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For St Augustine of Hippo, that wasn’t an either… or question. Yes, our life is predestined and yes, our will is free.

For sure, we make our free choices, but they don’t affect our salvation one way or the other. We are predestined to be saved or damned, and nothing we do can change the predetermined outcome.

There seems to be a conflict there, and I struggled with it for years. Eventually I think I found a way out that works for me, although some theologians may find my musings unsound – or worse.

Christianity is founded on the belief that Christ sacrificed himself to redeem our sins. But which sins? Surely not just a little boy telling his mother to shut up, or a fair maiden turning out not to be quite so maidenly?

Anyway, according to another basic tenet, all individual sins derive from the original collective one. So it was that sin that Christ redeemed by accepting an awful death.

This means that his sacrifice wiped man’s slate clean of the Fall and therefore of wholesale guilt. Yet since man demonstrably didn’t become pristine as a result, a second sin, Mark II as it were, must have replaced the first one.

Logically, this must have been the sin of rejecting Christ. That offence isn’t identical to original sin, though neither is it dissimilar to it. Both, after all, represent rejection of God: the first by disobeying and the second by failing to recognise him.

If Original Sin Mark I was disobedience and therefore rejection, then Mark II is rejection and therefore disobedience. The opposite of the second rejection is the kind of faith to which Paul, Augustine and Luther ascribed the sole justifying power.

But mankind in its entirety never rejected Christ. Some – arguably most – people did so, yet some – arguably few – didn’t. However small the second group might have been, it was made up of people who chose to belong to it of their own accord, thereby, if we follow this logic one step further, cleansing themselves of the new version of original sin. Hence the choice between acceptance and rejection can’t be collective. It has to be individual and it has to be free.

It stands to reason that a man could do nothing to redeem the collective Mark I; Christ’s sacrifice was necessary to achieve that. But it’s equally clear that a man can do something to redeem the individual Mark II.

Hence, whenever we demonise some people for belonging to a diabolical corporate entity, without proof of such membership or any individual wrongdoing, we dehumanise not only them but, by denying free will, all of mankind. A German who belonged to the SS was complicit in its atrocities, by association at least. But if one accuses an ordinary person who lived in Germany at the time, the accuser must bear the burden of concrete proof. The same goes for Russia and her KGB. Neither nations nor religions do murder; it’s people who do that.

One could still argue that, as the world at large demonstrably didn’t accept Christ, we may be slated for collective perdition. But what is undeniable for any Christian is that Christ showed a clear path to individual salvation, and we are free to take that path or not.

Free will thus becomes the most important property of man, and it can only remain so if we stand to gain from a correct choice or suffer the consequences of a wrong one. In fact, if our will weren’t free, if we were but puppets on God’s string, one would struggle to see why God would have bothered to make us so different from animals, or indeed to create us at all.

Moreover, if we accept as a given that God loves us, then we must find it hard to explain how such love could have been expressed by turning us into puppets, or else pre-programmed robots. God’s is the absolute freedom, but if we are truly created in his image, ours has to be at least a relative one. Only God can be totally free, but that doesn’t mean man has to be totally enslaved.

What does that do to predestination then? We have to believe that God has far-reaching plans for the world in general and man in particular. Otherwise we’d fall into deism, which defies logic: it’s hard to believe that God lovingly created the world, only then to lose all interest in it.

Does this mean we are predestined after all? And if so, provided we aren’t entirely happy with Augustine’s explanation of it, how do we reconcile predestination with free will? If the former subsumes the latter, how can there be any freedom in the world?

Luther struggled with this problem, resorting to paradoxes such as, “If it were in any way possible to understand how God who is so wrathful and unjust can be merciful and just, there would be no need for faith.” Such meek intellectual surrender is odd, considering Luther’s character and his insistence on the self-sufficiency of every Christian in dealing with God.

One can sympathise with his problem. Nonetheless, we must still try to come to terms with it. After all, if we believe that it was God who gave us reason, we might as well explore this faculty to its maximum, which can’t be just the ability to calculate compounded interest.

The whole issue of predestination is rooted in the timelessness of God, as opposed to the temporal existence of man. This juxtaposition gave rise to the most elegant solution to our problem, that by the Spanish Counter-Reformation thinker Luis de Molina.

In effect, though he himself didn’t use this terminology, Molina linked the philosophical category of time with the grammatical category of tense. Our lives unfold within three basic tenses: Past, Present and Future. But God, being timeless, has only one tense: the Present Perfect.

What is ‘will be’ for us is ‘has been’ for God. This means that when he predestines each individual for salvation or damnation, God does so not arbitrarily but on the basis of the free choices he knows the individual will have made during his life – before he has actually made them within his earthly timeframe.

This line of thought makes free will trump predestination as a philosophical notion. Predestination, as defined by Molina, is hardly worth talking about; it may be simply taken for granted. If, like God’s omniscience, this concept is based on God’s timelessness, then it resides in the very definition of God.

Using our God-granted free will, we may choose to believe in God or not. But if we accept him, then we have to take the whole package, including predestination.

However, basing, as Luther and especially Calvin did, a complex theology on predestination means assigning to it undue importance. An attribute resident in a synthetic a priori definition hardly rates such distinction, and insisting that it does may in some quarters be regarded as heresy.

Free will, and freedom in general, on the other hand, becomes part of the definition of man, possibly the most important part. The freer we are, the more human and the more godly we are; the further we are removed from animals.

P.S. While we are on such arcane subjects, and before we go back to talking about Trump and Putin, let me run another thought by you.

According to the Bible, a man and a woman become one flesh when they marry. But they had been just that before Eve came out of Adam’s rib and eventually led him astray. In other words, before original sin a woman was contained within a man’s body and they were one flesh. Marriage thus constitutes a return to the pre-Fall state of affairs. One hopes this makes married people sinless, but experience reduces this hope to wishful thinking.

This is the only slogan I find palatable. For, contrary to a common misapprehension, it’s not the economy but ideology that drives modern European governments – all the way to disaster.

All ideologies are totalitarian by definition, in that they seek – overtly or surreptitiously – sway over every aspect of life. Any ideology is a deity that’s always athirst. Its adherents are ready to sacrifice everything at its altar: national security, social tranquillity, economic prosperity.

Another feature all ideologies share is that they are short of positive content. Whatever little they do have is distinctly secondary to the negative animus. This, however, is seldom advertised for public relations purposes.

Thus, when ideologues commit mass murder, they usually justify it by the pursuit of a greater good. That may be social justice, economic equality, religious or racial purity, supposedly threatened national survival – the possible ruses are endless. But ruses they all are. The only real purpose of mass murder is the murder of masses.

Modern European governments have refrained from genocide in my lifetime (I regard Russia as European only in geography, not in essence). But they are still ideological, and hence underhanded, in everything they do.

Anyone blessed with functional eyesight can detect the workings of an essentially socialist ideology behind the toing and froing of the European Union. Since any ideology can rise only from the ruins of the traditional order, its first aim is to create such ruins.

During the Third Punic War, Cato ended every speech in the Senate by saying: Carthago delenda est – Carthage must be destroyed. Replace Carthage with ‘Western tradition’, and any EU dignitary could say the same thing whenever he gets up to speak in Strasbourg or Brussels.

But they don’t. In common with other ideologues, they have refined the subterfuge of couching their doctrinaire aims in the jargon of economic benefits.

Ideology? What ideology?, they keep repeating, if not in so many words. We simply want to pool Europe’s resources to create widespread peace and prosperity. One country mines iron ore, another mines nickel, a third one produces the coal that fires up the steel mills in a fourth that then shares the steel around. What can possibly be wrong with such division of labour and economy of scale? Only one thing: this is just smoke and mirrors.

In 1952, one of the EU founders, Jean Monnet, summed it all up with frank cynicism: “Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation.”

Whenever this quotation is cited to disparage the EU, its advocates claim it’s apocryphal. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. One way or the other, no one can deny that the sentiment is true to life. The EU does all it can to create a pan-European superstate, while systematically damaging the European economies it ostensibly seeks to improve.

Socialism, for all its sharing-and-caring sloganeering, is all about rapaciously centralising power until it’s completely monopolised by the state. The EU, and most nations within it, are demonstrably moving in this direction. And any observer of modern history will know that economic benefits are bound to fall by the wayside all along such a journey.

One slogan inscribed on EU banners is ‘autonomy from the United States’. Anti-Americanism is one button Europeans like to push to produce a desired response. We don’t do things the American way, they announce proudly. That much is true; they don’t.

Thus, though the EU economy was $3 trillion bigger than the US one in 1990, it’s now smaller, even though the EU has 100 million more people. This isn’t to say that the US is free from the socialist contagion. She isn’t. But it’s less virulent there.

Socialism is all about power, and power must be projected. The way a central government goes about that task is suffocating the economy with extortionist taxes and countless regulations, with no regard for the consequences.

Go no further than this observation when trying to explain why America prospers while Europe stagnates – this even during the four years of Biden’s quasi-socialist administration. In the past five years, the EU has outscored the US almost three to one in regulations passed. Add to this probably as many again courtesy of national governments, and you’ll see why the EU is growing only geographically, but not economically.

Another factor is energy costs, which are almost three times as high in Europe. That gap will grow even wider when Trump acts on his credible promise to increase the production of hydrocarbons by boosting exploration, drilling and fracking.

Europe, meanwhile, remains fanatically loyal to the net-zero subset of the overarching destructive ideology. Like all such urges, this is impervious to any outdated arguments based on reason and facts.

It’s pointless telling the Eurocrats that there is no scientific basis for that madness whatsoever. You can cite any number of facts, such as that the Earth has been warmer than it is now for 85 per cent of its known lifespan, or that anthropogenic carbon dioxide only has a minuscule effect on climate, if any. They won’t hear because they don’t want to.

They know that hydrocarbons have fuelled the West’s prosperity. That’s exactly the problem – socialists are ideologically committed to decrying prosperity for others, while enjoying it for themselves. That’s why the Germans shut down all their nuclear power stations just as cheap Russian gas stopped firing up their socialist self-righteousness.

The unceasing offensive against nuclear energy is another proof of the ideology behind climate madness. After all, nuclear reactors don’t produce CO2 emissions. They generate abundant and clean energy whose supply isn’t affected by windless, overcast days.

Our own socialists have the same urges. That’s why Starmer and his ministers barely conceal their desire for Britain to, in their jargon, “establish closer ties with the EU”, but in fact to rejoin it as a supplicant, if not as a full member.

There have been periods, most notably in the 1970s, when belonging to the pan-European club could confer some economic benefits, if no other. But seeking membership at this time is too stupid even for our Westminster lot.

But they don’t voice such intentions for any rational reasons, however misguided. They are tropistically reaching out to their ideological comrades on the continent. Their shared brand of socialism calls for expansion ad infinitum, and certainly beyond national borders. That’s all that really matters.

Let’s not be too beastly to socialist ideologues, or rather let’s not single them out for special opprobrium. A good ideology is an oxymoron. All ideologies are equally bad, and they defy their etymology by having nothing in common with ideas. They reside in the viscera, not the mind.

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When we try to define something, we must first single out its unique features, rather than those it shares with many other things.

A tricycle resembles a plane in that they are both made of metal, transport people and have three wheels. However, someone offering that explanation to a visiting alien, without mentioning that planes fly, wouldn’t be almost right or half-right. He’d be mad.

Yet it’s astounding how many intelligent people ignore this simple logical trick when trying to get their heads around Christianity. An epistolary exchange between Nancy Mitford and her good friend Evelyn Waugh is quite telling in that regard.

“How can you behave so badly – and you a Catholic!” wrote Mitford. “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic,” Waugh replied. “Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.”

Waugh’s riposte was a good answer to a bad question. For Mitford’s remark shows a woeful misunderstanding common to most intelligent atheists. Above all, she expected Christianity to make its communicants morally better. And if that manifestly didn’t work, it was the religion she blamed, not the communicant.

Christianity may indeed have a meliorating effect on some people, but that’s not what it’s about. There does exist such a thing as Christian (or Judaeo-Christian) morality, but it’s corollary to the faith’s essence, not the essence itself.

A greater writer than Mitford, Tolstoy, based his whole philosophy on the same mistake, reducing Christianity to its moral teaching or, even narrower, just the Sermon on the Mount. This made him perhaps the world’s most influential thinker in the first decade of the 20^th century, because that’s what the world wanted to hear. But a solid intellectual structure can’t be built on the wobbly foundation of a conceptual error.

Tolstoy’s falsification of Christianity made him “the mirror of the Russian revolution”, in Lenin’s phrase. It also made him talk nonsense on a vast range of subjects – half of the 50 volumes he left behind are taken up with essays, with nary a sound thought anywhere (for details, see my book God and Man According to Tolstoy, if you can find it).

The morality of our religion is called Judaeo-Christian because the Decalogue is an essential part of the Christian canon. Jesus merely added a few touches to the Ten Commandments: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I tell you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”

For most neophytes and non-believers the morality of loving one’s enemy presents a stumbling block. If asked to identify the unique feature of Christian morality – or, for that matter, of Christianity – this is the one they mention first.

That’s as if a tricycle has just soared up in the air and flown to a faraway destination. For there is nothing about that commandment that is uniquely Christian.

For example, try to identify this dictum: “He who has done evil unto thee, repay him with good.” Sounds just like Matthew 5:44, doesn’t it? Yet this pre-Christian Beatitude was written in Sumerian cuneiform some 2,000 years before Christ.

Many ancient religions and moral codes contained commandments identical to Judaeo-Christian ones. Thus the Babylonian king, Hammurabi, wrote this in the 18^th century BC: “The strong shall not injure the weak.”

And the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl instructed his adherents in the same Christian vein: “Dress the naked, feed the hungry; remember that their flesh is even like thy flesh, that they are such as even thou art; love the weak because he too is in God’s image.”

In fact, the longer we look at the religious thought that either preceded Christianity or developed concurrently with it, the more similar elements we’ll find.

In common with Buddhism, Christianity accepted that man is sinful (though not originally created that way).

In common with Platonism it postulated an ideal world beyond our earthly reach.

In common with Judaism it saw the world as the creation of one God.

In common with Philo (roughly Jesus’s contemporary) and other Hellenised Jews of Alexandria it defined Logos as God’s creative force. In fact long before John’s Gospel, Plato and the Jewish Platonists of Egypt used the word Logos to describe a self-differentiating divine unity, giving Gibbon an opening for one of his many anti-Christian jibes (to the effect that St John’s revelation had been taught in Alexandria four hundred years before it was written down).

If it were possible to reduce Christianity to its morality, we could still be worshiping An the Sumerian, Marduk the Babylonian or Quetzalcoatl the Mexican. Yet if we obstinately insist on forgoing an ancient temple for a church, we must do so in the full knowledge that, however important Christian morality is, it’s not what we worship.

The only aspect of Christianity that is unquestionably unique to it is the person of Jesus Christ, Logos made flesh, a triune God whose one hypostasis became man, accepted death to redeem the sins of the world, resurrected on the third day and showed a path to life everlasting.

If you read the Nicaean Creed, that’s what Christianity is. Nothing more, nothing less. The rest is commentary, in Rabbi Hillel’s phrase.

Courtesy of Tolstoy and other falsifiers, the word ‘Christian’ has expanded its meaning so much that it burst at the seams. People began to use it in the meaning of ‘good person’, which is a harmful solecism.

A Christian may or may not be a good person, and a good person may or may not be a Christian. A tricycle doesn’t fly, a child doesn’t pedal an airliner, and a Christian is someone who believes – and venerates – every word of the Creeds. What’s there not to understand?

Finally, after almost three years of Russia pummelling Ukrainian cities with every manner of bomb and missile, Joe Biden has magnanimously allowed the Ukraine to hit Russian targets with long-range ATACMS rockets.

The question every opponent of Russian fascism is asking is: “What took you so long?” Yet this isn’t what Trump’s people, including his son Donald Jr., are saying.

“The Military Industrial Complex seems to want to make sure they get World War 3 going before my father has a chance to create peace and save lives,” tweeted Don Junior, repeating the Kremlin line almost verbatim.

That war is already under way, Don, and it’s no use pretending it isn’t. And it’s Putin’s Russia, not “the Military Industrial Complex” that has started it.

According to David Sacks, a major donor to the Trump campaign, Biden’s decision violates the sacred tenets of American democracy: “President Trump won a clear mandate to end the war in Ukraine. So what does Biden do in his final two months in office? Massively escalate it.”

I’d suggest Mr Sacks brush up on constitutional law. Then he’d know what the words he used, “in office”, actually mean. To save him time, I’m on hand to help out.

The US Constitution doesn’t provide for an interregnum, with no president at the helm. Joe Biden may be a lame duck president, but a president nonetheless. He remains in office until 20 January, and he enjoys all the powers the office confers.

As for Trump’s “clear mandate”, I’m not aware that ending the war was a key part of his campaign. Most of the people who voted for him did so in the realistic hope that the economy would become more robust and the border more secure.

That’s what Trump campaigned on, and he outlined some of the ways, most of them sound, in which he’d act on his promises. He did make some noises about stopping the war in an hour, a day or a week, can’t remember which. But, a few noncommittal hints apart, he never said how he planned to do that, nor what kind of end he found desirable.

His voters didn’t give two flying rockets about the Ukraine, and I’m not sure they can tell it apart from the UK. All in all, Trump did win a clear mandate, but not to let Russia pound the Ukraine with impunity.

Nor did Biden “massively escalate” the war. He only did something he should have done almost three years ago: remove some of the shackles from a country defending Europe from fascism on the march. If he did so to make it harder for Trump to force the Ukraine’s surrender, so much the better.

Until now, the US has pursued a palliative approach to supporting the Ukraine. Every bit of military materiel the US supplied was gauged against the potential risk of escalation, all the way to a nuclear holocaust.

Somehow, it was only the Ukraine that was deemed capable of escalation. Russia’s carpet bombing of residential areas, targeting the energy infrastructure in the hope of Ukrainians freezing to death, large-scale murder, rape and looting of civilians – indeed her very unprovoked predatory assault on the Ukraine – didn’t constitute escalation. The victims fighting back did.

Now the Russians have pushed escalation even further by using foreign troops. It’s good to see that Putin enjoys such an intimate relationship with Kim. Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are, goes a Spanish proverb. That, decided Biden, was the last straw.

ATACMS missiles have a range of 186 miles, which makes them long-range only in a manner of speaking. They are far from being doomsday weapons capable of hitting the Kremlin.

They may help the Ukrainians to strike at the airfields and missile sites from which the Russians hurl death at the victims of their aggression. If that is escalation, I say bring it on.

That Biden is motivated by political rather than humanitarian considerations is fairly obvious. If he felt the urge to save Ukrainian lives, he would have removed his injunction earlier. But what motivates Trump and his people, all of whom are in favour of ending the war on Putin’s terms?

I singled out a few names two days ago (http://www.alexanderboot.com/birds-of-a-feather-2/), but, from Trump down, such sentiments are unanimous. His administration will force the Ukraine to sue for peace on pain of losing US supplies altogether.

Now, I can’t judge how decisive the use of ATACMS missiles will be. Such judgements are best left to experts. In my layman view, the hope there isn’t that the Ukraine will win the war but that she’ll be able to negotiate better peace terms.

But I can absolutely guarantee that Putin and his gang will regard any pro-Russian peace treaty, along the lines of what Trump may have in mind, as just a breather.

Putin may accept a chunk of Ukrainian territory in exchange for a ceasefire, but he isn’t after more land. He already has more than he knows what to do with. Putin is after restoring the Soviet empire to its past toxic grandeur, which means wiping the Ukraine off the map as a sovereign state.

The Soviet empire included three tiers: the 15 constituent Soviet republics proper, Eastern European colonies, and ‘finlandised’ neutrals, such as Austria and, well, Finland. All the countries drawn into that orbit are keenly aware of the menace they face.

That’s why Finland hastily joined NATO, something that had been out of the question for decades. That’s why Poland too supports the Ukraine with all she has got, while fortifying her own eastern border and rapidly beefing up her armed forces. The Finns and the Poles know what they are dealing with – they’ve had plenty of opportunity to learn.

The question is, When will the West learn? That sand in which some Western leaders hide their heads, ostrich-like, may soon get red hot. And yes, the way to prevent that is to negotiate with Putin – but from a position of strength.

The Ukraine is unlikely to occupy that position on her own, or even with Western aid. But if ATACMS missiles help her reach approximate parity, not only she but all of us will be better off. These rockets are a factor of de-escalation, but I don’t expect Trump and his people to understand this.

Regular visitors to this space know that I’m not an unequivocal admirer of Donald Trump. However, credit where it’s due, I have to praise some of his policies.

For example, his contempt for net-zero madness strikes a tingling chord of sanity in many a wounded heart. Even if Trump doesn’t manage to whip some sense into other countries, committing America to a bright hydrocarbon future is bound to have an invigorating knock-on effect on all of us.

As the US drills and fracks her way back to energy autonomy, oil prices will collapse globally, making things cheaper all over. By way of side benefit, Russia’s aggressive potential will be degraded, and assorted Middle Eastern tyrants will find it harder to blackmail the West.

Also, Trump’s intention to streamline central government comes straight out of the conservative – which is to say sensible – playbook. His success in that area would ease inflationary pressures on the economy, for it’s excessive public spending that’s chiefly responsible for inflation. It would also curb the meddling instincts of federal bureaucrats, which would have all sorts of positive effects, and not just economic ones.

The numbers Trump cites when talking about the scale and effect of such cutting strike me as a bit fanciful, but there is no denying that on that subject his heart is in the right place. Whether or not he and Elon Musk will be able to do what they intend is something else again.

They may find, as many before them have found, that the so-called deep state is quite resilient. Its core is surrounded by abattises and moats keeping interlopers at bay. Such defences have so far proved impregnable. For example, a similar offensive by the Reagan administration got stuck in the quagmire of federal bureaucracy.

The problems come not only from the necessary scope of changes – and it’s massive – but also from the time available for making them. Barring a constitutional upheaval, Trump only has four years at his disposal to cut the federal bureaucracy down to size, which makes him a man in a hurry.

Yet even with the best will in the world, haste seldom makes anything other than waste. An attempt to blow up an edifice that has taken at least a century to construct has to produce a toxic fallout that ideally should be spread over a lofty timeline. Cutting in one fell swoop whole departments employing hundreds of thousands of paper pushers may create shockwaves of chaos, and it’s not a foregone conclusion that these could be attenuated quickly.

Still, if Trump is serious about this, and I think he is, we should all wish him as much luck as he is going to need. Who knows, if America prospers by a decisive shift from centralism to localism, her example may even inspire Europe to mitigate its own affection for socialism, although that hope is slight.

Going hand in hand with reducing the inordinate size and wilful incompetence of federal agencies is Trump’s sincere commitment to cutting taxes. As a practical man of action, and one who has felt the lifetime noose of taxation on his own neck, Trump doesn’t need Arthur Laffer to instruct him on the destructive effects of extortionate levies.

He knows that higher tax rates don’t necessarily produce higher tax revenue, but they inevitably produce lower productivity, slower business activity and eventually stagnation. In modern, variously socialist, economies, taxation is anyway more punitive than economic. It is a weapon of class war, its battering ram. And say what you will about Trump, but a socialist he isn’t.

However, his plan of firing the first salvo in trade war will undo all the good things he hopes to achieve. Trump’s hands-on experience in economic activity didn’t prepare him for tackling the issue of tariffs, and he has little education to plug the gaping holes in his knowledge.

His plan of introducing 20 per cent tariffs on all imports (60 per cent on Chinese ones) is a three-foot blanket covering a six-foot body. If you pull it over your cold feet, the rest of you will freeze.

By protecting malfunctioning industries the state diverts to them the resources that could be more profitably spent to bolster others. By resources I don’t mean state subsidies – those are usually counterproductive – but the natural flow of capital from end user (other industries or consumer) to manufacturer.

Saved from more successful competitors, the protected industry loses incentives to lower the price of its products and improve their quality. Prices go up, inflation follows in their wake, the net effect on jobs and overall prosperity is negative.

The theory of this was established by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations: “To give the monopoly of the home-market to the produce of domestic industry… must, in almost all cases, be either a useless or a hurtful regulation. If the produce of domestic can be brought there as cheap as that of foreign industry, the regulation is evidently useless. If it cannot, it must generally be hurtful.”

Now, Trump doesn’t strike me as an avid reader of economic theory or anything else. But he should heed the voice of practical experience, including his own in his first term.

This will tell him that the mantra of saving American jobs by protectionism simply doesn’t wash this side of demagoguery. Dominic Lawson helpfully provides the numbers in today’s Times:

“Take the example of Trump’s 2018 steel tariffs, designed to preserve jobs in US steel manufacturing. Unfortunately there were more than 12 million jobs in US industries that used steel in their production process – and whose costs soared. A 2020 report by the US Federal Reserve board of governors suggested the steel and aluminium tariffs were linked to a loss of 75,000 US manufacturing jobs; there had been an increase of only about 1,000 in ‘protected’ US steelmaking jobs.”

Edmund Burke, whom Trump probably hasn’t read either, also wrote about the deadly effect of state interference in the economy: “The moment that government appears at market, all the principles of market will be subverted.”

And a government kicking off trade war doesn’t just “appear at market”. It barges in with destructive force. Hence catchphrases like “Buy American” or “Buy a foreign car, put 10 Americans out of work” may work as bumper stickers or campaign slogans, but they are economically illiterate.

I wonder if Trump actually realises that his lifelong affection for protectionist tariffs is at odds with his professed commitment to free markets. If he doesn’t, I hope his advisers explain the facts of life to him before it’s too late.

If he sets off a global trade war, the casualty rate will be appalling everywhere, including the US. After all, some 60 per cent of global GDP is generated by world trade. Throw a monkey wrench into those works, and there will be no winners. We’ll all be part of collateral damage.  

The first time I ever predicted an election result was a fortnight before 5 November. Trump will win, I said on a New York podcast, and he’ll win big.

Now, like a freshly deflowered virgin who enjoyed her first tryst, I’m encouraged to continue in the same vein. So here it is: there is no way the Senate will approve all of Trump’s picks for cabinet and staff positions.

I know it, all 100 senators know it and, most important, Trump knows it. Say what you will about the president-elect, but he isn’t short of street smarts. So why so many doomed picks?

One gets the impression that Trump wants to thumb his nose at the Washington establishment, even if it’s largely Republican. I can beat you all with one arm tied behind my back, he seems to be saying with his usual pugnacity.

Even if he loses one or two of his nominees, the message will have got home: the president will barge full speed ahead and damn the political torpedoes. So which ones will he lose?

I’m not going to venture a guess because there are several enticing possibilities. But in general one gets the impression that Trump doesn’t just want sycophantic loyalists. He wants sycophantic loyalists who reflect aspects of himself. His picks are an exercise in amour propre.

Thus two of his nominees have been accused of, though not charged with, sex crimes. Matt Gaetz, Trump’s choice for Attorney General, has been implicated in a scandal involving sex trafficking and statutory rape. And Pete Hegseth, his nomination for Defence Secretary, was investigated for sexual assault in 2017.

Innocent until proven guilty and all that, but the Senate isn’t a jury of one’s peers. It may well punish candidates simply on suspicion of scandal. Now, I find it hard to believe that Trump’s team missed such little peccadilloes when vetting candidates. More likely is that Trump actually wants to pick a fight, win, lose or draw.

Some of his other picks are guilty of things worse than suspected sexual impropriety. For example, his choice for Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., reminds us of the small step separating unorthodox from unhinged.

Mr Kennedy is clearly incapable of holding his views to the most rudimentary tests of factual veracity and sound logic. This isn’t surprising in someone who spent his youth in a narcotic haze. Kennedy’s CV includes several arrests for marijuana possession and one felony conviction for possession of heroin.

Trump said Kennedy is “a very talented guy and has strong views” who will “go wild on health”. I’m not sure about the talent part, but, considering Kennedy’s “strong views”, one can’t gainsay going wild.

He has never seen a conspiracy theory he couldn’t take on faith. An anti-vaxxer of long standing, Kennedy has stated that no childhood vaccines, including those against polio, are effective and all of them drive up autism rates.

There is absolutely no evidence of even correlation there, never mind causation. It is, however, a fact that the polio vaccine reduced the number of reported cases from an estimated 350,000 in 1988 to 33 in 2018.

On this basis, one can trust Kennedy’s self-diagnosis of having had a part of his brain eaten by some mysterious parasitic worm. That deficit of grey matter may also account for his belief that fluoride in drinking water makes children autistic, while herbicides in their food make them transsexual.

Many commentators raised serious doubts about Covid-19 vaccines, but Mr Kennedy opted for insane ones. The virus, according to him, was part of a dastardly conspiracy with racial objectives. It was specially designed to target black and Chinese people, while sparing Jews.

And speaking of viruses, it’s not HIV that causes AIDS. Kennedy has been reluctant to name the real culprit, but he wasn’t so reticent about Wi-Fi that, according to him, causes cancer. Sorted. Mystery solved.

As a general principle, Kennedy believes in voodoo medicine that relies on remedies unsupported by any clinical evidence. As to the drugs boasting such support, they should have no role to play in the health of the nation. Thus the announcement of Mr Kennedy’s nomination instantly sent tremors through the pharmaceutical industry, with its shares taking a headlong plunge.

And naturally his views on Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine must make Trump grin like the Cheshire Cat. That conflict, explains Kennedy, is in fact, “a US war against Russia” deliberately provoked by NATO’s eastward expansion. That was done specifically to “sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons.”

The Ukraine, insists Kennedy, shouldn’t be admitted into NATO, but Russia should. After all, Russians living in the Ukraine are “being systematically killed by the Ukrainian government”.

I share Mr Kennedy’s antipathy for the neocons but, should he find himself sitting at cabinet meetings next to Marco Rubio, a neocon par excellence and Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, he’d have to temper such feelings. Sen. Rubio, incidentally, voted to stop all US aid for the Ukraine.

My parents taught me to be chivalrous towards women, but I still can’t resist the temptation of treating Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nomination for Director of National Intelligence, as an out-and-out nutter.

Now, call me a racist and report me to the Equality Commission, but I have problems with candidates taking the oath of office on a copy of Bhagavad Gita, not the Bible. I appreciate Miss Gabbard’s multicultural background, but I question the suitability for the top intelligence role of someone raised on the Vaishnava Hindu tenets of karma and those promoted by the International Society of Krishna Consciousness.

Moving from the general to the specific, she goes even further than Kennedy in viewing Russia from Putin’s perspective. Thus media freedom in Russia is, according to her, “not so different” from that in the US.

Yes, we all bemoan the diminution of free speech in the West, which is indeed deplorable. However, it takes either a cosmically stupid individual, or else a Putin agent, to claim parity with Russia in that respect.

Does Miss Gabbard know that all Russian media are forced to function exclusively as propaganda outlets, and that the slightest disagreement with Putin’s policies is a shortcut to draconian prison sentences? If she doesn’t know that, she doesn’t belong in the intelligence services. If she does know and still says it, she belongs in the loony bin.

And of course the war in the Ukraine “could have easily been avoided if NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of Nato.”

One such concern, insisted Miss Gabbard in unison with Putin’s propaganda, was that the Ukraine has secret laboratories developing American biological weapons. That’s cloud-cuckoo-land. Also, in 2022 the Ukraine was still years, not to say decades, away from any hope of NATO membership.

Then what are Putin’s other “legitimate security concerns”, as opposed to illegitimate ones? That NATO would launch a massive unprovoked strike on Russia?

If Miss Gabbard genuinely believes that’s a possibility, she ought to have her head examined. No, hold that. I’ve already conducted that examination vicariously and found her either deranged or stupid or at least bone ignorant. A perfect candidate to head all US intelligence, in other words.

Add to this list of nominees Mike Waltz, chosen by Trump as his National Security Adviser, and you’ll see that all of them support his apparent intention to twist the Ukraine’s arm into agreeing to end the war on Russia’s terms.

And let’s not forget Elon Musk who, while cutting public-sector waste, will try to populate Mars with millions of colonists, fill roads with nothing but self-drive Teslas and implant AI electrodes into people’s brains to make them almost as intelligent as Mr Musk.

None of them will be blocked by the Senate for political reasons alone. Some of them, however, may be denied Senate approval because they aren’t quite mentally sound. So why, apart from the possible reasons I cited above, did Trump put them forth?  The title of this article should give you some clue.

Supporters of free enterprise über alles would be well advised to take a broader look at society. This would enable them to see that although competitive free enterprise may be a necessary condition for civilised society, it’s certainly not a sufficient one.

For one thing, men at the cutting edge of free enterprise don’t believe in competition. Quite the opposite, they’d like to nip it in the bud by bankrupting every business but their own.

A free entrepreneur par excellence usually can exist today only in a start-up mode, or else at the level of a corner sandwich shop. Once his business has become successful, his thoughts gravitate towards putting an end to competitive activity. He wants to put the competition out of business.

At that end of economic thought he is greeted with a fraternal embrace by his brother the democratic bureaucrat who, for his part, used to believe in pluralism while he was clawing his way up the party ladder. Now he has reached the top, pluralism means only one thing to him: a threat to his position. The modern brothers instantly recognise their kinship and have no difficulty in striking a corporatist partnership.

Free enterprise in the West today occupies about the same slot as it did in Lenin’s Russia during the New Economic Policy (NEP). Faced with an economic collapse and mounting famines, Lenin allowed most of the service sector as well as some small-scale manufacturing to go private. But what he described as the “commanding heights of the economy”, which is to say banks, heavy industry, foreign trade, large-scale manufacturing, exploration and control of natural resources, remained firmly in the hands of the Bolsheviks.

Replace ‘Bolsheviks’ with ‘the bureaucratic corporatist élite’, and today’s situation in the West isn’t a million miles away. For all the Sherman Acts and Monopolies Commissions in the world, big business has to gravitate towards monopoly – one of the few things Marx got right. That is, he was right in his observation but not in his explanation.

A modern businessman has a psychological need to achieve total control of his market in the same way, and for the same reasons, that a modern politician wishes to achieve total control of his flock. Class has no role to play here – one of the many things Marx got wrong.

Modern man prays at the altar of uniformity, and he melts down any class differences until they are reduced to quaint idiosyncrasies. Every class of philistine modernity tends to gravitate towards an amorphous middle. In today’s Britain, for example, the differences between ‘the proles’ and ‘the toffs’ seldom go deeper than the clothes they wear.

What also drives the modern ‘free’ businessman towards monopoly is the same utilitarian impulse that paradoxically drives many aristocrats towards socialism: they know that putting the clamps on the socially dynamic strata of the population will prevent any serious competition appearing. Here the entrepreneur’s longings converge with those of his employees who tend to act as a collectivist bloc.

Their motivation is old-fashioned envy coupled with the deep-seated belief that it’s possible for some to rise only at the expense of others falling. By the same token, the ruling bureaucracy has a vested interest in keeping businesses as large, and consequently as few, as possible for this will make control easier and more total.

In short, the only people who do believe in unvarnished free enterprise are big businessmen waiting to happen, those who are still climbing towards the summit and don’t want their rope cut. Once they’ve got to the top, they’ll realise the error of their ways and start acting accordingly.

Another dynamic at work here is a tendency towards the globalisation of business, closely following a similar trend in modern politics. Like modern life in general, business tends to lose its national roots. In the absence of protectionist tariffs, known to be counterproductive at least since the time of David Ricardo, an aspiration to monopoly drives a big business towards foreign expansion ad infinitum, which is another form of protectionism but one that doesn’t provoke retaliation in kind.

This megalomania, along with a tendency to dissipate ownership by financing expansion through stock market flotation, leads to a situation where ‘free enterprise’ becomes neither free nor entrepreneurial. The ‘capitalist’, Marx’s bogeyman, is eliminated in philistine modern societies as efficiently as he used to be shot in nihilist ones.

Most international corporations are neither run nor controlled by capitalists, if we define the breed as the owners of capital (or of ‘the means of production’). That type, rather than having been created by the Industrial Revolution, was killed by it, albeit by delayed action.

Today’s captains of industry don’t necessarily own the capital of which they dispose, and they don’t live or die by their success or failure. The risks they venture are usually taken with other people’s money, and they stand to gain untold fortunes by achieving success, while personally risking next to nothing in case of failure. If they fail, they take the king’s ransom of redundancy and either move on to the next bonanza or, should they so choose, retire to a paradise of philistine comfort.

Qualities required for a rise through modern corporations are different from those needed in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. They are, however, close to those required for careers in government bureaucracies.

This is partly due to the growing disparity between the ever-expanding outlook of the management and the ever-narrowing outlook of the specialists who make the products. In the old days, someone who designed bridges could advance to the next rung in his company by demonstrating ability. Once he got there, he continued to design bridges, but with added responsibilities.

People at the top rung would thus come from the same stock as those several steps below, although their duties would be different. Not so modern corporations. Growing specialisation creates a different situation: the people in production represent a different breed from those in the boardroom. The latter are hardly ever drawn from the former.

Most leaders of giant modern corporations come from legal, sales or marketing, rather than manufacturing, backgrounds. Curiously, when Marx wrote Das Kapital, the gulf between workers and management could still be bridged by hard work and ingenuity. The industrial conditions imagined by Marx were in fact a self-fulfilling prophecy: it’s only when some of his ideas were acted upon that an unbridgeable chasm appeared between the corporatist management and the narrowly specialised labour force.

Even as the governments of philistine modernity grow more corporatist, so, tautologically, do actual corporations. A new élite is thus formed, and it’s a homogeneous group whose members are indistinguishable from one another regardless of whether their original background was business or politics. Hence the ease with which they switch from the corporate to the government arena and back, especially if they come from the international end of either.

The spiritual father of the breed was Walter Rathenau, Managing Director of German General Electric in the 1920s. One of the leading theoreticians and practitioners of corporate socialism, he prophesied that, “The new economy will… be… a private economy [which] will require state co-operation for organic consolidation to overcome inner friction and increase production and endurance.”

Here was the original politician cum tycoon, and there was poetic justice when he was murdered in 1922, 11 years before his dream became a reality in Germany, and by the same people who made it so.

As ever, my interest here is primarily linguistic and taxonomic.

The old terms, such as ‘capitalist’, ‘proletarian’ or ‘worker’ no longer mean much and certainly nothing of what they meant a century ago. Witness Starmer’s difficulty when he was asked to define ‘working people’ (those he promised, falsely, would be exempt from his extortionist tax hikes).

Although Starmer isn’t a bright man, even he sensed that 19^th century terminology sounds like a ludicrous anachronism in the 21^st century. And because he isn’t a bright man, he couldn’t propose a non-Marxist lexicon to justify his Marxist longings. Mind you, that task may defeat even cleverer people than him.

Conservative Anglicans – conservative anything, come to think of it – are rejoicing. Justin Welby, the woke Archbishop of Canterbury, has resigned not so much under a cloud as in the midst of a hurricane.

Yet I remember the old Eastern tale and weep (figuratively speaking). This is how it went.

A blood-thirsty tyrant dies, and people all over the land are dancing, laughing and singing merry songs. Only a very old woman sits on a tree stump crying.

A young passerby asks, “Why are you so sad? Aren’t you happy the tyrant is dead?” “Young man,” says the woman. “I’m so old that I’ve seen many tyrants come and go. And you know what? Each new tyrant is worse than his predecessor.”

Conservative Anglicans are happy to see the last of Welby because they hope he’ll be replaced by someone like Richard Hooker or Thomas Cranmer. It’s more likely, nay certain, that the new archbishop will be closer to Hewlett Johnson, ‘the Red Dean of Canterbury’.

Welby fell on his sword following the scandal involving John Smyth, a libidinous lawyer who industriously abused more than 100 youngsters at Christian camps. The physical and sexual abuse had started before Welby was even ordained and continued until Smyth died in 2018.

Since much of that fun happened on Welby’s watch, whether or not he knew is a moot point. He had to assume responsibility and resign. However, some things that happened during his tenure were much worse than his lackadaisical ignorance of detail, that proverbial residence of the devil.

Yet neither the government nor the Church hierarchy criticised Welby for those offences, much less demanded his resignation. This, though he has done his level best to run our established Church into the ground.

I often quote the Venerable Matteo Ricci, who almost succeeded in converting China in the 16^th century. He encapsulated the inherently conservative nature of the Church by saying, Simus, ut sumus, aut non simus” (“We shall remain as we are or we shall not remain at all”). That adage ought to be inscribed on the portal of every church regardless of denomination.

It certainly wasn’t inscribed anywhere during Welby’s tenure. He did all he could to commit the Church of England to woke modernism at its leftmost.

Any religion must uphold eternal truths. Since such truths are by definition timeless, they must be impervious to the weathercock vicissitudes of social fashion. A church that strives to keep pace with secular modernity forfeits any claim to people’s allegiance.

People don’t go to church to extend their quotidian life. They go there to hold their quotidian life to higher eternal standards, find it wanting, repent, thank God for his forbearance and celebrate his glory.

When a church is barely distinguishable from social services and its message from that preached by woke media, it becomes superfluous. And people serve it a redundancy notice by staying away in droves.

That’s partly why some 3,000 Anglican churches closed on Welby’s watch, and many of those that still hang on are filled with empty pews. It would be churlish to put the whole blame at Welby’s feet. He was only a part of the problem, but he certainly was no part of a solution.

It wasn’t only lay parishioners who fled from the church but also hundreds of priests who defected to Roman Catholicism. Even Michael Nazir Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester who kindly wrote a preface for one of my books, left the church he had served with heroic distinction all his life.

Welby’s role model certainly wasn’t Matteo Ricci. It was Paula Vennells, the disgraced Post Office CEO and an ordained Anglican priest. Under her management over 900 postmasters were wrongly convicted, which led to the loss of jobs, bankruptcy, prison sentences and at least four suicides.

Vennells fought her corner to the last. Yet the inevitable happened: she was forced out of office, disgraced – and awarded a CBE for her work on “diversity and inclusion” as well as her “commitment to the social purpose at the heart of the business and her dedication in putting the customer first”.

Welby agreed wholeheartedly. Vennells, he said, “shaped my thinking over the years”. You don’t say.

He too heard Vox DEI in every tonal detail, even when it outshouted vox Dei. For example, Welby displayed a fanatical commitment to female episcopate and finally got his wish in the well-rounded shape of 24 freshly baked women bishops, each outdoing even him in their championship of wokery. If the Church of England had ever had a claim to apostolic succession, it was thereby expunged.

Nor was Welby shy in letting his views known on secular matters as well. A zealous Remainer, he regarded the EU as the greatest achievement of Christendom since the fall of the Roman Empire. That former oil trader also happily bit the hand that had fed him so well for so long by acting as Greta Thunberg’s disciple. “God,” he said, “was Green”.

I don’t know how closely the deity has analysed the data on global warming. Not very, would be my guess. Being omniscient He’d otherwise instantly see it for the woke scam it is, and one used as a stake aimed at the heart of the civilisation that used to be called Christian and now barely merits Western.

More to the point, Welby certainly never analysed it either. He simply reacted in a kneejerk fashion to the woke glossolalia reverberating through all the fashionable neighbourhoods.

And so on, all the way down the list. Tory ‘austerity’ (a meek attempt to restore a semblance of fiscal sanity) hurt the poor, presumably by reducing their number. The gap between the rich and the poor? Deplorable and “destabilising”. Public reaction to the rise of jihadist sentiments among young British Muslims? “Hysterical”. Israel’s presence in “occupied territories”? “Unlawful”. Avoiding extortionist taxes? “Wrong”. Rwanda scheme? “Morally unacceptable”.

Nor did Welby put his corporate experience to good use after switching careers. The financial affairs of the Church were badly mismanaged, and many of the 3,000 churches that closed down did so for lack of funds. The good prelate responded to the shortfall by insisting that the Church must shell out £100 million to atone for whatever part it had played in slavery.

This is the kind of woke nonsense one would expect from Jeremy Corbyn, not from a prelate in the Church of England, but Welby is personally invested. Apparently, he recently found out that one of his forebears used to be a slave owner, and now the whole Church must atone for Welby’s blood guilt.

And yet, as I said, I wish he could stay. The way the C of E is going, I wouldn’t be surprised if it fast-tracked Corbyn to the archdiocese, bypassing ordination and such incidentals as Jeremy’s atheism.

That old woman of Eastern folklore was wise. Every new tyrant is usually worse than his predecessor. So, if recent history is anything to go by, is each new Archbishop of Canterbury.

Next to Chesterton, C.S. Lewis is my favourite Christian apologist of the 20^th century.

From where I’m sitting, which is the seat of a reasonably well-informed layman, Lewis was sound on doctrine, even though he failed to appreciate the fundamental difference between Roman Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism.

His friend and frequent correspondent, Evelyn Waugh, set him straight on that matter in an instructive letter. That issue apart, the two men had much in common. In addition to being clear thinkers, they were both superb writers, if in different genres.

Lewis’s style was cogent and lucid, and he demanded these qualities not only of himself but also of anyone putting pen to paper. I couldn’t agree more: a writer is duty-bound to make the reader’s task as easy as the subject-matter allows.

This raises the question of biblical translations, and that’s where I’m not sure I entirely agree with Lewis. He thought that each generation was justified in translating the Bible into up-to-date vernacular. After all, what really matters about Scripture is the message, not the style. And the more quickly and unerringly is the message understood, the better.

Thus, Lewis had problems with the beautiful prose of the King James Version – precisely because it’s beautiful. Readers, he felt, would be so riveted to the glorious cadences that they’d be liable to miss the nuances of content, especially when conveyed in an archaic language.

True enough, some cultured atheists read the KJV just for its prose, which Lewis finds outrageous. An argument can be made, though, that many of those who begin by reading Scripture strictly for aesthetic reasons may end up seeing its truth. Not just Christian texts but also Christian art, especially music, can use beauty to claim converts.

In fact, the link between beauty, truth and morality has attracted the attention of some of history’s greatest minds: pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides, then Plato and Aristotle, followed by mediaeval scholastics like Albertus Magnus and Aquinas, then subsequent Catholic theologians, and of course classical German thinkers, most notably Kant.

Both Plato and Aristotle devoted much attention to what they called ‘transcendentals’, the ontological properties of being they defined as Truth, Beauty and Goodness. They existed as Three in One –what’s true and moral is also beautiful, what’s beautiful is also moral and true – and hence what’s ugly can be neither true nor moral.

Aquinas saw the obvious link between those transcendentals and Christian doctrine. God is One, and He is Truth, Goodness and Beauty. The unity of the three thus made a natural journey from philosophy to theology.

What follows from this is that all beauty comes from God and hence may lead to God. Bach’s cantatas, Fra Angelico’s paintings or Dante’s verse – and yes, the poetic music of the KJV – can lead one close to God more surely than the same message delivered by basic melodies, crude images and primitive doggerel.

Before Jesus Christ became a superstar, our mediaeval ancestors understood that perfectly, which is why they strained every physical and fiscal sinew to erect magnificent cathedrals, houses worthy of acting as God’s dwellings. In due course, they drew in the best painters to create iconic images and the best composers to write liturgical music.

The men of the Holy Roman Empire knew that beauty could act as a teaching aid, educating communicants on the truth, and hence beauty and goodness, of their faith. Then, centuries later, both the art and the music began to leave their original habitat to settle in private collections, museums and concert halls.

That broadened their appeal, and also diluted it. But not to the point of disappearance.

The Erbarme dich, mein Gott duet from St Matthew Passion, perhaps the most beautiful piece ever written, retains its celestial, God-like splendour in any secular context – and reminds listeners that secular isn’t the only context there is. All it takes is a modicum of sensitivity to grasp the divine inspiration behind such music. It’s not for nothing that Bach wrote Soli deo, gloria on his scores – “To God alone, the glory”.

It’s easy for a believing Christian to take exception to devotional art demeaning itself in this fashion. And it’s true that today’s youngsters may not know the Biblical stories behind many Renaissance paintings. Most of them don’t see God moving the artist’s hand. All they see is a combination of colours and shapes, just like modern art.

But ‘most’ is the operable word. Some of them may respond not only to the beauty of a painting, poem or musical piece, but also to the truth they convey. The sublime Russian pianist, Maria Yudina, made that point when writing that “Many paths can lead to God, but music is the one available to me.”    

As for Biblical translations, Lewis makes a good point that until the Reformation the Church had frowned on any of them, good, bad or indifferent (other than St Jerome’s 4^th century translation into Latin Vulgate). That restricted Scriptural access to those who could read Hebrew and Greek or at a pinch Latin, which is to say to the educated elite.

In fact, even in the century immediately before Lancelot Andrewes and his team produced the KJV, such translators risked their lives. William Tyndale, whose own translation formed the basis of the KJV, was in 1536 burned at the stake for his trouble.

One could argue in favour of such exclusivity, if not necessarily in favour of the method of its enforcement. Regardless of the language it’s in, the Bible is more easily misunderstood than understood by those not trained in theology, philosophy and textual analysis. Priestly mediation is thus essential for most believers, provided, of course that the priests themselves possess the necessary qualifications.

In the past, that was taken for granted; now, less so. In any case, it’s possible to argue against the very idea of vernacular rendering – even though, ignorant as I am of the original scriptural languages, I myself would be at a disadvantage. (The only thing I have in common with Shakespeare is that I too have “small Latin and less Greeke”.)

But even conceding the validity of vernacular translations, I still disagree with Lewis when he insists, in a characteristically Protestant way, that Biblical texts should be instantly comprehensible to even uneducated readers. To that end, they shouldn’t be written in a language other than the one people speak.

Now, polling my Orthodox friends, I hardly ever find any who are fluent in Church Slavonic. Yet every Sunday they are exposed, with no visible ill effects, to the Mass largely celebrated in that language. They don’t seem to suffer from the gap separating the language of the street from that of the liturgy.

Until the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), millions of world Catholics happily celebrated Mass in Latin, even though, unlike Lancelot Andrewes and his friends, they didn’t typically converse in that language. This goes to show that for almost 2,000 years people accepted the existence of liturgical languages different from those they spoke.

The Catholic Church decided to go populist then, and at about the same time Anglicans began to rebel, at first meekly, then aggressively, against the greatest religious texts in the English language, the KJV and the Prayer Book. Both denominations suddenly felt an acute need for more up-to-date replacements.

(In some Protestant denominations, such populism produced texts along the lines of “Don’t dis your Mum and your Dad, it ain’t cool”, which presumably would make Mr Lewis happy had he lived long enough to enjoy such prose.)

Since the KJV was Protestant, the Catholic Church dropped it altogether, although it would have been an easy enough matter to make the doctrinally required amendments in the same style. Instead, it produced inoffensive but anodyne texts, lexically and phonetically devoid of any sense of grandeur and rhythm.

For example, anyone who thinks that “have mercy on us” is an improvement on “have mercy upon us” should be taught a remedial lesson in English and have his hearing examined, and I’d even be in favour of public flogging. But at least the Catholic Church has a ready excuse: it had to produce its own vernacular translation after doing to Latin Mass what the Anglicans did to the KJV and the Prayer Book.

The latter, on the other hand, are out of excuses – unless they think that “This ring is a symbol of our marriage” is better than the traditional “With this ring I thee wed”. Empty pews all over Britain testify to the failure of this liturgical populism.

It’s true that people in close, personal communion with Christ don’t need aesthetically perfect accoutrements to maintain that dialogue. But the Church has known from time immemorial that some, perhaps most, believers need help – and some unbelievers need grandiose architecture, a tingling voice and a moving painting to cross the threshold.

Lewis also objected that the language of the KJV is more beautiful than the Greek of the Evangelists and Apostles, who were no poets and scholars (although Luke and Paul were educated men). True, but the people who produced the translation were just that, and they decided that beautiful prose might add something to the appeal of eternal truth without taking anything away from it.

People who insist that church art belongs only in the church display the sort of dogmatic rigorism I find both admirable and alien. Let’s just say I won’t feel guilty next time I put on the recording of Christa Ludwig singing Erbarme dich.

Anyone who possesses even a cursory familiarity with history will know that the much-vaunted special relationship between Britain and the US is rather one-sided.

It’s certainly not a relationship of equals, at least not in any economic or strategic sense. In such matters, Britain is the junior partner if she is a partner at all.

Tender recollections of the two countries fighting side by side during the Second World War don’t cut much ice. After all, both were also allied with Stalin’s USSR, possibly the most diabolical regime the world has ever known.

That alliance was a marriage of convenience, and so is the special relationship, such as it is or probably isn’t. Still, the in-coming US president has often spoken about the warm feelings he has for Britain, where his mother was from.

And as I understand Trump, personal likes and dislikes matter to him. His view of life seems to be circumscribed by “the art of the deal”, to quote the title of his book. Put into practice, such transactional Weltanschauung can only work if the two parties to the deal trust each other, and Trump, who spent much of his business life in the murky world of Atlantic City casinos, probably thinks in Atlantic City categories. Nothing is just business; it’s also personal.

In addition to that – or probably as an extension of that – he is notoriously sensitive to disrespect. If he isn’t seen as The Man, he has to deal from a position of weakness, which is seldom a guarantee of success.

Paying respect or, better still, obeisance to Trump is a shortcut on the road to his heart. Liking Donald is the trait he most values in people, and never mind other traits. A foreign dictator may be a mass murderer and a despot, but a few well placed compliments can put him on Trump’s good side.

This I believe was expertly utilised by Russia’s KGB rulers who put their tradecraft to profitable use. As a result, during his first term Trump said he trusted Putin more than his own intelligence services.

It’s Putin that Trump now has a special relationship with, though that doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll be acting in Russia’s rather than America’s interests. But it does mean that Trump will find it easier to do a deal with Putin than with a politician who hasn’t genuflected before him or paid him fulsome compliments.

Conversely, a foreign politician who disses The Donald (I’m sure he thinks in such terms) will never endear himself to him, and neither will his country even if it shares much history and culture with America.

Morbid sensitivity to slights is a salient feature of any narcissistic character, and Trump’s is as narcissistic as they come. We all hate to see our loved ones insulted and attacked, and that goes for self-love as well. “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance,” wrote Oscar Wilde, and Trump’s romance is still going strong after all these years.

I am not offering this character sketch as criticism, although I do find Trump’s character rather off-putting. This outline is just an attempt to point out the task facing foreign statesmen and diplomats who’ll have to find an accommodation with Trump’s government. The task is arduous, and I fear we’ll have to discover exactly how arduous over the next four years.

For Starmer’s government – I hate to call it British – can forget about having a special relationship with Trump’s administration. They’d do well to have any working relationship with it at all. Members of the Starmer cabinet, including Sir Keir himself, have said so many nasty things about Trump over the years that even a man with a much thicker skin would feel the stings. Or, more to the point in this case, wouldn’t forgive them.

The Mail has kindly put together a small, by no means exhaustive, collage of the insults members of the Starmer cabinet have flung at Trump. All you have to do is decide whether my take on his character is true to life and, if so, what kind of special relationship Britain can hope to have with the US while Trump is in the White House.

1 Sir Keir Starmer: “Humanity and dignity. Two words not understood by President Trump.”

2 Angela Rayner (Deputy Prime Minister): “The violence he [Trump] has unleashed is terrifying, and the Republicans who stood by him have blood on their hands.”

3 Liz Kendall (Work and Pensions Secretary): “Like most bullies, Trump doesn’t like it up him.”

4 Louise Haigh (Transport Secretary): “We must stand up to this belligerent and reckless President.”

5 Steve Reed (Environment Secretary): “The rest of us will show the racist bigot what we really think of him.”

6 Hilary Benn (Northern Ireland Secretary): “As well as deliberately sowing division, Donald Trump demeans the office of President of the United States.”

7 Wes Streeting (Health Secretary): “Odious, sad, little man. Imagine being proud to have that as your President… an imbecile.”

8 David Lammy (Foreign Secretary): “Racist and KKK/neo-Nazi sympathiser… a troll… beneath contempt… a tyrant in a toupee… a profound threat to the international order.”

9 Yvette Cooper (Home Secretary): “Watching Trump has been truly, truly chilling… vitriol and abuse.”

10 Jonathan Reynolds (Business Secretary): “Disregards all but himself – like Brexiters.”

11 Ed Miliband (Energy Secretary): “A racist, misogynistic, self-confessed groper.”

12 Lisa Nandy (Culture Secretary): “Human rights nightmare.”

13 Anneliese Dodds (International Development Minister): “Doesn’t heed democratic values.”

14 Peter Kyle (Science Secretary): “History was always going to be the best judge of Trump and his snivelling acolytes.”

15 Lucy Powell (Leader of the House of Commons): “Can Donald Trump just butt out.”

Some of our papers have suggested that Trump may make Britain exempt from the protectionist tariffs he will impose on everyone else. It has even been mooted that he may sign a free trade agreement with Britain, which would be hugely beneficial to us.

(In his first term, that agreement fell through because we refused to import American chlorine-washed chicken legs. You might say Britain chickened out but you shouldn’t – a pun is right next to sarcasm as supposedly the lowest form of wit.)

That strikes me as a pipe dream, in light of everything said above. But I’ll be happy to reassess my evaluation of Trump’s character if he can rise above his wounded ego to such an extent.

Whether or not that happens, I’ll do my best to separate my view of Trump’s personality from my judgement of his policies. As I said the other day, the policies already revealed or hinted at are more appealing than their source.