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Some 20 years ago I was splashing about buckets of cold water to douse the universal enthusiasm about glasnost, perestroika and the ‘collapse of communism’.

There’s no tradition of civilised society in Russia, I was writing, and whatever little there used to be has been crushed during the 70-odd years of Bolshevism. Hence the belief that, having shed the shackles of communism, Russia will turn into a Western or even quasi-Western society is, to be charitable, naïve.

There was no viable group to replace the Communist Party in government. Or rather there was one: the KGB. That’s why, rather than hailing what a particularly brainless neocon described as the end of history, I shuddered to think what those people would come up with next.

Now we know: all those wonderful things so beloved of useful idiots amounted to a transfer of power from the Party to the organic fusion of the KGB and organised crime.

Proof was quickly provided, if any was needed, that a market economy not buttressed by a legal tradition of long standing is a synonym for gangsterism – and an attempt at democracy for which there’s neither taste nor historical prerequisites is bound to result in some sort of fascisoid regime.

I can’t claim clairvoyance, much as I’d like to. What I can claim is some knowledge of political history, specifically of revolts resulting in drastic changes to societies.

Different as they might have been, they all have something in common, some sine qua non of revolutionary makeover.

All modern revolutions, whether self-described as bourgeois, peasant or proletarian, were perpetrated by middleclass intelligentsia cohering on the basis of a plausible idea. In revolutions too, the word came first.

Actually, ‘intelligentsia’ is too broad a term, implying a whole class of people. In reality, revolutions are made by a small, vigorous and unscrupulous core within intelligentsia.

In addition to detesting the existing order, such activists always have a clear idea of where they wish to take the country, and they always brandish some easily digestible slogans for public consumption.

Sometimes the idea coincides with the slogans, and sometimes – perhaps usually – it doesn’t. Not to embark on a long foray across many centuries and borders, let’s just look at the two Russian revolutions in 1917.

The February one deposed the tsar whose rule was widely seen as untenable. The active group in the event was formed by left-of-centre liberals, who thought Russia could prosper as a copycat Western-style democracy, complete with all the liberties implicit therein.

Like all revolutionaries, the members of the Provisional Government wanted to destroy something, in that case Russia’s absolutism. Unlike some revolutionaries, they also wanted to create something: a Russia shedding her Golden Horde heritage in favour of Western democracy.

Yet eight months later the Provisional Government was ousted by another, Bolshevik, revolution.

The Bolsheviks, led by a syphilitic ghoul, had no constructive purpose whatsoever. They were driven by zoological hatred of everyone who wasn’t a Bolshevik.

Their hatred was truly classless: they murdered with equal relish aristocrats, officers, priests, engineers, scientists, academics, workers and peasants.

They didn’t really seek anything constructive. All they wanted was absolute power enabling them to spread Lenin’s syphilis all over Europe and eventually the whole world.

The divergence between their desiderata and their slogans was as wide as it could be, for the simple reason that the desiderata owed much to Russia’s Asian, which is to say Mongol, political heritage, while the mendacious slogans came from the European Enlightenment.

By the time I grew up, in the ‘60s, people widely, and the intelligentsia universally, detested communism. The powers that be, on the other hand, having gorged on the blood of 60 million victims, were suffering from reflux: the general slackening of will.

They had lost the taste for mass murder, and inevitably a dissident movement appeared. I was a small part of it, and I remember the all-abiding hatred we all felt for the communists.

But what, other than the death of communism, did we actually want? Whenever that question was asked, a fog descended.

We’d mouth general platitudes along the lines of democracy, liberty and all things Western. Yet we knew next to nothing about the West and understood even less. Even though I was bilingual and read mostly Anglophone books, I was no better than others.

That became instantly obvious whenever we were asked any question beginning with “And specifically…” We couldn’t offer any specifics that wouldn’t be laughed out of a freshman seminar on political science at any Western university.

Predictably, when the sclerotic Soviet Union could no longer survive, it wasn’t my fellow dissidents (I myself left Russia in 1973, half a step ahead of an arrest squad) who took over, but the people they either hated (KGB) or despised (gangsters).

Looking at the situation today, one can detect obvious parallels. The Russian intelligentsia almost universally detests Putin’s kleptofascist regime. That’s good, because it’s indeed detestable.

Those with the gift of the gab write about the Putinistas knowledgeably, convincingly, at times brilliantly. But what sort of alternative do they see in their mind’s eye?

Generally speaking, their frame of reference is yet again negative: whatever Putin likes, they hate and vice versa.

If Putin manipulates religion for his purposes, they’re militant atheists. If Putin is against homomarriage, they’re for it. If Putin is anti-EU, they think it’s the greatest achievement in political history. If Putin were to insist that the sky is blue, they’d argue it’s polka dot.

All that is good knockabout stuff, but specifically, ladies and gentlemen? What kind of Russia would you like to see?

A Western one, comes a reply as thunderous as ours used to be back in the 60s. Yet their ignorance of the West is as staggering as ours was, if less excusable. After all, unlike us they can travel in the West and have access to any information they want.

When I read Russian opposition publications, I’m as impressed by their deep insights into Russia as I’m appalled by their wilful ignorance of the West, married to the typical effrontery of ignoramuses who aren’t even aware how little they know.

As an example, here’s my translation of a recent piece by the popular blogger Mikhail Pozharsky. As far as I can glean from his sketchy bio, he started political life as a Nazi who wanted, among other things, to kill all homosexuals. He then travelled all the way to libertarianism, with an interim stopover at liberalism.

Here he offers his take on conservatism, and I’m publishing this piece in its entirety only because it’s typical of the level of political thought within the opposition intelligentsia.

“The lupine stupidity of conservatism

“Wolves are considered dangerous predators, but they have an Achilles heel: they fear everything new and unknown. That determines how they’re hunted: little red flags are hung around the forest, and, because wolves are scared of approaching them, they run where the hunters await. One wonders why some people and whole nations like to emulate such stupid beasts. However, there is an explanation.

“For wolves are a perfect symbol of political conservatives. What in fact is the conservative agenda? Do you see something new, unknown? Run away, go into a stupor – as long as you don’t get anywhere near! Conservatism is a political ideology without an ideology as such. It is wholly replaced with kneejerk neophobia, an irrational urge to maintain the status quo.

“A conservative’s thought is never independent – he runs wherever he’s driven by representatives of other political forces, mainly socialists (it’s not for nothing that those little red flags are red). Conservatives are driven by the principle ‘I’ll cut off my nose to spite lefties’. Thus they keep running inside the perimeter hung with flags, thereby popularising the left agenda.

“Yet there’s no fundamental difference between conservatives and lefties. The left seek absolute power in order to raze the old society and build a new one in accordance with their utopian fantasies. Conservatives also seek absolute power, but to the opposite end: protecting everything old from natural erosion. That’s why repentant socialists often become conservatives, and vice versa. But they seldom join the ranks of defenders of freedom. They are all enemies of freedom.

“A conservative defending freedom is as rare as a socialist doing so. The USA was initially built on liberal principles. That’s why an American conservative may support free enterprise. However, the same American conservative will be against freedom in other areas – he’ll be in favour of protectionism and a ban on same-sex marriage. Conservative is incapable of pondering and developing the ideas put forth by the Founding Fathers. A conservative is a kneejerk ‘want everything as it was’.

“That’s why supporters of freedom, libertarians, may have conservative views in the area of morality or religion. But they can’t be political conservatives. Political conservatism is as incompatible with liberty as socialism is.”

As one of those lupine conservatives who detest liberty, I don’t think any commentary is necessary. One seldom sees so much ignorant bilge put forth with so much arrogance.

The only true statement in the piece is that conservatism isn’t an ideology, but the poor chap isn’t even aware of the negative connotations of the word ‘ideology’.

Now political taxonomy is a tricky business, and ‘conservative’ means different things to different people. In Russia as often as not it stands for ‘Stalinist’ and, when used pejoratively in that sense, it’s justified.

But Pozharsky is talking specifically about American conservatives, who are supposed to be enemies of freedom and have no ideas of their own, other than opposing same-sex marriage and free trade.

It’s true that conservatives neither want to murder all homosexuals, as Pozharsky did when he was a Nazi, nor to see them marrying, as he wants now he’s a libertarian. Yet he allows libertarians to have conservative views on morality and religion, which views are incompatible with the championship of homomarriage.

But never mind the intellectual muddle, feel the ignorance. Pozharsky – and take my word for it, he’s typical – not only knows nothing about conservatism, but he doesn’t even know what the word means.

Talking specifically about American conservatism, he hasn’t read a single word written by Russell Kirk, James Burnham, Frank Mayer, Whittaker Chambers, William F. Buckley, Erik Kuehnelt-Leddihn (Austrian American) and dozens of others I could mention.

Nor is he familiar with the history of conservative thought, signposted – among hundreds of others – by Aristotle, Burke, Goethe, Chateaubriand, de Maistre, Tocqueville or, if he wants to talk about American Founders, Ames, Randolph and Calhoun.

So what will happen to Russia when Putin finally goes, as go he must at some time? Who’ll take over? Pozharsky, of the cutlet fame? His fellow liberal-libertarian admirers of the West about which they know the square root of sod-all?

I dare say it’s more likely, nay guaranteed, that they’ll be ousted, possibly massacred, by heirs to Putin and therefore the Golden Horde tradition of Russian politics – this time with a huge thieving dimension (not that corruption has ever been dormant there).

My advice to Russian intelligentsia would be to stop looking to the West for answers. They should have done so many centuries ago, when the West was in ascendancy. Yet over the past couple of centuries the West has been busily destroying what took almost two millennia to create – what conservatives cherish.

Whatever good is still extant in the West can’t be just run through a copier – the run-out will be garbled. By all means, they should study the Western experience critically, adapting what could be useful, discarding the rest.

But the first order of the day should be for them to generate indigenous ideas based on concrete Russian realities, not on Western ones they don’t understand in sufficient depth.

And they ought to refrain from sweeping statements about the West that upset me so. These are never amusing, grown-up or clever.

Or if it isn’t, it should be. For only one medical researcher combines deep penetrating insights with the courage to stage death-defying experiments on himself.

Many doctors, including five Nobel laureates, have gone down in history for exposing themselves to pathogenic, toxic and radioactive substances. Jesse Lazear exposed himself to yellow fever, Max von Pettenkofer to cholera, Daniel Zagury to AIDS – the list can go on and on.

But it’ll never be complete without the name of Jean-Claude Juncker, or Junk as he likes to be known to his friends among whom I proudly count myself.

Last July Junk came up with a daring hypothesis on the aetiology and symptomatology of sciatica. His courageous self-experimentation at the NATO summit then turned the hypothesis into scientific fact.

Junk’s breakthrough discovery was that sciatica is caused by the toxic substances added to Glenfarclas malt whisky. As with all such additives, the adverse effect is directly proportional to the amount consumed and the rate of consumption.

To support this theory Junk self-sacrificially, not to say heroically, consumed a full bottle of the dangerous beverage. Sure enough, he immediately developed a bad case of sciatica, featuring a unique clinical picture.

In addition to pain in the lower back, the virulent form of sciatica caused by Glenfarclas is evidently characterised by zigzagging, stumbling, losing one’s balance, trying to topple over backwards, laughing uncontrollably and for no good reason, kissing everything that moves and forcing foreplay on men and women alike.

At the time I started a campaign demanding that Glenfarclas labels carry a government health warning. Predictably the government, preoccupied with such marginal issues as Brexit, ignored my entreaty.

More evidence, they said, was required before such a step could be taken. My friend Junk, they added, should be encouraged to collect more research data. According to them, the corpus of evidence gathered hitherto only qualified as a promising start.

When I conveyed the bad news to Junk, he took it in his stride. “All we can do, Al,” he said, “is keep plugging away. I don’t care if I have to drink Scotland dry to help all those millions of sciatica sufferers.”

Junk was true to his word. He chose the Africa-Europe summit at Vienna’s Hofburg Palace as an appropriate site for his self-sacrificial self-experimentation. When I later asked him how much Glenfarclas he had consumed to bring on sciatica symptoms, Junk told me it was none of my bloody business.

“Let’s just say it was well in excess of LD50,” he said, yet again resorting to the arcane technical jargon that comes naturally to him but leaves ignoramuses like me bemused.

“LD50, you nincompoop,” explained Junk, sensing my bewilderment, “is Lethal Dose 50, the amount of an ingested substance that kills 50 per cent of a test sample. Well, I’m in the other 50 per cent.” he added proudly. “Tell that to those Brexiteer énculés.”

Even before that momentous event, Junk had staged a lower-level trial to obtain more evidence of sciatica causing bizarre amorous episodes. He had been filmed ruffling the peroxide hair and kissing the cheek of Pernilla Sjölin, the EU’s deputy head of protocol.

Aware of the episode’s medical significance, Miss Sjölin went along, which encouraged Junk to consume more whisky, thereby exacerbating the sciatica symptoms.

He then expanded his sample base by engaging Mrs May in a foreplay session, involving kissing, petting and murmuring sweet nothings into her ear, such as “You nebulous bitch, why don’t you pull your head out of your cul and tell me what the bloody hell you want.”

Yet it was the Vienna conference that was singled out for the full-scale experiment. This time it took several burly assistants to keep Junk upright, while he was laughing uncontrollably and trying to fall down.

The amorous symptoms of Glenfarclas-induced sciatica also manifested themselves with new clarity, this time transcending the line separating the sexes.

Yet again Junk selected a Croatian politician as his subject. If in July he had tried to feel up Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, the comely president of that country, this time he focused on Croatia’s PM Andrej Plenkovic (“I thought he was Kolinda,” he later told me. “That’s sciatica for you.”)

When sciatica finally made it impossible for Junk to get up from his chair, he remained seated while trying to, in his parlance, ‘score’ with Estonia’s Prime Minister Juri Ratas. Evidently Junk had upped the dose of the control substance to produce a cleaner experiment.

Here’s a man willing to suffer excruciating pain for the sake of medical science. And not just pain.

Sciatica is known to produce other conditions, such as cirrhosis of the liver, hypertension, cardiomyopathy, arrhythmia, fibrosis, pancreatitis and imprisonment for affray. Junk is heroically risking all those to advance human knowledge, and I can’t think of a worthier candidate for the Nobel Prize.

I’m also comforted to know that the future of the EU is in such safe, if slightly shaking, hands.

Junk isn’t dedicating his life to this other noble cause in his life for the measly €350,000 a year, plus unspecified expenses. Yet again he’s sacrificing himself for the common good – and how many of us can say the same?

Common law may mean different things. In purely legal terms, it’s a judicial system based on custom and precedent, rather than statute.

England and most of her former colonies, such as the US, have this bottom-top system in place. On the other hand, continental countries, such as France, practise top-bottom positive law, with clever chaps who know better getting together and concocting laws for everybody to live by.

But then common law may also mean one judicial system for all, and there the difference between England and continentals is slight. However laws are generated, it’s assumed that they apply equally to everybody.

For a legal system to function properly, there can be no parallel systems or sub-systems. No competition is possible, which is one reason, among many, for banning Sharia law in non-Muslim countries.

This sounds self-evident, but these days nothing is. Hence gathering strength at the expense of the English Common Law is the glossocratic law imposed by a panoply of minority pressure groups.

‘Glossocratic’ means government by the word, of the word and for the word. At its heart lies the understanding that whoever controls language controls minds, and whoever controls minds controls, well, everything.

The two legal systems are vectored in the opposite directions. The traditional common law going back to Scripture is now routinely flouted, with its underlying principles shunted aside.

Crimes that strike against individual property and person often go unprosecuted and even uninvestigated. Burglary, for example, is no longer thought worthy of police attention, and even gruesomely violent crimes often receive derisory sentences if any.

That situation isn’t unique to Britain. Thus Chériff Chekatt was free to have fun at that Strasbourg Christmas market even though he had 27 criminal convictions to his name, most for violent crimes.

Clearly, France’s positive law isn’t doing better than England’s common law in making sure that such human refuse don’t roam the streets looking for prey.

I’m not necessarily advocating the three-strikes-and-you’re-out arrangement, but surely any country not bent on suicide should have such a policy for 27 strikes. Yet all Western countries are exhibiting suicidal tendencies galore.

Meanwhile the parallel glossocratic system is flourishing, with its injunctions enforced mercilessly, surely and universally.

Because glossocratic laws spring from neither precedent nor statute, it’s impossible to contest them or to seek justice. In any case, the glossocratic law isn’t about justice. It’s about power and control.

Three examples spring to mind off the top, all from the past week or so.

The comedian Konstantin Kisin was invited to do an unpaid charity gig at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Richly endowed with a sense of civic responsibility, he agreed.

By way of thanks he was served with a ‘behavioural agreement form’, specifying areas held off-limits for jokes:

“By signing this contract, you are agreeing to our no-tolerance policy with regards to racism, sexism, classism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia or anti-religion or anti-atheism,” went the agreement, adding that such self-restraint will “ensure an environment where joy, love and acceptance are reciprocated by all”.

In other words, making even a remotely funny joke on any subject would contravene the parallel system of glossocratic law, and no appeals were allowed. To his credit, Kisin didn’t even try to appeal. He simply refused to appear and made some laudable statements about freedom of speech.

Going back a few days, advertising regulator, the Committee of Advertising Practice, issued a ban on “gender stereotypes that are likely to cause harm, or serious or widespread offence”.

Harmful stereotypes in ads, explained CAP, “contribute to how people see themselves and their role in society”, and can therefore hold some impressionable souls back.

Advertisers will no longer be allowed to show, say, butter-fingered men breaking the dishes they wash, women being weaker (shorter?) than men and in any way subservient to them, or presumably men leading a bayonet charge with no help from the weaker, nay equally strong, sex.

One could of course cite scientific proof of innate physiological differences between the sexes (or rather among the sexes: a bisexual dating site lists 22 of them). But no such evidence is admissible in a glossocratic courtroom.

As I say, no appeals are allowed; due process boils down to morbidly undue sensitivity, institutionally mandated but seldom actually felt.

Another example of glossocratic justice at work was helpfully provided by animal rights groups, which are impervious to the sheer idiocy of the very term ‘animal rights’. Rights dialectically coexist with duties: someone with no duties, such as animals, can’t have any rights by definition.

But glossocratic tyranny is never about the face value of the proposition. Those animal righters don’t really care if you kick Fido every time he crosses your path. All they want is to control your language and thus your mind.

Hence you can find yourself in glossocratic prison for saying “kill two birds with one stone.” The mandated inoffensive alternative is “feed two birds with one scone”. (With or without Devonshire cream? We have the right to know.).

In the same spirit, thou shalt replace “there are many ways to skin a cat” with “there are many ways to eat a kiwi” – or else. Also criminalised are expressions like “go the whole hog”, “sweating like a pig” and “human guinea pig”, which deny their God-given rights to the species mentioned.

Actually I pride myself on having pioneered this long-overdue initiative by taking exception to any idioms including the word ‘dog’. In all of them, I’ve been campaigning, the offensive noun can be profitably and poignantly replaced with ‘wife’.

Hence I suggest such inoffensive alternatives as “let a sleeping wife lie”, “you can’t teach an old wife new tricks”, “sick as a wife”, “a wife’s breakfast”, “a wife in a manger”, “a hair of the wife”, “a barking wife never bites”, “go to the wives”, “if you lie with wives, you’ll get fleas” – though not, again for physiological reasons, “wife’s bollocks”.

However, I face a horrible conundrum. For, having thus found myself on the animal righters’ good side, I’ve run foul of the parallel laws passed by those who are programmed to be mortally offended by any irreverent remarks about women, that long-suffering minority that happens to be a majority.

The tyrannical system of parallel laws is both proscriptive and prescriptive. It not only specifies things that can’t be said, but it also dictates things that must be said.

Moreover, its remit shows a potential for endless expansion, specifically because its laws are demonstrably absurd. That, as Orwell once observed, is the nature of tyranny.

The tyrants know that their laws are ridiculous, and they know that we know. So much more satisfying it is for them to make us comply: when despots speak, reason stays silent for its own good.

Orwell was talking about fascist regimes, and that’s exactly what’s gestating within our body politic: a foetus of fascism conceived by glossocratic diktat.

But none dare call it that. The term ‘fascist’ is these days reserved for hard-working, church-going, Tory-voting conservatives who resist glossocracy in a hopeless last stand.

When it comes to attacking them, the glossocratic law instantly turns permissive: no holds barred. Thus a simple impersonation of cultured diction elicits roars of laughter; the vilest and most groundless accusation is avidly accepted on faith.

It’s only anomic slurs that go unpunished by glossocracy. Quite the opposite – they’re actively encouraged.

That’s par for the course, for the animating impulse of modernity is the urge to destroy everything of long provenance. Including the Common Law.

 

Drawing parallels with the past is a perilous pastime for those who’d like to keep some vestige of sanity. Still, just this once wouldn’t hurt.

Reading the account of the exchange between Jean-Claude ‘Junk’ Juncker and our own Theresa May, one wonders if a similar encounter could have taken place between, say, Castlereagh and Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna.

T: Your proposals are nebulous.

C: Who are you calling nebulous?

T: I didn’t.

C: Yes, you bloody well did.

T: No, I didn’t.

C: You did too.

T: I didn’t either.

C: Did, did, did, did…

T: Didn’t, didn’t, didn’t…

C: Liar, liar, your pants are on fire.

T: Cross my heart and hope to die, I didn’t.

C: Did, did, did, did…

T (sticks his index fingers into his ears and chants): Na, na, na, na…

C (screams at the top of his lungs): You call me nebulous once again, and I’ll shoot you like a mad… Canning!

T (unplugs his ears): Oh yeah?

C: Yeah!

T: Says who?

C: Says I!

T: Well, you can go and…

Hard as I strain my fecund imagination, I still can’t picture this dialogue taking place in 1815. Yet there’s nothing surprising about it having taken place in 2018 (albeit without the few embellishments I added for emphasis).

Old-fashioned things like dignity, manners and style have gone out of modern politics, as they have out of everything else. However, even with that proviso it’s painful to witness the spectacle of Her Majesty’s prime minister haggling like a fishwife with a booze-addled foreigner from one of those iffy countries.

What makes it even harder to take is the realisation that the booze-addled foreigner is actually right, and Her Majesty’s prime minister is wrong. In fact, my friend Junk ought to be complimented on his restraint in having chosen a mild word to describe Mrs May’s performance.

He would have been within his right to use meatier adjectives, such as ‘inane’, ‘idiotic’ or even ‘half-arsed’. Any one of those would have been richly deserved.

Now that we wax nostalgic, let’s agree for old times’ sake that this government has handled Brexit in ways that would make Messrs Pitt, Castlereagh, Palmerston et al spin like tops in their graves.

Sometimes they acted as true statesmen, sometimes they didn’t, but they never went to Europe as supplicants, begging for ‘deals’. Just imagine any one of them imploring chaps from Luxembourg and Poland to let our parliament pass more of our own laws.

The very concept of a deal is deeply flawed anyway, borrowed as it is from commerce. Merchants live or die by deals; statesmen operate in pacts, treaties, alliances – or, barring those, conflicts.

A deal presupposes both sides relinquishing something for the sake of a greater mutual good. Yet one thing that a self-respecting country can never relinquish is its sovereignty, not without a fight anyway. British sovereignty is vested in Parliament, and no fragment of it can be broken off and traded away.

For an equitable deal to materialise in commerce, both sides have to be trading in good faith. If one of them isn’t, no deal is possible. Yet in this case, neither side is.

The EU doesn’t want an equitable deal. It wants to stop Brexit in its tracks or, barring that, to make it so painful that other members will think twice before following Britain’s suit.

And Mrs May doesn’t want to leave at all. She seems to think that Britain’s sovereignty rightfully belongs to an unaccountable foreign body with generous pension provisions for its operators. So she works surreptitiously to undermine the popular mandate, while making a show of respecting it.

Any courageous, statesmanlike PM would be telling the EU what we’re going to do, not asking if we could please do it. Britain may not be the great power it was at the time of Pitt, Castlereagh or Palmerston, but that doesn’t mean it has to humiliate and dishonour itself.

Yet humiliating their own country comes naturally to our spivocrats, nonentities to a man, or in this case woman. They are driven by self-interest and self-perpetuation, not by any considerations of bono publico.

In pursuit of such ignominious ends, they effectively act against their own country, joining forces with foreign governments, few of which have Britain’s best interests at heart.

I’m not as ready as some of my friends to bandy the word ‘treason’ about, what with its very specific legal implications. But used loosely, treason is exactly what Mrs May’s government and the so-called Remainers are committing.

If they acted as British statesmen, rather than as European bureaucrats of, well, nebulous allegiance, they wouldn’t negotiate at all – or if they did, they’d do so from a position of strength.

They wouldn’t genuflect before Junk and his accomplices, begging them for a deal. And once some thin gruel were served to them, they wouldn’t do an Oliver Twist and embarrassingly ask for more.

Instead they’d prepare the ground for an orderly fall-back and leave unconditionally and without paying any exit fees, making clear to the EU that, if we assume our share of liabilities, we must also have our share of assets.

That out of the way, by all means we could then discuss free trade agreements or any other ‘deals’. But making the exit contingent on a ‘deal’ puts those who are desperate to reverse Brexit into a powerful, nay dominant negotiating position.

Junk and his gang have effectively been handed veto power over Brexit and a decisive say in Britain’s internal politics. They could, for example, oust Mrs May by refusing to be enveloped in the nebula of her waffling and announcing harsh punitive measures awaiting a no-deal exit.

In effect, they could reduce Britain to a third-world status by facilitating the advent of a Trotskyist government that sees Venezuela as its role model.

Messrs Pitt, Castlereagh, Palmerston et al had their failings. But they would never have prostrated themselves in such a humiliating manner before a continental power.

But then in those days Britain had proud statesmen. All we have are spivocratic, deal-making nonentities. Is that really the kind of government we deserve?

Assorted presidents and prime ministers have assured us that Islam is a religion of peace.

Unfortunately, no one told that to Chériff Chekatt, and neither had he demonstrably ever heard the assurances of assorted presidents and prime ministers.

Thus unenlightened, Mr Chekatt screamed the lapidary slogan ‘Allahu akbar!’ and shot up a Christmas market in Strasbourg, killing three (so far) and wounding 12.

The next day the police caught up with him, and he was killed in the ensuing shootout. Now Mr Chekatt faces the arduous task of entertaining the 72 virgins of paradise, which has to be the only place where so many virgins can be found.

Then again, since Islam is rather permissive on the minimum age of consent it’s quite possible that Mr Chekatt’s love interests still wear nappies. One way or another, he deserves a bit of posthumous fun for having proved true to his religion.

He was a good Muslim, meaning he acted according to the commandments of his faith as laid down in its holy book. That is a reasonable definition of a pious man.

Thus a good Jew is one who observes the Ten Commandments and loves his neighbour as himself. A good Christian also observes the Decalogue and loves his neighbour, but with embellishments:

“But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, be good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

Since we’re all committed to diversity, however it manifests itself, we must be happy to know that the Koran imposes rather different demands on its followers:

“When the sacred months have passed, then kill the Mushrikin [infidels] wherever you find them. Capture them. Besiege them. Lie in wait for them in each and every ambush…”

The Koran contains roughly 300 verses elucidating various facets of the same general entreaty. Since Mr Chekatt followed his holy texts faithfully, he definitely qualifies as a good Muslim: he did kill the infidels wherever he could find them.

At this time of the year a Christmas market provides a promising hunting ground for infidels: one can confidently expect to find crowds of people who think there just may be a god other than Allah, and Mohammed isn’t his prophet.

There’s also the off chance that the shooter might bag, in addition to a few infidels, the next worst thing: a bad Muslim, one who doesn’t go around killing people even though the Koran says he must.

Mr Chekatt in fact had the good luck of doing just that: one of his victims was Kamal Naghchband, who had fled the Taliban and obtained asylum in France 15 years ago. Mr Naghchband was a peaceful man, who ran a garage at his local mosque and left infidels to their own vices and devices.

He was thus a bad Muslim, which clearly doesn’t preclude being a good man. Mr Chekatt, on the other hand, was a good Muslim, which means that under no circumstances could he have been a good man.

Actually he wasn’t. By age 29 Mr Chekatt had amassed 27 criminal convictions for violence, robbery and theft. It was during one of his stints in prison that he learned what being a good Muslim meant, and who says custodial sentences have no educational value.

The piquancy of the situation is that the French police had known all about Mr Chekatt’s piety long before he went Christmas shopping. But, if you listen to them, there was nothing they could do.

This is a case of what I call ‘faitaccomplism’: governments act ill-advisedly, not to say criminally, to create a potential for catastrophe. And when it duly arrives, they shrug their shoulders: “There was nothing we could have done”. Quite. Other than not acted with criminal negligence in the first place.

In that spirit, European governments have hospitably welcomed tens of millions of cultural aliens, actually hostiles, over just a few decades.

Even if only an unrealistically low one per cent of them are good Muslims, ready to kill infidels wherever they could find them (such as at a Christmas market), we’re blessed with tens of thousands of potential murderers roaming our streets.

Many of them are citizens of European countries; some, like Mr Chekatt, their natives. So indeed there’s little the police can do to prevent murder.

They can’t deport a citizen, born and bred in the country. They can’t even deport a non-citizen who’s in the country legally. Theoretically they’re able to deport an illegal alien, but that’s often more trouble than it’s worth.

They can’t imprison someone preventively simply on the basis of his belonging to a high-risk group. According to the French police, they don’t even have the manpower to keep tabs on the 12,000 known jihadists – never mind the tens of thousands of likely ones.

It’s faitaccomplism at work. Had France not allowed millions of Muslims into the country, the problem wouldn’t exist. But, as cliché-mongers will tell you, history knows no subjunctive mood. France does have at least five million Muslims, and that’s it. Sorted. Fait accompli.

Now I know little about France’s criminal law, but on general principle there must be provisions for keeping in prison a recidivist with 27 convictions to his name, regardless of the chap’s religion.

Yet even if the criminal law provides for something like that, the law of political correctness doesn’t, and that’s the one that takes priority. European governments have sleepwalked into the rule of glossocratic non-law, where abstract (and hare-brained) principles trump any concrete considerations of citizens’ safety.

In this legal system, someone who shows, Koran in hand, that Islam is at least partly to blame for the crimes committed in its name presents a greater danger than the good Muslims who do murder because that’s what their religion tells them to do.

The good Muslims only attack individuals, while a truculent breaker of politically correct non-laws attacks the central ethos of society. Off with his head.

This leaves us pondering an interesting linguistic dichotomy: for a Muslim to be a good man, he has to be a bad Muslim. And vice versa.

First a disclaimer: I know and like Gerard. That’s hardly unique, for he’s known and liked by many.

Nor can I claim any originality in deploring his choice of the thuggish criminal Tommy Robinson as his adviser. I’m sure many of Gerard’s friends feel the same way.

Where I diverge from some is in understanding, compassionately, why Gerard did what he did, going I’m sure against his better instincts.

Whenever a friend of mine has a problem, my first impulse is to offer help, if only in the shape of unsolicited advice. Alas, I can’t do so in this case – for the simple reason that I can’t find anything sensible to suggest.

The problem is that, though Gerard’s heart and head are both in the right place, his party isn’t. In fact, when Gerard took over as Ukip leader, the party was moribund.

It was sinking fast, and it took all of Gerard’s administrative talents to keep it afloat. But a ship that’s not structurally sea-worthy will sink sooner or later, for all the best efforts of its captain and crew.

That I’m afraid is Ukip’s situation, and it largely derives from the party’s nature. For Ukip isn’t really a party, in the sense in which we usually understand the word. It’s more of a pressure group, pressing on a single point: getting out of the EU.

For Ukip is a party not just of a single issue but of a single hope. The hope, even if continuously frustrated, can sustain the party’s life. But the hope fulfilled will have the same effect as the hope stamped out: death.

In other words, the party’s success would spell its demise, which isn’t how other political entities typically define achievement.

A political party is deemed successful when it gains enough votes to win or at least influence elections. It may or may not become king, but, to justify its existence, it must always have the capacity to be a king maker.

A party can become successful only when it enjoys a broad, and expandable, support base. It doesn’t have to be all things to all men (although most parties try), but it does have to be many things to many men.

A single-issue party is thus at an inherent disadvantage, which Ukip illustrates vividly.

I once asked a senior Ukip figure if the party could extend its life expectancy by positioning itself as the true conservative party, as distinct from the Labour Lite that has appropriated the name.

That was an ignorant question, my interlocutor was quick to explain. For Ukip isn’t only, perhaps not even predominantly, conservative.

For the issue of Brexit is narrow enough to attract broad masses. People who disagree on everything else may still overlap on that one point.

Generally speaking, they are all disaffected with the existing establishment, Tory, Labour or especially the cross-party apparat that transcends any nominal affiliation and governs on the basis of narrow self-interest. But they do fall into separate, sometime irreconcilable, groups.

One group is indeed formed by intuitive conservatives, those who realise that a transfer of sovereignty from Parliament to any foreign body invalidates Britain’s constitution and hence effectively Britain herself. Anyone who knows Gerard Batten or has read his book on Henry VIII will know that this is the group to which he belongs.

Another lot are old-fashioned patriotic Labourites, who are socialists not because they wish to destroy Britain but because they’re misguided into believing that socialism won’t do that.

Yet another group are hard-Left socialists in the Corbyn vein, for whom the EU isn’t socialist enough. They do want workers of the world to unite, but only under the Corbynites’ own aegis. If conservatives are loath to weaken the constitutional mandate, this lot hate weakening their own power.

And then there’s another wad of humanity, one with which the Remainers perfidiously identify the whole Brexit movement: fascistic thugs. This group is best exemplified by Tommy Robinson.

If the conservatives and old-fashioned Labourites are chiefly motivated by love, the Tommy Robinson types are driven by hate – of foreigners, minorities such as Muslims and often also Jews, poor people, rich people, you name it.

A conservative may deplore the uncontrolled influx of Muslim immigrants because he is aware of the cultural and demographic catastrophe that may ensue once a certain critical mass has been reached. But he won’t viscerally hate individual Muslims, the way fascistic types do.

So why did Gerard welcome that criminal thug into the inner sanctum of Ukip? The answer lies not in any imperfection of Gerard’s character, but in the structural defects of his party.

Dave Cameron put Ukip in the coffin by agreeing to hold a Brexit referendum. And, when more Britons voted to leave than had ever voted for anything else, they nailed the lid shut. The single issue seemed not to be an issue any longer.

A succession of Ukip leaders followed, until the reins were taken by someone with all the requisite qualities: Gerard Batten. He prised the coffin lid open because Ukip couldn’t be buried yet.

Hence Ukip had to go back to acting like a party, which entailed standing in all sorts of elections, winning some, affecting the outcome of most and thereby putting a squeeze on the mainstream parties.

After all, Dave Cameron didn’t call a referendum out of the goodness of his heart. He did so because Ukip was cannibalising the Tory vote, delivering marginal seats to Labour.

Since the cross-party apparat is tirelessly working to undermine, ideally torpedo, Brexit, the need for Ukip is as urgent as ever. But the core support for it has been compromised.

The disaffected Tories have gone back to their political roots, as have the disaffected Labourites. After all, both their parties claim to be committed to Brexit.

Those prodigal sons will smell a rat sooner or later, but later is no good for Ukip. It needs to make its comeback now, before the coffin has been lowered six feet under.

The most immediate political opportunity lies in bringing under its unifying banners all sorts of marginal groups, those that go by the misnomer of ‘extreme right’. There are at least half a dozen of them around, and I mean only the largest ones, those that call themselves a party.

However, Ukip’s charter wisely ostracises BNP types and their ideological relations – it’s incumbent on a serious political party to disavow any extremist group claiming affinity with it.

When a party refuses to do so, it thereby brands itself as not serious. Corbyn’s Labour springs to mind.

Throughout its life, the Labour party has tried to keep communists and other hard left riff-raff out. In that effort, the party has been only variably successful, but at least until now the hard left has been unable to claim the party as its own.

Now the loony left are in charge there, and one can only pray that the British have enough nous left to keep that bunch out of power – for all the vacillating inadequacy of the Tories. Alas, I’m not sure electorates are capable of thinking in terms of lesser evil.

Labour didn’t have to open its doors to the lunatic fringe, but I’m sure Gerard Batten feels Ukip is in no position to be fastidious. If it can survive at all, it has to get support wherever it can find it. It can no longer afford to pick and choose.

Having said all that, if I were a member of Ukip, I’d leave it over this out of sheer squeamishness – just like many years ago I stopped attending parties at a conservative magazine because I had espied some BNP types there.

Mercifully, anticipating just such a situation, I never joined Ukip even though I faithfully voted for it in a number of elections. Now I’m not bound by party loyalty to defend the hiring of Tommy Robinson.

I would never hire scum like that in a million years, and I’d leave any room he’d enter. But I have the luxury Gerard lacks: reaching for the high moral ground.

I’m responsible to no one but myself; he has a party to run. I can afford being uncompromising; Gerard can’t. So I’m sorry he did what he did – but I understand why he did it.

Call this a sop to my American past, but I think that, in everyday life, a baseball bat offers certain ballistic advantages that a cricket bat doesn’t.

The cricket one is heavier, but, since the force of impact equals mass times velocity squared, it’s speed that’s at a premium. And, when swung with grim intent, a baseball bat travels through the air so much faster.

What does this recondite information have to do with the price of tea in China? Nothing. But it has something do with my Christmas shopping.

We always spend Christmas at our little house in the Burgundian woods, out of range for some essential supplies. So each time we go we stock up on some condiments unavailable there and, at Christmas, also Bramley apples, essential to stuffing a goose (the French have no equivalent).

However, before we get to that stuffed goose we have to drive halfway across France, and that’s where the baseball bat comes in. As another sop to my American past, I’d prefer a gun but, France being what it is, I’ll have to settle for a palliative.

For there’s a distinct possibility that our way may be blocked by rioters taking a dim view of les anglo-saxons motoring through their beautiful countryside. I, in my turn, will definitely take a dim view of louts endangering my vehicle, person or wife (not necessarily in that order).

Hence I’ll have to stock up not only on marinated grape leaves, Stilton and sumac, but also on the aforementioned piece of sports kit. This although my only previous experience buying one was as embarrassing as it was comic.

It was 1984, and I had just moved from Houston to New York, where I found that my car, and by extrapolation my person, was a target for abuse.

The car itself, a much-dented Chevy, was unremarkable, but the word ‘Texas’ on the number plates clearly had a vast offensive potential. People hissed Oedipal m-words, flashed obscene gestures, spat on the car’s bonnet in slow traffic.

Impervious to Tolstoy’s sermon of non-resistance, I finally had enough. Fearful of carrying an illegal pistol, I bought a baseball bat and stuck it under the bench seat. But the weapon never saw the light of day because soon thereafter I got a company car.

That left the Impala sitting idly in the driveway awaiting a buyer, or perhaps a wreckage crew. But then my company car broke down just when I had to drive out of town to meet an IBM client. So the Chevy had to be brought back into life.

Realising that the sight of the jalopy would permanently damage my company’s reputation, not to mention my own, I parked it as far from IBM’s front door as the spacious car park allowed. That way, I figured, we’d have to take the client’s car when we went to lunch.

Now I don’t know how IBM is at present, but at that time it was the most conservative company around. Not only did it have the strictest dress code of suit and tie, but white was the only colour acceptable in a shirt.

The executives’ monochrome personalities tended to match their attire. Their idea of a joke was to ask “Warm enough for you?” on a sweltering day. A real knee-slapper, that.

Anyway, come lunch time I suggested we go out for a bite, and my earnest client readily accepted. “But,” he said, “do you mind if we take your car? Mine’s being fixed.”

My ploy having failed, I had to offer a lengthy explanation as we walked half a mile to my banger. “Sorry about the state of the vehicle,” I said, “but my company car is being fixed too. This one’s my wife’s.”

The client assured me he understood, and off we went. Alas, I had to brake rather sharply at one point, and the baseball bat rolled out from under the front seat.

“Your wife must be one tough lady,” remarked the client, perfectly deadpan. I must have turned beetroot red, not something I do often.

The embarrassment was such that in the intervening 34 years I never once have been tempted to shop for a baseball bat again. Until now.

On the remote, nay practically nonexistent, possibility that potential French rioters are reading this, I’m hereby putting them on notice.

If they block my way in a threatening manner, I won’t even slow down – human flesh actually improves traction. And if they do force me to stop, I’ll come out swinging, putting Babe Ruth to shame.

My priest will approve, and if he doesn’t, I’ll quote Augustine’s De Civitate Dei on the subject of just war. The French police may be less forgiving, but, as Teddy Kennedy once said, I’ll drive off that bridge when I get to it.

P.S. Brigitte Macron’s family owns the Jean Trogneux chain of sweet shops started in their home town of Amiens. The original shop is known for its macaroons (macarons in French), which delicacy is almost a homophone of Manny’s surname.

Could it be that it was this phonetic affinity that led Brigitte to commit that famous statutory rape 26 years ago?

Anyway, having tried those celebrated macaroons at Amiens, I can testify to their superlative taste. It would be a shame if the rioters razed or torched those outlets, as they’re trying to do. France’s First Foster Mother would be upset.

As fires, tear gas and stun grenades turn Paris, the world’s most beautiful capital city, into a combat zone, the urge is strong to understand why.

Why do people take to the streets in a country whose legal system leaves plenty of room for peaceful protest? Is it really just because they don’t want to part with a few more euros to fill their cars?

In general, why do people start or join revolutions? Or why do countries go to war?

Granted, at times violence may be necessary and, if you believe Messrs Augustine, Aquinas et al, even moral.

The Greeks fighting against Xerxes, the Romans against Hannibal, anybody against the Bolsheviks or Nazis could all cite unimpeachable reasons for resorting to violence – they knew they could die, but they were certain some things were worse than death.

However, many, perhaps most, conflicts between countries or especially people within the same country lack such noble reasons. They do have plenty of noble slogans, but that’s a different thing altogether.

For example, why did American colonists rise against George III, one of history’s least tyrannical monarchs? Was it really because of taxation without representation?

But taxes (including duties on tea, that party drink so popular in Boston) were even higher in the metropolis, and many Englishmen weren’t represented either.

Moreover, directly the revolution succeeded, taxation skyrocketed. Americans then realised they didn’t like it even with representation, but it was too late to do anything about it.

If the French thought Louis XVI had scaled the heights of despotism, they were quickly disabused of that notion once their revolution conquered. They didn’t get their liberté, égalité, fraternité. They got hundreds of thousands perishing to revolutionary violence inspired by considerably less attractive desiderata.

By the same token the Russians overthrew the unquestionably tyrannical Nicholas II to hasten the advent of an earthly paradise created for the benefit of workers and peasants. However, both groups, as well as the rest of the country, were then promptly enslaved and had to die in their millions to realise how false their original slogans were, how little they had to do with real life.

And so on, so forth. Each time we look at a violent clash we wonder why it occurred – only to find as often as not that the stated reason isn’t the reason. It’s at best a pretext.

The on-going mayhem in France was supposedly inspired by public revulsion against new fuel taxes. On the face of it, that was a perfectly legitimate grievance, especially considering why those new taxes were to be introduced.

Manny Macron is wholly preoccupied with pan-European, pan-planetary and presumably pan-Galactic issues. Such lofty concerns leave him no time for tackling lowly domestic issues, such as millions of Frenchmen living from hand to mouth in la France profonde.

Whenever there’s a conflict between high and low, Manny will go high any day. Hence he’s prepared to squeeze the poor out of their cars for the sake of preserving the planet, presumably ours. I don’t care if your supermarket is 10 miles away, Jean-Pierre, he seems to be saying. Walk, it’s good for you.

Alas, people who can neither travel to a supermarket nor afford decent groceries find little consolation in how pristine the air will be in the next century.

Keep your planet, Manny, they seem to be saying. Just don’t rob us for trying to get about – and in most of France the car is the only possible transportation.

The grievance was legitimate, but the mode of its expression wasn’t. When they are unhappy with the government, poor people don’t set buildings and cars on fire, smash shop windows, deface statues – not of their own accord.

They need to be organised and led to do those things, and that’s where professional malcontents move in, those of the right, left or centre, it doesn’t really matter.

They slide over the ostensible issue and tap deep reservoirs of resentment, envy, fear, jealousy, hatred – all those maelstroms bubbling in the depths of the subterranean sulphuric swamp of the human psyche.

When thanks to their efforts an eruption occurs, the original grievance is buried underneath. No concession on the part of the government will quell the unrest, not quickly at any rate and certainly not for ever.

Having played hard to get for a couple of weeks and insisting that, unlike his predecessors, he wouldn’t surrender to violence, Manny then did just that and announced that fine, no hike in fuel tax if that’s how you want to play it.

That was missing the point. The riots had acquired a life all their own, and it was no longer about the measly extra €50 a month to fill that antediluvian Renault. “We want lower taxes tout court!” screamed the rioters, now properly primed.

However, they then contradicted themselves by demanding that the wealth tax that Manny had abolished be reinstated. Let’s remark parenthetically that in purely economic terms that measure made a lot of sense – similar steps have led to a brisker economic activity everywhere they were taken.

That’s the essence of trickle-down economics: stimulating wealth producers to produce more wealth makes everybody better off – eventually. Alas, that last word undoes all the others.

Eventually? When is that? Ten years from now? Two? To hell with that! We want to make the rich pay – now!!! (Il faut faire payer les riches – in French politics this mantra is heard more often than any other.)

Trickle down? That means the rich pissing on the poor! We want Macron’s arse (Macron, on veut ton cul)! screamed the rioters, and they didn’t mean that in the nice, Alexandre Benalla sort of way.

Nothing but a complete redistribution of wealth would do, explained the ring leaders. Now we’re talking – the language of a communist revolution, or a fascist one if you’d rather. This is where the two converge, smudging along the way all the technical differences between them.

That’s why the rioters were equally encouraged by the Trotskyist Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the fascist (okay, populist) Marine Le Pen, who profess mutual hatred. But then so did Stalin and Hitler, which didn’t prevent them from amicably dividing Europe between them in 1939-1940.

It’s no use pretending that all the fun was caused by the new taxes on diesel. Manny can scream “No new diesel tax!!!” till he sounds like Luke Armstrong on a bad day, it won’t make any difference.

Revolutions, big or small, aren’t about getting what the people want. They are about smashing what the people hate. The true animus of any uprising is always negative.

Love may be inscribed on the bumper sticker, but it’s hatred that’s in the driving seat. A car thus propelled will crash sooner or later, but those who revved it up don’t care.

A word of avuncular advice: when you pay an exorbitant amount for a Shakespeare production in London, do your research.

Before parting with £120 for two tickets to see Antony and Cleopatra at the National, I had followed my own advice, but only halfheartedly.

All I had done was scan the reviews, which had all been gasping with delight, and there I was last night, perched in a stone-like seat designed according to the Suvorov principle of “train hard, fight easy”.

If for Stanislavsky the theatre began at the cloakroom, the NT show began with the captions displayed on either side of the stage, saying that “this production is captioned for the benefit of the deaf, deafened and hard of hearing”. At first I thought ‘deafened’ was redundant, but I realised in due course that the sound effects had just such an effect.

Now you would have thought that at my advanced age I’d know better than to trust critics. Had I been less credulous I would have realised that this production is but another exercise in vulgar vandalism.

The advertising poster showed the eponymous characters wearing neutral costumes, which cleverly disguised the fact that the production was in modern dress. Most Shakespeare plays are these days.

I struggle to understand why. That is, I can’t identify any fathomable artistic reason for this abomination. Other reasons are limpidly transparent, all based on the director’s ideology and hubris.

The underlying statement seems to say that Shakespeare is timeless and – that dread word – relevant. In the past, directors used to rely on the sublime text to reconfirm Shakespeare’s transcendence. Today’s lot must feel the Bard needs help, for otherwise the paying public might miss the point.

The problem is that theatre even at its best demands at least some suspension of disbelief.

We must accept that the sketchily painted backdrop is indeed Ranevskaya’s cherry orchard; that Nora’s doll’s house has four walls, rather than just the three we can see; that Hamlet is actually only thinking about being or not being, rather than speaking out loud.

The play may be classicist, romantic, modern, absurdist or surreal but, if it’s written by a great playwright and staged with talent, taste and sensitivity, we’ll accept the narrative as life unfolding before us.

There may be an initial effort involved, but no longer than for a minute or two. After that our lives morph into the action; the passive viewer becomes an active participant, not just a chap expecting an entertaining night out.

When the text is sublime, most of the job has already been done. The greater the play, the lesser the original effort required to believe it.

All the production staff have to do is refrain from doing harm, implicitly taking some sort of theatrical Hippocratic oath. If they have genuine talent, they can add something to the play. But their first responsibility is not to subtract from it, not to make suspension of disbelief difficult.

Here I’m acutely sensitive to the possible shortcomings of my own imagination, which must be lamentably inferior to the critics’ own powers. For I found it impossible to believe I was looking at Octavius Caesar, when all I saw was a young black man wearing a double-breasted suit and moccasins with no socks.

That sort of thing goes over big in SW1, or rather used to in the past, when it seemed ‘cool’. But here we have this lad with his accent some 500 miles north of SW1, delivering lines like: “Let not the piece of virtue which is set betwixt us, as the cement of our love to keep it builded, be the ram to batter the fortress of it.”

Doesn’t the director realise how tasteless this incongruity is? The costume doesn’t have to be Roman or for that matter Elizabethan; it can be neutral and generic.

But we’re supposed to be looking at the Roman emperor, not a mock-Sloanie layabout. All I saw was a grossly miscast actor who couldn’t enunciate his lines properly.

The actress playing Cleopatra was black too, as were half the supporting cast. My literal mind struggled to get around the artistic message being conveyed there.

The protagonist, as her surviving busts show, wasn’t black at all. She was a Ptolemaic monarch of Greek origin, and as aristocratic as they came at the time. No doubt her Greek and Latin sounded as patrician as she was – Cleopatra may have used sex as a political tool, but she certainly didn’t sound like a London slapper one could meet in a City wine bar.

And, in this case, not a good-looking slapper at that, and I’m not talking about the combination of lines and curves the actress possesses. A real actress may not be a beautiful woman, but she’ll make us believe she is.

For example, Vanessa Redgrave was almost 50 when she played Cleopatra. And yet her mastery was such that we saw a beautiful young woman who bewitched Antony, and Caesar before him.

Sophie Okonedo is roughly the same age now, but one couldn’t believe great men would fall under her spell. She came across as rather common mutton straining to act like tasty lamb. And to her credit she honestly didn’t even pretend to be regal.

If the director wanted to use this occasion to strike a blow for racial integration, I’m sure there are cries of approval to be heard in London’s better postcodes. Yet in aesthetic heaven, there’s only weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Transsexualism got an airing too: Agrippa, that stern warrior, was played by a woman. That was supposed to mean something profound, but I’m not sure what.

Ralph Fiennes, the good actor playing Antony, was the only cast member who could deliver his lines comprehensively. In fact, he was the reason I wanted to see the play in the first place: having seen his Prospero a few seasons ago, I knew he could do Shakespeare well.

But the director Simon Godwin wouldn’t let him. Rather than coming across as a dramatic hero with the odd touch of sardonic humour, Fiennes played a vaudeville comedian at heart who occasionally had to pretend something tragic was happening in his life.

But at least one could understand what he was saying, which in the context of that production was no mean achievement.

And speaking of production, the usual bag of tricks one nowadays expects in a Shakespeare play was dragged on and emptied with relish. Rather than a great play, we saw a multi-media presentation, complete with radar scanners, computer screens, jets roaring overhead, the whirring of helicopter rotors and giant backdrop videos of rioting Africans.

The production was supposed to last three and a half hours. We lasted one and a half, and even that was going some.

As a civically responsible person, I felt like reporting that act of gross vandalism. But  our arbiters of taste all thought the production was brilliant. So I felt like a burglary victim in today’s Britain: nobody would have been interested in my complaint.

Simplistic (as distinct from simple) philosophies attract – and corrupt.

Whenever someone reduces the whole complexity of life to a straightforward proposition or two, people feel grateful. They no longer have to think for themselves.

Just apply the ready-made stencil to the problem at hand, cut away everything that sticks out and the problem is no more.

But then a curmudgeonly pedant points out something that stubbornly resists the excising scissors. Suddenly Bob’s no longer your uncle – and Fanny is emphatically no longer your aunt.

True to character, I propose to cast myself in that spoilsport role today, using the boxing ring as my battleground.

Boxing is very much in the news following the heavyweight bout between the American Deontay Wilder and our own Tyson Fury. The two pugilists manfully slugged their way to a draw, with the latter twice picking himself up from the canvas to withstand more battering.

(Allow me to paraphrase: Mr Fury was twice knocked unconscious, suffering two concussions and each time taking multiple additional blows to risk lasting cerebral damage if not instant death.)

Whenever boxing attracts public attention, it attracts public debate. Should such brutal displays be banned? Or should people be allowed to do as they please, provided they hurt no one else but themselves?

Matthew Syed jumped into the debate swinging with libertarian haymakers. In turn, I’ll try to point out gaps in his defences, but without landing the knockout blow of advocating a ban.

For what interests me here isn’t so much boxing qua boxing as the weakness of any dogmatic libertarian argument, however it’s applied.

Mr Syed shows enviable erudition in pointing out the historical provenance of boxing in classical antiquity and quoting nineteenth century accolades for “the science of sweet bruising”. Yet he also acknowledges that boxing is a dangerous sport.

Fighters get killed in the ring. Barring that, they suffer brain damage. Having taken thousands of punches to the head, they develop things like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s at a prematurely young age.

My Syed is aware of this: “The lasting harm of boxing can be gleaned from any number of interviews with former champions, the slurred words and slowed speech as instructive as any medical report.”

But then he throws a libertarian counter: “They [the fighters] know the risks, they recognise the dangers and are willing to encompass them.” And oh yes, many of them are grateful to boxing for the life they otherwise wouldn’t be able to have.

It’s true that one doesn’t immediately see how Messrs Fury and Wilder could have split $15 million for one night’s work in any other way, at least legally. It’s also true that the choice of this profession was their own, and it was made freely.

However, now we appeal to antiquity, all the same arguments would apply if Messrs Fury and Wilder wielded gladii, not boxing gloves – provided they hadn’t been forced to become gladiators.

Granted, the likelihood of death or serious injury would be even greater, but statistical probabilities shouldn’t be allowed to affect the core principle. If two adults freely agree to kill each other, who are we, libertarians, to object?

However, if we’re horrified at this suggestion and insist that gladiatorial combat is an inappropriate public spectacle, then we acknowledge that the libertarian argument has its limits.

Once we’ve agreed on that, the issue becomes eminently debatable. A line can be drawn, and it’s up to us to decide exactly where. Entering into our consideration would be, inter alia, such retrograde notions as the inviolability of the person and the sanctity of life.

Assuming that Mr Syed wouldn’t enjoy the show of two gentlemen trying to kill each other with their swords, he seems to see a qualitative difference between that and seeing them trying to kill each other with their fists.

I don’t – but then, though I don’t believe in progress, I do believe in civilisation. Etymologically opposite as this word is to militarisation, it presupposes the existence of a social and cultural arrangement wherein grievances are settled peacefully, not with brute force.

Since propensity for violence is demonstrably part of human nature, the role of civilisation can be defined as a never-ceasing effort to discourage the bad parts of our nature, while encouraging the good ones.

Conversely, casting civilisation aside and allowing the bad parts of our nature to triumph is sheer atavism, a throwback to a time when people expressed themselves with the untrammelled brutality that always accompanies unchecked freedom.

Viewed in that light, any violence hurts not only its immediate victims but society at large. For example, European society was for all intents and purposes killed by the Great War, even though a relatively small number of Europeans perished in the conflict.

Downscaling from there, two young men bashing their brains out don’t just hurt themselves. For they aren’t the only ones exercising their free choice to engage in atavistic savagery.

The reason Messrs Wilder and Fury were paid all those millions is that throngs of panting viewers around the world enjoy the show of two feral men suffering repeated concussions. They love the sight of blood in the ring – and beyond.

I don’t know if they still do it, but in the old days the proud holders of ringside seats at Madison Square Garden would come equipped with newspaper sheets to protect themselves from the scarlet spray. They knew what was coming – and looked forward to it.

One would find it hard to argue that boxing civilises by encouraging the good side of human nature to come to the fore. Hence I’d suggest that the damage done to the viewing public, and therefore to society, is greater than that suffered by the two sluggers.

It’s the public, not so much the boxers’, health that concerns me.

It’s true that most professional boxers would find it hard not only to match their income in any other occupation, but indeed to earn any income at all.

For example, Mike Tyson’s IQ is just over 70, and I suspect most boxers have something similar – that’s before they take thousands of blows to the head. This isn’t a good qualification for remunerative employment in our value-added economy.

Moreover, since these men are innately violent, one could feel relieved that their natural tendencies are manifested in a roped space 20 by 16 feet rather than in the High Street, where Christmas shoppers could otherwise find themselves on the receiving end of crosses and uppercuts.

So yes, boxing isn’t without its positive effects. But these are barely noticeable compared to the heavy blow it deals to civility, and therefore civilisation.

Whether or not it should be banned is a separate argument, and one I’m not prepared to make. Too many unrelated variables would go into a decision of this sort, such as the encouragement it would give to some central authority to ban anything it sees fit.

My task is merely to point out the inherent weakness of the undiluted, unvarnished libertarian argument in this and most other instances. Life is too complex to lend itself to simplistic reductions.