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My Dutch is a bit rusty. To be more exact, my total vocabulary in that language is about a dozen words, of which haring takes pride of place.

If your Dutch is even rustier than mine, it means the greatest delicacy inspired by God and produced by man: the barely marinated herring one gets from Amsterdam street vendors. But you probably guessed what it means without my prompting since the word is practically a homophone of the English equivalent.

I’m allowed to guess too. And my guess is that the Dutch for pogrom is, well, pogrom. As someone born in Russia, I’m proud of that country’s contribution to most Indo-European languages, and I’m sure Dutch is no exception.

The word stands for an outburst of mob violence against Jews. Recently its meaning has been expanded to designate any riot aimed against any group. However, as a conservative, I’m happy to report that the Dutch are busily restoring the original, anti-Semitic, meaning of ‘pogrom’.

That restoration project started when supporters of the football team Maccabi Tel Aviv descended on Amsterdam the other day. Their team was to play Ajax, a team that, like our own Tottenham Hotspur, has Jewish roots.

The Hebraic nature of the occasion was too much for pro-Palestinian thugs, sorry, I mean protesters, to bear. When they espied a group of Maccabi supporters in the city centre, they began to chant pro-Palestinian slogans and wave Palestinian flags.

Now it’s never difficult to confuse a group of football lovers in any country with a bunch of shrinking violets. So the Israelis responded in kind, flipping fingers at the mob, shouting “F*** you” and “F*** Palestine” – in English. It’s good to see how the English language acts as lingua franca, bringing people of different nationalities together. This is another reason for me to feel proud.

What followed brings back fond memories of mass violence in Russia’s Pale of Settlement, circa 1880, or else in Berlin, circa 1938. Outnumbered Maccabi fans were beaten unconscious, kicked, stomped, clubbed, stabbed, chased around the city where they desperately tried to hide in hotels, made on pain of death to shout “Free Palestine”, robbed. Some victims begged for their lives, some offered the louts the ransom of all the money they had on them.

“It’s for the children, mother****ers,” roared their Anglophone assailants. “Now you know how it feels.”

As anti-Israeli violence began to spread and turn into an old-fashioned anti-Semitic pogrom, things got so desperate that President Netanyahu had to send over two transport planes to evacuate the Israelis. In the aftermath, various Dutch politicians offered profuse apologies, promised to prosecute all the thugs involved, and assured the world that those brutes were in the distinct minority.

That, no doubt, is correct. Evildoers never constitute a majority in any country. However, they often punch above their weight.

It’s useful to remember that card-carrying Nazis made up only about 10 per cent of the German population, and the communist parties in both the Soviet Union and China couldn’t claim such meagre membership even at their peak. Moreover, when the Russian tsar fell in February, 1917, there were only 24,000 Bolsheviks in the country, of whom only a few hundred were actively involved in taking over Russia. Yet that’s precisely what they did just a few months later.

It’s tempting to think that the thugs were mostly Muslims, either recent arrivals or those born in Holland. Yet looking at the scowling feral mugs of the pogromshchiks (do let’s import not just the root word but also its derivatives), one also sees many true-orange Dutchmen, doubtless of the left-wing persuasion.

Courtesy of Hitler, anti-Semitism is widely regarded as a right-wing phenomenon, which is false on several levels.

First, Hitler’s NASDP was a socialist party, flying the same red flag as their parteigenossen in the Soviet Union, albeit with a different superimposed symbol. However, since leftists like to tar conservatives with the Nazi brush, Hitler had to be portrayed as a German precursor of Maggie Thatcher.

Actually, the Nazis only became right-wing in the eyes of progressive mankind when they attacked the Soviet Union. Until then, they had been widely and correctly seen as a socialist heresy. But since Stalin was undeniably left-wing, Hitler had to be his opposite.

Second, parties that are usually described as right-wing today tend to be nationalist populist, or perhaps even national conservative if you’d rather. Most of such parties are staunch allies of Israel, which they see as a fellow nationalist – and essentially Western – state fighting for its survival.

Thus Geert Wilders, the politician of that hue who won last year’s Dutch election, is a loyal friend of Israel (as is Donald Trump). He correctly identified the Amsterdam mayhem as directed not just against Israelis but Jews in general.

“Looks like a Jew hunt in the streets of Amsterdam,” he wrote. “Arrest and deport the multicultural scum that attacked Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters in our streets. Ashamed that this can happen in the Netherlands. Totally unacceptable.”

The key word in that rebuke is ‘multicultural’, although Wilders might not have seen it as such. He probably was making an anti-immigration statement, which is one of his recurrent themes and perhaps the most salient one. But he stumbled on the root of that particular evil in its modern incarnation.

Anti-Semitic sentiments lie dormant in gentile populations, where they affect more people than those who ever vent such feelings. Yet even if conservatives dislike Jews, mostly for snobbish reasons, they are unlikely to be vociferous, much less violent, anti-Semites. One of my conservative friends (I really have no other) once defined anti-Semitism in jest as disliking Jews more than absolutely necessary.

Yet, snide offhand remarks at boozy parties apart, conservatives seldom say or do anti-Semitic things. They are by definition civilised people who refrain from such self-expression because it’s vulgar and tasteless.

Anti-Semitism may not be alien to some conservatives, but it’s certainly not an essential ingredient of conservatism. And they despise wild-eyed Muslim terrorists, which by some dialectical mechanism moves them towards respect for Israel.

Not so with the Left, especially its Marxist wing (I’m not sure there is any other). The Jew for them is the embodiment of the Capitalist, the perennial bogeyman. That’s why many Marxists emulate the virulent anti-Semitism of Marx who repudiated his own Jewish roots.

Such is the tradition of long standing. However, following the Holocaust, many Leftists, those who purloined for their own nefarious use the term ‘liberal’, eschewed that tradition by tucking it away for future use as appropriate.

Enter Israel, which provides a ready outlet for left-wing anti-Semitism. It can now come out of its hidey-hole in the guise of multiculturalism, one of the blunderbusses the Left aim at the heart of our civilisation. The existence of Israel is an equivalent of a carte blanche saying “now you can” to the Lefties, and they grab it with avid alacrity.

Thus the most recent outrages of public anti-Semitism in Britain occurred within the ranks of the Labour Party, especially but not exclusively when it was led by Corbyn. By and large, the more influential the loudmouthed Leftist minority is in the country, the more often will anti-Semitic outbursts occur.

That’s why I’m not surprised that the latest pogrom happened in Amsterdam and not, say, in Paris or London. Even though the Dutch delivered more parliament seats to Wilders than to anyone else, the country continues to be in the forefront of the European Left assault on Western tradition.

The country leads from the front by pushing through such subversive measures as euthanasia, transsexualism, same-sex marriage. And even though the largest party in Holland is pro-Israel, Palestinian flags fly over Amsterdam and other Dutch cities in perhaps greater numbers than anywhere else. Pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah and generally pro-Islamic propaganda is in the mainstream of the Dutch press – even more so than in our own dear Guardian and The Independent.

Hence the air of Holland is galvanised with ostensibly anti-Israel but in fact anti-Semitic charges. The slightest provocation, and sparks begin to fly all over the place.

They did so the other day, and Wilders is right to be “ashamed that this can happen in the Netherlands”. Yet we should all be ashamed that this can happen anywhere, where the Left rule the roost.

In fact, I can think of one such country taken over by radical socialists bent on class war, cultural war and in general war on the West. You know the one I’m thinking of?

P.S. Speaking of The Guardian, it offers its employees counselling to help them cope with the trauma of the US elections. May I suggest a lobotomy instead?

A negative trade balance makes all God’s children uneasy. There’s something, well, not positive about it. Positivity is better than negativity any day, as we must agree.

The same goes for a trade deficit. ‘Deficit’ means shortage, not enough of something. The opposite of that is abundance, which is much better, isn’t it?

Exploiting our kneejerk reaction to words like ‘negative’ and ‘deficit’, economists describe a situation where a country imports more than it exports as an economic catastrophe, a notch short of total collapse. And if you argue with them, they’ll bury you under an avalanche of graphs and charts proving that you are an ignoramus in the science of economics.

But here’s a thing about economics: it’s not really a science because it doesn’t go beyond common sense. As the late Prof. Lewis Wolpert argued, modern science always does.

If we look at photons getting to us from faraway stars by unerringly and, on the face of it, rationally choosing the shortest path of least resistance for millions of years; if we even begin  to consider the implications of quantum mechanics, universal constants or modern genetics with its undecipherable codes, we’ll see that common sense will help us grasp none of these.

Economics is different. It not only doesn’t go beyond common sense but invariably and miserably fails when trying to do so. Economists unfurling all those graphs aren’t trying to elucidate the problem. They are trying to obscure it, and probably for nefarious reasons.

The father of economics, Adam Smith, never had to do this. His books rely on plain common sense to explain a simple problem: how to get out of people’s hair and let them get on with what they know how to do best: make a living. Yet for modern economists, economics is too simple to understand.

So let’s engage in homespun, commonsensical economics to ponder trade deficits. Let’s begin by imagining a butcher and a greengrocer running their shops in the same neighbourhood. Most people living there ignore BMA guidelines and eat lots of meat while shunning fruit and veg.

As a result, the butcher is prospering, while the greengrocer is teetering at the edge of bankruptcy. Thus the butcher can buy all the greengrocer’s produce he wants and gorge himself on Brussels sprouts and broccoli. The greengrocer, on the other hand, looks wistfully at the chops and steaks in the butcher’s window, swallows his saliva and moves on knowing he can’t afford such delicacies.

The butcher thus has a negative trade balance with the greengrocer, and the latter a positive trade balance with the former. And it’s the butcher who is much better off.

Extrapolating from a neighbourhood to a nation, the same observation may apply. One country may be so much more successful than another that it can import more than it exports. Its trade deficit is a sign of prosperity, and long may it continue.

I’m not saying that a negative trade balance is always good. But it isn’t always bad either. It all depends on a multitude of other factors, such as the size and health of the domestic market, the quality of the products and services the country offers for sale abroad, and – above all – political and strategic considerations.

Germany, for example, shows how a positive trade balance can make a country flourish first and suffer second. The Germans know better than anyone how to make things people want to buy. Just look at their cars and you’ll see that, pound for pound, they are better than any other.

The frugal French mostly drive their own cars, but they buy them for price, not quality. Give a Frenchman a Mercedes for the price of a Renault, and you know which one he’ll choose. Replace a Renault with a Ford, and an American’s choice would be the same.

However, an economy that lives by exports may also die by them. That’s what is happening to Germany’s motor trade and other manufacturing industries. Its two biggest markets, America and China, now buy fewer German cars.

Both countries find it easier than the EU to manipulate their currencies, keeping them artificially low. America, because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency; China, because its communist government rules by fiat. A low exchange rate is meat for the exports and poison for the imports – the population finds it much harder to buy other people’s goods, while the other people can gorge on the cheap goods they import.

Add to this the protectionist tariffs practised by China and soon to be practised by America on an even larger scale, and you’ll understand why Volkswagen has had to close three of its factories, with the other car makers (and other German manufacturers) soon to follow suit. This explains why the German economy languishes at zero, soon to be sub-zero, growth and, consequently, why the governing coalition has collapsed.

Donald Trump and most of the billionaires forming his coterie, especially Musk, are protectionists. Fortunately, unlike most European countries, America has a vast domestic market and can do rather well without relying on imports too much. Musk certainly wants Americans to buy his Teslas rather than cheap Chinese exports.

Parenthetically, the prominent role Musk is slated to play in Trump’s administration worries me. His IQ is doubtless higher than that of any Democratic candidate, but man doesn’t live by IQ alone. Bobby Fischer, for example, had an IQ of 184, but he was an idiot in any field other than chess, and insane to boot.

While one can’t question Musk’s cleverness and business acumen, his sanity is open to doubt. I don’t know how else to explain his vast financial commitment to settling millions of earthlings on Mars, which is crazy, and implanting AI chips into people’s brains, which is sinister.

Apparently, his role will be trimming billions from the federal budget – and thousands of freeloaders from the federal payroll. Godspeed to him, and I hope he succeeds where so many have failed. But the problem with madmen is that they may be geniuses in one area and unpredictable eccentrics in all others.

Just like Trump, Musk also bewails foreign imports, and both men don’t care if they hurt American consumers with protectionist tariffs if the Germans, Chinese et al. hurt even more. Trump in particular is at his most populist when he talks about protecting American manufacturers from greedy foreigners.

“They do it to us, we’ll do it to them,” he says every chance he gets. Doing it to them may lead to lower tariffs on American products, which would be lovely. But it may also lead to an out-and-out trade war, which America isn’t guaranteed to win.

This apart, I like the early noises emanating from the Trump team. They want to cut taxes and, apparently, government spending. They also credibly promise to make America energy-independent again by increasing the production of oil and also by reverting to fracking. Idiotic and ruinous net zero also has a target on its back: one good thing about Trump is that he sees all this climate nonsense for the scam it is.

The corollary benefit of increased hydrocarbon production will be a collapse in oil prices, which will hurt the countries one doesn’t mind hurting, notably Russia and Iran. Iran will get it coming and going if Trump restores the strangulating sanctions he imposed in his first term, as he probably will.

That’s what makes national economies more complex than those of families. All economic policies can’t be just about economics. Strategic and political factors inevitably come into play, queering the pitch (or, for my American readers, throwing a monkey wrench in the works).

Yet the purely economic case against a trade deficit isn’t as straightforward as Trump wants his adulating audiences to believe. As often as not, it’s a sign of health, not illness. But I suppose no one has ever won an election by giving two sides of every story.

In the wake of Trump’s landslide victory, many world leaders sent The Donald their congratulations, heartfelt or otherwise.

Starmer offered his “hearty” and “fond” felicitations, adding that David Lammy also sends his regards. Nevertheless David insisted on adding his own message.

“Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Trump and Heil Donald,” was how our Foreign Secretary expressed his own fondness for the president-elect. “Arbeit macht frei,” he added with multilingual ease befitting a top diplomat. Mr Lammy was doubtless alluding to Trump’s intention of making America great again through hard work.

“You know what you can do with your congratulations?” wrote Trump in reply. “You can shove them into your drawer and keep them ready when I win another term in four years. You know what they say in New York? Constitution, schmostitution, as long as you play your cards right.”

President Putin also sent his congratulations, although his choice of words may be regarded as unorthodox in some quarters. “Death to the Ukies!”, he wrote. “Say these words and that dossier goes away. Long live The Donald! As the Russian saying goes, you wet your bed, you lie in it. And Donald? I know where you’ll live from 20 January. Best of luck with that!”

Yet it was Manny Macron whose congratulatory note touched an innermost chord in Trump’s heart. He did so with that celebrated Gallic je ne sais quoi for which the French are so justly famous.

The note was on the prolix side, as any writing in French tends to be, yet it was so full of subtleties that, though they might have escaped Trump, Manny’s reputation for epistolary attainment – even in a language other than his own – will be further reinforced.

“Monsieur Le Donald,” he wrote. “I’d like to congratulate you du fond de my heart. As vous savez, I share most of your convictions, and those I don’t yet share I soon may.

“Your every sentence rings a cloche in my coeur, reminding me of the trials facing every leader. You have already served one four-year stretch, and it is testimony to your appeal that you now have another four years tagged on.

“Our two great peuples have been accomplices for a long time, and let me assure you that as long as I am the chieftain of France, we’ll aid and abet you in all your undertakings. Should you ever have problems, you can always count on La Belle France to bail you out. And you can count on me personnellement for a get out of jail free card whenever you need it.

“Now that your presidency is an open and shut case, je sais que the jury is finally in. I know you’ll do your time in Maison Blanche with honneur and élan. Once again, félicitations, mon ami.

“J’espère que you will believe my sincérité when I and ma mère adoptive Brigitte express les sentiments of notre profond respect and amitié. Politiquement, Manny.”

“What’s that frog on about?” commented the president-elect off the record. “Them cheese-eating surrender monkeys can’t even write good.”

Trump’s victory may or may not be a reason to rejoice, but it’s definitely a reason to gloat. The anguished contortions of left-wing faces are precious.

And yes, there is such a thing as a left-wing face. You can recognise it by the smug expression of someone who knows what’s good for you better than you do. It’s Gnosticism without the gnosis.

Nor is it just facial reactions. Lefties are keen to bewail the depth of the tragedy that has befallen the world. Reading their whingeing comments, one can be justified to think that the SS has come back and is rounding up all lefties. Hail to the Chief ought to be replaced with Heil Hitler.

The impression is strengthened by The Guardian’s call for “resistance”. I think the word they were looking for but for some reason didn’t find was ‘opposition’. That’s what political runners-up do in civilised societies. ‘Resistance’ evokes the images of Frenchmen wearing berets and shooting Nazi occupiers with Sten guns dropped by SOE planes.

What happened yesterday caught the ‘liberals’ by surprise, but I can’t imagine why. The result has been confidently predictable for quite some time.

Appearing on a New York podcast a fortnight ago, I broke my lifelong custom of never predicting election results. “Trump will win,” I said, “and he’ll win comfortably”.

My host, a MAGA Republican, said, “Well, yes, common sense would suggest…”. “Common sense has nothing to do with it,” I replied. “The polls say so, as long as you know how to read them.”

My plebiscitary prescience has been acquired not by an exercise of any extraordinary gifts, but simply by the experience of closely watching US elections from Nixon onwards. And extreme Left candidates only ever win there by subterfuge, when they successfully put on centrist airs.

Biden took the trouble of doing that in 2020 and won. Harris didn’t in 2024 and lost. Kamala didn’t even bother to conceal her unwavering allegiance to the NYT version of woke socialism – and her feeble grasp of the visceral instincts of Middle America.

She’d even introduce herself at mass rallies by informing the audience that her pronouns are she/her. Though I haven’t lived in the US for 36 years, that’s too short a time for Americans to have changed so much as to countenance such glossocratic power grab.

The electric-hybrid and Prosecco states bookending the continent on either coast predictably went for Harris. The more numerous pickup-truck and Bud states in between just as predictably didn’t.

Having played Cassandra once, I’m not going to do so again by trying to second-guess Trump’s policies. As everyone knows, he is rather unpredictable, although I imagine domestically he’ll try to do roughly the same things he did the first time around.

It’s his foreign policy that makes me look to the future with apprehension. Trump wasn’t a bad peacetime president, although he wasn’t quite the saviour of MAGA fantasy. However, the West is no longer at peacetime, and we can no longer make do with just a reasonably competent if eccentric administrator at the helm. We need a war leader, and that calls for a different DNA.

Churchill, for example, has few equals among statesmen who have ever led their countries at war. As a peacetime prime minister, on the other hand, he was unremarkable. Mind you, looking at our government today, I’d happily settle for unremarkable, but the fact remains: good at peace doesn’t necessarily mean good at war, and vice versa.

Speaking of Trump’s foreign policy, one obvious development requires no crystal ball to predict: Foreign Secretary Lammy can’t possibly remain in his job past Inauguration Day. Yes, I know our national pride can’t allow a foreign power to dictate our cabinet appointments. But needs must.

Trump doesn’t strike me as a magnanimous type who is likely to forgive the epithets Lammy has been throwing at him for years. A narcissist is like an elephant, and Trump will never forget Lammy’s vile insults, such as calling him a “neo-Nazi sociopath”, a “fascist” or a “KKK type”. Hence the poor chap won’t be welcome at Trump’s new home, and Britain needs America more than America needs Britain. Lammy should start looking to life on the backbenches or ideally out of public life altogether.

Unlike my New York host, I’m not overcome with joy. I’m only glad we’ve been spared the gloom of Kamala ‘She/Her’ Harris at the White House. However, under normal circumstances either candidate should only have been able to enter that building by going on a guided tour.

Yet our circumstances throughout the West are anything but normal. We are witnessing a tectonic shift in political strata, with the centre being crushed by the two extremes.

The seismic activity is brisk: the whole bulk of Western politics has been pushed so far out of kilter that the old notions of left, right and centre have lost whatever meaning they ever had. I’ll leave it for the wielders of such terminology to sort themselves out, but I only hope they’ll stop referring to the likes of Trump as conservatives.

Conservatism no longer has a reliable constituency anywhere in the West, which is why I can’t think offhand of a single Western leader who merits the conservative sobriquet. Yet it’s not only nature but also politics that abhors a vacuum. The space vacated by conservatives has been filled by radical right-wing demagogues.

What goes for right-of-centre conservatives also goes for left-of-centre socialists. Most of today’s Democratic (and Labour) politicians are closer to Lenin and Trotsky than to Humphrey or Gaitskell. And a clash of the two extreme poles is fraught with danger.

Newton’s Third Law says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This law works in politics too because the two extremes see each other not as opponents, friendly allies who happen to disagree on some points. They see each other as implacable enemies and act accordingly.

Hence, when one extreme emerges victorious, it seeks to expunge every trace of the other extreme’s policy. Such an action produces an equal and opposite reaction when the roles are reversed. No one minds how vindictive the reaction is and how many babies are thrown out with the bathwater.

Swift’s brilliant satire features Big-Endians and Little-Endians locked in eternal arguments about how best to break a boiled egg. The writer satirised his contemporaneous Tories and Whigs, pointing out in his lucid style how trivial the political differences between them were. We should have such risible problems, those typical of a civilised society.

The sharp polarisation of today’s politics is a characteristic of a disintegrating civilisation. Ever since the Girondists took their place right of the aisle at the National Assembly, and the Jacobins left of the aisle, Western civilisation – certainly including its political expression – has been coming apart.

The present clash between a right-wing demagogue and a left-wing nonentity incapable even of coherent demagoguery emphasises this point, drives it home with deafening force. Still, as I’ve been saying throughout the campaign, given the two extremes, sensible people should choose the more acceptable one.

Thus Americans have made the right choice, although I’m sorry that was the only choice on offer. The simulacra of their dilemma dominate the politics throughout what used to be the civilised world on either side of the Atlantic. So my congratulations have to be tinged with sadness.

Though he writes about the US election, William Hague unwittingly shows why the Conservatives lost their own: because of wet mock-Tories like him.

The title of his article in The Times, Trump Is No Reagan – We All Need Him to Lose, is only half right. Trump is indeed no Reagan, a truism amply communicated by his name.

But the second part makes so little sense that one has to doubt Lord Hague’s mental competence. He seems not to realise that, for Trump to lose, Harris has to win. Yet Lord Hague doesn’t even attempt to show why that victory would be any good for America or, for that matter, Britain.

Parochially speaking, Trump is rather well disposed toward Britain, while Harris hates her with a barely concealed passion.

Her Jamaican father, a Marxist professor of economics, was oppressed by dastardly British colonialists all the way to Stanford. And her scientist mother was downtrodden in Madras to such an extent that she had to take her emotional wounds to Berkeley. Kamala mentions her parents’ CVs often, and with much passion. One could be forgiven for believing that she regards moving from Jamaica and India to California as a harrowing ordeal, for which she holds Britain responsible.

Lord Hague is so effusive about Ronald Reagan, and so derisive about Trump, that I for one am ready to vote for the former in preference to the latter. That, however, isn’t an option, and Lord Hague’s animadversions are as pointless as they are malevolent.

This isn’t to say Trump is above criticism. It’s true that his obsession with protectionist tariffs isn’t normally associated with fiscal conservatism. It’s also true that he seems to advocate the same mistake David Stockman, Reagan’s economic guru, made by putting too much faith in the Laffer Curve.

Arthur Laffer drew that geometrical shape to show that higher tax rates don’t necessarily produce higher tax revenue. However, when he became the OMB Director under Reagan, Stockman found out to his horror that, as he put it in his book, “The Laffer Curve doesn’t pay for itself.”

That is, tax cuts must be accompanied by a concomitant reduction in spending, a harsh economic reality that seems to escape Trump. In general, his economic pronouncements tend to be the kind of demagoguery that plays big in downmarket public bars, but has little chance of improving public finances.

Lord Hague waxes nostalgic about the Republican Party when “it was in the safe hands” of “the great Senator John McCain” and Mitt Romney. Their ideas were so closely aligned with Mr Hague’s (as he then was) that “the transatlantic bonds of conservatism held fast.”

Add the adjective ‘wet’ or, better still, the particle ‘non-’ before ‘conservatism’, and Lord Hague’s nostalgia would be justified. He makes that clear by saying that “political ideas flow freely across the ocean. Isn’t Britain’s new government influenced, in its ambitions for renewable energy and deficit spending to fund public investment, by the confidence of the Biden administration in pursuing those goals?”

Indeed it is: both governments are united in their wholehearted commitment to destroying their economies with foolish policies based on fraudulent science. If such is Lord Hague’s idea of economic unison, then both countries would be better off each treading its own path.

Meanwhile, he continues to tug on our heart’s strings: “It is hard for British Conservatives to accept that the Republican Party we knew so recently has become inhabited by something quite different, by a cult of personality rather than a political philosophy. It is as if a close friend has died, or at least taken leave of their senses.”

Hold on a moment, where did I put those damn handkerchiefs… There, we can talk now, and let’s ignore Hague’s woke use of a plural pronoun with a singular antecedent.

Fair enough, the Republican Party has changed since Reagan’s time, as has the Conservative Party since Maggie’s tenure. However, the impression one gets from Lord Hague’s dirge is that the main opposing parties, Democratic and Labour, have remained the same.

He is right in saying that Trump is no conservative, although on balance he is more conservative than Lord Hague. But the opposition Trump faces isn’t the Democratic Party of Jimmy Carter or even Walter Mondale. It’s a crypto-Marxist group, with ‘crypto-’ on its way out. Similarly, our own Labour Party has just passed a whole raft of Marxist legislation designed to stoke up class war along the lines of The Communist Manifesto.

It’s reasonably clear to those who, unlike Lord Hague, can reason, that the gentlemanly ‘conservatism’ dripping wet is powerless to stem the flow of subversive Marxism threatening to engulf Britain first and America second. Since real political conservatism is moribund in Britain and well-nigh nonexistent in America, perhaps it takes the radical populism of a Trump or a Farage to put up effective resistance.

Lord Hague is sympathetic to our allies facing barbarian onslaught, the Ukraine, Israel and, potentially, Taiwan. He correctly remarks that today’s world is turbulent and the maelstrom jeopardises the West and hence world peace. Faced with such threats, he thinks the West would be unsafe if led by Trump – and it was much safer when led by Reagan.

That may be true, especially since during the eight years of Reagan’s presidency the US defence spending increased by 66 per cent. Trump, on the other hand, makes regular pronouncements on America’s defence budget being bloated because she ill-advisedly has to pay for the defence of others. He has also said occasionally that, if other countries can’t look after themselves, he is inclined to let them sink or swim on their own.

However, Trump isn’t the paragon of verbal responsibility. He may say one thing and do another, keeping everyone guessing. He may also come off the wall like Humpty Dumpty, and with the same effect.

Lord Hague deplores Trump’s unpredictability, comparing it unfavourably with Reagan’s unwavering commitment to the defence of the West, not just the US. I share his fears for the future of the Ukraine especially, what with Trump’s transactional eagerness to do a deal with Putin.

Kamala Harris, on the other hand, is entirely predictable, something that escapes Lord Hague’s attention. She is guaranteed to continue Biden’s policy of dripping just enough lifeblood into the Ukraine’s arm to keep the country in the fight until it bleeds out. And I have to remind Lord Hague once again that it’s not Reagan but Harris who is the alternative to Trump.

It takes two not just to tango but also to stand in elections. Sniping at Trump is good knockabout fun, and he is indeed an inviting target. However, saying on that basis that we need Harris to win has as little to do with conservatism as does Lord Hague’s career.

Given the actual choice facing the American electorate, I’d vote for Trump any day and ten times on Tuesday (a voting pattern perfected by the Democratic Party).

These days it’s fashionable for supermarkets to list ingredients down to the molecular level. In the spirit of openness and transparency, some lists read like the whole periodic table of elements reshuffled.

And yet I believe they conceal one important fact: unbeknown to us, all their beef is halal. This conclusion is conjecture, but it’s not baseless conjecture. I simply trust the comparative evidence before my eyes.

I started gathering it in 1974, when I settled in Texas where I was to spend the next 10 years. And in that state beef isn’t just a staple meat. It’s an object of veneration and pride. It’s a cult, with the steak sitting atop the totem pole of beef worship.

Perhaps half a million square miles in Texas are taken up by pastures and feeding stations. The latter, as I recall, do little to improve the olfactory environment. Driving west out of Houston one has to go through 20 miles of dung stench, piercing enough to defeat the capacity of any air conditioner to cope.

I don’t know if Texans take an oath of allegiance to beef, but they are certainly prepared to go to war against its enemies. This they proved at the end of the 19^th century, when sheep farmers dared to move into the state.

When I was little, I read O. Henry’s Western stories where every gung-ho cowboy was prepared to shoot any ‘shepherd’. I couldn’t understand the nature of that hostility until Texans told me about the Range Wars.

Those were shooting wars with hundreds of casualties. They were fought for control over ‘open range’ used for cattle grazing. Before oil made Texas rich, cattle farming was the state’s main industry, which is why the ‘shepherds’ threatened the livelihood of the indigenous population.

Hostilities broke out, people died, and the ‘cowboys’ won. Since then no self-respecting Texan will touch sheep’s meat, which I found out the hard way when trying to serve leg of lamb to the boss of my first ad agency. He apologised most courteously but still refused to touch the offensive substance. Mercifully, the supermarkets were open late and I could pop out to buy some steaks.

Texas steak houses competed for custom, but none believed that size didn’t matter. The restaurant next door to me offered three sizes: one pound (for children), two pounds (for women) and three pounds (for Men, always implicitly capitalised).

Not only were the steak houses particular about who should eat what size but they also dictated how the steaks should be ordered. “The management isn’t responsible for steaks ordered well-done” was the ubiquitous sign. Steaks were supposed to be cooked rare or medium-rare, and that’s how I grilled them at home perhaps three times a week on average.

My favourite cut was ribeye, two inches thick and weighing only about a wimpish pound. Once the steaks were grilled, one was supposed to let them rest for 10-15 minutes to make sure the juices spread evenly throughout the fibres. However, no matter how long a steak had to rest, some blood always squirted out when the knife went in.

Now, by that meandering route, we’ve finally reached the point of my detective story. You can follow its plot by buying a steak from a British supermarket or butcher, cooking it rare and then cutting into it immediately – without letting it rest.

Committing that sacrilege in Texas would result in a geyser of blood squirting up to the ceiling. However, doing so in Britain will be a bloodless experience. Not one drop will come out.

You are welcome to offer your own explanation, and I promise to listen. But until then, I’ll be able to think of only one possible answer to the question “Where did the blood go?”. It was drained into the ground because the animal was slaughtered the halal way. (Since Muslims outnumber Jews 12 to 1 in the UK, it has to be halal rather than kosher butchering.)

The reason for this is fairly obvious. Since Muslims make up some six per cent of Britain’s population, much of the meat has to be halal anyway. Hence supermarkets benefit from the economies of scale by using a single halal abattoir, rather than different suppliers for halal and haram meat.

Though I dislike cruelty to animals, I’m not a great champion of animal rights. In fact, I question the validity of the term. Rights are dialectically linked to responsibilities and, since animals can’t have the latter, they aren’t entitled to the former.

I do, however, support essential freedoms. Hence, if some religions demand that cattle be slaughtered in a cruel way, then by all means adherents to those creeds must obey. Moreover, I don’t have a strong gastronomic objection to halal meat, which I prove with gusto when eating at Turkish or Lebanese restaurants.

But I object strongly to purveyors of food not informing us that the food they purvey is halal. If Muslims have a right to eat halal meat, we have a right to know that the steak we buy conforms to the standards of a religion other than our own.

Is this an attempt to sneak Islam in by stealth? I doubt it, and in general I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories. In all likelihood, supermarkets’ motives are pecuniary rather than subversive. However, something about it all isn’t kosher. It’s halal.

“Their [Tory] brand is broken and they have lost the trust of the British people,” writes Nigel Farage.

It’s hard to argue against the second part of that statement. A party beaten by a 282-seat majority is no longer trusted to govern the country, this much is clear.

But the first part is worth talking about. First, I dislike the word ‘brand’ and other marketing terms in this context.

In its natural habitat the word ‘brand’ describes the image projected by a product. More often than not, it has nothing to do with the product’s quality, price, service backup or any other tangible characteristic. In today’s world, tending as it is to uniformity, a brand is a distinction without a difference.

If you wish to disagree, you’ll have to explain to a Briton why he should ‘just do it’ with Nike and not, say, Adidas, or to an American why it’s ‘Miller time’ and not, say, Coors time.

Miller’s time-honoured jingle says, “When it’s time to relax, one thing stands clear. If you’ve got the time, we’ve got the beer”. Without straining my memory I could instantly name half a dozen other brands that could say exactly the same thing, and they’d all similarly taste of equine urinalysis. (Sounds so much more elegant than ‘horse piss’, doesn’t it?)

The jingle reflects what ad people call ‘preemptive benefit’: claiming for one’s brand the benefits of the whole product category. This trick may be of long standing, but it’s just that, a trick.

Every American knows the phrase “It’s Miller time”, and I’ve heard it used at the end of a workday or even of a tennis match, after which the people would drink something else or nothing at all. This testifies to the excellence of the brand’s ad agency, but it says nothing unique or even specific about the product.

British conservatism, on the other hand, can issue a slogan its chief competitors can’t possibly duplicate or appropriate: God, king and country. American conservatives can come up with slogans, but not those that communicate uniqueness.

For example, MAGA can be used by any political party whatsoever. Not only the Democrats, but also the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, the Alliance Party and numerous others can also claim that they want to make America great again.

But the party that thrashed the Tories in the general election can’t possibly plagiarise their slogan. It doesn’t believe in God, is lukewarm at best on the king and puts ideology before the country.

Just imagine Keir Starmer proudly declaring in the Commons that his government stands for God, king and country, and you’ll know what I mean. This would be as unthinkable as him defining working people or indeed a woman.

‘God, king and country’ is the essence and philosophy of British conservatism, not just its brand. The three elements are arranged in the order of priority: the first one communicates the timeless metaphysical underpinnings of British politics, the second one the continuity of the constitution from the past to the future, and the third one the fusion of both into a properly functioning commonwealth of free subjects.

Everything else that British conservatism may stand for is strictly derivative, however essential it may be. For example, practising the philosophy contained in that triad would mean devolving political and economic power to the lowest sensible level, all the way down to the individual. “God, king and country” goes against the grain of an omnipotent bureaucracy lording it over the people. It presupposes government by justice, not by fiat.  

The three elements exist in a synergistic unity, as such tripartite entities tend to do. This unity used to be personified by the Tory Party, and the problem is that it no longer is, not that the Tory “brand is broken”.

It’s from this perspective that I think one should assess Kemi Badenoch’s elevation to Tory leadership. Because she has been an MP for many years we can judge the things she has said, and, because she was a government minister for two years, we can judge the things she has done.

Will the Tory Party succeed under her aegis? That depends on how you define success.

Assuming, against recent experience, that Mrs Badenoch will lead the party into the next general election, I don’t think she has to do much to win it. Starmer and his merry men will do all the work for her by destroying the country to a point where the British will vote for any opposition, even if it’s led by a hybrid of Attila the Hun, Bluebeard and Jack the Ripper.

That would be the success of the Tory brand but not necessarily of Tory principles. It’s Britain, not the Tory brand, that’s broken. And it’s not some brand values that can put the nation together again, but the sage, courageous and consistent application of the conservative essence.

The Tories lost the election not because they were too different from Labour but because they were too much like it. They’ll never be able to heal Britain if that situation doesn’t change.

Will Mrs Badenoch be able to change it? I don’t know, you don’t know, and no one knows. However, most of the time she says all the right things. Her detractors say she talks too much about principles and too little about policies, but that ignores the political standing of her party.

It’s no longer in government. It’s now in opposition where, barring some cataclysm, the Tories are going to remain for the next four years at least. And a Shadow PM has to operate mostly in the negative mode: throwing bricks of criticism through the windows of the governing party.

This is a relatively easy task, certainly compared to the work of a political glazier who has to put glass in those windows. The task becomes easier still when the government’s policies are as destructive and subversive as those of Starmer’s government, and we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Much more difficult is to establish the solid grounds from which the bricks can be thrown. Mrs Badenoch should devote her greatest efforts to recapturing and rebuilding the conservative soul of the Conservative Party, and it remains to be seen whether she has what it takes.

She lists as her influences Roger Scruton and Thomas Sowell, which isn’t a bad way to start. Thomas Sowell is today’s most honest, intelligent and non-ideological economist and sociologist, while Scruton was a conservative philosopher and, more important, my first editor when I began writing for Salisbury Review.

I can hear the echoes of Sowell when Mrs Badenoch rages against the critical race theory. As far as she is concerned any school that teaches “elements of political race theory as fact, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law”.

Prof. Sowell would also flash an avuncular smile when hearing her say that a new ‘progressive’ ideology currently on the rise is built on “the twin pillars of constant intervention on behalf of protecting marginalised, vulnerable groups, including protecting us from ourselves – and the idea that bureaucrats make better decisions than individuals.”

And Mrs Badenoch’s spirited defence of free expression is also something I’ve heard from Prof. Scruton. “Exemplified by coercive control,” she once wrote, “the imposition of views, the shutting down of debate, the end of due process, identity politics is not about tolerance.” True. It’s about imposing fascisoid controls by glossocratic methods, as any conservative will agree.

Just like Roger Scruton, Mrs Badenoch describes herself as an agnostic, whose “cultural values” are nevertheless Christian. This sort of thing makes me uneasy, whoever says it. Christianity is an essential part of British conservatism not because of its culture or morality, but because of its truth. Rejecting the truth while upholding the “cultural values” is tantamount to believing that a successful society can be based on a lie.

This, however, is a minor glitch in the modern context. Conservatism has been secularised like everything else, and the first part of my favourite triad has been reduced to lip service. Still, that’s better than no service at all, and it may be possible, just, for a conservative to be an agnostic who respects our civilisation.

In general, Mrs Badenoch has consistently campaigned against wokery, which is more valuable in my view than even conservative economic policies. Policies can be changed but a nation corrupted by wicked ideas may never recover.

What I like most about Mrs Badenoch is the spittle-sputtering hatred she elicits from the Leftists. Thus Dawn Butler, a black Labour MP, confirmed my conviction that negritude is no longer a race but a left-wing political ideology.

Since Mrs Badenoch doesn’t espouse that ideology and is in fact openly contemptuous of it, she, as far as Miss Butler is concerned, represents “white supremacy in blackface”. Why not just call her a coconut, Dawn, and be done with it? Tell us what you really think — and what your party really is.

On balance, Mrs Badenoch talks a good game, and time will show whether she is also capable of playing it. I wish her well and hope she’ll be able to heal the soul of the Conservative Party. Provided, of course, that there is still something left to heal.

The ringing argument was made by Horace (b. 65 BC) in his Ode: Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt. (“They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea”.)

Translating this into our prosaic realities, it’s wishful thinking to believe that millions of new arrivals can be successfully assimilated into the ethos of their new country. Recognising this, Britain doesn’t even try to absorb arrivals from exotic lands into British culture.

Hence our mandated commitment to diversity, a fanciful belief that, since all cultures are equally valid and valuable, they can happily co-exist in fraternal proximity. Such is the British approach to the problem.

The French approach is different. They proceed from the assumption that, since French culture is God’s gift to mankind (although God doesn’t exist), there is no need for any other culture and hence for diversity. All new arrivals must be absorbed so deeply into the new ethos that they become French by some osmotic cultural anointment.

Anyone who has ever visited the banlieues around Paris will know that the French way has failed miserably. However, a visit to the comparable areas of London will confirm that the British way has failed just as badly.

And a short trip northwards, to places like Leicester, Leeds or Bradford, will illustrate the price of failure. Demographically, culturally, linguistically and even legally, large swaths of those places have been transformed by large-scale immigration so much that an outside observer may not recognise them as British cities.

Simple arithmetic shows that, if immigration from culturally alien places continues unabated, within a couple of decades all British cities will lose every trait that makes them British. But help is on the way, and it’s going to come from the Labour Party, the most consistently pro-immigration group in the country.

This realisation dawned on me this morning when I read Janet Daley’s article If the West Is Finished, Why Are the Huddled Masses Flooding Here?

Mrs Daley seems to believe that the huddled masses flooding here are living proof that the West isn’t finished. Since so many Westerners are pessimistic naysayers, mass immigration must be welcomed as the reassuring evidence of the West’s rude health.

After all, people from all over the world aren’t falling over themselves trying to get into Russia, Iran or North Korea. They do, however, know that “the combination of liberal democratic government and free market economics [she probably means ‘economies’, but what’s a couple of letters among friends?] is the unbeatable, absolutely irresistible formula for maximising personal fulfilment, mass prosperity, and social justice.”

Put another way, Mrs Daley believes – correctly, I think – that most people come to France, England or Germany not because they want to become culturally French, English or, God forbid, German. They do so in the hope of having a more comfortable life. This can be delivered either by free markets (“mass prosperity”) or state handouts (“social justice”).

More power to their elbow and all that, but when the influx of culturally alien immigration reaches a certain critical mass, it transmogrifies the host culture into something potentially hostile to it. This, to me, far outweighs any economic benefit we may derive from cheap labour, and even any pleasure we get by eating in ethnic restaurants.

It may come as news to our “liberal democratic government”, but most Britons don’t want to live in areas run by Sharia law and wake up every morning to the sound of a muezzin singing from a minaret (or is it the other way around?). That’s why the issue of curbing, stopping or even rolling back immigration enjoys a perennial presence in British political discourse.

One government after another undertakes to do something about it, some of them even try, but all of them fail. However, I have an inkling that this Labour government will succeed without even trying.

If Mrs Daley is right, and I think she is, that it’s mostly Britain’s relative prosperity that attracts immigrants and not their affection for Shakespeare, Turner, Vaughan Williams and warm ale, then one may logically conclude that any diminution of that prosperity will reduce the flow of immigration.

Poland illustrates this hypothesis persuasively. When the country had just dropped the shackles of communism but hadn’t yet cured her economy of its fallout, the huddled Polish masses rushed to these shores. Since Britons no longer had either the skills or the desire to work as plumbers, builders, scaffolders and electricians, Poles took over those functions.

However, in the subsequent couple of decades the Polish economy (economics?) has picked up momentum and is rapidly closing the gap with Britain. Poland’s GDP per capita has already reached two-thirds of Britain’s and parity is just round the corner.

Vindicating Mrs Daley’s supposition, thousands of Poles are going back, leaving Britain’s rusty plumbing unattended. Before long we’ll all have to learn DIY, although I don’t quite see that happening in, say, scaffolding.

Since it’s reasonably clear that Labour policies will impoverish Britain in short order, the incentive to come here will gradually disappear – first for Eastern Europeans, then, by incremental steps, even for Jamaicans, Somalians and Syrians. Why expose yourself to the hardships of emigration when you can do just as well at home?

I think that I’ve just outlined the PR strategy for our government, and Mrs Daley must take some of the credit. Rather than denying the obvious truth that Labour’s policies will beggar the country, its spokesmen should turn the negative into a positive.

Within a year or two, they’ll be able to make a verifiable claim that they are succeeding where several Tory governments had failed. Immigration, legal or otherwise, is now under control and in fact some dinghies are even beginning to sail in the opposite direction. Job done.

Jokes aside, the only immigrant group I know intimately and not by hearsay is the Russians who, like me, have left their homeland in the past half-century. While all of them claimed they were attracted by freedom, I’d suggest that some 80 per cent at least were primarily motivated by economic considerations.

Most of them found what they were looking for in the US, and many of them became Americans, or as near as damn. But becoming an American is much easier than evolving into an Englishman, Frenchman or, God forbid, German.

Even Mrs Daley, who has lived in Britain for yonks still reasons like the American she was born to be. Arguing ab oeconomia comes more naturally to American conservatives than to British ones. That’s why she managed to write a whole article without once mentioning the cultural and social traditions of Europe.

I hope I don’t sound like a Tommy Robinson type if I suggest that, notable but hardly numerous exceptions aside, arrivals from what is imprecisely called the Global South can never assimilate in Britain, nor even adapt to it. It’s easier to believe that they can force the country to adapt to them, and in fact one can already see that happening.

Horace was right, as those Romans usually were on such matters. But I doubt the poet knew he was making an anti-immigration statement.

Anyone who insists that no help is needed obviously hasn’t been following the news.

Forget about another lost decade. After Labour’s first month in office, Britain is on track to give a whole new meaning to what Gertrude Stein once called ‘the lost generation’.

The economic, social and cultural damage done already or confidently predictable in the near future will take many years to remedy even if a sage government takes over at the next election. Yet, as things stand, the odds against such a government ever turning up are prohibitive.

Eagle-eyed observers can’t help noticing that our liberal democracy consistently raises nonentities to power. This is a serious matter: the first requirement for any political system should be that it elevate to government those fit to govern.

Brilliant statesmen can paper over the cracks in any system, while incompetent ones are guaranteed to turn such cracks into gaping holes with jagged edges. Casting a panoramic glance over our political scene, I can see no candidates for the former role.

My heartfelt belief is that any system that continues to malfunction with predictable regularity suffers from wide-ranging structural defects. However, proposing a complete overhaul of democracy is what a friend of mine unkindly calls ‘mental masturbation’.

An eminently practical man, he refuses to speculate about impractical ideas, however attractive they may sound. If it can’t be done, it shouldn’t be discussed, he says.

I’m not so sure about that. It’s useful to start out by establishing an ideal and then deciding how much of it is attainable. Proceeding strictly from immediate expediency loses sight of any perspective, eventually leading to untreatable myopia.

But fine, I resign. Let’s not even consider any sweeping changes. But may I please suggest a minor tweak? Surely there’s no harm in that?

If you’ll forgive a little pun, nowadays an opposition party climbing the greasy pole to power always lies in wait. Our Labour government illustrates this statement by practising electoral mendacity on a level never seen before, certainly not in my lifetime.

One lie is currently in the news, for Labour clearly had no intention to keep its promise of no new taxes for ‘the working people’. Thus, just five months ago, Rachel Reeves, then Shadow Chancellor, promised “no additional tax rises”, other than those already announced.

When she removed the Shadow from her title, however, she announced massive tax hikes sucking an extra £40 billion out of the economy and hurting everyone working in the private sector. One gets a distinct impression that in Labour’s taxonomy only members of publicly financed nomenklatura qualify as working people.

Now, as any regular reader of this space will confirm, all that was predictable. Even someone with my modest grasp of politics and economics knew that Starmer, Reeves et al. were lying through their teeth. They planned to go the whole socialist hog from day one, and only kept that aim under wraps for tactical reasons.

By then the Tories had got up everyone’s nose so much that Labour might have been elected even without their massive campaign of bare-faced lying. However, they’d certainly not have won by a landslide enabling them to wreck Britain at their leisure with no meaningful opposition anywhere in sight.

So how come the electorate didn’t see through that transparent tissue of lies? I could answer that question, but not with the brevity this format requires. Let’s just state the obvious fact that our gullible voters evidently aren’t equipped to tell the truthful wheat from the mendacious chaff.

They are always ready to swallow any lie hook, line and stinker, and Labour’s lies do reek to high heaven. (My propensity for feeble puns is a form of Tourette’s, doctor, and there’s nothing I can do about it.) Britons clearly can’t protect themselves against false promises made to dupe them into voting a certain way.

Now, if they can’t protect themselves against the system, the system must be changed to protect them anyway. That can be done by making specific campaign promises legally binding for at least the first half of the upcoming term in government. If the victorious party then proceeds to break them, the election results must be annulled, and a new election called.

By specific promises I don’t mean generalised waffle about a better, fairer Britain, yet again making British nativity the winning ticket in the lottery of life. Such claims are too vague to be enforceable, which is true everywhere, not only in Britain. (MAGA is an example of such nebulous sloganeering.)

But if a party makes concrete promises, such as not to raise the minimum wage, nor to increase the tax burden on small businesses, it must be held to them legally. Failure to honour such promises must incur a hefty fine and an electoral re-run.

If the electorate still chooses to vote the same way, so be it. But at least the people will be voting in the knowledge of what kind of government their choice ushers in.

As it is, something odd is going on. A politician may be drummed out of his chosen profession for telling fibs about such relatively trivial misdeeds as conducting an ill-advised extramarital affair, taking money for posing some questions in Parliament, making shady investments, safeguarding the minor interests of a country other than his own.

But he suffers no consequences whatsoever for lying his way into power, betraying the confidence of millions of people, and hurting them the way he intended all along but kept that intention under wraps. Micro-corruption is a sacking offence, while macro-corruption is a legitimate way of doing politics.

Yet I fail to see any valid moral difference between knowingly making false electoral promises and stuffing the ballot boxes. In either case, political power isn’t so much won as stolen, which compromises the whole system so much as to make it inoperable. A stolen election isn’t substantially different from a coup d’état.

My pragmatic friend will probably regard any mention of enforceable morality in politics as a sign of onanistic mental propensities. However, I’ll argue that in this case I’m the one who is being pragmatic.

It takes moral censorship to punish immoral politics – and to protect the people from the dire consequences of broken promises. Alas, we’ve been served yet another proof that the people are incapable of protecting themselves. This means our democracy is in urgent need of help, and my modest proposal is a way to start.

The Leftists have always been with us, but the current crop is different.

People like MacDonald, Attlee, Bevin, Gaitskell, even Wilson may not make the rather short list of politicians I venerate. But at least they all loved their country and tried to do their best for her.

Today’s lot hate Britain and hence don’t mind hurting her with destructive policies. But what does loving one’s country really mean?

One’s countrymen are one’s neighbours, and both Testaments issue the same commandment: “Love thy neighbour as thyself”. That raises the next question of exactly how much we love ourselves.

Few of us consider ourselves perfect, free of any character blemishes. Few believe they’ve never done anything wrong, and most people I know – including a certain A. Boot – have done shameful things they’ve regretted ever since.

Yet though we may not always like ourselves, on balance we seldom lose self-love. Fair enough: we like for something; we love in spite of everything.

It was the US naval commander Decatur who some 200 years ago applied that principle to patriotism in a spiffy toast: “My country, right or wrong.” Since then that phrase has adorned the rear bumper of many American cars, but the sentiment hasn’t made any inroads into the hearts of Labour ministers.

Ideologically, which is to say emotionally, they loathe Britain, right or wrong. And intellectually, they are too stupid to know right from wrong.

Thus they hate every great cultural and political landmark signposting Britain’s history, along with the giants associated with those landmarks. However, much as I despise the likes of Starmer and Reeves, I admire their honesty.

They don’t try to conceal their feelings for Britain. They hate the country and they don’t care who knows it. That’s why the moment they lied their way into 10 and 11 Downing Street, they immediately removed from those Georgian walls the portraits of the men and women the nation has every right to be proud of.

When Britons argue about naming the country’s greatest monarch, Elizabeth I is always in that conversation. So naturally Starmer found her likeness unworthy of a place in Number 10. The sins of that great monarch weren’t redeemed by her sex – the benefits of womanhood don’t apply to colonialist vermin.

Off the wall Queen Bess went, although to the best of my knowledge her portrait hasn’t yet been tossed onto the pyre. I wouldn’t put that past our Marxists, but I suppose they need to lodge their feet more firmly under the desk before touching a match to the twigs.

Elizabeth’s reign was really the beginning of the British Empire, a political entity our rulers see as evil and in every way inferior to the Soviet Union. Thus, following the Queen into what their role model Trotsky called ‘the dustbin of history’ was Sir Walter Raleigh, who was prominent in colonising North America. Colonising anything makes anyone worse than Hitler and immeasurably worse than Stalin. So no mercy to Sir Walter from Sir Keir.

And who was the greatest cultural figure of Elizabethan England and hence tarred with the same imperial brush? Correct. So William Shakespeare was also deemed unworthy of a place on that wall, and his portrait was yanked off.

The British Empire reached its peak under another Queen unworthy of her sex. Rather than repudiating the Empire as the devil’s spawn, Victoria went a long way towards strengthening it. And William Gladstone was one of the most illustrious prime ministers of that era.

Now Gladstone operated on the left of Victorian politics, but Victorian left wasn’t left enough. Contemporaneous though Gladstone was with Marx, he didn’t exactly heed the latter’s dogma. Still, he might have hung on to a place on that wall had the sins of his father not been visited upon him.

Sir John Gladstone owned 2,508 African slaves, and was paid £105,781 in compensation after slavery in the colonies was abolished in 1833. In Britain proper it was abolished in 1807, and in fact English privateers had been harassing the slave trade for many decades before that. Still, the mark of Cain was attached to William Gladstone and, as far as Starmer is concerned, it’s indelible. Into the bin with that reprobate’s portrait.

Now we all appreciate that every woman in high office strikes a blow for equality. Yet we’ve also had to learn that womanhood is a political, not biological, concept. No one is born a woman – this is an honour that has to be earned by wholehearted commitment to neo-Marxism.

That may be partly why Starmer finds it hard to define a woman. Physiologically, he has already implied that 34,000 British women have penises (one-tenth of one per cent, as he put it). But politically, he’d have to deny their sex to millions of Tory-voting women, which may be a step too far even for him.

However, he could still dump the portrait of that sexless monster Margaret Thatcher and did so with alacrity. The first female prime minister doesn’t belong in the residence of a committed feminist.

Starmer’s neighbour, Rachel Reeves, has the power of her feminist convictions. Moving into 11 Downing Street, she declared that thenceforth a female-only rule would be imposed. All artworks in her new residence must be “of a woman or by a woman”.

In that spirit, she threw out the portrait of former chancellor Nigel Lawson who, in addition to his toxic conservatism, committed the crime of being male. The vacant place was filled with the portrait of Ellen Wilkinson, who in 1920 became a founding member of the British Communist Party.

I don’t know whether Miss Reeves’s grasp of communist history matches her affection for it, but, unless she’s prejudiced against foreigners, I could recommend a few other candidates. Rosa Luxemburg, for example, or… no I get it. Rosa Zemliachka would be even better.

That lovely girl was in charge of massacring 100,000 people in the Crimea during the Russian Civil War. Her Marxist credentials were thus impeccable and, unlike Miss Wilkinson, she succeeded in putting them into practice big time.

Yes, I know she wasn’t British but, on current evidence, I doubt Starmer and Reeves are either, in any other than the ethnic sense. Their spiritual home is where their art is.