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Back in the 1930s, the Bolsheviks and the Nazis had their admirers in the West. However, not many people this side of George Bernard Shaw admired both at the same time.

Putin is in that sense a unique figure because swarms of his fans can be found at either extreme of the political spectrum. Assorted ‘right-wing populists’ love the Russian chieftain, but then so do such undeniably left-wing figures as Corbyn.

Even people called conservatives in America, Pat Buchanan to name one, adore Putin, as do their British counterparts, such as Peter Hitchens and Christopher Booker. It’s as if some present-day Paul proclaimed “there is neither Right nor Left for you are all one in Vlad.”

Why do most people outside the political mainstream, and even some within it, fall over themselves to extol Putin’s non-existent virtues?

Some of it may be ignorance, although that’s often too simplistic an explanation. Sometimes it isn’t: I’ve talked to Putin admirers who knew shockingly little about Russia.

But surely the gentlemen I’ve mentioned know enough about the crimes committed by Putin’s regime, inside and outside Russia. They may be aware that the Russian economy is criminalised from top to bottom, that money laundering is the only growth industry there, that elementary civil liberties have been suppressed, that Russia is waging hybrid war against the West and so forth.

One suspects that even many on either political extreme know such facts, and yet their panegyrics for Putin lose none of their volume. Why?

The simple answer is that both the Right and the Left admire Putin because the former believe his propaganda and the latter don’t.

The propaganda is balm to a Right-leaning soul. Putin’s Goebbelses position Russia’s kleptofascist junta as a champion of conservative values, strong government, the vital importance of the Church and all those lovely things.

The music is so beautiful that it’s impossible to turn the radio off, and who cares about the false notes – it’s the intent that counts. The listeners either don’t realise or refuse to accept that false notes are all there is.

Traditional values are only as good as the tradition. Putin’s Russia packages Stalinism with the worst features of tsarism and calls it conservatism. So it is, but this isn’t the conservatism of Burke or Chateaubriand, nor even of Pat Buchanan.

The same goes for strong government: it all depends on how it uses its strength. Margaret Thatcher’s government was strong, so was Fidel Castro’s – can we agree that strength isn’t good ipso facto? As to Putin’s religiosity, this is indeed Pauline.

Overnight KGB officers and Party secretaries treating faith as a criminal offence became pious Christians who cross themselves before government meetings.

When I see videos of that travesty, I strain to find somewhere in the background the horse they fell off when they heard the voice of God. Taking that obscene spectacle seriously takes not just suspension but elimination of disbelief.

Forgetting Putin’s gang for a second, it’s useful to remember that when a Russian talks about the Church, he means something different from what the word connotes to a Westerner.

I’m not going to talk about filioque and other doctrinal differences between Eastern and Western Christianity, crucially important though they are. What’s relevant here is the existential difference between the civilisations the two Churches have produced, and what place they occupy in each.

If Christendom appeared at the confluence of Jerusalem and Athens, for the Russian Church these are only two of the feeding tributaries. The others, more relevant to my theme, are Byzantium and the Golden Horde.

The Byzantine Church was an aspect of absolutist government, and its important function was to sacralise the power of the Caesar. Political power, religion and wealth were so organically fused together as to become one.

Had Russia got her Christianity from the proselytising Catholic orders, her history might have taken a different course. As it was, her religion came courtesy of Byzantine theocaesarism, and her politics came from the same source, with a later admixture of Mongol absolutism.

Hence every attempt by the Russian Church to get out of the state’s clutches led to savage suppression, reaching its height under Tsar Alexis and his son Peter (the Great). Under the latter, the Church was placed under the auspices of a secular government department, the Holy Synod.

Still, under the tsars the Church was able to attend to its main business and even produce outstanding thinkers: though its supervisors were laymen, they were still Christians who had to pay spiritual fealty to the Church.

In their impetuous youth, the Bolsheviks set out to wipe out the Church altogether. Some 40,000 priests were murdered in all sorts of imaginative ways on Lenin’s watch, and that was before Stalin got going.

However, destroying the Church proved easier than destroying the religious yearning that has been with man since before he learned to build houses. As Stalin’s empire was being overrun by Nazi panzers, Lenin’s heir realised that his power could do with some sacralisation too.

The Church was brought back into the fold: it agreed to be used lest it might be abused. It then suffered the indignity of being placed not just under the government, but specifically under its secret police, which was responsible for bolstering Russian patriotism.

This fine tradition perseveres. The current patriarch Kirill (ne Vladimir Gundiaev, aka ‘Agent Mikhailov’) is a career KGB operative – as were his only two rivals for the office.

Rather than having undergone a spiritual catharsis, Putin and his jolly friends have prostituted the Church to make it serve their propaganda ends, both at home and abroad.

The propaganda sways the Western Right, who accept as real the lies peddled by Russian media. They’re so starved of Christian or any other virtues in their own governments that they are willing to believe in the Emperor’s clothes.

The left-wingers’ eyesight is better: they see that all this talk about tradition is just propaganda. Realising that Putin’s regime is a direct heir to Stalin’s, its reincarnation in different clothes at a different time, they’re prepared to overlook all that conservative camouflage woven out of a tissue of lies.

The old truism about extremes converging seems to be vindicated. But a truism is different from truth. In this case the underlying supposition is that the two extremes set out to be different and then somehow drift together.

But that’s not true: if they drift together, they weren’t that different in the first place. It’s just that their similarity lies deeper than any superficial divergences in policies and pronouncements.

Both extreme worship power as such, which is pointed out often enough. But underneath this is the same religious yearning I mentioned earlier, a craving for an ideal kingdom not of this world.

Except that modernity has trained people to accept the purely physical boundaries of this world, with nothing beyond it any longer imaginable. Hence that ideal kingdom has to be found not in heaven but elsewhere in earth.

Looking at our politics, Westerners of all political hues despair. Those on the Right and on the Left may hate their governments for different reasons, but hate them they do. Yet, as Cicero put it, dum spiro spero.

No longer capable of investing their hope in God, people are ready to invest it into any fraudulent pyramid scheme, including what Nietzsche called “brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers.”

Both the Right and the Left, bereft of any realistic hope of bliss at home, look at Putin’s criminal regime and see brothers where only enemies exist. They want to believe so much that they’ll believe anything.

Mr – or, to use the honorific he doubtless prefers – Comrade Corbyn has snubbed the Queen’s invitation to attend the state dinner in honour of President Trump.

Perhaps it’s worth pointing out to Corbyn that a state occasion at Buckingham Palace is different from dinner at a friend’s house. Thus in my private capacity (which is the only capacity in which I can act), I’ve been known to decline dinner invitations if I didn’t like the company.

For example, I’d probably not attend a dinner where another guest would be Corbyn, whom I find sufficiently revolting to put me off my food. However, in the unlikely, nay impossible, event that such an invitation was issued by Her Majesty, I’d feel duty-bound to attend – whatever the guest list.

Being rude to one’s friends is par for the course: that’s what friends are for, though not all they are for. However, being rude to the Queen means disrespecting her realm, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Such rudeness goes beyond bad manners even if manifested by an ordinary subject. But when the Queen’s invitation is thrown in her face by a high official, it shows instantly and undeniably that such a person isn’t fit to be a high official.

Admittedly, Mr Trump isn’t the kind of man I’d welcome at my own dinner table. We’re all God’s children and all that but, if a particular God’s child is a narcissistic, functionally illiterate vulgarian, I, my wife and our other likely guests wouldn’t enjoy his company, and neither would he enjoy ours.

But this is neither here nor there. For when Trump is on a state visit to Britain, it doesn’t matter how narcissistic, illiterate or vulgar he is. What matters is that he is the head of state in a country friendly to ours, and allied with it for some 200 years.

In any case, since Corbyn is every bit as narcissistic, illiterate and vulgar as Trump, this can’t be the reason for his boorishness. And I do hope he didn’t turn down the Queen’s invitation because he didn’t expect to have a good time.

Apparently, the last time he attended such an event he described it as “one of the most boring nights I have ever had”. That may well be, but state occasions aren’t attended for their entertainment value. They are among those things that come with the territory for leaders of Her Majesty’s Loyal (in Corbyn’s case glaringly disloyal) Opposition. You do it not because you want to, but because you have to.

Perhaps, rather than trying to second-guess Corbyn’s reasons, we should listen to the man himself. So here are his own words: “Theresa May should not be rolling out the red carpet for a state visit to honour a president who rips up vital international treaties, backs climate change denial and uses racist and misogynist rhetoric.”

Now “racist and misogynist rhetoric” doesn’t belong here at all, for if Trump ever indulges in such affronts to Corbyn’s sensibilities, he does so in private. I’m not aware of a single racist or misogynist word Trump has uttered ex cathedra in his capacity of US president – and it’s in that capacity that he’s visiting Britain.

As to ripping up “vital international treaties”, which ones would they be? The only treaties Trump has ripped up are one that was guaranteed to turn Iran into a nuclear power, with deadly consequences for America’s and Britain’s allies; and also the Luddite Paris Accords, penalising the West for the environmental damage largely perpetrated by the Third World.

This dovetails neatly with “climate change denial”, which is among the most serious crimes against New Age pieties. Corbyn is obviously unhappy that Trump refuses to let his knee jerk whenever yet another fad makes a claim, especially if both the fad and the claim are bogus and anti-Western.

All this means is that Trump’s politics differ from Corbyn’s, as if we didn’t know that already. Hence Corbyn refuses to break bread with a leader whose political convictions clash with his own.

Splendid, glad we’ve established that. But logically the opposite must also be true: Corbyn has to see nothing wrong with the politics of those leaders with whom he has happily sat down to dinner.

Hence a quick scan of such kindred souls will provide an optically perfect insight into the convictions, and personality, of our likely next PM. So here goes, in no particular order:

Corbyn has attended a state dinner with Xi Jinping, president of a communist country running what effectively is a slave economy, suppressing free speech and murdering or imprisoning dissidents.

Comrade Jeremy has described as his friends members of Hamas and Hezbollah, murderous terrorist organisations that mysteriously fail to activate Corbyn’s revulsion at racism and misogyny. As he put it: “It will be my pleasure and honour to host an event in Parliament where our friends from Hezbollah will be speaking.”

Clearly, he doesn’t regard as racist a heartfelt commitment to murdering Jews, accompanied by regrets that Hitler didn’t quite finish the job – even though the Holocaust never happened, and if it did, it was the Jews’ own fault. As to the Muslims’ treatment of women, if that’s not misogyny, I don’t know what is.

Incidentally, Trump is perhaps the best friend Israel has ever had among US presidents, which alone would suffice to make Corbyn detest him – hatred of Israel, ideally as an expression of virulent anti-Semitism, seems to be an ironclad criterion for membership in his Labour party.

Who else? Oh yes, Comrade Jeremy never had any compunction against sharing a meal with IRA murderers, including Gerry Adams himself. In fact, he timed such friendly get-togethers to coincide with IRA atrocities.

He met Adams in the 1980s, when the IRA was waging a war of terror against Britain. A fortnight after the IRA blew up the Tory conference, killing five people, Corbyn had tea at Westminster with two convicted murderers. And he did the same in 1996, the year of the bombings in Manchester and the Docklands.

Corbyn also went to Syria to meet Assad, with his trip funded by the Palestinian lobbyists who also organised an event at which Jews were blamed for the Holocaust. I wonder if afterwards Jeremy described Assad as a gas.

And of course he’s a self-proclaimed friend and admirer of Maduro, a communist who is equally good at bankrupting a previously rich Venezuela and driving armoured cars over those who object.

Clarity is beginning to emerge. Corbyn’s criteria for selecting his dinner companions include a propensity for mass murder, anti-Semitism, hatred of Britain and her allies, communist ideology and general criminality.

President Trump should be proud he doesn’t qualify.  

Dear me, ever so sorry. Is that what they call a Freudian slip? Yes, I suppose it is. I mean hands of course.

And I do mean it: I think Penny Mordaunt may well make a damn good Defence Secretary, better than just about any of her parliamentary colleagues I can think of.

It was five years ago that Miss Mordaunt appeared in a swimsuit on Splash!. Until then I hadn’t heard of her, but then I don’t follow Westminster politics as closely as I should.

However, the photographs of the semi-clad Undersecretary of State for Something or Other impressed me, and not only because of her shapely thighs. It’s just that I couldn’t think of any other female Tory politician who would have posed that way, at least while in office.

Margaret Thatcher? Be serious. Anne Widdecombe? Please. Esther McVey? Well, I suppose she might, but hasn’t yet.

Anyway, my curiosity piqued, I looked beyond Miss Mordaunt’s thighs, meaning at her record, and what did you think I meant? Amazingly, the more I looked, the more I liked – and I thought I’d never say that about a politician.

In fact, although my own thighs are unlikely to excite anybody’s imagination, I feel we have much in common.

Miss Mordaunt is a Royal Navy reservist, who once actually served as an acting sub-lieutenant, which roughly corresponds to my reserve rank in the Soviet army (all university graduates got that after some perfunctory training).

She studied philosophy at university, which happens to be my favourite subject. She was in PR; I was in advertising. She likes off-colour jokes – so do I. As shown by her appearance on Splash!, she doesn’t seem to take herself too seriously – neither do I. She has a taste for pranks, as do I.

In fact, on a dare from her fellow naval officers, Miss Mordaunt once repeatedly worked a rude word for penis into her parliamentary speech.

I’ve never been in a position to do so, but probably would if I could. In fact, my public speeches have at times featured the kind of jokes that elicited Oh-my-God gasps from the audience (one of them was based on a foreign leader misspelling “can’t”).

On a more serious note, Miss Mordaunt detests the EU as much as I do and has voted on her principles when opposing Mrs May’s deal, or rather double deal. In spite of that she has managed to stay on the right side of the Remainer PM, and that’s where our similarity ends: I wouldn’t have the requisite diplomatic skills.

Add to this Miss Mordaunt’s Christian name, which is the same as my wife’s (although she hates the diminutive form of it), and she’s my kind of girl. Moreover, she may well turn out to be my kind of politician, although, modern politics being what it is, I’m not holding my breath.

I’m sure that feminists around the world are throwing their hats (or perhaps other items of their apparel) up in the air. They must be rejoicing at seeing a woman ascend to one of the top positions in the government of a major Western country.

Just kidding. I know they aren’t rejoicing, as they never did when Margaret Thatcher became PM or Jeane Kirkpatrick US Ambassador to the United Nations. You see, neither Mrs Thatcher (as she then was) nor Mrs Kirkpatrick, both conservative after a fashion, qualified as women in the eyes of feminist activists. Neither, for all her feminine allure, does Miss Mordaunt.

Ever since sex got to be described by the grammatical category of gender, it stopped being sex, hitherto understood as a simple function of a chromosome mix. Sex stopped being biological, physiological, chromosomal, hormonal or what have you.

It became a form of political expression, and the politics it expressed were – and remain – uncompromisingly left-wing. As such, they rise above, or rather drop below, nature, logic and even sanity.

Women who refuse to claim a victimhood status as a way of cocking a snook at every traditional certitude thereby forfeit their womanhood. Womanhood means victimhood or it means nothing.

Race has become like that too. Every pejorative term white racists use to describe blacks has its counterpart in the abusive slurs ideological blacks hurl at those who refuse to reduce their whole personalities to a chromatic incidental.

‘Uncle Tom’, ‘Bounty’, ‘Coconut’ are heard whenever a black person achieves a prominent status. For example, though I’ve never heard the eminent philosopher Thomas Sewell complain about that, I’m sure he has heard such invective many times.

When I just moved from the US to Britain (31 years ago – has it really been so long?), I once talked to an impeccable, Telegraph-reading gentleman. The subject was American blacks, who I said tended to be left-wing.

“They are left-wing,” opined my interlocutor, “because they are black.” “It’s actually the other way around,” I said. “They are black because they are left-wing.”

In the same sense, Penny Mordaunt isn’t really a woman. She may yet become one by taking a wide step to the left and starting to pronounce on the plight of her sisters. But somehow I doubt she will. Then again, I’m idealistic enough to think she’s my kind of girl.     

One of the comments on my yesterday’s piece raised some serious questions that deserve a serious answer.

Here is how a reader responded to my statement that I oppose Catalan secessionism: “…it is strange that someone who believes in conservative localism would be against the regionalism of, for instance, the Catalans. Franco sought to subsume all of the geographical region of Spain under one identity. Such plans are still being attempted by the EU, as well as our Muslim friends. Whatever the source, it must be resisted.”

Franco thereby finds himself in a posthumous company I doubt he would have welcomed in his lifetime. This shows the inherent dangers of allowing superficial similarities to overshadow profound differences.

The EU seeks a unity based on politics. “Our Muslim friends”, on the other hand, wish to unite the world under the aegis of their religion. That’s a fundamental difference, as great in its way as the one between the EU and the Holy Roman Empire.

The latter loosely united European states on an ecclesiastical basis, while leaving plenty of room for them to keep and nurture their national cultures, economic arrangements and politics. This is the kind of European Union I’d welcome today, should the remotest possibility of such a settlement exist.

On the other hand, I’m opposed to both the EU and especially to the threat of a pan-European caliphate because I see both as tyrannical and mortally dangerous to everything I hold sacred. Thus it’s possible to welcome some types of unity while dreading others.

As to Franco, it wasn’t he who “sought to subsume all of the geographical region of Spain under one identity”. It was dynastic marriages that did that, and long before little Francisco was even a twinkle in his Daddy’s eye.

The one in the twelfth century incorporated Catalonia into the Kingdom of Aragon; the one in the fifteenth century integrated Aragon (and therefore Catalonia) with Castile. So do let’s blame Ferdinand and Isabella for a united Spain, not the late Caudillo who, as a traditionalist conservative, fought to preserve Spain as she had been for half a millennium.

But the question remains: Is there an inherent contradiction between championing traditional localism while at the same time opposing Catalan separatism – or, extending the argument, that of Scotland and other constituent parts of the United Kingdom?

That puts into focus the title above. ‘The great larceny of modernity’ is the term I use to describe the transition from Christendom to another, modern, civilisation that was largely inspired by its violent rebellion against Christianity and the civilisation it had created.

However, discarding one civilisation to usher in a successor isn’t the same as a scientist abandoning one theory in favour of another. The old civilisation may be knocked off its perch outwardly, but it can’t be fully uprooted from the consciousness and instincts of the people weaned on it.

That’s why successful revolutionaries always strive to destroy the house of the old civilisation, while looting its furnishings and moving them, appropriately vandalised, to the lodging of a new civilisation.

For example, if you look at the revolutionary slogans of post-Christian modernity, you’ll notice their tripartite form regardless of where and when they were concocted.

Starting from the French “liberté, egalité, fraternité”, one could site the American “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness”, the Russian “vsia vlast sovetam” (all power to the Soviets) or the German “ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (one people, one nation, one leader). And even a somewhat less significant twentieth century revolution had to chip in with a vapid ‘Work harder, produce more, build Grenada!’

What we are witnessing here is the first stage of larceny: the revolutionaries sensed that the world around them was alive with Trinitarian music. Since people’s ears were attuned to it, they were predisposed to respond to similar sounds even if they conveyed a different meaning.

In a similarly devious way the linear, teleological nature of Christian eschatology was transformed into the secular doctrine of progress.

Unlike the Eastern mind trained to respond to circular, static philosophies, the Western mind had been conditioned by its philosophy to expect a dynamic linear movement.

With an enviable sleight of hand, modernity replaced the kingdom of God as the final destination of linear development with the eudemonic idea of happiness as the ultimate goal of life – which, courtesy of St Anselm, had been known since the eleventh century as a sure recipe for amorality.

In the same vein, the Christian concept of equality before omnipotent, merciful God was vulgarised into a worldly equality before an omnipotent if less than merciful state; Christian inviolable value of every person became ‘human rights’; ennobling Christian charity was turned into the corrupting welfare state; reason as a tool for understanding the creation of rational God was turned into soulless secular rationality.

And of course the sublime idea of Christianity (and its civilisation) bringing all peoples together into a single commonwealth was eventually perverted into producing such an obviously wicked contrivance as the EU.

The important thing to remember is that the anti-Christian rebellion was inspired not so much by a desire to create as by an urge to destroy.

It’s no coincidence that the first wholly atheist century, the twentieth, brought about the destruction of every traditional empire. Whatever we may think of, say, the Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns or Romanovs, it’s hard to deny that their empires were infinitely preferable to their immediate secular successors.

But the chaps wielding the battering rams of modernity hadn’t considered the pros and cons before wreaking their mayhem. They were driven by a destructive animus above all, however totally it was camouflaged by demagoguery about progress, liberation, equality or whatever.

All this applies in spades to the perversion of traditional Christian localism as the bedrock of any political dispensation. This developed as a revolution against the statist collectivism of the Greco-Roman world with its overall conception of man, nature and reality.

For Christianity was indeed a revolution, the only truly successful one in history. It stressed the autonomous value of the individual and built its political dispensation from there up. Hence the family became the most essential building block of society (you’ll notice how systematically and passionately the ensuing modernity has been destroying the family).

Familial local institutions, such as parish, guild, township, village commune formed a cocoon  protecting the family from the central political power of the princes. Thus even that most absolute of monarchs, Louis XIV, had more power over his glamorous courtiers than over the lowliest of peasants.

That familial localism was destroyed by all modern states, regardless of their ostensible ideology. The family and institutions based on it got to be seen as competitors to the burgeoning power of the central state. That’s why they had to be destroyed – but with an element of larceny thrown in yet again.

The local self-government of small communities has been replaced by the post-Christian notion of national self-determination as a natural entitlement of every ethnic group, no matter how lacking in size or self-sufficiency.

That cause has been faithfully served by every enemy of traditional European institutions because it was seen as a powerful weapon against them. The First World War, the final violent assault on traditional Europe, is a great example of that underlying impulse.

Thus Woodrow Wilson, a politician whose sinister influence tends to be underestimated, was at the same time a fanatic of a single world government and a great champion of national self-determination.

There was no contradiction there at all, at least not to a modern mind. The first was the end; the second, the means. National self-determination fanatically pursued is bound to tear asunder Europe’s traditional commonwealths – QED.

However, the ensuing independence is as bogus as most things about modern politics. For, having left the organic, historical arrangement in existence for centuries, those newly independent countries seamlessly pass into real bondage to the Johnny-come-lately contrivance of the EU.

What do you think will happen to Catalonia or, more relevant, Scotland when they leave the yoke of their traditional association? They’ll become EU members within months, possibly weeks, losing in the process the not inconsiderable autonomy they enjoyed before.

Thus Catalan – or for that matter any other European – separatism will only increase the size of a political setup about which my correspondent clearly feels as I do.

To conclude, political issues are much more nuanced and complex than they appear on the surface. They aren’t easily reducible to catchy, simple slogans. Simple tends to be simplistic and eventually destructive. Just look at the slogans sited above.

Most people suffer from a touch of solipsism when observing political events in other countries, especially those close to their own.

We look at the riots in France, the influx of millions of Muslims into Germany or – more to my today’s point – the elections in Spain and take a daring mental leap from those countries to Britain, looking for parallels.

However, besides the common civilisational thread tying all Western countries together, each has its own particular history, culture and political idiosyncrasies.

Alas, few of us possess enough experience, knowledge and sensitivity to appreciate fully such subtle differences. Instead we look for obvious similarities, trying on foreign clothes to see if they fit our own body politic.

Other countries become a prism through which we look at our own, and it’s in that spirit that I followed the elections in Spain.

Briefly, although Spain’s governing Socialists won the snap election, they didn’t win a majority and will have to seek coalition partners, probably in parties to their left.

One would think that although the conservative Popular Party lost half of its seats, it would still be a better partner. But PP is at odds with the Socialists on the issue of Catalan independence, which it opposes. 

Yet the most interesting result is the success of Vox, a party that’s variously described as populist, extreme right-wing or Francoist. Since Franco’s death in 1975, the party has only once gained a parliamentary seat. This time it won 24 of them.

This may be a reflection of a growing trend. Parties similar to Vox are gaining a greater share of voice, and increasingly of vote, throughout Europe.

I manfully accept the charge of ignorance when it comes to the ins and outs of Spain’s politics. This even though I once had too much Rioja Alta at lunch in Madrid and joined a massive demonstration against the Socialist government that had just set some ETA terrorists free.

However, my fellow demonstrators detected a note of mockery in my heavily accented shouts of “¡No mas concesiones a ETA!” and “¡Viva España!”. They began to look peeved, and Penelope had to drag me away to safety before my drunken enthusiasm got us killed.

In a similarly lubricated outburst I also once screamed “¡Viva Generalissimo Franco!” when driving through a largely communist crowd in Barcelona, but there I was sober enough to floor the accelerator pedal in good time.

However, this experience doesn’t qualify me to attempt a scholarly analysis of Spain’s politics. Hence I look at Vox and wonder whether I’d vote for a similar party in Britain.

All I have to go by are newspaper reports listing the key planks of Vox’s programme. Scanning them I mentally tick those with which I agree.

From what I can glean, Vox opposes: multiculturalism [tick], unrestricted migration [tick], radical feminism [tick], abortion [tick], homomarriage [tick], laws against gender violence [tick, whatever that means], any concessions to the Catalan and Basque secessionists [tick, a more tentative one].

So, seeing that I endorse Vox’s programme, would I have voted for it if I were Spanish? More important, would I vote for a similar party in Britain if one existed? The answer to that question is a resolute “that depends”.

I’m wary of politicians, parties or groups that define themselves negatively, in terms of things they hate, rather than things they love. And if the thing they love is blood and soil nationalism, I’m even more wary.

Judging by Vox’s opposition to homomarriage and especially abortion, it combines some Christian inputs with its neoliberal economic ideas and a traditional liberal support for a powerful central state.

That suggests some intellectual muddle for there’s more to Christian politics than just opposition to abortion and homomarriage. One constituent is a preference for localism over centralism and a lukewarm attitude to neoliberal economics, particularly when it’s raised to the status of a social and moral panacea.

At least a Christian element is present there, whereas none exists in similar British groups. These are crystal clear on things they hate, typically the EU and Muslim immigration, and disconcertingly hazy on things they love.

That’s hardly surprising because such causes bring under their banners not only conservatives like my friends and me, who see them in a broad cultural, social and political context, but also fascisoid thugs like Tommy Robinson who simply detest foreigners, especially chromatically different ones.

I’d love to see, say, UKIP become a real conservative party, supplanting the one that bears this sobriquet though it’s no longer entitled to it. But that’s impossible even in theory, for UKIP draws its support from groups across the whole spectrum that otherwise have nothing in common.

History shows that, when conservative gentlemen and fascisoid thugs form a single party, eventually the latter oust the former. Thus, if either UKIP or the Brexit party ever gains an electoral victory, it’ll be taken over by the Tommy Robinson types, not someone like Gerard Batten or even that friend of Putin Nigel Farage.

Such a prospect terrifies me almost as much as the more likely victory of Corbyn’s Labour. Almost but not quite. I’m a firm believer in the ad hoc political principle of ABC: Anyone But Corbyn.

Hence I’d vote against Corbyn regardless of whom he were up against. For the same reason, I wouldn’t vote for any marginal party just to register my contempt for the Tories: the contempt is strong, but such a vote could let Corbyn in. So I’d pinch my nostrils and vote Tory.

Similarly, I’d vote for the Tories if they were opposed by any party led by the likes of Tommy Robinson. And if I were Spanish… well, in all honesty I don’t know enough about Spain’s politics to have a strong view.

I like Vox’s programme more than any other on offer, but countries aren’t governed by programmes. They are governed by people who most of them use political programmes to gain power. How they’ll act when they’ve gained it is anybody’s guess.

It all comes down to the situation common to all mature, or rather senescent, democracies: people vote not for but against. They support what they see as the lesser of two evils because they are faced with the evil of two lessers.

It’s useful to remember that, while not all populist parties are fascist, all fascist parties are populist, and it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference when they’re out of power. And when they are in power, it’s sometimes too late.

On historical evidence, we must also beware of single-issue politicians – even if we agree with the single issue. Thus I’m deeply concerned about the Islamisation of Europe, but I hope this cause may be championed by conservatives, not fascisoid thugs.

If you detect a note of relativism in all this, you’re right. But the relativism isn’t mine – it’s the effluvia exuded by modern politics. Much as we’d like to breathe a cleaner political air, it doesn’t exist.

When a Duma delegation recently visited North Korea, one of its members jubilantly announced: “We are kindred souls!”

He meant that the kinship is based on both countries suffering under the yoke of sanctions, all completely undeserved. But the meeting between Vlad and Kim in Vladivostok the other day established other reasons for the two rogue regimes to feel close affinity.

They are fused together by their shared reliance on nuclear threats as a way of staying in power. That scarecrow adorns their field in which nothing grows, other than the weeds of a pampered nomenklatura blowing billions on assorted monuments to bad taste around the world.

Other than that, North Koreans are starving, as are the Russians, albeit so far on a smaller scale. Things like indoor plumbing are beyond the reach of some 20 per cent of them, and I bet that proportion is much higher in Kim’s bailiwick.

In any normal country such leaders would be ousted, and in any subnormal country probably also Ceaușescued, Saddamed or, if you’d rather, Gaddafied. Obviously, no such normal or subnormal outcomes appeal to Vlad and Kim.

Both are casting envious glances at China, a country occupying a position between North Korea and Russia on the dictatorship scale. China is marginally less oppressive than the former and marginally more so than the latter, but with one crucial difference.

China took to heart the old saw “if you can’t beat them, join them – and beat them at their own game”. Her murderous dictators are relying on the West’s own institutions to gain respectability first and dominance second – and not a particularly distant second at that.

Using China’s traditional business acumen and her unlimited supply of cheap, practically slave, labour, the Peking tyrants flood the West with goods and finance, gradually moving in to colonise parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America – and threatening to do the same to Europe.

In the past 10 years, China has invested $318 billion in European assets, including some strategic industries. But that’s only on the surface. Underneath the surface are 355 mergers and joint ventures for which no terms were disclosed.

A nation counting 1,000-year eggs among its culinary delights isn’t short of patience. The Chinese will continue to buy Europe bit by bit until they find themselves in a position to dictate terms.

Their nuclear weapons are there mainly to discourage any rash countermeasures, and also possibly to make it easier to conquer Taiwan when the time comes. For the time being China doesn’t need to threaten anyone directly – she’s doing fine as it is.

The Chinese option is off limits even for Russia, never mind North Korea, which has no money to buy foreign industries. Conversely, Vlad and his gang are awash with purloined cash, and they’ve probably laundered more of it in the West than the Chinese have invested.

But therein lies the key difference: the Chinese invest; the Russians launder. Once it’s scrubbed clean, the money is used to create a philistine paradise complete with yachts, palaces and expensive whores (not just those of the sexual variety – some politicians and hacks also reach out for Vlad’s rouble).

Yet one thing Vlad and his gang can’t buy with their loot is respect. They do however know that fear is a reasonable substitute. Kim knows it too, and the two evil regimes overlap on the common denominator of hysterical nuclear threats.

Vlad rattles his big bombs to persuade Western leaders that no serious problem anywhere in the world can be solved without his participation. That strategy succeeded in Syria, with Trump’s acquiescence. In fact, his eagerness to give Putin a foothold in the Middle East adds fuel to the burning questions that the Mueller report has failed to answer.

Since other Western countries are sometimes more recalcitrant, it never hurts to remind them – as Putin’s Goebbelses do round the clock – that they could be turned to radioactive dust at the push of a button.

North Korea can’t have such global ambitions; hers are strictly regional. The countries Kim wants to keep in perpetual fear are Japan and especially South Korea, which has had the audacity to use the same people and geographic conditions to create a thriving economy, while Koreans north of the border are undernourished if they are lucky or starved to death if they are not.

China, which accounts for 90 per cent of North Korea’s trade, could put an end to Kim and all his nuclear games in one fell swoop. But she doesn’t want to: Kim can be used as the bad cop to keep China’s Asian competitors on the straight and narrow.

Vlad is using Kim for the same purpose, with the added benefit of keeping America nervous. And nervous America is, as any person would be facing a madman brandishing a razor. That’s why Trump keeps making overtures to Kim, trying to sweet-talk him into abandoning his nuclear arsenal.

Kim won’t, however; and Vlad certainly doesn’t want him to. “Denuclearisation can only happen gradually,” he explained. However, Vlad failed to define gradually in any temporal terms. How gradually are we talking, Vlad? A year? A hundred? When hell freezes over?

Actually, added Vlad, for it to happen even on such a nebulous time scale, “North Korea needs guarantees.” Of what exactly?

That no Western country is planning an attack on North Korea? Fine. Though I’m not authorised to speak on any Western government’s behalf, I’m prepared to issue this ironclad guarantee now: Neither the US nor Britain nor France is going to launch a nuclear strike on North Korea if Kim gets rid of his nukes.

Western countries can only ever attack North Korea or, for that matter, Russia in the same sense in which back in 1939 Poland attacked Nazi Germany, and Finland the USSR.

On 31 August, Germans wearing Polish uniforms attacked the radio station at the border town of Gleiwitz. When the next day Germany launched a massive offensive against Poland, it was portrayed as a defensive response to Polish aggression.

On 26 November, the Soviets shelled their own outpost at Mainila on the border with Finland. The shelling was used as a pretext to start an aggressive war against that tiny country – the Soviet Union had to defend itself against the dastardly Finns.

Neither Put-in nor Jong-un will stay in power unless they whip up a state of paranoia at home and fear abroad. Like a thief shouting “Stop thief!” louder than the pursuing crowd, both criminal regimes keep whining about the threat of an imminent attack from the West, hoping that way to stay in power and perhaps even to win some concessions.

Yes, Vlad and Kim are indeed close friends – with both desperately short of any other. In fact, when the UN introduced a resolution condemning Russia’s theft of the Crimea, North Korea was one of only ten countries (other than Russia herself) that voted against.

The others were Armenia, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Well, tell me who your friends are…

P.S. Happy Easter to all my Orthodox readers! Христос воскрес!

In these days of Brexit chaos, things to make us proud are hard to come by. So much more precious then are the recent data showing that we can at least be proud of our leadership in an area not normally associated with Britain: romance.

Continentals, especially those in the bottom half of Europe, always brag about their passionate virility, while mocking the British for their cold, calculating rationalism devoid of any romantic impulse.

Napoleon even went so far as to describe the British as “a nation of shopkeepers”. A nation of shoplifters would be closer to the mark nowadays, but that’s not the point.

The point is that it’s time to abandon the stale, false image of Britain and her people. For it’s precisely in the area of romance that Blighty comfortably leads the way.

Our pupils may lag behind continentals in literacy and numeracy exams, but British youngsters outperform them by a wide margin in pregnancy tests. And, as we’ve just found out, Britain accounts for 55 per cent of all gonorrhoea cases in Europe. So who says romance is dead in perfidious Albion?

Actually, the technical term ‘gonorrhoea’ rather takes the romance out of it, making the condition sound undesirable, perhaps even shameful. However, as Dr Mark Lawton, a sexual health consultant in Liverpool, correctly states, “Shame is not a word that should ever be associated with sexually transmitted infections.”

Hear, hear. In fact, rather than stigmatising gonorrhoea, we should applaud it – hence the nice, warm colloquial name for it, the clap.

For that survey shows that Britons are more capable of love, broadly defined, than anyone else in Europe. It’s people refusing to describe as love a quick tumble in the dark alley behind the pub who should be ashamed of themselves. What matters isn’t the duration of a romance, but it’s sincerity and intensity.

Even more despicable is an attempt to ascribe our record-breaking incidence of the clap to an underuse of condoms during romantic entanglements. Well, at least there aren’t many spoilsports about who blame sexual promiscuity and the general decline in moral standards. Thank God, who everybody knows doesn’t exist, for small favours.

Such archaic notions were rightly jettisoned long ago – people my age remember them sailing out of the window back in the ‘60s. In fact, we were the ones who pushed them that way. And as to using condoms, that’s like smelling a rose through a gas mask.

It’s not as if young Britons aren’t aware of condoms and their use. Why, even kindergarten pupils are taught how to pull a johnny on their pee-pee, when the pee-pee is big enough to be thus enveloped. By the time they reach secondary school, those pupils know all there’s to know about condoms – and reject them for being cold, antiseptic killers of romantic spontaneity.  

Moreover, since clap isn’t exclusively transmitted by the conventional amorous method, many women may balk at having to chew on a bit of impersonal, disembodied latex. No, the clap is caused by romance itself, not by any shortage of its paraphernalia. It’s a tax on love, and as unavoidable as any other taxation.

One must admit – and rejoice! – that modern electronic media make it easier to find the love of one’s life (or perhaps just of an hour in one’s life) than ever before. Things like online dating, chat websites and e-mails put love, and therefore the clap, within easy reach.

The pattern is repeated over and over again. Boy finds girl’s photo on the net. Boy likes what he sees. Boy makes contact. Girl responds favourably. Boy meets girl, say, in the dark alley behind the King’s Head. Boy and girl instantly fall in love. Boy and girl consummate their love with a quick roll in the dirt. Boy and girl introduce themselves (this last step is strictly optional and in fact may be infrequent). After a few days, boy and girl discover they have the clap.

Sweet romance, as they say. In that spirit, I propose the old song “I gave my love a rose…” should be changed to “I gave my love the clap.”

Having written this, I realise how hopelessly behind the times I am by suggesting that it’s the boy who initiates the infectious contact. These days, the girl is just as likely to make the first approach leading to contagion, which is what women’s liberation is all about.

As a lifelong champion of modernity, I hope you’ll join me in a round of clapping applause for our young compatriots who are showing those continentals what’s what.

It’s the British who are the nation of lovers; it’s the British who joyously indulge in public copulation in places like Ibiza – while the locals look on with admiration and envy. Long may it continue.

I thought the time would never come.

Pasted all over my Burgundian village are posters demanding Frexit as a way of re-establishing France’s democracy. Another poster claims that a return to the franc would create 1.2 million jobs.

I’m not sure how they put an exact number on this, but there’s no doubt that the euro hurts France economically.

By adopting a currency that’s the Deutschmark in all but name, the French lost the ability to devalue their own currency and therefore compete with German manufacturers on unit price. That means they lost the ability to compete tout court because German cars and fridges are of higher quality.

The posters confirm what I’ve been noticing for quite some time now: the French have problems not just with Manny Macron, but also with the EU – and they correctly detect the umbilical link between the two.

By ‘the French’, I don’t mean my friends educated at the kind of top schools Manny wants to abolish as a sop to the mob: they all worship the EU the way they no longer worship God. The French who detest the EU are mostly regular folk: shop owners, barbers, plumbers, electricians, nurses.

This is where France is different from Britain: we don’t have such a clear-cut class divide between the Leavers and the Remainers.

Our watershed isn’t social but political. Right-leaning people are Leavers almost to a man, whereas the lefties, with some exceptions, tend to be Remainers. Age could also play a role, with a propensity to support Brexit more noticeable among the older, and therefore wiser, people.

But neither class nor education seems to have a big role to play. For example, my educated British friends are almost all Leavers – but then they neither work for the BBC nor frequent fashionable parties.

Perhaps a wider polling sweep than my own observation would show a certain Brexit bias among the B-, C social groups, but, if so, I’m sure the watershed would be nowhere near as wide as in France.

The reason is simple: though all modern states seek to make themselves more centralised and consequently less accountable, they do so to varying degrees in different countries. Thus Anglophone countries retain vestiges of their ancient traditions of localism, with some of the power exerted from bottom to top.

France has never had such traditions, or certainly not since her absolute monarchy came in to suppress feudal liberties. Both her quasi-monarchic state and her positive law tend to operate from top to bottom, which widens the distance between the state and its subjects.

Even local government exists mainly to convey and enforce central diktats, not to enable small communities to govern themselves as they see fit. That makes local government unwieldy and therefore big.

One can see this simply by looking at the size of the mairies in French towns and villages relative to their population. For example, the mairie of my local village in the picture below could probably accommodate all its 1,500 inhabitants.

All this promotes ‘us vs. them’ sentiments, which are more prevalent than in Britain and especially the US.

When things are going swimmingly, the French don’t resent that state of affairs very much, with their latent resentment seething without bursting out. But when the economy is stagnant, as it is now, the situation changes.

France being France, people take to the streets. That explains the increased popularity of that new fashion accessory, the yellow vest. It also explains the growing resentment of the EU that removes government even farther away from the people. More and more Macron and his jolly friends are seen as little more than EU quislings, out of touch with the French.  

Yesterday Manny tried to diffuse the situation by tossing some bones off his royal table towards the masses hungry for his demise. He’s going to reverse, he declared, France’s inherent dirigisme, with much of life directed from central Paris.

Manny clearly felt like saying he’d do so by personal edict, but then became aware of the inherent paradox and checked himself just in time. Instead he promised to make it easier to hold referendums, which promise, if acted upon, is guaranteed to make mob rule irreversible.

There has never existed a major country successfully governed by direct democracy. People elect their representatives and then trust them to govern on their behalf through institutions.

It’s only when the institutions fail to govern wisely and equitably that referendums are waved before the people. A referendum is a government’s tacit admission of its own ineptitude.

A bit of histrionic demagoguery followed, as it always does when modern politicians talk. Help me, pleaded Manny, to “rebuild the art of being French”.

But that art has never been lost, which is precisely the problem here. The art has been pushed underground by France’s rampant statism and its extreme manifestation in EU membership.

The whole point of the EU is to toss dozens of diverse cultures into a cauldron and boil them into a homogeneous mass devoid of any particular flavour and texture. The French don’t need lessons in being French. Many of them simply realise that it’s difficult under the EU aegis.

Sensing that his presidency is hanging by a thread, Manny then tried to mollify the restless populace with a few mea culpas.  

“In a way,” he said, “I imposed on the French the impatience and the demands that I have for myself and members of the government… I regret it. First of all because that is not who I deeply am and because I think that that did not help my cause.”

But that’s exactly what he deeply is, precisely the type of apparatchik produced by modern politics, especially in France. A small group of supposedly clever people imposing their demands on everybody else is the essence of French politics, which just might work after a fashion if those people are indeed genuinely clever – not when they are Manny.

“I must be more human,” added Manny, implicitly admitting that so far he has been rather less than human. For once, I agree.

“I admire young Greta’s idealism,” writes Stephen Glover, “but why do our politicians lose all reason over climate change?”

Starting from the second half of his headline, it’s not just politicians and not just over climate change. For reason has been excommunicated as a direct, if protracted, result of the Age of Reason – which was in fact a successful attempt to replace true reason with an ersatz surrogate.

Hence, for example, the strained attempts made over the past couple of centuries to explain human behaviour by anything other than by reason making free and conscious choices between sound and unsound, moral and immoral, good and bad.

The likes of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin joined forces with Fraud, Junk and an army of behaviourists to portray man as a puppet whose wires are pulled by forces beyond his control.

The forces may be evolutionary-biological, social or sexual-subconscious or anything else other than man’s own mind. And those exegetes assign to such forces powers that are positively super-divine. God, after all, left man with free will and an ability to make conscious choices based on his own mind and moral sense.

No such weak-kneed liberalism for the apostles of the scientific scam. They preach the notion of a man in bondage to his biological and psychological makeup, only quantitatively different in that respect from animals.

Reason must then be relegated to an inferior status because it makes man too different from beasts for any slapdash theory to survive. None of those evolutionists or psychologists can explain why, while both a man and his dog possess urinary tracts and therefore can relieve themselves on a statue, only man is capable of designing it.

Our anomic, deracinated, ignorant people, shaped by their atheism at best or some diabolical New Age creed at worst, have turned those half-baked theories into self-fulfilling prophecies. Fair enough: keep calling a man a dog, and in due course he’ll start barking.

Hence it’s futile trying to apply rational criteria to an attempt at understanding any serious issue of public import. Things haven’t got to be the way they are because serious people thought the situation through and chose the best way to go.

No, it’s just that some inconsequential yet garrulous people listened to the signals resounding through the atmospheric intellectual vacuum and then let their knees jerk in what they saw as the most promising direction.

People affecting our lives no longer think; they react on reflex. They don’t say things they think true – they say things they feel they have to say for fear of opprobrium. The old dichotomies of right-wrong, true-false, logical-illogical simply don’t come into it.

This takes me back to the first part of Mr Glover’s headline: “I admire young Greta’s idealism, but…”

Now Mr Glover did go out on a limb by voicing some mild, good-natured criticism of Greta Thunberg (not at all like my vituperative attack on that demented, possibly evil child yesterday), along the lines of her being a bit too radical and not sufficiently aware of the economic consequences of her sermons.

That’s commendable, for criticising any climate change activist is these days tantamount to blasphemy, not to say apostasy. A hack guilty of it may well be risking the auto-da-fé of a P45, so Mr Glover gets a B+ for courage.

Alas, he has to be marked down for his use of reason. Why does he admire Greta’s idealism? Does he think any idealism ipso facto worthy of admiration?

What about the idealism of young Muslims who blow themselves up in crowded places? Would Mr Glover write “I admire the idealism of those young Sri Lanka terrorists, but…”?

No? Then how about “I admire Jeremy Corbyn’s idealism, but….” More likely, but still no?

Mr Glover evidently can’t keep his knee from jerking. A reasonable man, he too has been trained not to activate his reason when the buzz of Zeitgeist is in the air. Otherwise he’d realise that idealism is only praise-worthy when the underlying ideal is.

Having made that stride, he could then take another step towards observing that a propensity to idealism seems to be inversely proportionate to the capacity for reason. That’s why the words ‘young’ and ‘idealism’ fit together so snugly.

Until age 25 or so a person’s brain isn’t wired properly, and neither is the person fully plugged into the historical, cultural and intellectual continuum. Gonads act as the dominant organ producing thought, meaning that little thought is produced.

That makes ‘paedocracy’ the most dangerous paedo- word.

We are these days obsessed with paedophilia, but even the most promiscuous of perverts can only harm a relatively small number of people. On the other hand, allowing young idealists to have a say in serious matters, never mind the power to affect them, may well destroy the whole society.

William Golding showed in his Lord of the Flies what happens when the young take over. It’s children’s time, and there are no rules.

Though America’s Founding Fathers seldom draw my unqualified praise, they were wise to the dangers of youthful idealism. That’s why the US Constitution set the lower age limits for public office: 25 for a congressman, 30 for a senator, 35 for a president. They also set the voting age at 21, which was ill-advisedly lowered to 18 in 1971.

We can quibble about the arithmetic (personally I’d add at least 10 years to all those limits and apply them in every Western country), but the underlying principle is unassailable: people like young Greta, with all their youthful enthusiasm, mustn’t be allowed a public voice.

How much better would Mr Glover’s headline be had it started with “I detest young Greta’s idealism, and…” Oh well, wishful thinking.

I ought to have known that, when it comes to our politicians, no rock bottom exists. Even if it did, our governors would somehow find an even lower level to which they could sink.

To wit: not only did a minister of the Crown agree to talk to Greta Thunberg, a mentally unstable Swedish girl fanatically spouting voguish rubbish, but – and I swear I’m not making this up – he actually apologised to her for the Industrial Revolution.

When young Greta told Michael Gove that Britain had accrued “a mind-blowing carbon debt” over the 200 years following the Industrial Revolution, any responsible adult would have told her to stop talking nonsense, take a quick number one and go to bed.

Instead, our Secretary for the Environment said: “As I listened to you I felt great admiration but also a sense of responsibility and guilt because I recognise I am of your parents’ generation. I recognise we have not done nearly enough to deal with the problem of climate change.”

The previous day Greta, all pig tails and the glistening eyes of a dangerous fanatic, addressed Her Majesty’s Parliament. To give you an idea of the general level of her audience, let me remind you that within that august body Mr Gove is seen as a conservative (!) intellectual (!!!).

Hence it’s no surprise that they allowed the disturbed youngster to lecture them on the facts of natural life, most of which aren’t facts but ignorant rants.

“We just want people to listen to the science,” declared the poor girl, without specifying which particular science people ought to listen to.

The implicit claim is that all scientists support Greta’s extravagant claims as absolutely true and universally valid. However, that simply isn’t the case.

In fact, such claims are mainly supported by scientists who receive climate-change grants from the UN and its affiliated institutions. Those who haven’t been blessed by the laying on of UN hands tend to evaluate the issue of anthropogenic global warming more critically.

Actually, we know that some 80 per cent of climate change, one way or the other, is due to solar activity that has nothing to do with anything man does on ‘our planet’. We also know that the graph of global temperature has had peaks and troughs throughout history.

For example, when Julius Caesar conquered the Tin Islands, grapes grew abundantly in Scotland, which suggests a climate somewhat different from what it is now. Yet I don’t think the Scots overindulged in aerosol sprays and air travel.

Also, non-UN scientists have identified the Medieval Warm Period lasting from about 950 to 1250 AD, when global temperatures were higher than they are now, though the carbon footprint was rather lower.

It’s also true that any serious attempt people have ever made to feed and clothe themselves has resulted in some release of heat. This happens, for example, during extensive agriculture, when the soil is turned over.

So I’d like to take this opportunity and apologise to the unhinged girl for the anonymous inventor of the plough all those centuries ago, who unfortunately doesn’t sit in Parliament and thus can’t apologise for himself.

In general, science should be left to scientists. Let those qualified to study such issues in sufficient depth do so, publish results in arcane journals and then get together at conferences and try to reach a consensus.

However, the problem of climate change (they no longer say ‘global warming’, having found out that science invalidates that term) has been taken out of scientists’ hands. It has been transferred into the sweaty palms of young fire-eating revolutionaries who have to channel their destructive, nihilist impulses into some sort of conduit.

Communism provided one of those for a few decades, but all those photographs of piled corpses and skeletal concentration camp inmates have made it somewhat less productive.

Yet, as the First Law of Thermodynamics tells us, energy doesn’t disappear; it simply transforms into another kind of energy. Thus much of the same animus has been alternately bursting into other channels: anti-nuke today, animal welfare tomorrow, homomarriage the day after, climate change the day after that.

Never mind the cause, feel the energy, seems to be the general rule. The young, whom the Satanist-in-Chief Trotsky called ‘the barometer of the nation’, are ideal agents of upheavals, what with their perfect combination of unformed brains and abundant vitality.

Yet it takes grown-ups to harness vitality and steer it towards the desired ends – and rather few grown-ups at that, provided they are trained in the dark arts of venomous propaganda.

Such chaps are seldom in short supply. That’s why youngsters swelled the ranks of Bolsheviks and Nazis, the Red Guards and Khmer Rouge, the CND and Greenpeace – and now of the Extinction Rebellion.

Greta Thunberg is typical in this sense, if rather tending towards the more precocious end of the range.

According to her, she first became concerned about warm weather when she was nine years old, which points at an unfortunate oversight on her parent’s part. Greta’s father ought to have noticed that his little girl was going off the rails, thrown her over his knee and given her a good spanking.

Then again, such a time-honoured treatment might not have worked because little Greta is clearly deranged. She admits openly that she has been “diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, OCD and selective mutism,” which should have put her into psychiatric care long ago.

“I see the world a bit differently, from another perspective…,” she adds. “I can do the same thing for hours.” Yes, quite. Loony bins are full of patients making similar claims.

By the time she reached the ripe old age of 15 the poor girl began to skip school every Friday, camping outside Sweden’s parliament with a hand-written sign saying “School Strike for Climate”.

The idea of ideologised truancy appealed to millions of youngsters worldwide, who avidly followed suit.

I’m not surprised about Greta’s popularity among young idiots worldwide. Madness attracts, and absolute madness attracts absolutely. Deranged fanatics must emit a contagious miasma that has a hypnotic effect on susceptible masses.

Just watch videos of Hitler’s speeches, and you’ll know what I mean. A modern Western man in the throes of shamanistic ecstasy should have immediately attracted men in white coats. Instead Hitler attracted millions of hypnotised dummies bellowing their Heils!!! in unison.

Greta is typologically similar. She too talks in frankly apocalyptic terms: “We probably don’t even have a future any more. That future has been sold so that a small number of people can make unimaginable amounts of money.”

Notice the appeal to envy. It’s osmotic rather than rational because even a youngster, assuming some degree of mental competence, would know that it’s modern science and technology that keep an extremely large number of people in clean water, food, decent quarters and medical treatment.

The same large numbers who before the Industrial Revolution would have died now not only live but have enough leisure time on their hands to listen to crazed prepubescent creatures.

Unsatisfied by the havoc caused in London by the Extinction Rebels she inspired, Greta is now calling for a general climate strike in Britain. It’s not enough that London traffic is at a standstill, now they want to paralyse the whole country in the name of Greta’s lunacy.

And people – MPs! – listen. Not just Gove, but also Berkow, Corbyn, Cable and countless others are falling over themselves to meet Greta, genuflect and kiss her ring.

Having detected a mind and temperament similar to his own, Jeremy Corbyn provided a perfect accompaniment to Greta’s rants: “Young people will be the most affected by climate change – seeing them take charge of their future is inspiring. Labour’s committed to working with young people campaigning to save our planet.”

I bet it is, just like Trotsky and Pol Pot. But I wonder – as Corbyn never does – what he means. For young people to be ‘the most affected by climate change’, the end has to be nigh fairly soon, say in a few decades, which isn’t a claim even most activists make. Jeremy should have said ‘those yet unborn’, which would have been more sound if just as stupid.

My guess is that most Greta admirers among our politicos don’t give a damn about either her or her crusade. What they do care about is staying on the right side of orthodoxy.

One distinguishing feature of modernity is its capacity for effecting overnight metamorphoses. Yesterday’s perversions become today’s norm; yesterday’s villainy, today’s morality; yesterday’s lunacy, today’s orthodoxy.

And each orthodoxy has its figureheads who must be lauded as a signal of virtue. Greta is one such – and she has already been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s official: the world is mad.