is strictly off limits.

Daniel Finkelstein illustrates this simple rule in today’s article This Isn’t the Election Politicians Think It Is.

Drawing on statistical data and on the material gathered in the book Democracy for Realists by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Lord Finkelstein proves that most voters vote for spurious reasons. They know little about the candidates, even less about their policies and next to nothing about the issues on which the elections are decided.

For example, only one per cent of the respondents to a current poll have heard of the suppressed Russian report that’s very much in the news. And 42 per cent truthfully admit they haven’t noticed a single election story over the past few days.

Half the respondents have never heard of Shadow Chancellor McDonnell, which means they don’t know this rank communist is the eminence grise of the Labour Party. Only 18 per cent can place Dominic Cummings’s name, and he’s believed to pull Johnson’s strings.

“So,” asks Lord Finkelstein not unreasonably, “if people aren’t following much, what determines election results? Do elections actually hold politicians to account at all?”

No, is the answer to that, if one reads Democracy for Realists, which analyses reams of statistical data. Evidently most people hold contradictory or even mutually exclusive views on many political subjects.

Nor do they know what the politicians’ views on these subjects are. For example, half of German voters didn’t know whether a party called Die Linke was on the left or right. That’s like not knowing whether the Brexit Party supports Leave or Remain: Die Linke means The Left in German.

Here in Britain many people support nationalisation, but oppose Labour policy on this issue because they don’t know nationalisation is Labour policy. Similarly, they are indifferent to Johnson’s promise to increase state spending because they don’t realise this represents a dramatic change of Tory policy.

The book shows, numbers in hand, that policies don’t really affect how people vote. Nor does the government’s record.

“The problem,” writes Lord Finkelstein, “is that voters aren’t very good at working out who to blame when things go wrong or who to credit when they go right”.

And they judge whether things have gone right or wrong almost exclusively on the basis of their income over the past two quarters – not even over the lifetime of the current parliament.

Other factors coming into play have nothing to do with politics at all. For example, a natural disaster, such as the current floods, damages the incumbent, while England’s success in a football tournament benefits him by increasing the ‘feel-good’ factor. 

Another important, practically decisive, factor is the herd instinct: people vote a certain way because that’s how they believe the PLUs (People Like Us) vote now or have voted traditionally.

Since the previous generations of one’s family usually qualify as PLUs, Lord Finkelstein concludes that: “This election could be decided by the extent to which grandparents are left spinning in their graves.”

Yet to me this isn’t the conclusion of the argument, but its starting point. Lord Finkelstein doesn’t seem to be aware of this, but his informative article punches an irreparable hole in what I earlier described as “indiscriminate, unqualified, universal suffrage”.

He shows persuasively that most people cast their votes for utterly frivolous reasons, reducing elections to a roll of the dice. Because a chap hasn’t had a rise in the past six months, and because his Grandpa voted for Harold Wilson, he may vote in a communist (well, Corbyn’s) government without realising that’s what he’s doing.

A few years later he’ll look at the smoking ruins of everything Britain used to be and will perhaps change his vote. That is, provided he realises that the destruction has been caused by certain policies – and, for that matter, assuming he’ll be allowed to vote at all.

Democracy etymologically presupposes self-government, with the demos trusting its most qualified representatives to look after its interests for a few years. But if, as Lord Finkelstein shows so well, the demos is manifestly unqualified to act in that capacity, doesn’t that undermine the whole concept?

His findings tally with both my observations and thoughts on this subject. Unlike me, however, he isn’t prepared to draw the conclusion his facts demand. That’s shoddy, timorous thinking.

Daisy the Sacred Cow is so lovely, and she moos so cutely, that she’s impossible to slaughter. And if a politician or a pundit dares to suggest such a thing, he’ll instantly stop being a politician or a pundit. Lord Finkelstein knows this very well.  

For those who played truant when literature and physics were taught, the title implies a parallel with Richard III, the protagonist in both Shakespeare’s play and the mnemonic for the colours of the spectrum.

The parallel doesn’t work on all levels, even though Richard and Andrew were both war heroes. One could resort to feeble puns by suggesting that Andrew’s battle cry was “A whore, my kingdom for a whore!”, but that would be pushing it.

First, the kingdom isn’t Andrew’s to barter away. Second, if his Newsnight interview is anything to go by, he has never had the slightest interest in ladies of easy virtue. Third, I told you it was a bad pun, didn’t I?

One does wonder why HRH decided to do that interview in the first place. He said his aim was to clear the air. Others say it was to lay a smokescreen. They all agree that neither objective was achieved.

And both groups refuse to believe HRH, much to my dismay. What’s there not to believe?

Andrew was friends with Jeffrey Epstein, but that doesn’t mean they had the same predilections. Penelope and I are closer than Andrew and Jeffrey ever were, yet our tastes differ. I like oysters; she doesn’t. I like my white wine cold; she likes it practically at room temperature. I drink vodka with Russian food; she drinks champagne.

Thus, though Jeffrey liked pubescent girls, it’s illogical to insist on Andrew’s guilt by association. Especially when he tells us he never sampled the goods on offer at Epstein’s residences, other than room and board.

HRH stopped talking to Epstein in 2006, which shows laudable prudence. After all, Jeffrey was at the time investigated for having sexually abused 36 underage girls, and Andrew didn’t want to be tarred with the same brush.

Then Jeffrey served a 13-month sentence in prison, and it would have been unseemly for a prince to visit him there just to maintain friendly contacts. So far so good.

When Jeffrey was released, Andrew displayed commendable loyalty by resuming their friendship and his use of Epstein’s townhouse in Manhattan.

Granted, he couldn’t have helped noticing many nubile girls, otherwise known as jailbait, floating through the premises. But, as he truthfully stated, he paid no attention to that backdrop.

Andrew didn’t connect those young ladies with Epstein’s having just served a term for paedophilia. After all, he was used to having staff around. So he naturally assumed that’s what those girls were and left it at that.

That brings into question the hiring policy at Buckingham Palace. Somehow I doubt Her Majesty employs a bevy of scantily clad nymphets to move about the palace with nothing to do. But then Andrew lives there and I don’t, so don’t listen to me.

One of the erstwhile nymphets, now 31, claims Andrew not only noticed her, but in fact knew her intimately. As proof of that insane allegation, she has produced a photo of Andrew with his arm around her waist and his hand on her bare midriff.

The interviewer asked HRH about the picture, and he honestly said he didn’t remember it being taken. No problem there: I don’t remember when and by whom every photo of me was taken, do you? What better proof does one need?

Was the photo perchance a fake, persisted the inquisitive interviewer, repeating the claim previously made by Andrew’s retainers. I can’t prove it is, nor that it isn’t, replied the prince, to my satisfaction. If that’s not an exculpating statement, I don’t know what is.

Anyway, when Jeffrey came out, and both his friendship and hospitality again became available to HRH, the bond between the two men blossomed again. Except that apparently prison hadn’t had its universally expected rehabilitating effect on Jeffrey.

He kept reoffending and being charged, which was more than HRH could bear. Driven by his royal sense of propriety, he decided never to speak to Jeffrey again.

To make sure the paedo got the point, Andrew chose to make it in person, rather than by phone or letter. As he explained, the decision was based on his exaggerated sense of honour, and, as someone whose own honour is rather understated by comparison, I applaud him with admiration.

To make the point even more telling, Andrew then spent four days in Epstein’s mansion, which stands to reason in view of his decency. HRH is too sensitive a man to have given it to Jeffrey cold turkey. It was much kinder to soften the shock by revealing the message gradually, bit by wounding bit.

As to then attending a party at Epstein’s place, Andrew explained that he didn’t do parties. The next day all papers were full of photographs of Andrew boogying the night away at different stages in his life.

That was a woeful misunderstanding of what HRH had actually said. What he meant was that, as a member of the royal family, he didn’t do political parties, which is consistent with his constitutional role.

Then the ex-nymphet also claimed that Andrew had sweated profusely when dancing with her before taking her to bed, and the interviewer had the bad taste to bring that up. That gave HRH the chance to remind us of his war record.

When I fought heroically for our country in the Falklands, he explained, I produced so much adrenaline that my sweat glands shut down. Now, even though anhidosis is usually caused by diabetes or alcoholism, ‘usually’ is the operative word.

Who’s to say the condition can’t also be caused by Argie bullets? As to the numerous pictures showing HRH dripping with sweat on many a dance floor, that’s ridiculous to mention in the age of Photoshop. Give me five minutes, and I’ll give you a picture of an Egyptian mummy sweating bullets.

To cap it all, today’s papers display 60-point headlines screaming “Andrew used the n-word”. I read on, expecting a revelation that the word had come up during HRH’s audience with Nelson Mandela, but was bitterly disappointed.

Apparently, he merely referred to a possible pitfall as “a nigger in the woodpile”, which expression only became taboo a few years ago. I agree he should have said “a person who identifies as someone of Afro-Caribbean descent in the woodpile”, but he chose brevity over probity.

I can’t blame him, though I’m in favour of expunging every hint of the offensive term, in words like ‘niggardly’, ‘niggle’ and ‘renege’. That means we’ll have to rename Nigeria, the Niger River and my friend Nigel, but the task wouldn’t be beyond us.

Meanwhile, let’s leave the Duke of York alone. He shouldn’t have given that interview, but he acquitted himself with the courage of a Falklands hero and the honesty of George Washington.

“Britain has been infiltrated by an ugly strain of Russia phobia,” complains Evgeny Lebedev, owner of The Evening Standard, The Independent and other media interests in Britain.

Anyone else would have written not Russia phobia but Russophobia. The difference is important – the latter is an irrational fear of Russians; the former, only of Putin’s Russia and those who do her bidding.

Lebedev’s name-calling was prompted by the current scandal of rich Russians meddling in British elections, just as they’ve been proved to meddle in US ones.

He himself has suffered traumatising abuse: “Newspapers that pride themselves on tolerance… have written… that Russians like me are a ‘fifth column in modern Britain’. One obscure publication… has called me a Russian spy.” Wounding words indeed.

Now, groundless accusations of a crime, such as spying for a foreign country, strike me as libellous and defamatory. Is Lebedev going to sue? He should, for otherwise some sceptics might think the accusations aren’t as libellous as all that.

He then proceeds to unravel his own argument by uttering two seemingly innocuous phrases: “I have lived [in Britian] since I was eight years old” and “I bought The Evening Standard in 2009 and The Independent in 2010.”

Lebedev has such long residency in Britain because his father, Alexander, was a KGB spy working at the Soviet embassy under diplomatic cover. Actually, the past tense in that sentence contradicts Putin’s frank admission: “There’s no such thing as ex-KGB. This is for life.”

If Vlad is to be believed, Alexander Lebedev only ever left his KGB/FSB job supposedly. Like many other KGB officers, including Putin himself, he was infiltrated into legit life by his lifelong sponsor. Lebedev was, according to cynical Muscovites, appointed oligarch.

Following in the footsteps of Putin and his colleagues, Alexander became a billionaire overnight, ostensibly displaying a business acumen that puts to shame the likes of Bill Gates and Jim Ratcliffe, who both took years to make their fortunes.

In fact, they all – including Putin – acted as conduits for transferring KGB and Party funds, along with oil revenues, out of Russia and into the West. They are welcome to live high on the hog off the proceeds, but they only have the use of their money, not the ownership of it.

Theirs is the leasehold, with the freehold remaining in the firm grasp of the ruling KGB camarilla. Those people know that money can do so much more than buy yachts and palaces in the West.

It can also serve their nefarious ends in all sorts of other ways: by enabling them to penetrate political circles, skew Western elections, draw influential Westerners into blackmailable activities, spread Putin propaganda – and in general poison the air with the emanations of their putrid cash.

Lebedev’s “I bought…” is a barefaced lie exposed by a simple question: Where did the money come from, Evgeny? Where did a man still in his 20s and without any lucrative business experience find the funds to acquire major British media?

Oh well, he actually ‘co-owns’ the papers with his KGB father. In other words, those media outlets are in fact double-fronted. Evgeny acts as the front for Alexander; Alexander provides the same service for the KGB/FSB camarilla running Russia.

That’s why Lebedev’s indignant protests along the lines of “I have never met Vladimir Putin” are risible, if true. I don’t think Kim Philby ever met Stalin either, and I doubt Robert Maxwell ever broke bread with Andropov. Yet they both served the Soviet cause each in his own way.

The influx of filthy lucre pilfered by the ruling kleptofascist gang from the Russian people has a deeply corrupting effect on the host country. British politicians and other influential figures are being seduced and bought, wholesale or retail.

Buying legitimacy comes with a higher price tag, but no expense is spared. Thus the transparent gangster and Putin’s confidant Abramovich had to pump hundreds of millions into Chelsea FC to become accepted as a fixture of London society – until even the pliant British government caught a whiff of his malodorous wealth.

Abramovich had his visa revoked and for a while could only watch Chelsea games on television. HMG also threatened to invoke unexplained wealth orders (UWOs) to seize the assets of rich Russians suspected of having profited from the proceeds of crime.

But there’s nothing unexplained about their wealth. No one can make billions in Russia without being in cahoots with, and accountable to, the KGB camarilla. The wealth of every ‘oligarch’ is contingent on Putin’s good graces, which are in turn contingent on their toeing the line.

How they do so varies. I doubt, for example, that many of them engage in common-or-garden spying. More typically, they are agents of influence, talent spotters or simply bacilli of corruption slowly dripped into the veins of our society.

The new arrivals come bearing billions, and we welcome the loot. But, contrary to Emperor Vespasian’s adage, the Russians’ money does smell. It comes packaged with global laundering, regular assassinations and other criminal activities.

Thanks to Russian ‘oligarchs’, London has become the money laundering capital of the world, which corrupts the whole society. Filthy money sullies every hand that touches it.

Those purloined and laundered billions buy political clout, not just Belgravia mansions (the Russians purchase close to 80 per cent of London houses worth £10 million-plus). Today’s politicians lack the moral fibre to steer clear of ill-gotten loot.

This is a cross-party phenomenon. A few years ago, Osborne and Mandelson enjoyed hospitality on the yacht belonging to the mobster Deripaska (banned from entry in the US, by the way). Later, when Osborne lost his cabinet job, he had a soft landing as editor of Lebedev’s Standard.

And last year, Boris Johnson stayed with the Lebedevs at their Umbrian estate. “I am proud to be a friend of Boris Johnson,” boasts Evgeny. That’s no doubt true. But if Mr Johnson is equally proud of this association, he ought to remember what friendship with Putin and his emissaries has done to Trump’s entourage.

The Conservative Party follows its leader’s lead and avidly accepts campaign contributions from Lebedev’s friends, if not, if he’s to be believed, from Lebedev himself.

Those figuring in the unfolding scandal are Alexander Temerko, formerly of Russia’s Defence Ministry; Lyubov Chernukhina, the wife of  Russia’s former Deputy Finance Minister; financiers George Piskov, Alexander Knaster and Lev Mikheev, all with FSB connections. There are, no doubt, many others.

Those accepting their donations ought to remind themselves that the Conservative Friends of Russia (later renamed the Westminster Russia Forum) was launched by the senior diplomat Sergey Nalobin, who was subsequently expelled from Britain for espionage.

“If you don’t touch ordure, it won’t stink,” says the Russian proverb, which our politicians ought to learn in the original language (Не тронь говно, не завоняет). They should tell those Russians in no uncertain terms to stay away from British politics, ideally from Britain – and to keep their filthy money to themselves.

And Evgeny Lebedev should spare us his bogus indignation. He knows what’s what, and so do we. Well, some of us do, at any rate.

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.