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Two points, as a matter of fact.

First, all NATO countries do display criminal negligence in their defence policy, relying on the US to protect them against the Russian threat.

Why should America foot a disproportionate part of the bill? Trump’s question is legitimate, and one can only be amazed that no previous US president asked it with the same forcefulness.

Of course, Trump is being slightly disingenuous there. He knows that some of America’s defence spending is actually a payment for her playing the role of global leader. When the British Empire was cast in that role, Britannia didn’t rule the waves for free either.

Yet the T in NATO stands for Treaty, and any treaty is a contract. A contract always involves terms and conditions with which all the parties must comply for it to remain valid.

One such term is that all NATO members must spend at least two per cent of their GDP on defence. Sure enough, the US pays roughly double that. However, of the 28 other NATO members, only the UK, Greece, Estonia and Latvia meet that requirement, just.

The UK apart, but only slightly apart, the other four dutiful members hardly represent a formidable military force. But all other NATO members are in default of the contract.

Trump is demanding that they raise their expenditure to the same four per cent that the US spends. This may be fair, but it’s utterly unrealistic – that’s like demanding a million-pound ransom from a hostage who lives in a bedsit. But the stipulated two per cent is indeed a must.

However, Germany, NATO’s richest European member, spends a pathetic 1.24 per cent. Then of course she faces exorbitant bills to accommodate all those millions of Muslims who bring welcome cultural diversity to Europe.

Trump is right to point this out, as he’s also right on his second point: Germany’s dependence on Russia. I don’t know if Germany is totally controlled by Russia, as Trump claims, but she’s certainly greatly controlled.

How can it be otherwise if Germany gets 70 per cent of her gas courtesy of Gazprom (one of whose employees is Germany’s former chancellor Schroeder)? And this percentage will go up even further in two years, when the new pipeline comes on stream.

Now energy, quite apart from its immediate use, is a strategic commodity. At wartime it becomes as critical as any weapon system, even more so. If Britain had depended on Germany for much of her energy, we’d have had a swastika flag flapping over Westminster in 1940.

It’s such strategic considerations, rather than just the billions flowing into Putin’s coffers, that should concern Trump.

But then the president sees life mainly in financial terms, just as he sees foreign policy as merely a series of deals to strike. There’s nothing to be done about that; a man in his 70s isn’t going to change the philosophy of a lifetime.

“What good is NATO?” asks Trump, and this is a valid question to which there’s only one possible answer, one I offered above. NATO’s principal role is to protect the West against the Russian threat.

The West’s commitment to NATO is thus bound to hinge on how clearly and realistically it perceives the Russian threat. If they regard it as non-existent, one can’t blame European governments for their reluctance to shell out billions for protecting themselves against nothing much.

If there’s no threat, then it’s much more important for any German government to spend money on enabling Germans to retire on practically their full pay. Pensioners vote; tanks don’t.

It’s reasonably clear that Merkel doesn’t see Putin’s Russia as a threat. But does Trump?

Here we again re-enter the murky waters of Trump’s relationship with Putin. These waters may never become limpid because a US president has enough power to side-track an investigation into his affairs, even if he can’t stop it altogether.

However, it’s still possible to get to the bottom of at least some areas. One such is the profits Trump derived from Russia, and these were sufficiently large to invoke words like ‘kettle’, ‘teapot’ and ‘black’ whenever he accuses Germany of living off Russia’s gas.

Trump’s son Donald Jr., who in the run-up to the election had regularly shuttled between New York and Moscow, clarified matters a few years ago, when he happily admitted that “… Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets… We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

On record, Trump tried to negotiate huge property development deals with the Russians some 10-15 years ago, but nothing much came of it. He did get a few million for organising a beauty pageant in Moscow and building a golf course or two, but such amounts would hardly have constituted ‘a disproportionate section’, nor really ‘a lot of money pouring in’.

So where did the ‘disproportionate section’ and ‘a lot of money’ come from? From off-record deals, obviously.

One can only guess there, although some researchers, such as Yuri Feltshinsky (Litvinenko’s co-author), add a fair amount of substance to the guesses by providing much circumstantial evidence of how laundered Russian cash saved Trump from his latest bankruptcy.

Yet staying in the realm of facts, Trump is on record regularly expressing his admiration for Putin – and the president isn’t on record saying one bad thing about him.

Whether this comes from genuine admiration or something underhanded is interesting but irrelevant. Both are equally reprehensible.

It’s also a fact that the Russians pumped a lot of money and effort into trying to boost Trump’s presidential campaign.

Whether or not that had any appreciable effect is open to question, but the effort itself isn’t. And the gangsters manning the Russian government and ‘parliament’ are also on record cracking champagne and dancing in the aisles on hearing the news of Trump’s victory.

The gangsters were in for some let-down because neither they nor perhaps even Trump himself appreciated the constitutional limits on presidential power in the US. Thus Trump has been unable to repeal anti-Putin sanctions, as he promised to do during the campaign. But he did make the promise.

Dipping into even murkier waters of the What If? genre of geopolitics, we might go all the way and ask all sorts of unpleasant questions.

What if Trump indeed isn’t an entirely free agent? What if his threats to dismantle NATO have an ulterior motive? What if the deal he seeks to strike with Putin will involve dividing the world into spheres of influence, the way Hitler did with Putin’s role model Stalin?

Trump’s tête–à–tête with Putin on Monday may answer those question, or then again it may not. But don’t think for a second we have no reason to worry.

P.S. Two excellent reasons to support Trump’s visit to London: Jeremy Corbyn and Sadiq Khan. They both protest against it.

As I write this, our papers are bursting at the seams with encomia for Gareth Southgate, the England manager.

These are largely merited, although my preference would be to tone them down a bit. After all, it’s only football, not a breakthrough in the treatment of cancer.

But I generally keep such misgivings to myself, realising that no treatment of cancer would ever cause such a riot of mass hysteria. Panem et circenses, and all that.

When I say that the encomia are largely, as opposed to totally, merited, I specifically have one praise in mind, that Southgate is a refined, cultured individual.

It would be amply appropriate if qualified with “…for a footballer”. With that relativist proviso, Gareth is indeed a paragon of culture.

He sports sharp three-piece suits in fashionable colours (although, and this is unforgivable, he wears a belt rather than braces under his waistcoat), sports no visible tattoos, speaks in a comprehensible accent and manages to string words together without linking them with the f-word and its derivatives.

Actually, it’s possible for a man to be cultured and still swear a lot. I’d go so far as to say it’s a prerequisite, but here I may be influenced by the Russian quip “even though he swore a lot, he wasn’t a man of culture”.

What is absolutely impossible for a cultured man to do is commit the kind of solecisms that abound in Southgate’s speech. I do mean the kind of solecisms, not simply misusing words every now and then.

Show me a man who claims he never misuses a word and I’ll show you a self-obsessed boaster. We can all get careless and use a wrong word (mea culpa, although I can always use my accident of birth as an excuse).

But only a linguistic lout will ever misuse a word because he wants to sound ‘posh’ (using this word without at least implied quotation marks isn’t posh). This is a dead giveaway of an ignoramus with pretensions of upward cultural mobility.

Asked before the World Cup how his players would respond to racial abuse from the crowd, Southgate replied, “The idealistic response would be to walk off the pitch…”

He clearly thinks that ‘idealistic’ is the ‘posh’ version of ‘ideal’. It isn’t. The two words are cognates, but then so are ‘dish’ and ‘disk ‘or ‘shirt’ and ‘skirt’. They do mean different things though.

That wouldn’t be worth mentioning if this minor matter didn’t reflect a major sociocultural trend: compulsive, increasingly compulsory, egalitarianism. In this, language is only an indicator, but a reliable one.

When I worked in advertising, I used to take notes of my colleagues’ solecisms and malapropisms – and bear in mind we’re talking about professional communicators here.

I heard (and saw) them use ‘erstwhile’ for ‘esteemed’, ‘appraise’ for ‘apprise’, ‘risqué’ for ‘risky’, ‘simplistic’ for ‘simple’, ‘a priori’ for ‘in advance’, ‘effect’ for ‘affect’, ‘masterful’ for ‘masterly’, ‘complimentary’ for ‘complementary’, ‘eminent’ for ‘imminent’, ‘cryptic’ for ‘short’ – well, I don’t intend to burden you with my whole list.

These aren’t careless errors of cultured men. It’s linguistic and cultural louts stealing words that belong to others and then triumphantly flaunting them in front of the rightful owners.

Occasionally, pedant that I am, I’d point out that, say, ‘masterful’ isn’t the same as ‘masterly’. This invariably ran into an indignant response: “What difference does it make? Language is just a means of communication.”

Well, language is a means of communication, but it isn’t just that. I wouldn’t raise that point though, knowing I’d lose my audience – and probably my job.

Instead I’d say: “Precisely. That’s why words should be used in their real meaning, to make sure communication isn’t misleading. In this case, a presentation can be masterly and it can be masterful. I don’t know which you mean; your communication has misfired.”

This would have earned me the reputation of a stuck-up w*****, except that I slyly protected myself by being good at pool and swearing with some creative neologistic flourishes each time I missed a shot.

Because I couldn’t drink five pints of lager at lunch, that didn’t quite make me one of the lads, but at least it offered some social protection.

In the past, cultured people spoke in a cultured way and uncultured people spoke in an uncultured way. For there’s only one way to learn a language properly, whether one is born to it or not: voracious reading of good books over a lifetime.

Cultured people did that, and linguistic precision came as a bonus. Uncultured people, which is to say the majority, didn’t do that, and bad usage came as a consequence.

Lexical and grammatical properties were clearly signposted, and little trespassing ever occurred: the uncultured masses (with notable and welcome exceptions) felt no need to better themselves culturally. In fact, they looked down on toffy-nosed speakers, a sentiment that truly cultured people didn’t reciprocate.

Then, with the advent of compulsive egalitarianism, came the misapprehension that all people are created equally well-spoken and endowed by their creator, that is Darwin, with the inalienable right to mangle English as they see fit.

There are noticeable differences of course, but different no longer means better and worse. Any way of speaking is deemed to be as good as any other.

Anything people say is correct because they say it. This has become the linguistic ideology preached by even supposedly educated commentators on language (Oliver Kamm of The Times is a bright example).

Actually, this isn’t so much an ideology per se as an ideological subset, part of the systematic and deliberate  lowering of cultural standards to the lowest and commonest of denominators. This tendency is sometimes described as ‘prole drift’, though I wouldn’t dare use such an elitist and discriminatory term.

Having got this off my chest, I’m going to join 30 million other British fans in cheering Gareth’s team on in the World Cup semi-final tonight, screaming “Ingerland!!!: at an unresponsive TV screen.

Idealistically, we should win the whole f***ing thing.

P.S. At least Gareth isn’t as bad as French football commentators, who insist on using phrases like grosso modo, a priori and in extremis every two minutes. This has an opposite effect to the one desired.

The unfolding crisis in Westminster clarifies the nature of British politics.

I’ll give you a hint: it has nothing to do with any claim, slogan or, for that matter, constitution – written or otherwise.

Our monarch doesn’t rule through Parliament, nor indeed in Parliament.

Our government isn’t a democracy in the strict etymological sense of the word, nor even figuratively. It’s not the rule of the people; it’s the rule over the people.

To use Burkean terminology, our MPs are neither people’s representatives nor even their delegates.

Our government has no balance of power – this was replaced by dictatorship of the Commons a long time ago, but now it’s not even that.

The Cabinet doesn’t exercise executive power, and nor does Parliament have legislative supremacy.

The Prime Minister has little control over the Cabinet, which doesn’t matter very much because the Cabinet has little control over anything.

We aren’t ruled by the monarch, the people, Parliament, the Cabinet or the prime minister. We’re ruled by the apparat.

This word of Latin origin but Soviet usage designates a sort of faceless power behind the throne, a collective éminence grise wielding an inordinate control over affairs of the state.

In totalitarian states, the apparat performs a largely bureaucratic function, and its power derives therefrom. The big cheeses usually have neither the time nor the inclination to get into the nitty-gritty of day-to-day government. This is a function they tend to delegate to the apparat.

It’s therefore up to the apparatchiks either to release the devil that’s in the detail or keep him bottled in there. They can surreptitiously undermine any diktat or else make it appear as a flash of genius.

That’s how Stalin gained power in the Soviet Union – unlike Lenin and Trotsky, he didn’t mind getting his hands dirty with bureaucratic drudgery. When Lenin appointed Stalin Secretary General of the Party in 1922, the job was seen as just that, secretarial. Stalin referred to himself with sly self-deprecation as secretarishka (little secretary).

However, the little secretary soon became the big boss. Acting behind the loudmouths’ backs, he built his own apparat brick by brick. And in that edifice there was no room for any of the thundering revolutionaries.

The apparat proved too strong for them, and 30 years later it proved too strong for Stalin as well.

In October, 1952, he was demoted from Secretary General to just one of the Secretaries. Even though he retained much of his power, a fair chunk of it was now in the hands of the apparat. Four months later Stalin died under suspicious circumstances.

In Britain the role of the apparat was traditionally played by the Civil Service, which used to be considered the best in the world. I don’t know if it still is, though I doubt that on general principle. But it’s definitely not the apparat any longer.

That is, some of its members do belong to the apparat, as do some MPs, some cabinet members, some journalists, some businessmen, some all sorts of people. The current apparat is a hodgepodge of different professions, different influences, different groups.

Just as any other apparat, it exerts its power behind the scenes, but that doesn’t make its power any less real. The apparat is invisible but, just as Kepler deduced the existence of some planets from the deflection in the orbits of others, its presence is indisputable.

It’s not a conspiracy in any usual sense of the word. There are no dark smoky cellars with evil men hunched over the floor plan of the Houses of Parliament.

The apparat doesn’t want to blow up Westminster. It only strives to undermine the constitutional principles on which it rests, and it’s getting away with that because those principles are largely forgotten and even more largely ignored.

Yet it’s not just Westminster that lives or dies by the constitution. It’s Britain herself, for politics largely (though far from exclusively) defines Britishness, which, unlike Englishness, is itself a political construct.

Take away the British constitution, and Britain will no longer be Britain. Politics to us is what wine and cheese are to the French.

France has had 17 different constitutions during the period that Britain has had only one – yet France has remained France, kept together by wine, cheese, language and culture in general.

However, Britain won’t survive the collapse of her ancient constitution because she has no wine and cheese to fall back on – and no language, as anyone who has ever heard young people speak these days will confirm.

Margaret Thatcher came out of the apparat, but she tried to turn against it. She didn’t realise that the apparat had become too strong to take on. So it proved. The apparat got rid of her and dragged Britain into the EU.

The reasons for that constitutional treason were both physical and metaphysical. Physically, the politicians within the apparat realised that the EU offered them life after death. After being ousted from Parliament in London, they could still have lucrative political careers in Brussels or Strasbourg, giving them a lifelong membership in the apparat.

But there were also deeper reasons. The apparat lives a life of its own, and it’s supranational by nature. An apparatchik from England has more in common with an apparatchik from Finland than he does with any Englishman who doesn’t belong to the apparat.

Since the apparat doesn’t owe its life to Britain, it owes her no allegiance. It’s parthenogenic; the ovum from which it was born hadn’t been fertilised by any national input.

What happened on 23 June, 2016, was a popular revolt against the apparat. The apparat had permitted it to happen because it had grown so arrogant that a defeat in the referendum seemed inconceivable.

Similar revolts, in various forms, are happening all over the Western world, with their apparats fighting a rearguard action, usually victorious for the time being. The apparat always comes back with reinforcements, and that’s what’s happening in Britain now.

Do you think for a second that those Tory Remainers, led with singular ineptitude by Mrs May, are trying to defeat the referendum they lost because they don’t realise they’re destroying the country? Don’t they know that they’re practically unrolling a red carpet for the Trotskyist evil to settle with catastrophic consequences at 10 Downing Street?

Of course they do. But they don’t care because their loyalty is pledged not to the party, nor, God forbid, to the country, but to the apparat. They aren’t only supranational but also suprapartisan. They don’t care if the Tory Party or even Britain herself dies – as long as the apparat lives.

If we still ran our politics constitutionally, the government would have abided by the solid vote in the referendum regardless of how some members of the government had felt about it.

The people voted to be rid not only of the EU but, even though many of them didn’t realise it, of the apparat as well. The only decent course of action for a truly constitutional government would have been to leave the EU within a couple of weeks of the referendum, and without paying any exit fees.

Whatever negotiations were necessary could have proceeded from that starting point. Some economic sacrifices might or might not have followed but, even if they had, they wouldn’t have been as severe as those made by the British during Germany’s previous attempt to unite Europe.

The British government felt then that no sacrifice was too great to preserve the nation’s sovereignty and therefore her soul. The British government today is British in name only.

The apparat rules and it’s proving invincible, its muscle gradually built by the steroids of surreptitious power. Prime Minister Corbyn, anyone?

There’s something eerie about a physician committing a crime. Compassion and empathy are doctors’ job requirements after all.

A mechanic or an architect may have those qualities, either out of religious conviction or simply because he’s a nice person. But if he’s neither a believer nor particularly nice, no one is going to say he isn’t fit for the job.

It’s different for doctors. When a medic lacks compassion and empathy, and especially if his callousness leads him to a life of crime, somehow he’s more culpable than a mechanic or an architect would be under the circumstances. We expect higher moral standards from a man who took the Hippocratic oath.

That’s why David Mackereth, a top NHS doctor with 26 years’ experience, should count himself lucky. He committed a heinous crime and merely got sacked.

This testifies to the generous tolerance of modernity. At another time or in another place, the same transgression would send him down for a long stretch. Or, if the death penalty were still on the books, he’d get the chop.

By now you must be anxious to know what kind of crime put an end to such an illustrious career. I won’t keep you in suspense any longer, but do make sure you’re sitting down.

Dr Mackereth believes that – wait a moment, let me get hold of myself – one’s sex isn’t a matter of choice. How about that, have you ever heard anything so outrageous?

Not only that, but he insists on putting this belief, reactionary to the point of being fascist, into practice. Dr Mackereth denies his patients the right to sex self-identification. He obtusely refers to a person born with the XY chromosomes as a man and to one bearing XX chromosomes as a woman.

And he mangles the English language, its present version at any rate, by describing a man as a he and a woman as a she. Is it any wonder that the NHS  described him as ‘unfit to work’. Unfit to live, more like it.

Rather than accepting his punishment with meek submission, Dr Mackereth dared to defend himself, invoking his Christian faith.

“I’m not attacking the transgender movement,” he said, “but I am defending my right to freedom of speech, and freedom of belief.

“I don’t think I should be compelled to use a specific pronoun. I’m not setting out to upset anyone. But if upsetting someone can lead to doctors being sacked then, as a society, we have to examine where we are going.”

How can an educated man get things so wrong? We have ample freedom of belief, with the little proviso that, if your belief happens to be Christian, you keep it to yourself and certainly don’t act on it – especially within the sanctuary of the NHS.

And we have more than enough freedom of speech – but not of any old speech. A Muslim may refuse to shake hands with a female client (a case from my own experience) or insist that all pork products be removed from a school canteen. How much more freedom do you need?

Do you also want a Christian to quote Genesis 5: 2 (“Male and female created he them…”) with impunity? Be reasonable now. This would be not freedom but anarchy, repudiating the authority of modernity altogether. That simply won’t do, will it now?

It won’t. That’s why Dr Mackereth was found to be in violation of modernity’s real Bible, the 2010 Equality Act. Off with his head.

Actually, if I were him, I wouldn’t have mentioned Christianity under the circumstances. After all, every master of rhetoric, from Socrates on, has taught that an argument should be couched in terms one’s audience can understand.

These days any overt reference to Christianity renders the audience not just uncomprehending but hostile. Thus insisting on the truth of one’s beliefs because the Bible says so is an admirable moral stand, but a guaranteed loser in a debate (or a sacking offence, as Dr Mackereth found out).

Mercifully, there’s seldom any need, especially when arguing about tangentially medical matters, such as transsexuality, abortion and euthanasia. Christianity has informed our civilisation on such matters, and its precepts held sway for so many centuries that they’re firmly implanted in Western thought – regardless of how egregiously modernity perverts and abuses it.

The sanctity of human life, for example, is originally a religious concept, but every secular legal or moral code has incorporated it as well. That’s why it’s possible to build an irrefutable intellectual argument against abortion and euthanasia without venturing outside common sense and sequential logic.

Because Christianity is true, it’s supported by a corpus of medical, scientific and legal knowledge to such an extent that it’s no longer necessary to refer to scripture. Purely, or rather seemingly, secular arguments can do the job for themselves.

In this case, Dr Mackereth could merely have cited reams of medical research proving beyond any doubt whatsoever that it’s impossible for a man to become a woman and vice versa. Cutting bits off or sewing them on isn’t going to do the job. Physiology and biology won’t be denied.

Real sexual amorphism does exist, but it affects such a small number of people that it shouldn’t merit public discussion, never mind legislation. The overwhelming majority of today’s transsexuals are disturbed individuals who should be either told to go home and forget that nonsense or, in extreme cases, offered psychiatric help.

Had he taken that line of defence, Dr Mackereth would still have been sacked. Like any other state behemoth, the NHS isn’t about intellectual rigour. It’s about bending people to state control.

But he could have taken it to court and taken his chances. His defence counsel could certainly have brought more tomes of scientific evidence into the courtroom than any other defence could ever boast.

Or perhaps he’d lose the case anyway. A tyrant can forgive any crime, except one against tyranny. And all modern states, regardless of what they call themselves, are tyrannical to an extent unthinkable at any time before Jesus Christ became a superstar.

That’s why Dr Mackereth should count himself lucky. He committed a crime against the modern despotic ethos, yet he’s still at large. Long live liberalism.

A film script has just crossed my desk, and I do think it has great potential. The financing may be hard to get, and critical support is far from assured, but that’s not taking anything away from the sparkling exuberance of the script as such. But judge for yourself.

OPEN ON ROOM SOMEWHERE IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE. RENT GIRLS AND BOYS ARE SITTING AROUND OVAL TABLE DISCUSSING THEIR STOCK-IN-TRADE. THROUGHOUT SUBSEQUENT EXCHANGES CAMERA PANS ROOM, CUTTING ON CLOSE-UP OF SPEAKER, THEN REVERSING TO TESSA FOR REACTION SHOTS

TESSA: In an ideal world, I’d like a hard one. But I’ll take a soft one if I have to. Better than none.

BORIS: A soft one is like polishing a turd…

TESSA (DISMISSIVELY): Oh shut up, Boris. You’re the only one here who goes in for coprophilia.

MICHAEL: I don’t know how to take this…

TESSA: The way you always do, Michael. Bend over and take it like a man.

PENNY (WAKING UP): I’ll take a hard one any day. A soft one is useless, worse than none.

TESSA (SARCASTICALLY): Oh good morning, Penny. Glad you could join us. We’re talking about leaving the Brussels home and starting our own. You know, the Common European Home, COM for short? What did you think we were talking about?

PENNY (DISAPPOINTED): Oh that. And I thought…

ANDREA: No one here gives a turd what you thought, Penny. Anyway, all you ever think about is flashing your thunder thighs.

BORIS: And speaking of turds…

TESSA: Oh shut up, Boris. No one here is speaking of turds. We’re talking about keeping our johns well happy after we go freelance. Without getting the Brussels cougar daddy really livid.

ANDREA: I’m with you, Tessa. The soft one will do me. And if you wanted a hard one, that would do me too. COM to think of it, the hard one would do me even better. (GUFFAWS)

MICHAEL: I think I’m speaking for all the rent boys and girls here when I say that we’re all unreservedly, unequivocally and uncompromisingly committed to the hard one. But we are all –  just as unreservedly, unequivocally and uncompromisingly – committed to Tessa, who prefers the soft one. Sorted.

PENNY: The hard one worked for me, last time I did my TA training…

DAVID: What’s that, TA, Penny? Tits and…

PENNY: Not funny, Dave. That’s Territorial Army, I’ll have you know. I’m an officer there…

BORIS: When it comes to TA, you’re a bloody general, Penny.

TESSA: Penny, either listen or go parade your TA somewhere else.

PENNY (IRONICALLY): Yessir!

TESSA: Anyway, I did Brussels the other day and I know how we can keep them sweet.

DAVID (SCOWLING): I get it. By poaching their johns.

BORIS: And by polishing a turd.

TESSA (IRATE): Oh, shut your gobs, lads, for crying out loud. They won’t mind it all that much if we poach some of their johns, long as they get their cut. You do us right, we’ll do you right, they told me at the home.

LIAM: Why do we need to leave the home then? If we still kick our hard-earned back their way?

TESSA: So they don’t send the boys in. Get it? Or shall I draw you a picture?

DAVID: I don’t get this. Are we leaving COM or what? I thought we were starting our own home, smaller and leaner.

TESSA: You thought right, Dave. A new home run by the old home’s rules. What’s there not to like?

BORIS:  With you as the bloody madam, no doubt. (STABS FINGER INTO MICHAEL’S CHEST) You said I’d get the madam’s job, you turd.

MICHAEL: I did, unreservedly, unequivocally and uncompromisingly. But seeing that Tessa here is doing such a sterling job…

LIAM: Not a euro one?

BORIS: No one’s laughing, Liam, you turd.

TESSA: Boris, one more ‘turd’ from you, and you’re back to walking Fleet Street. You follow?

BORIS: Yes, madam.

TESSA: So we’re all in agreement then? We’ll hold on to the soft one and wave it at COM? See if they swallow it?

ANDREA: Oh they will. Especially if they can get freebies at our new small home. And come and go as they like.

BORIS (WITH RESIGNATION, OR RATHER WITHOUT IT): Fine, have your soft one, you bloody turd polishers.

DISSOLVE TO OVAL OFFICE AT WHITE HOUSE.

TRUMP: So I hear the Limeys beat off Switzerland.

PENCE: It’s ‘beat’, sir, not ‘beat off’. And it’s Sweden, not Switzerland.

TRUMP:  Sweden, Switzerland, ain’t no goddam difference. Don’t be like Tessa, Mike, always correcting my English.

PENCE: I think she’s going soft on you, sir.

TRUMP: Not me, you asshole. She’s goin’ soft on COM.

(FADE TO DARK SCREEN WITH CREDITS CRAWL COMING ON)

That question was hilariously asked in the Monty Python film The Life of Brian. It was hilarious because it was so incongruous.

Everybody knows we got – inter alia, oodles of alia – our plumbing, roads, aqueducts, public lavatories, alphabet and much of our thought and legality from the Romans. Even the notion that a meal should have three courses came from them.

However, as any wizened old cynic will tell you, every silver lining has a cloud.

In this case, recent research shows that the Romans are directly responsible for almost two million people dying of tuberculosis every year – not to mention all those millions who have died over the centuries from the time soldiers wore shiny breastplates to the time they started sporting Kevlar vests.

TB first appeared in Africa some 5,000 years ago and there it stayed until the Romans got going in earnest. When the Roman republic became the Roman Empire, TB began to spread like bad taste.

This ought to have given mankind a pause, best used to ponder the downside of globalism and free movement of people.

The upside, otherwise known as the silver lining, is obvious enough and it’s primarily economic. Some will insist it’s cultural as well and England, say, can benefit no end from the resuscitating cultural input of the 100,000 Somalis now resident here.

Without sounding too reactionary for words, let’s just say that the cultural benefits of global human circulation are open to debate. What’s indisputable is that people from exotic countries bring not only couscous and curry, but also viruses and bacteria.

If you look at two other deadly blights that have afflicted Europe, syphilis and Aids, both were spread due to the Europeans’ unquenchable thirst for expansion.

Syphilis, which reduced the number of Schubert lieder and Baudelaire poems (and, on the plus side, shortened Lenin’s life), was by all accounts brought to Europe by a triumphant Columbus expedition.

So it wasn’t just potatoes, chaps: old Christopher’s ships were also laden with some 30 exotic infections, including smallpox, measles, influenza – and of course syphilis.

I’m not suggesting considerations of hygiene should have put a stop to exploration. And, the day after the great US holiday, I won’t dare insinuate that we should have left America undiscovered and let native Americans (previously known as Red Indians) get on with it.

However… well, I won’t develop this qualifier to its logical conclusion. Suffice it to say that, had those 30 diseases stayed where they came from, Europe might have been spared hundreds of millions of deaths.

A curmudgeon like me may be a bit harsh on the Third World, but then so are the statistics. In 2016, the latest year for which such data are available, 10.4 million people contracted TB, and 1.7 million of them died.

More than 95 per cent of all cases occurred in what used to be called underdeveloped countries. (Are they now called ‘differently’ or ‘alternatively’ developed? Hard to keep up with all the progress.)

And Google helpfully informs me that “Sub-Saharan Africa alone accounted for an estimated 69 per cent of all people living with HIV and 70 per cent of all Aids deaths in 2011.”

Such petty concerns shouldn’t be allowed to stop, nor indeed slow down, the march of diversity. But it wouldn’t hurt raising them from time to time, for not raising them may hurt very badly indeed.

Now what was that about ‘the Aids of March’?

Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Permanent Secretary of the French Academy and a historian of Russia by trade, has written an article in Le Figaro, lamenting that Russia now sees herself as mainly an Asian power.

Her take on history is that Russia has always been like a pendulum swinging between Europe and Asia, and only the West’s bloody-mindedness has kept her from settling at the European end where she belongs.

To drag Russia back into the European fold, Mme Carrère d’Encausse calls for “searching for paths towards real dialogue”, meaning lifting all sanctions against Russia.

The article is so inane and so ignorant on so many levels that it’s tedious trying to comment on them all. Yet the columnist Igor Yakovenko undertakes just that task in one of those on-line journals that are blocked inside Russia because the great leader doesn’t like them.

Writing with his characteristic brilliance and, alas, equally characteristic shallowness (especially when venturing outside Russia), Mr Yakovenko points out that no such thing as a homogeneous Asia exists, although he believes, incorrectly, that a homogeneous Europe does.

“The civilisational barrier between India and China,” he writes, “is no smaller than that between either country and any country in Europe.

“There are different Asias. Towards which does the Figaro writer think Russia gravitates?

“Europe does exist as a whole. In spite of all the differences among European countries, they all rest on the same foundations of values and culture: Christianity, Greco-Roman heritage and the Latin alphabet. Yet no Asia as a whole exists: different religions, cultures and alphabets.”

It pains me to say this about a writer I hold in high regard, but Mr Yakovenko here displays a characteristic Russian reluctance to hold what he writes to rigorous tests of fact and logic.

(Such intellectual standards were firmly established by the most influential Russian thinker ever, Leo Tolstoy. In addition to novels of unmatched genius, he produced 25 volumes of unmitigated rubbish on every conceivable subject: religion, philosophy, morality, politics, agriculture, education, economics, art. I’d refer you to my book on the subject, God and Man According to Tolstoy, but MacMillan published it as an academic volume and charges astronomical amounts for it.)

The unqualified point about the common European alphabet is bizarre, and Mr Yakovenko wouldn’t have made it had he given it a moment’s thought. For many European countries eschew the Latin script either partially (Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia use both Latin and Cyrillic) or wholly (Bulgaria uses Cyrillic; Greece and Cyprus, Greek).

It’s reasonably clear that to Mr Yakovenko the Europe to which Russia belongs is Western Europe, not Bulgaria and Cyprus. Russia to him, and to most of the Russian intelligentsia, is unquestionably Western European culturally, which means unquestionably European tout court. I wish it were as simple as that.

Actually, the question in the title above has been asked for the better part of four centuries, and most persistently since the reign of Peter I (1682-1725). Every theoretically possible answer has been flogged to death: a) Europe, b) Asia, c) both, d) neither.

Yet even most Russians, and Westerners this side of L’Académie française, still struggle with the answer. So perhaps history should offer a clue.

The accounts of Elizabethan travellers to Russia, such as Giles Fletcher, show they didn’t for a second see the Russians as fellow Europeans. In fact, the territory that’s now Russia was identified on the contemporaneous maps as either Muscovy or, more usually, Tartary.

Peter I set out to change that situation in one fell swoop by, as he put it, “chopping a window into Europe”. Chopping is a rapid, violent action, and that’s how it turned out. For example, at least 300,000 died building Peter’s European capital on a Finnish swamp – his window was chopped through human flesh.

Peter’s turn of phrase was unfortunate in other respects as well. For windows are only used by burglars or Peeping Toms. The phrase “opening a door to Europe” would have been nicer, if probably less accurate.

Peter’s idea was that Russia should learn from Europe the better to dominate it – the way he himself had learned from the Swedish generals he later routed at Poltava.

Yet, like most tyrants, he was a man in a hurry. What had taken Europe millennia to accomplish he wanted to compress into his own lifetime.

Hence saplings of the West were imported wholesale and planted in a Russian soil all too ready to reject them. However, in the arts if not much else, the saplings did grow into luxuriant trees. A century after Peter’s death, Russia took her place side by side with other great European cultures, especially literatures.

Yet there’s more to culture, and infinitely more to civilisation, than just the arts. In fact, I’d say that artistic pursuits are perhaps the least important, if most enjoyable. Sweden, for example, is undeniably a European country even though she has made a rather understated contribution to European arts.

Civilisations differ from one another mainly in the way they see God, man and the world the former created and the latter inhabits. This underlying vision, typically based on the founding religion, determines everything else – and certainly the relationship between the state and the people.

Russia got her Christianity not from the West but from Byzantium, and she got it later than Western European countries did. Now the differences between Western and Eastern confessions may seem trivial to a modern observer, but the doctrinal disagreements begat two civilisations going their divergent ways.

One key disagreement, over filioque, seems to be recondite and trivial. In 1054 the West, as represented by Rome, had declared that the Holy Spirit proceeds equally from the Father and the Son. In turn the East, as represented by Constantinople, insisted that the procession was not double but single, from the Father through the Son.

Yet it’s largely (though far from solely) this seemingly inconsequential difference that explains why political liberty found its natural home in the west, and tyranny in the east.

After all, expressed geometrically, double procession would look like an equilateral triangle. The Father and the Son have true equality underpinned by the Holy Spirit. The three hypostases thus possess what today we call equal rights. Translated to a civilisation based on this concept, the triangular Trinity is likely to be reflected in pluralism.

Conversely, single procession from the Father through the Son implies a straight line, an immutable vertical hierarchy, with the Father sitting at the top. The implications of this went beyond theology.

What was at stake was the kind of kingdom Christians wished to build in this world. Hence the schism of 1054 directly led to the violence of 1204.

That clash between Western and Eastern Christians was linked to the disagreement over filioque, although not just to the face value of the matter. The issue of filioque highlighted the growing chasm between the West and the East, even though the two ostensibly shared the same religion.

In any case, Eastern Christianity had always been under a great influence of other Eastern religions, and consequently of the way of life that sprang from Eastern religiosity. For example it was largely for this reason that Eastern Christianity tended to gravitate towards mysticism, a direct sensory link with God that more or less excluded reason.

It’s also largely because of Eastern influences that various deadly heresies were much more prevalent in the East than in the West. Many of those sprang from the Manichean tendency to regard the physical world as evil.

While a Christian has at his fingertips an immediate link between the absolute grandeur of God and the relativity of earthly life, an exponent of an Eastern religion hasn’t. If for a Christian the absolute is unknowable completely, for, say, a Buddhist the absolute is completely unknowable.

Inextricably linked to the Eastern view of the physical world was relative indifference to tyranny – after all, hard as people tried, there was no getting away from evil on earth anyway. Introspection offered the only escape route, and that road could be taken in any social and political environment.

On the other hand, the West, while obviously accepting that Christ’s kingdom was not of this world, still couldn’t be contemptuous about this world. Christianity sought salvation of the world, not from the world.

The notion of a sovereign individual, intrinsically valuable because of his humanity rather than any particular achievement, is uniquely Western, which is to say European. While compromised in Eastern Christianity by both outside influences and Byzantine Caesarism, this notion is alien to all civilisations that actually are Eastern .

In this, regardless of the many significant differences astutely observed by Mr Yakovenko, they are similar, not to say identical.

Eastern mystical, introspective agnosticism, not to mention straightforward Confucian materialism, are as different from Western individualism as the Buddhist transmutation of souls is different from Christian resurrection.

All this determined the core differences in the relationship between man and state. In the West, with minor glitches here and there, that relationship has always been based on inchoate liberties and at least some pluralism.

In the East, tyranny is the congenitally natural form of government. Hence it’s rather facile to cite, as Mr Yakovenko does elsewhere, the example of Japan and the Asian Tigers as paragons of former Eastern tyrannies that saw the light of Western democracy.

Those countries might have borrowed some Western models for purely economic reasons (or else have been forced to do so by a victorious America), but underneath it all their national character survives very nicely. An essential part of it is subjugating the individual to the collective, and the collective to the leader.

Now, just as Russia got her religion from Byzantium, she got her statehood from the Mongols led at the time by Genghis Khan’s grandson. The rule of the Golden Horde continued for centuries, and even Ivan III (d. 1505), nicknamed ‘the gatherer of the Russian lands’ for his attempts to bring all  principalities together under Moscow, continued to pay tributes to the Mongol khan.

If the ideal (alas, no longer the practice) of Western politics is subsidiarity, the devolution of power to the lowest sensible level, Eastern – and therefore Russian – politics is vectored in the opposite direction. Because this is coded into the country’s DNA, Western-style democracy can never succeed there, nor has ever succeeded.

This isn’t to say that Russia can never acquire a veneer of pluralism – Mr Yakovenko is right in saying “If Taiwan and Singapore can do it, why can’t we?” No reason at all, though I for one would be pleasantly surprised if Russia progressed that far.

But veneer is all that could possibly be on offer. Russia can no more adopt the essence of the West (especially at a time when the West itself is destroying it) than a man can change the colour of his eyes.

So, to answer the question in the title above, Russia is Asian in every sense that should count to Mme Carrère d’Encausse – in ways the country interacts with Europe. Russia’s politics, legality, philosophy, view of life, existential instincts, relationship between the state and the people are all, mutatis mutandis, Asian.

But yes, Mr Yakovenko – Pushkin, Tchaikovsky and Repin are definitely part of European culture. No one can deny that.

When I said the other day that my pieces would be coming thick and fast, I was foolishly overconfident.

It turns out that, contrary to my misconception, regular writing requires a lot of energy, certainly more than I possess at the moment. So I have to take it easy.

Hence my pieces will be coming in a trickle, rather than a steady stream. But one such trickle will appear tomorrow.

Back in 1990 Norman Tebbit, arguably the best modern PM Britain has never had, came up with a useful test to determine the extent to which immigrants are integrated.

Which team do they support when England plays the one from their native land?

Tebbit had specifically cricket fans from the Subcontinent in mind, but the test works just as well with any other sport and any other group.

But immigrants, Lord Tebbit? How very 1990s. What about second-generation natives? Where do their allegiances lie?

Two German football players, Özil and Gündogan, had answered the question exhaustively before the World Cup started. And then Germany crashed out at the first stage of the competition. One detects a causal relationship there.

Both players are second-generation Germans of Turkish descent. In the run-up to the World Cup both posed with Erdogan and gave him a Germany jersey inscribed with ‘to our president’.

Any football federation with any backbone at all would have responded in an unequivocal fashion. If Erdogan is your president, then Germany isn’t your team.

But football these days imitates life (and exceedingly vice versa). Reacting that way would be deemed decidedly anti-multi-culti. Who says new arrivals or even people born in Germany have to integrate in German society? Anyone who says so must be in favour of genocide.

To be fair, there was some brouhaha in the wake. After all, Frau Merkel is teetering on the edge of political extinction, mainly because of her open-door policy that supplemented the three-odd million ethnic Turks resident in the country with over a million other Muslims.

But the noise died down quickly, outshouted by the demiurge of political correctness. That Germany’s team was rent asunder as a result goes without question. But was Germany herself? No more than she already is.

Anyone who, like me, has experienced schadenfreude (an appropriate word or what?) at the sight of Germany exiting the World Cup at group stage ought to ponder the wider implications. And they are indeed wide.

When millions of citizens feel loyalty to a country other than the one that is, or is soon to be, their home, the home is no longer a home.

It’s merely a house, or rather a hotel inhabited by unconnected people from all over the world. And few people treat hotel rooms with the same loving care as they treat their homes.

Nationhood is a relatively new concept in European history. Throughout the Middle Ages, Europe was united for real, not in the ersatz (another appropriate word?) way peddled by the EU. What united it for real was Christianity and the culture it was creating.

For example, what was Thomas Aquinas’s nationality? German, because that’s what he mostly was ethnically? Italian, because he grew up in Aquino? French, because he spent most of his life in Paris and is buried in Toulouse?

Any or all of the above, from the modern standpoint. From the contemporaneous standpoint, it didn’t matter one iota.

And even in the seventeenth century Europe was still held together by dynastic more than national ties. The Great Condé, for example, twice led Spanish troops against his own country, ruled by his cousin Louis XIV.

Now imagine for the sake of argument Montgomery or Patton leading Nazi troops against the Allies – and losing. What would happen to them? The mode of execution is the only thing open to debate.

Yet Condé got away with a mild slap on the wrist. He was guilty only of squabbling with his cousin, not of treason – as we understand the word.

However, Europe is no longer held together by either religious or dynastic ties: modernity is innately divisive. Yet no other basis for unity exists, nor can exist. As the EU is finding out, a desire for six-week holidays and 30-hour work weeks doesn’t quite work as the adhesive.

Hence a strong sense of national identity within separate but friendly countries is the only realistic obstacle in the way of anarchy. I for one regret that this is the case. But it is the case.

The suicidal drive towards multi-culti diversity is a bomb under the foundations of what’s left of our civilisation. And the bomb’s action isn’t even particularly delayed.

What happened to Germany’s football team can be seen as a microcosm of a much larger catastrophe looming over Europe’s mountains and plains. In that, other than just purely geographic, sense Britain is a fully paid-up part of Europe for she is susceptible to all the same trends.

I can see that by the example of England’s Russian community, and I don’t mean the recent immigrants with their yachts, football clubs and the urge to ‘whack’ one another. I’m talking about the English equivalents of Özil and Gündogan, native-born Britons of Russian descent.

In the early 90s I encountered many of them at the 1812 Ball, one of the premier events in the London social calendar. Normally I detest such festivities, but that time curiosity got the better of me: all those Golitsyns, Obelenskys and Tolstoys were walking, talking Russian history.

In addition, I admired, and still do, the book Victims of Yalta by Nikolai Tolstoy, who was the MC of the ball. Either he or his co-MC, can’t remember which, opened the proceedings by announcing that the gathering was honoured by the presence of the Russian ambassador. “Our ambassador, ladies and gentlemen!”

Now Count Tolstoy (in the absence of primogeniture, everyone even remotely related to a count has the same title) is about as English as Lord Tebbit, and his accent even more so. He was born in England and educated at some of the best schools. His Russian, on the other hand, is uncertain, not to say practically non-existent.

How was that career KGB ‘diplomat’ Tolstoy’s and his friends’ ambassador? I couldn’t answer that question, so, when the ambassador rose to speak, I demonstratively walked out across the polished floor. He wasn’t my ambassador – even though I lived the first 25 years of my life in Moscow.

I cite this example simply because it’s something I witnessed myself. The Russian community is still small and rather insignificant in Britain. But it’s indicative of the general trend towards particularism and away from national unity.

This is an explosion waiting to happen, and the fallout will be considerably less enjoyable than Germany’s defeat at the World Cup.

First, I’m deeply moved by all the good wishes I’ve received from you. I thank you all collectively, albeit belatedly: the French hospital where I got some on-the-job training in pulmonary embolism had no Internet access.

I’m lucky to be alive, for the time being, said the doctor, to which I replied that some of my readers may not share that assessment. That wasn’t just a weak attempt at a bon mot, but a reflection on experience.

Some seven years ago I wrote something in The Mail that displeased Peter Tatchel, that great champion of homosexuality. He immediately ran my photo, captioned with all the relevant contact details, in his paper PinkNews.

That produced hundreds of abusive e-mails, most describing me metonymically as female genitalia, and some expressing a heartfelt wish that I croak soon, preferably as a result of ingesting faeces (their language was more colloquial). One irate reader, doubtless a diagnostician of no mean attainment, wrote that he’d gladly kill me, but thankfully there was no need. Judging by my photograph, I was going to peg it soon anyway.

He almost got his wish, if seven years too late. I ended up on a different floor in the same hospital I had graced with my presence just a few days earlier.

For once I found myself the youngest member of a group: every other patient there topped me by at least 10 years. Most of them were demented and, with a few exceptions, bed-ridden.

The few exceptions floated around, making tiny steps like Japanese geishas, but not resembling those ladies in any other way. They looked more like characters from a late Fellini film with casting by Goya during his Black period.

Much to my wife’s amazement, one chap mistook her for a nurse and asked for a yoghurt. “You’re lucky he didn’t ask for an enema,” I told her. The same patient, his eyes popping out of their orbits, would occasionally wander into my room and say ‘Bonjour’ in a way that made me fear he’d then introduce himself as ‘the Auxerre slasher’.

Not the best 10 days in my life, all in all. But hey, at least I wasn’t in an NHS hospital with a syringe driver pumping diamorphine (purified heroin) into my vein.

Actually, my vast medical experience (on the receiving end) includes a month spent on just such a driver. But that was at a private hospital, where the medical staff had no murderous designs on my person.

That apparently wasn’t the case at Gosport Hospital, Hampshire, where close to 650 patients were killed by diamorphine overdose during the 90s.

Now, any druggie will tell you that heroin is a dangerous drug. As Dr Shipman could have testified, it kills if administered in overdose. That’s why it’s banned in many countries, such as Australia and New Zealand, and it’s only ever used in Britain as part of palliative care, when the patient is in agonising pain.

Even then care must be exercised not to OD the recipient accidentally, due to a faulty driver, for example, or a wrongly calculated dose. No such care was taken at Gosport.

Moreover, only about 45 per cent of the victims were in any pain at all. Apparently, in many cases the doctors prescribed, and the nursing staff administered, diamorphine to some patients not because they needed it, but because they were ‘difficult’.

The patients got the message: many tried not to make excessive demands for fear that the medics would kill them. They were old people, like those I met at Auxerre, but many of them were lucid and perfectly able to enjoy what was left of their lives.

They certainly hadn’t consented to euthanasia, which in common parlance means killing and, when done the Gosport way, murder. (Actually, I see no valid moral difference between any type of euthanasia and murder, but my state of health is making me more mellow.)

The report on the final solution practised at Gosport didn’t mention any other NHS hospitals, but the residual cynic in me refuses to believe it’s an isolated case – while the realist is certain it isn’t.

Why would it be? State-run Leviathans like the NHS are congenitally incapable of realising that every human life, no matter how miserable and predictably short, has an intrinsic value.

The big, omnipotent state is self-serving and self-perpetuating. Individuals are seen in that light, and they become expendable should they interfere with the innate imperative of the big state.

Such is the underlying impetus, and obviously it’s manifested to various degrees in different types of state. But manifested it invariably is, and the NHS is a prime example.

Any state tries to brainwash its subjects in the noble motives animating its actions. But frankly, this side of the USSR, I’ve never seen this effort succeed as spectacularly as with the NHS.

The British believe in overwhelming numbers that it’s the NHS that puts the Great into Britain. They also believe that other countries are turning green with envy watching the NHS in action.

If so, they manage to contain the urge to follow suit admirably: Britain is the only European country with fully nationalised medical care. All others use some combination of public and private financing, and the results – certainly in France – are much better.

For that’s what the NHS is: a method of financing medical care. That’s all. It doesn’t occupy a high moral plateau, which socialism never does. It’s not a surrogate deity to be worshiped instead of God. And it’s emphatically not free, which is a common misconception.

‘Free’ means something one doesn’t have to pay for. Yet somebody has to pay for all those MRI scans and mastectomies. Such things are expensive; and the more inefficiently provided, the dearer they get.

If patients don’t pay for them directly, the payment comes from the government, which makes most of its money from taxes. ‘Free’ thus means that the transfer of money from patient to hospital is mediated by the state acting as a general contractor with megalomania.

But governments are less efficient than private enterprise. Thus we must assume that, say, mastectomies are more expensive when one pays for them through the government, whether one needs them or not, than they would be if one paid for them direct, and only when one needed them.

(In this regard, I wish Europeans spared me their tales about poor Americans dying in the streets because they can’t afford hospitals. If that were the case, life expectancy in the US would be much lower than in Europe – but it isn’t.

I visited enough friends in American municipal hospitals, where poor people are treated, to know that they are infinitely superior to the NHS. The US system isn’t perfect; no human institution is. And it’s being made more and more imperfect by the litigiousness endemic in America. But people don’t die by the roadside because their bank balance is too low.)

Yet when we pay for state medicine we don’t just pay for mastectomies and scans. An ever-growing proportion of our money pays for the ever-growing state bureaucracy required to administer ‘free’ medical care, something for which they would pay less if medical care were not ‘free’.

Moreover, since steady growth of nationalised medicine is tantamount to the state extorting increasingly larger sums from the people, ‘free’ medical care places an ever-growing proportion of the nation’s finances and labour force under state control, thus increasing the power of the state over the individual.

The NHS is already the biggest employer in the world, and its fans seem to hope it’ll eventually become the only one in Britain. They’re prepared to throw more billions down that bottomless pit even if it means neglecting defence of the realm.

In other words, ‘free’, translated from the NHS, means “serving the state, not the citizen, and therefore being more expensive than it otherwise would be, not to mention less efficient”.

I’m not qualified to pass judgement on the desirability of using diamorphine. On my own example, I know it’s used effectively even in the country’s best private hospitals, but that’s only one man’s experience.

Yet any drug can kill if used inappropriately, either by accident or with malice aforethought. If used correctly, aspirin can make your headache go away. If used wrongly, it can make you bleed to death.

And of course diamorphine is a killer in the wrong hands – such as the hands of the NHS.