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Speaking, or rather ranting, at Davos, Trump actually said this to the European leaders: “If it wasn’t for us you’d all be speaking German and a little Japanese.”

I heard this phrase many times in American bars, usually in disreputable parts of town and close to chucking out time. This cliché favoured by drunken yobs has been satirised by many American comedians and film makers. For example, in A Fish Called Wanda, it was uttered by a character portrayed as a walking caricature of a moron.

Trump follows interesting role models, in other words. But he was still only warming up. America, or rather he personally, could “financially destroy” Switzerland, said Trump, showing exactly how guests in a foreign country should behave.

Denmark is ungrateful to America for having saved its bacon in the big war, was the way Trump put on his historian’s cap. “Europe has been screwing us for 30 years,” he continued, and NATO “gave us nothing”. Actually, European, including Danish, soldiers died side by side with Americans in Afghanistan, which is the only time Article 5 of the NATO charter  has been invoked.

NATO’s Secretary General Rutte later spoke to the man he had once deferentially called ‘Daddy’ and enlightened him on that subject. That was like trying to convince a lunatic that he isn’t really Jesus Christ.

Actually, Europeans could say with equal justification that the US has been screwing them. Since the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, US bonds have acted as default purchases in the financial markets for decades. This has allowed the US to run up her staggering sovereign debt of $36 trillion, which has largely enabled Americans to enjoy unprecedented prosperity.

During his campaign for a second term, Trump bemoaned the national debt and promised to do something about it. He kept that promise by adding another £2.25 trillion to the debt. Apparently, the markets are uneasy about this, which means the US cost of borrowing is going up. This means, inter alia, that Americans will pay a higher interest for all their loans, cars, mortgages, holidays, whatever they borrow for.

Yet the question of who exactly has been screwing whom never came up as a possible retort. That allowed Trump to ratchet up the level of insults.

Europeans are “stupid people” for buying Chinese-made windmills. The Chinese, on the other hand, are savvy for selling those abominations but never using them themselves. Actually, China produces 44 per cent of the world’s wind power, but what are facts among friends.

The subject of Russia never came up, but when it had in the past Trump often repeated the lie that the US provided $350 billion’s worth of aid to the Ukraine. Once again, what’s an order of magnitude among friends. In fact, the numeral he cites refers to the amount appropriated by Congress. The actual aid delivered was under $40 billion, but no one can pull the bit out of Trump’s clenched teeth.

His mode of delivery makes one want to disagree with Trump even when he is right. Such as, for example, when he ranted about Europe’s spending too much in general and too little on defence, uncontrolled immigration and commitment to the “green new scam”. Actually, a native speaker who has been to school would have said “new green scam”, but Trump isn’t into mellifluous elocution.

If someone – anyone – spoke to me in that hectoring, insulting tone, I’d tell him to perform a ballistically unlikely act on himself and walk out. This regardless of what he was saying, true or false. Yet leaders of great – fine, formerly great – countries sat there like naughty schoolchildren reprimanded by a stern headmaster.

No one even responded with the phrase in the title above, which would have sucked some electricity out of the air. Perhaps the Europeans sensed that Trump was blowing off some steam before performing one of his usual about-faces.

Sure enough, he did allow that he wasn’t after all going to send the 82^nd Airborne into Greenland, or rather Iceland, as he kept calling it. A Freudian slip perhaps? Is Iceland going to be declared another essential link in America’s defence chain, making her ripe for occupation? If I were a member of Iceland’s government, I’d give serious consideration to beefing up the coastal defences. Just in case.

For the time being, Trump has come up with a solution for Greenland/Iceland that every sensible commentator, including this immodest one, has been offering for yonks. The US doesn’t need to occupy Greenland to use it for Arctic defences. The Danish government, and NATO in general, would be happy to let Americans build as many bases on the island as they desire.

Trump’s insistence that the land under the bases should be sovereign US territory is a moot point. This is the self-evident case with all US bases anywhere in the world, and no special dispensation is required.

Of course sovereignty over the area of US bases doesn’t imply one over the rare earth minerals that are as plentiful in Greenland as they are hard to mine. This may still prove to be the sticking point for Trump, who never forgets to look after number one, which doesn’t always mean his country.

And oh yes, Trump has withdrawn his threat to slap additional tariffs on those European countries that oppose a US occupation of Greenland. I’m not surprised: it has been two days since he first issued that threat, plenty of time not just for a 180 but even for a 540.

In general, the whole atmosphere of Davos evoked conferences of the past where implacable enemies tried to find some accommodation making a military clash unnecessary. If Trump continues in this vein, it won’t be long before Europeans chalk the US up in the rubric of foe rather than friend.

I’d take that as a personal tragedy and, more important, a catastrophic development for the West at large. As for inviting Putin to join the Gaza ‘peace board’, I’ve already commented on that surreal outrage, so I shan’t repeat myself.

Actually, since that sham board is Trump’s personal project, no European country can block Putin’s appointment. Checks and balances are disappearing from Western politics, and the US isn’t doing brilliantly in that respect either.

P.S. While we are on the subject of English usages, I continue to absorb the intricacies of my learned language.

Thus a football commentator the other day described a tackle as ‘vociferous’, even though neither party had uttered a sound. Did he mean full-blooded? Crunching? Bone-crushing? My pet idea of fining the misuse of big words has been vindicated yet again.

Football commentators don’t know better, but Will Self, the writer who grew up in a professor’s family should. Yet here’s a passage from a Times review of the new Dictionary of Biography, specifically Self’s entry on JG Ballard’s novel Crush:

Self talks about Ballard’s fascination with the fact that the “dysfunctional relationship between humans and technology reached a sort of orgasmic crescendo in a paean to the delirious psychosexuality of celebrity car crashes” – “a sentence,” comments the reviewer, “that could only exist in a dictionary confident of its readers”.

Yes, confident that his readers are as ignorant as he is. A crescendo, Will, isn’t to be confused with a climax, orgasmic or otherwise. It’s a way of getting to the climax by gradually increasing tempo and volume. It’s a staircase one climbs to get to an Islington flat, not the flat itself. Glad to be of help.

The solecism apart, that whole sentence is a pseud straining every tendon to show he’s posher than thou. This is a pseud version of the ditty: “The working class can kiss my arse, I’ve got the foreman’s job at last.”

When a man says something others don’t understand, he may be a bad communicator or else a genius. However, when he himself doesn’t realise what he is saying, concerns about his mental health are valid.

The other day, incensed that European countries seem to disagree that Trump can help himself to any piece of land he desires, he sent a message to Norway’s prime minister.

I hope he knows what he meant to say, but what he actually did say makes no sense this side of a lunatic asylum. But judge for yourself:

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the US.”

Others have scrutinised those claims of eight wars miraculously stopped, and discarded them. Some of those wars lasted only a few hours; some involved no fighting at all; some weren’t really stopped.

And Trump not only hasn’t stopped the most important war, one raging in the heart of Europe, but has consistently taken the aggressor’s side. Just the other day he repeated his stock idiocy that it’s Zelensky who is at fault in continuing hostilities. Why can’t the Ukraine just capitulate and adopt Putin’s ‘peace’ plan Trump has claimed for his own?

However, none of this is a sign of clinical disengagement from reality. Playing fast and loose with facts, especially for the purpose of self-aggrandisement is Trump’s stock in trade after all.

Neither does his atrocious syntax betoken psychiatric problems. All it says is that the money Trump’s Daddy paid for his expensive education was sorely squandered. But read on.

Why did Trump try to stop all those wars he never quite stopped? Was it to stop woeful bloodshed? No. Was it to pursue America’s geopolitical interests? No. Was it because Jesus said peacemakers are blessed? No.

The only way his first sentence can be read by any textual analyst is that Trump became a peacemaker solely because he wanted to win the Nobel Peace Prize. That failing, he has lost interest in peace, other than saying it’s of course still important, in general terms.

But coming to the fore now is “what is good and proper for the US”. Contextually, this means that peace is neither good nor proper for Trump’s country. Implicitly, he also bears a grudge against Norway (“your Country”), although it wasn’t the country’s government that slighted Trump so egregiously, but the Nobel Committee, established and endowed by the legacy of Alfred Nobel.

It’s true that the Peace Prize is the only one for which Norway’s government appoints judges, but they are in no way obligated to do as they are told. But this is a minor point compared to the delirious rant of Trump’s first sentence.

Yet that wasn’t all. Because of the perfidious Norwegians and generally obstreperous Europeans, Trump is ready to press his claims for Greenland. Since he is no longer committed to the cause of peace, he can grab the island the hard way, see if he cares.

Hence he is prepared further to indulge his affection for initial caps: “The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.”

This is arrant nonsense, although one appreciates Trump’s abandoning strictly parochial concerns for the sake of global ones. It’s true that the Arctic is becoming a major arena of great-power confrontation, and it’s also true that Greenland, equidistant as it is from Russia and America, is a vital strategic hub.

But Trump doesn’t need “Complete and Total Control of Greenland” to beef up NATO’s defences in the region. Treaties that have been around for almost as long as I have allow the US to open and operate any number of bases on the island, in addition to those already there.

At the height of the Cold War, the US kept up to 15,000 soldiers on the island; now that number is 200. I’m sure Greenland, Denmark, that perfidious Norway and the rest of NATO would be perfectly happy to cooperate with the US every step of the way.

Hence my forensic investigation suggests that either Trump’s loss of touch with reality reflects a true pathology or, more sinister and more likely, he actually wants to destroy NATO. This will be an inevitable outcome of any American invasion, the end of the alliance that has kept the West safe for 80 years.

Even Trump isn’t so insane as to think America can fend for herself in this world without any help from anybody. Hence he must be looking for new alliances to replace the one he finds useless.

You aren’t winning any prizes for guessing exactly where he is looking. It was announced yesterday that Trump has invited Putin to join his Gaza ‘board of peace’. Since we already know that, because of those Norse ingrates, the Donald has lost all interest in peace, he must feel that Putin will offer some welcome counterbalance.

Now, Putin is an indicted war criminal wanted by The Hague for the atrocities his troops have committed — are continuing to commit — in the Ukraine. He is a tyrant who unleashed the only serious war in Europe since 1945, and he shows no signs of planning to end it soon, if ever.

Inviting Putin to join that ‘board of peace’, in fact using the words ‘Putin’ and ‘peace’ in the same sentence, is either a sign of mental instability or part of a general strategy. I hope it’s only the former, but fear it must be the latter.

Trump has always sensed typological proximity to Putin, something he emphatically doesn’t feel about any Western leader. Now Trump’s new step closer to Russian fascism shows he wants to drag Putin back to the top table of world politics.

Of course, there’s the little matter of the outstanding warrant for Putin’s arrest issued by the International Court of Justice. This means he could have his collar felt if he visits any country recognising the court’s authority.

I have a solution for Donald: invade The Hague and force them to revoke the warrant at gunpoint. And oh Donald, The Hague is in Holland, in case you’re wondering.

The Twenty-Fifth Amendment, anyone?

Talking to an American friend the other day, I said Trump is a savage, which overshadows anything he does or doesn’t do.

In response, I was treated to a litany of Trump’s achievements, most of them in domestic policy, most of them real. I acknowledged as much, adding, however, that such things are transient and instantly reversible. Unlike, unfortunately, the damage Trump’s savagery does to our civilisation.

This isn’t to say I was right and my friend was wrong, or vice versa. We were simply talking about different things and looking at the issue from different vantage points. His view is possible, but then so is mine.

I’d answer the question in the title by saying: exactly the same things that are wrong with modernity. Trump is a quintessentially modern man, which I don’t use as a term of praise.

Because of his high station and larger than life personality, Trump amplifies modernity’s vices, the way a funhouse mirror exaggerates facial features into a grotesque caricature. Or else he takes onto himself modernity’s vices: if modernity is Dorian Gray, Trump is the picture in its attic.

The sickness of modernity takes on its most virulent form in Trump: he is a walking symptom of that malaise and also its contagion. The aetiology of this disease is a neo-pagan reaction against Western civilisation, otherwise known as Christendom – not just its founding religion but its core understanding of what it is to be fully human.

One doesn’t have to be a believing Christian to see what kind of world that reaction has produced, although some powers of dispassionate observation would come in handy.

Cogent critical inquiry into first causes has given way to the obtuse superstition of materialism, with a logical fallacy at its base. Freedom, which thinkers from Plato to Aquinas understood as liberation from all constraints, including inner ones, preventing one from living a life of rational virtue, got to be seen as liberation from all constraints, full stop. Reason and morality were severed from their divine source and replaced with voluntarism, the primacy of one’s own will with all its fickle vagaries.

As a result, we see a world sinking into an unremitting banality of tastes, ubiquitous vulgarity of philistine consumerism, widespread idiocy elevated to an egalitarian virtue, collapse of unifying morality, increasing monstrosity of persecution and warfare. Add to this the worship of science as a deified panacea, and conditions are in place for mankind to annihilate itself, not just what little is left of our civilisation.

If in Christendom’s past, freedom to choose was seen to be liberating only if one chose well, these days choice itself has become the be all and end all. We have before us an endless menu of moral values, consumer goods, cultural trends, consumer goods, intellectual attitudes, consumer goods, political philosophies – and above all consumer goods.

We are free to choose any or none, knowing that no objective criteria exist to judge the quality of our choices other than our own will. The fallacy of materialism is the logical impossibility of nature creating itself; the fallacy of modern morality is the logical impossibility of living only by one’s own rules.

Can you see whose portrait I am sketching? Just remember who said the other day that he is guided by his own morality and nothing else.

All such seeming abstractions have a direct bearing on how a civilisation of disparate peoples arranges itself politically. As ever, new words appearing or old words acquiring a new meaning act as weathervanes showing which way the civilisational winds are blowing.

A year or so ago, I appeared on a New York podcast whose host never takes his MAGA cap off. “What’s wrong with nationalism?” he asked, knocking me off my stride.

I looked at that imaginary weathervane and saw where it was pointing. You see, I’ve never used ‘nationalism’ (as distinct from patriotism) as anything other than a pejorative term. The question posed by my host could, to me, be paraphrased, without changing its meaning, as “What’s wrong with a primitive, dogmatic, narrow-minded ideology?”

One thing wrong with nationalism is that it’s a denial of Christian politics. That by itself presented little problem to my host who isn’t a Christian. But my other friend is, and yet he presumably doesn’t see anything wrong with nationalism either, because doing so would be tantamount to seeing something wrong with Trump, and that option doesn’t seem to be on the menu.

Nationalism became a force in European politics when the secular state could no longer tolerate the autonomy of the church within its borders.

Before Christendom became just a figure of speech, Europe had been united in its faith and the view of life it entailed. Dynastic squabbles did happen, but they reflected differences among princes, not among nations.

Christian universalism held sway. A Christian from Augsburg had more in common with a Christian from Naples than either had with a Muslim, a Zoroastrian or a pagan – or indeed his compatriot from Augsburg or Naples who wasn’t a Christian. Divisive clefts only appeared when princes began to revolt against the political authority of the Hapsburg Empire and hence the spiritual authority of the papacy.

It was then that nationalism became a battle cry, and it was in the fire of that battle that the Reformation, that anteroom to atheism, was annealed. That adumbrated an era of ‘religious wars’, a glaring misnomer.

An innocent outsider might believe that those wars were fought over recondite matters of dogma and doctrine. In fact, princes didn’t rebel against the Empire because they were Protestants. They became Protestants the better to rebel against the Empire.

That’s how the West’s unity was destroyed – partly in the name of nationalism. And this is how Trump’s nationalism is destroying the last vestiges of that unity, enfeebling the West and strengthening its enemies. Considering that socialist internationalism is working towards the same goal, the West doesn’t seem to have much of a chance.

The politics of Christendom also featured power relationships, but some philosophical and moral constraints were applied to mitigate the fallout. Modernity, on the other hand, has reduced power relationships to sheer arithmetic: whoever has more brawn will dictate. But in Trump this modern vice appears in its crystallised form – and, as all his other vices, it’s presented as a virtue by his fans.

Both the grammar and vocabulary of modern politics are changing before our very eyes. For example, MAGA enthusiasts are extolling their idol’s ‘common sense’ and ‘pragmatism’, both on closer examination revealed as merely synonyms for amorality.

Princes of Christendom were sometimes – often – immoral, but they were never amoral. For that reason, though they could be violent and cruel, sometimes very violent and cruel, their violence and cruelty never acquired the modern casual, industrialised callousness free of prior or posterior pangs of conscience.

Depriving politics of any moral content and reducing it to ad hoc nationalist expediencies ought to appal conservatives, and especially Christian conservatives. Yet no such revulsion is in evidence among MAGA fans, which raises the question of what exactly they wish to conserve. Protectionist tariffs? A West of every nation for itself with the devil taking the hindmost?

Anomie is a ubiquitous feature of our deracinated modernity, which destroys all links between action and any guiding principles, those of a higher variety, that is. Conservative commentators on Trump, such as George Will, single out his impulsiveness, his tendency to respond to his own whims and hardly anything else.

But they don’t trace such qualities and practices back to what Leni Riefenstahl called, in a different context, a triumph of will. A triumph, that is, over reason, faith, morality, custom, culture, tradition – everything that goes into the making of a civilisation.

As I say, Trump is the crystallised quintessence of modernity. One’s evaluation of his presidency is therefore contingent on one’s feelings about this epoch, and you know what mine are.

He’ll be gone in three years, leaving behind a West hopelessly fractured, its enemies perking up, an America universally reviled from without and torn apart from within – and a few achievements in domestic affairs, which are as likely as not to be undone by his successors. But that’s modernity for you.

If you take exception to this observation, it ought to take just three words to bring you around: María Corina Machado.

Just think of other statesmen who have tried to ingratiate themselves to Donald Trump and failed miserably. Zelensky, for example, dared to express a mild disagreement with Trump and his wolfhound, Vance, and had to be shouted down the way Edvard Beneš was at Munich in 1938.

Hitler told him something to the effect of ‘shut up when grow-ups are talking’, and the way Trump treated Zelensky was eerily similar. (I hope my MAGA friends don’t think I’m suggesting that Hitler has come back as Trump, in anything other than manners at any rate.)

And what did Zelensky’s audacity, albeit respectfully expressed, get him and his country? The hole from a bagel, as the Russians put it. US military aid to the Ukraine was cut off, or as near as damn, and even the funds already appropriated by Congress continue to sit in American banks – that is, if Trump doesn’t favour Omani ones.

That’s what male pride and testosterone aggression get a supplicant talking to Trump. Only extravagant praise, lick-spittle sycophancy and some spectacular offering are tantamount to respect, as Don Trump (and Don Corleone before him) define the concept.

In common with most intelligent women, Miss Machado can see through men with X-ray accuracy. So she put her feminine wiles to good use and found a path to Trump’s heart.

The starting point of that meandering journey was her presenting to the president her Nobel Peace Prize medal, that Trump has always said should be his as of right anyway, or would be if there were any justice in the world.

In the process, Machado called Trump “the heir of Washington” (note the definite article – there have never been any other heirs). After all, the president had made a “unique commitment with our freedom”. I do hope she meant “to our freedom”, for otherwise the praise sounds ambiguous.

Both the donor and the recipient seemed to think that what Trump now possessed wasn’t just the medal, but the prize itself. If so, then a question arises about the $1.2 million in legal tender that accompanies the prize. That sum may be pocket change to Trump, but it’s the thought that counts. Did Machado enclose a cheque for the full amount?

One way or the other, Trump’s note of thanks to Machado did suggest that he regarded himself as a full-fledged laureate of the prize: “María presented me with her Nobel Peace Prize for the work I have done. Such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect. Thank you María!”

I know that the president doesn’t always appreciate semantic nuances, but to those who do there exists a valid difference between the Nobel Prize and the Nobel Prize medal. The former is a great accolade; the latter, just a bauble.

A misunderstanding was brewing, but the Nobel Committee nipped it in the bud. Its prizes, it said, “cannot be revoked, shared or transferred to others… a medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate cannot.”

So that’s it then. Machado gets to keep her prize (and presumably the $1.2 million). Trump, on the other hand, will have to satisfy himself with merely a gold disk, and we know how much he loves that metal, especially as part of interior decoration.

If Machado hoped that her gesture of rispetto would soften Trump up to a point where he’d install her as Venezuela’s democratic leader, she has so far come a cropper. Maduro’s thugs continue to oppress the country without Maduro, although God only knows how long that will last – and even Our Lord God Almighty may find it hard to second-guess Trump.

Meanwhile what’s happening in Iran isn’t without gruesome parallels in US history. In 1956, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and other American CIA-run stations encouraged Hungarian patriots to rise against their communist oppressors.

Though no formal promise to support the Revolution with military aid was given, those broadcasts created a widespread impression that help was on its way. The Revolution started, no US help arrived, Soviet tanks rolled in and thousands of people were butchered.

Am I the only one who detects a parallel? When Iranian protesters started their revolt, the regime responded with a violent crackdown, murdering thousands (estimates vary, but by all accounts more Iranians died than Hungarians in 1956).

Radio Free Europe is no longer in business, but there is no shortage of other media outlets. It was through those that Trump promised to protesters that “Help is on its way!”. Everyone took it as an imminent US invasion, but so far that hasn’t materialised.

Instead, Trump helpfully informed Iranians that the ayatollahs had promised to stop executions. And their word is their bond, we all know that.

One can be forgiven for forming the impression that sometimes it’s more dangerous to be America’s friend than her enemy. Let’s wait and see what happens, but at the moment things aren’t looking good.

Any observer of recent history will probably agree that, when it comes to changing an evil regime, there are only two hard and fast rules: hard and fast.

Unlike the old soldiers of Gen McArthur’s rhetoric, evil regimes never fade. They either die quickly or linger on.

Most evil regimes collapse in on themselves, but some need a nudge from outside. In the former case, the end usually comes instantly and unexpectedly.

Ceaușescu’s regime in Romania is a good example of this. One day crowds of admirers screamed themselves hoarse, sycophantically extolling the dictator’s virtues; the next day – and I do mean the very next – they danced with the same abandon around the mutilated bodies of Ceaușescu and his wife.

Similarly, few observers predicted that the Soviet Union would implode so instantly out of the blue. Yet it did, catching brigades of Sovietologists unawares. Neither did they foresee that the Soviet Union would come back as Putin’s Russia: same bitter pill, different wrapper.

Two other evil regimes, those of Venezuela and Iran, show signs of resilience in the face of public dissent, and these may be examples of a situation where outside help is necessary. What piques my interest today is specifically Iran, mainly because thousands of its protesters have been murdered by troops firing at unarmed crowds.

I don’t know Trump’s plans for Venezuela, and I’m not sure anyone including himself can boast a clearer vision of the immediate future. So far one thing is obvious: there has been no regime change in Venezuela, not yet at any rate.

All the key monsters of the regime are still in place, oppressing their population as brutally as Maduro ever did. Hence the spectacular removal of Maduro from his bedroom strikes me as just that, a spectacle, a grandstanding gesture. Though things can change quickly, at present the operation seems as woolly strategically as it was brilliant tactically.

What’s going on in Iran is different for any number of reasons, except one: the regime there may differ from Maduro’s in every detail, but is similar to it at its evil core. Thousands of protesters have been massacred in the past few days, and the ayatollahs give every indication that they are prepared to slaughter thousands more to stay in power.

Trump is making bellicose noises about ousting that regime by military action, and that may still be on the cards. The question I’d now like to pose is this: When is a foreign invasion aimed at ousting the current leaders of a country justified? Is it ever?

This is one question of geopolitics, among many, that doesn’t encourage a dogmatic answer. The absolutist ‘yes’ or ‘no’ have to give way to the relativist ‘that depends’.

Here I’d like to remind you yet again of my favourite Persian story. Back in the old days, the people danced in the streets celebrating the demise of their despotic ruler. Only one old woman stood outside, weeping silently.

“What’s the matter, Grandma,” asked one of the dancers, “Aren’t you happy the tyrant is dead?” “Young man,” answered the woman. “I’ve lived so long that I’ve seen many tyrants come and go. And you know what? Every new tyrant was worse than his predecessor.”

That situation definitely arose in the same country, now called Iran, in the late 1970s. I lived in the US at the time, and I still remember virulent attacks on the Shah in the ‘liberal’ press, which is to say the press. He was called tyrannical (just about true), undemocratic (definitely true), corrupt (doubly true).

Hence, clamour was thundering from every newspaper page that the Shah should be overthrown, and the US intelligence services heeded that sentiment. They busily worked behind the scenes to foment public unrest in Iran, and it was steadily reaching fervour pitch.

President Carter (whom the Houston oilmen I knew invariably called ‘the peanut farmer’) did his bit too. Oil imports from Iran were ended, and some $8 billion of Iranian assets in the US were frozen by Executive Order.

Finally, the pressure told. The Shah, whose regime was unsavoury but fundamentally pro-Western, fled and was replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini, whose regime was evil and fundamentally Islamist. That old woman of the ancient tale was vindicated.

The other day I wrote about a strong messianic element in the American psyche and, off and on, American foreign policy. The idea never quite goes away that American-style democracy, complete with a bicameral parliament and precedent-based law, could thrive in any society, no matter how tribal and congenitally hostile to the West.

Around the time of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and over the next few decades, that absurd notion was gradually translated into policy by the so-called neoconservatives, more appropriately called ‘non-conservatives’. It was at their instigation that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was undertaken, with disastrous consequences.

As I recall, a leading neocon agitator, to whom I happen to be related, wrote that, as he watched Iraqis queuing up at the voting booths, he had tears in his eyes. “So did I,” I wrote to him, “but for a different reason”.

It gives me no satisfaction to see that I was right: I’d rather have been wrong. Instead of the stable, if wicked, Saddam regime, the country and much of the Middle East were thrust into a blood-drenched chaos. One consequence of immediate concern to Europe was that it was quickly inundated with millions of refugees, who continue to sap the Continent’s resources and undermine its social and demographic fabric.

Unlike Saddam’s Iraq, however, the ayatollahs’ Iran presents a definite danger to Western, and specifically American, interests. For one thing, though the news of Iraq’s possessing WMDs was fake, Iran is definitely developing nuclear weapons. Should it acquire them, the entire geopolitical picture not only in the Middle East but in the whole world will change — and not for the better.

Then, quite apart from this and also from the oil-related issues, the country is a close ally of both Russia and China.

If the term ‘axis of evil’ ever had any meaning, it certainly does now. Iran is China’s agent in the Middle East, and the ayatollahs also do all they can to boost Putin’s war effort. As I write, thousands of Iran-made Shahed drones are killing Ukrainians and wiping out their towns.

The regime may become instrumental in ensuring China’s and Russia’s firm and irreversible grip on the region, and it would be tedious to list all the reasons such a development would be catastrophic for Europe and widely damaging to America.

So here we are: relativism all over. It was strategically wrong to attack Iraq in 2003, but it would be strategically justified to oust the ayatollahs in 2026. But doing so would require commitment to the long game, and on past evidence the US tends to be a sprinter, not a stayer, in such matters.

She ousted Saddam and his regime, but, realising that Iraq was in no hurry to become a version of Indiana, soon withdrew, leaving the region to its own devices and vices. That lesson should be learned. The US and NATO in general ought to commit to a prolonged physical presence in Iran – or not bother at all.

Going in half-cocked would misfire badly – and if that happens, the events in Iraq will look like child’s play by comparison. Several zeroes may well be added to the current number of victims, and, like in any entropy, the consequence will be unpredictable.

Before any such invasion is mooted, the leaders involved ought to ask themselves several questions, and only go ahead if the answer to each is a confident yes.

Is there a valid reason to invade? (Yes, would be my answer to this). Are we capable of doing so? (Yes.) Are we prepared to handle the long-term consequences of such an action? Commit ground forces for a long time? Take casualties? Successfully build a benign alternative regime?

You’ll notice that I’ve left these last questions open. I simply don’t know the answers our powers would offer. I hope they do.

Let’s just say that, the further any government moves to the left, the more things it wishes to ban, especially things private.

Our own Marxist government is palpably waging war on everything private: private medicine, private education, private pensions, private transport – and now apparently also private parts.

If you instinctively look down in trepidation, relax. The Starmer gang isn’t in favour of castration, unless it goes by the name of sex – pardon me, gender – change.

No, our Marxists only want to ban from X the Grok AI tool that can take people’s clothes off at the touch of a key. And, to use Donald Trump’s favourite expression, Starmer can do it the easy way or the hard way.

The easy way is for Elon Musk, the owner of X, to agree to remove the strip-teasing software. The hard way is for Musk to refuse to do so, and for Starmer then to ban X in Britain altogether.

Sir Keir is so deeply worried about XXX on X that he disregards the obvious fact that any number of AI packages can do exactly the same thing. He also forgets that Britain used to regard free speech as a fundamental aspect of free society.

In today’s article, Lord Hannan cites an appalling statistic: apparently, more people are arrested for something they say on social media in Britain than in Russia or China. Admittedly, those on the receiving end of such prosecution here don’t yet get long prison sentences as they do in Russia. But the trend is unmistakable.

I, everyone and his brother never cease to repeat that freedom of speech mainly refers to freedom of offensive speech. The most oppressive government in history wouldn’t censure anyone saying how wonderful it is, and how happy the people are to be its slaves.

HMG, Tory as well as Labour, has been veering leftwards for decades, having finally ended up in the gutter of minority politics. Every minority, no matter how tiny or objectionable, can now claim enforceable freedom from offensive speech as its basic right.

Thus calling someone like me a ‘fattie’ could be grounds for criminal prosecution if I claimed that the sobriquet offended me or, worse still, traumatised me for life. When a government steps on the path of prosecuting things of this kind, it will in due course start banning any speech that deviates from what was called ‘the Party’s general line’ in Stalin’s Russia.

Since that line tends to zig and zag, people will be expected to perform non-stop verbal calisthenics to keep up. If it’s suddenly declared that the word ‘Eskimo’, used since the 16^th century, has become offensive and is to be replaced with ‘Inuit’, we’ll be expected to toe the line – or else.

Having said that, genuine, as opposed to feigned, offence should be discouraged. In relation to Grok, using AI to find out what your friend’s wife may look like with her kit off is tawdry. But it isn’t offensive to anything other than good taste. However, uploading on YouTube a fake picture of the same woman in flagrante delicto with a dog ought to be punished.

If our Marxist government were simply going to penalise the dissemination of such images, it would be hard to argue. But insisting on removing that tool from X and threatening to ban the whole platform should Musk predictably refuse to comply is tantamount to the denial of Britain’s centuries of constitutional history.

I don’t know how computer-literate Starmer is, but even if he isn’t at all, someone in his entourage should tell him that what he proposes to do isn’t only despotic but also useless.

Services like VPN enable viewers to get around state bans on dissident media, which any Russian will tell you. All anti-Putin websites have been banned for years, and yet thousands of Russians happily follow them every day through circuitous routes.

For all its manifest faults, the global net is definitely a weapon against tyranny. However, it’s useful to remember that it can also serve tyranny just as faithfully.

One has to admit with some chagrin that Starmer’s real problem with X isn’t so much its content as its owner. I see Musk as a libertarian radical, not a conservative, but such nuances don’t matter to Marxists.

What matters is that Musk is neither woke nor generally left-wing. Moreover, he doesn’t bother to conceal his contempt for everything Starmer holds dear, including Starmer himself.

Marxists and other extremists see the world in the binary terms of friend or foe. He who isn’t a friend isn’t someone who has a different point of view. He is a mortal enemy to be silenced, punished or even eliminated – the difference among the three options is contingent on the Marxists’ hold on power.

I’ve mentioned a distinction between a libertarian and a conservative, but the line separating the two is thin. The two groups actually overlap in some of their desiderata. However, as is often the case, the valid differences are those not of kind but of degree.

So it is in this case. There exist two kinds of censorship, proscriptive and prescriptive. The former is the authorities dictating what people shouldn’t say. The latter is telling people what they must say if they know what’s good for them.

I spent the first 25 years of my life in a country where both types of censorship were enforced with singular brutality. Been there, done that, and it pains me to see Britain inching the same way.

Back in Russia, even learned treatises in fields like microbiology were routinely rejected if they didn’t feature the requisite number of quotations from Lenin. If the author protested too loudly, questioning Lenin’s authority on, say, photosynthesis, he could be reprimanded, possibly sacked, possibly even imprisoned. In the generation before mine, he could have been shot.

However, all political states, even the most liberal ones, practise some forms of proscriptive censorship. Incitement to murder, for example, is against the law everywhere, as is libel (differently though it may be defined). The question is where you draw the line.

A libertarian like Musk will tell you lines oughtn’t to be drawn anywhere this side of incitement. A conservative wouldn’t be so sure. He would define his view of Western civilisation not so much in political terms as in those of culture, temperament, intuition, style and taste.

If our politics disintegrates into an exchange of obscene insults, our manners disappear, our culture turns into an exercise of mass vulgarity, our tastes are dictated by the mob, and our ancient freedoms are replaced with loudmouthed claims of entitlement, then how is our civilisation Western – or indeed tautologically civilised?

Some forms of mild censorship may be required for us to cling on to the last vestiges of our dying civilisation. For example, the now ubiquitous four-letter word used to be banned from British broadcast media. Then the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan used it on a BBC programme in 1965 to prove that the word was so thoroughly desemanticised that it had lost all its shock value.

I agree: the word doesn’t shock any longer. But its unrestrained public use has an erosive and brutalising effect on taste, style and therefore our civilisation, that cognate of civility. That’s why I’d happily ban it from television, although I understand the ‘slippery-slope’ arguments of those who wouldn’t.

However, I’m sure that what our Marxists plan to do, ban a platform owned by someone they dislike, is the point on which conservatives, libertarians and even apolitical lovers of liberty converge. This is an exercise in typical left-wing despotism; something I’d call par for the course.

Yesterday I wrote about America historically defining herself in sacral terms. In the spirit of full disclosure, some parts of the article were lifted out of my book Democracy as a Neocon Trick.

I figure if you plagiarise yourself, it’s not really plagiarism, although an editor once took exception to this lazy tendency of mine. Instead of complimenting my dedication to responsible recycling, she issued a stern rebuke.

The thing about that Democracy book is that it was written before the God of America reincarnated as Donald Trump. Hence it lacked up-to-date illustrations, mostly relying instead on copious historical references.

That void was yesterday filled by a reader of mine who pointed me in the direction of a truly astounding publication, The God Bless the USA Bible. Since at first I thought she was putting me on, I put my fingers on the keyboard, and, what do you know, Google told me she wasn’t.

Here it is, that superlative publication. The adjective in this case refers not to the quality of the book, but to the number of superlatives it inspires. This is the most vulgar, the most idiotic, the most obscene and the most blasphemous tome I’ve seen since The God Illusion by Dawkins came out.

Snugly fitting under one, genuine-imitation-leather, cover are several texts conjoined in fideistic unity: handwritten chorus to God Bless the USA, the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance – and, as an afterthought, the King James Version.

Yours for only $59.99, this standard edition is “endorsed but not signed by President Trump”. But don’t despair: a signed version also exists, and you can purchase it for a knockdown price of $1,000. A simple subtraction shows that a facsimile of Trump’s autograph costs $940.01, and I’d call that a bargain.

However, if a grand is too rich for your blood, you can still upgrade on the standard version without having to mortgage your house. For just $40 more you can treat yourself to the Presidential Edition, “commemorating the 45^th and 47^th President of the United States of America Donald J. Trump”. What, not God?

The companion volumes, each at the same price of $99.99, are the First Lady Edition, commemorating Melania; the Vice Presidential Edition, commemorating Vance; and the somewhat repetitive Golden Age Edition, again “commemorating the 45^th and 47^th President of the United States of America Donald J. Trump”.

I do wonder, without spending $1,000 to find out, how Trump signs his personalised edition. Having myself signed quite a few copies of my own books, I know that this genre abounds in creative possibilities. For example, depending on the addressee, I sometimes wrote “From the admiring [smitten, awed, respectful, humble] author”.

However, with all due respect, I doubt that even Trump thinks he actually wrote any of those texts. The time is nigh, I’m sure, when he’ll begin his televised speeches by saying, for example, “My fellow Americans, I’m God, let’s talk Venezuela”, but it hasn’t arrived yet.

Still, I wouldn’t like to second-guess the president – his imagination in such matters is infinitely more fecund than mine. Though Penelope does sometimes call me ‘The Vulgar Bootman’, I hope she simply likes the sound of the pun without believing it has any real substance to it.

Out of interest, I wonder whether Trump gets a slice of that biblical action and, if yes, how big. He has been licensing his name for years to various property developers around the world, who believe his endorsement would make the buildings more desirable.

Does God feel the same way? I’ll ask Him the next time we talk. Meanwhile, I hope King Charles III reads, marks, learns, and inwardly digests this lesson in how to monetise public office. This sort of thing beats his Duchy Original jams and biscuits hands down.

Can’t you just see it? The God Bless the UK Bible, endorsed and, for an additional fee, signed by His Majesty, King Charles III. Besides the KJV, the contents could include such texts as the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights (yes, we have one too), the Habeas Corpus Act and an offer of a royal discount on the full range of Duchy Original products.

Compared to the billions the Trump family has made out of such friends of America as Oman and Saudi Arabia, getting a few bob by flogging a deified America is mere pittance. But hey, take care of the pennies… and all that.

I’m sure there must be a way of checking the sales figures for this project, but I’m not sufficiently adept at manipulating computers. Still, supply-side economists reverse the famous adage of Jean-Baptiste Say by preaching that supply generates demand.

If true, then these obscene volumes must be flying off the shelves. I do, however, have a question for all MAGA fanatics: Do you realise how obscene these volumes are? How unspeakably vulgar, how demeaning not only to Scripture but even to politics?

No, perhaps not. Cults cauterise minds, and treating the US as God, with Trump as His son and prophet, is no exception. This is yet another vindication of Sophocles’s maxim, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad”.

The gods have definitely turned MAGA fanatics mad, but I hope the deities will make an exception this once and agree not to destroy them, or their country. However, first indications are appearing that Trump may be restricted, if not yet destroyed.

The other day, five Republican senators joined the Democrats in denying Trump emergency powers to wage war on Venezuela, presumably also on Denmark. American legislators seldom go against the president from their own party, and Trump responded in a fashion all his own.

He called Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), one of the five, and unloaded on her a full compendium of words that until recently only appeared in unabridged dictionaries. The good senator was lucky that her private parts were outside Trump’s reach, for otherwise, if his earlier advice on treating women is to be believed, he would have made her change her vote.

As I wrote yesterday, equating America with God didn’t start with Trump. But this unenviable tendency has never before scaled such heights of blasphemous vulgarity. Then again, I’m sure there are some people out there whose aesthetic evaluation of The God Bless the USA Bible is different from mine. I suggest they hurry and order one or all of those volumes while stocks last.

For my part, I have for President Trump that special feeling of gratitude I reserve for those who provide helpful illustrations to my musings. If all the quotations from former presidents don’t make my case, then this project certainly takes the (Duchy Original?) biscuit.

Donald Trump keeps invoking the ‘manifest destiny’ of America to rule the Western Hemisphere, thereby using a stock phrase in the lexicon of American exceptionalism.

For Trump, manifest destiny means that America answers only to an authority infinitely higher than silly international laws or impotent defence alliances. This makes the US a simulacrum of old kingdoms whose absolute monarchs ruled by divine right.

Such monarchs always said they were accountable to God only, meaning, in earthly terms, to no one. In a clear echo of such sentiments, Trump said the other day that he recognises no constraints other than his own morality. That was something Louis XIV or Nicholas I could have claimed, except that they probably would also have mentioned God in that context.

The tendency to express the nature of the US in quasi-religious terms didn’t start with Trump. It goes back to that Mayflower passenger, John Winthrop, who borrowed a phrase from St Matthew to describe America as a divinely ordained “city on a hill”.

The Biblical phrase immediately entered American lore and there it remains to this day. The underlying spirit cuts across party lines: the phrase was used by both the arch-Democrat John Kennedy and the arch-Republican Ronald Reagan. In other words, America isn’t just different from all other countries; it is saintlier and therefore better.

While other lands amble aimlessly through life, it’s America’s right and duty to carry out a messianic mission by spreading the ideals of liberalism, democracy, democratic liberalism, liberal democracy, republicanism or any other voguish political term denoting the underlying virtue.

In 1809 Jefferson expressed the principle of America as a beacon without relying on biblical references: “Trusted with the destinies of this solitary republic of the world, the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government, from hence it is to be lighted up in other regions of the earth, if other regions of the earth shall ever become susceptible of its benign influence.”

Tastes differ but facts shouldn’t: America was not “the only monument… and the sole depository… of freedom and self-government”. England, among others, had form in those areas too. But then the puffery of political pietism knows no bounds.

In due course the ‘city on a hill’ was helped along by other similar claims. In the 1840s the journalist John L. O’Sullivan coined the term ‘manifest destiny’ so beloved of Trump. Said manifest destiny was according to him “divine”: it was incumbent upon America “to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man”.

That God-like mission entailed the worldwide enforcement of the inalienable rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Already at that early date the impression was conveyed, for the time being obliquely, that America’s founding documents were binding not just for herself but also for the unsuspecting outside world. If all those countries didn’t realise what was good for them, it was up to America to teach them – and chastise them if they played truant.

Never in the history of the world, at least not since the heyday of Rome, had there existed another nation so bursting with such refreshingly sanctimonious arrogance. The world had to wait until the twentieth century for the American antithetical doppelgänger to appear: Soviet Russia on her own messianic crusade. The differences between the two are obvious enough, but the similarities are just as telling, if less commented upon.

The two messianic countries tucked away at the periphery of Christendom had both a positive and a negative constituent to their aspirations. While their positive aspirations differed, their negative desiderata were identical: the repudiation of the old order, otherwise known as European civilisation.

(“Repudiation of Europe,” Ezra Pound once said, “is the raison d’être of America.”)

America was more successful in achieving her positive aim of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ (it was more achievable to begin with, for being more pragmatic), understandably so. A seducer, after all, is likely to run up a higher amatory score than a rapist. It remains to be seen which of the two will repudiate Europe more decisively — it’s a close race at the moment.

To reinforce the quasi-religious aspects of their self-worship, both countries borrowed their iconography from various creeds, either pagan or faux Christian.

In ghoulish mimicry of Christian relics, for example, the ‘uncorrupted’ body of Lenin still lies in its mausoleum, minus the erstwhile mile-long queues of worshippers. Rumours used to be spread that Soviet scientists were working on ways to bring Lenin’s body back to life, and every Soviet city, town or village was adorned with posters screaming “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will always live!”. The mass murderer was a simulacrum of Jesus Christ.

Many have commented on the perverse references to religion in Bolshevik iconography, but few have noticed that the same mimicry is also robust in America.

Hardly any speech by American leaders from the eighteenth century onwards has omitted quasi-religious references to canonised historical figures, whose deeds are routinely described in Biblical terms. “Fellow citizens, the ark of your covenant is the Declaration of Independence,” pronounced John Quincy Adams, and he meant it exactly as it sounded.

Sacral visual imagery also abounds, as do mock-religious shrines to past leaders. Mount Rushmore with its 60-foot likenesses of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln carved in granite is an obligatory site for American pilgrimages.

George Washington in particular is worshipped in a religious manner as ‘Great Father of the Country’. The interior of the Capitol dome in DC displays a fresco entitled The Apotheosis of Washington where the sainted Father is surrounded by Baroque angels and also representations of other Founders in contact with various pagan gods, such as Neptune, Vulcan and Minerva.

In the same vein, the Lincoln Memorial is designed as a Greek temple and is actually identified as such in marble: “In this temple, as in the hearts of the people, for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”

The Jefferson Memorial, not far away, is also a replica of a pagan shrine, with various quasi-religious references inscribed. Cited, for example, is a quotation from Jefferson’s letter to Washington preaching that: “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? … Commerce between master and slave is despotism.”

It is useful to remember that these ringing words were uttered by a man who had his chattel slaves flogged to mincemeat for trying to escape. Jefferson also openly despised every Christian dogma and sacrament. His statement would therefore be either hypocritical or downright cynical if we were to forget that by then ‘God’ had become the shorthand for ‘America’.

To emulate the God of the Scriptures, the American deity has to claim creative powers. God Mark I may or may not have created the world, but it’s definitely up to God Mark II to recreate it.

One of America’s spiritual fathers, Thomas Paine, said as much. In his revolutionary gospel Common Sense Paine thundered off his pulpit that: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand…”.

Thus from the beginning American patriotism took on certain characteristics that until then had been more commonly associated with love of God, not of one’s country. And new patriotism began to claim precedence over old morality.

This isn’t to say that no true religious spirit existed in America – it did, and at the time it was still virile. But that residual piety had no role to play in the day-to-day running of the new republic.

For American politicians the Bible wasn’t so much a guide to their activities as an inexhaustible source of spiffy phrases, a precursor to the Roget’s Thesaurus of Quotations. Real life was driven by the unreal religion, one based not on a God worshipped but on a country deified.

That’s why many observers on this side of the Atlantic are wrong when believing that Trump is sui generis. In fact, he drinks from the founding and historical sources of the American psyche, appealing powerfully to those in whom those sources continue to gush.

Unlike traditional, organically developed European countries, America was built on an ideology, and any ideology is a secular faith. That’s why the US appears as enigmatic to an average Englishman or Spaniard as Russia seemed to Winston Churchill.

Such people don’t realise that an American is defined not only by culture, language and national allegiance, but also by a form of neo-pagan piety, a secular cult that’s a simulacrum of Christian messianism. Some Americans are passionately devout exponents of this totemistic cult, some less so.

Trump genuflects before that totem pole with what may or may not be genuine devotion. One way or the other, he knows how to speak to true believers in their own language, and that’s what makes him an electoral success.

Yet it also makes him unacceptable to those who kneel at different altars, both literal and figurative. Europeans are happy to welcome America as an ally, even sometimes as a role model. But they’ll always resent and resist a hectoring, bullying America, as personified by Trump. This sort of thing doesn’t travel well.

… has so much been paid by so many to gratify so few. My having to paraphrase Churchill’s famous saying should alert you to my problem.

My own words simply failed me when I tried to react to the data just published by the National Energy System Operator (NESO). If you are unfamiliar with this outfit, don’t rush to indict it for anti-Labour bias.

In fact, NESO is a government quango responsible for our energy systems. As such, it’s more likely to err on the side of its paymaster, which is to say the government or, more generally, Labour or, more narrowly, Keir Starmer or, more specifically, Ed Miliband.

This lengthy introduction is necessary to prime your credulity because I’m about to unveil a truly incredible datum. Are you ready? Good. Now brace yourself:

Labour’s, more specifically Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s, insanely criminal drive towards net zero will cost us £4.5 trillion over the next 25 years. That’s £4.5 followed by 12 zeroes in case you’re wondering.

In a sane world, that forecast, exceeding Britain’s entire GDP, would be sufficient to mitigate the government’s commitment even to a sound policy. But our world is anything but sane, which is why a gang of obtuse Marxist apparatchiks are allowed to beggar the country in the name of an ideological construct lacking any valid scientific evidence.

Yet even assuming that the theory of global warming is correct, and ‘our planet’ is on course to be incinerated by carbon dioxide, Britain’s suicide by net zero is completely meaningless. The country produces merely one per cent of the world’s output of that dastardly gas. So even if we hit the madcap net zero target, it won’t increase ‘our planet’s’ chances of survival one bit.

Those who cross the sea may change their sky, according to Horace, but not their soul (caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt) and, more to the point, certainly not their atmosphere. This they have to share with countries like China, India and Russia that are many unsavoury things, but woke isn’t one of them.

That staggering £4.5 trillion sum covers carpeting the country with new wind farms and their pylons, building a network of charging stations for electric cars, upgrading roads warped by those heavy vehicles, installing millions of solar panels, switching from boilers to heat pumps, beefing up the grid to enable it to accommodate millions of electric appliances pretending to be cars – and God only knows how many other items I’ve left out.

The current projection far exceeds all previous forecasts, which is par for the course of government estimates. Hence it wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest that the £4.5 trillion – although ample to bankrupt the country – has more to do with hope than expectation. We ought to double it to be on the safe side, although ‘safe’ seems to be a misnomer.

Thus, Britain is going to spend £182 billion a year or more to ruin the country and only £61.7 a year to defend it. But things like defence, secure borders and fiscal responsibility are the domain of conservatives, aka reactionaries, aka racists, aka colonialists, aka transphobes, aka fascists.

Marxists, aka progressives, don’t mind stripping the country’s defences bare, flinging her door wide open to welcome swarms of Third World migrants hostile to the West – and they certainly don’t mind reducing the country to Third World penury.

The net zero drive will push our state debt from its current stratospheric level to a galactic one, which any normal person would anticipate with trepidation. But one function of exorbitant sovereign debt is a transfer of power from the people to the state, meaning to the Milibandits of this world.

A disaster to you and me is a boon to that Marxist lot. What I find astounding is that such nonentities as febrile of ideology as they are feeble of mind can take part in Western politics, never mind gaining electoral success.

There had to be millions of Britons voting for this hybrid of communist cell and lunatic asylum – but then one is born every minute, as T E Barnum once said about suckers. But don’t get me started on one-man-one-vote democracy of universal franchise.

Labour won their 2024 landslide with about one-third of the popular vote. This they deem sufficient to regard the election as a mandate to do as they please. And, until 2029, no constitutional mechanisms exist for the people to prevent this electoral Marxist takeover from ruining and, as a result, enslaving the country.

Moreover, the Tories are happy to score rhetorical points off the government. But during their 14 years in power they had plenty of chances to nip this subversive nonsense in the bud – and failed to take any of them. Moreover, their commitment to net zero was only a couple of degrees cooler than Labour’s.

For example, as (Tory!) Prime Minister, Boris Johnson set a legally binding target for the UK to reach net zero by 2050. After reverting to his pre-political journalistic trade, he acknowledged he had gone “far too fast”, and that his policy was “too expensive for ordinary people”. You don’t say.

Talk, however, is cheap. It’s action that matters, and I don’t hold much hope that, in the unlikely event the Tories win the next general election, they’ll abandon this criminal policy. At best, they’ll add a few years to the target without ever repudiating it altogether.

Nigel Farage is making encouraging noises, but he still isn’t within striking distance of 10 Downing Street. I’m willing to bet that, as the key to that house moves within reach, he too will start to waffle about the drive being too fast, though generally virtuous.

I hope Reform will prove me wrong, but so far they haven’t denounced the whole business as an ideological construct erected on the foundation of no proper evidence. One thing I can say for Trump is that he doesn’t mind calling global warming a “hoax”. Neither does he hesitate to pull the US out of all international eco-setups, that ideal sinecure for Marxist apparatchiks, those Frankfurters who fell out of Marx’s buns.

But, barring the possibility of Trump deciding that America “needs to own” not only Greenland but also Britain for security reasons, we are stuck with the Milibandits on the eco-prowl.

So start drilling new holes in your belts, chaps. Our governing cabal is out to beggar the country, and there’s precious little we can do about it.

Martin, I’ll have you know, is one of our best football writers, possibly even the best.

Reaching such a distinction seems to be enough for most lifetimes, but not for Martin’s. A few years ago he moved from The Mail to The Times, partly because his brief was expanded to include the odd feature on other subjects as well.

This violated the commandment tersely enunciated by Clint Eastwood in one of his films: “A man must be aware of his limitations.” Unfortunately, this commandment is obeyed no more faithfully than the better-known ten.

People, especially creative ones, always want more. David Hume, for example, was by all accounts a great historian (I haven’t yet got around to reading his History of England, but I promise I will). Yet he wanted to graduate to philosophy, which really wasn’t his forte.

A century later, Tolstoy, in my view the best novelist in history, decided to become a philosopher, theologian and a teacher of mankind. The result was some 50 volumes of unpleasant rubbish with nary a sound thought on any subject. (I shouldn’t knock old Leo because his ineptitude provided the inspiration and material for my book God and Man According to Tolstoy.)

To use a much less lofty example, I once wrote a novel but never tried to send it out to publishers. It was good enough to print, I suppose, but my guiding principle in such matters is that good enough isn’t good enough.

I realised that, in accordance with the Peter principle, I had reached the level of my incompetence, which, alas, is the only thing I have in common with Messrs Hume and Tolstoy. And also, I’m tempted to add, with a number of successful instrumentalists who insist on becoming conductors (orchestra, not train). Some of them manage to become successful there as well, but I can’t think offhand of any becoming good – I mean Furtwängler or at least Svetlanov kind of good.

Martin Samuel should have stuck to writing his masterly football columns, staying within his natural habitat. Instead, he has gate-crashed an area that requires more thought and general erudition than does the saga of wingbacks and holding midfielders. Unfortunately, Martin lacks such qualifications, but he does satisfy his paper’s relatively new requirement of being on the ‘liberal’ side of things.

This he proved by his article today, ICE Violence is Chilling – It Feels Scary to Visit the US. Martin will have to spend 45 days in the US this summer, I’m guessing to cover the World Cup. And, after the Minneapolis shooting, he fears for his life.

“What befell Renee Nicole Good should make even the most law-abiding citizen uncomfortable”, he writes. “Now you could take a wrong turn and get caught up in an ICE patrol” – and then bang-bang, no more Martin.

The danger of being shot during an American junket has always existed, he explains. But at least in the past the attackers used to be criminals, not trigger-happy ICE officers.

I don’t share Martin’s assessment of the situation, but even when fear is unfounded, it can wreak havoc on people’s behaviour. This can turn into a panic, and then even “the most law-abiding citizen” may put himself in harm’s way by doing something rash.

My fear is that, should Martin panic and get shot by those dastardly ICE or other law-enforcement officers, I’ll no longer be able to enjoy his football articles. Therefore, I feel it behoves me as a former 15-year US resident to offer Martin some avuncular advice on how to avoid a police bullet.

When I lived in Texas, one of the gunniest states in the Union, I had many brushes with police, typically over driving too fast or not sober enough. In those days, cops still had a sense of humour, which once enabled me to get out of a ticket. When the officer asked me where the fire was, I replied, “In your eyes, you gypsy savage you.” He laughed and let me get off with a warning.

But even so, I always followed the same procedure well familiar to every American. When a cop stops you for any reason, you do exactly what he says.

Before he says anything, you put both hands on the top of the wheel and await instructions. If he tells you to take out your licence and registration, that’s what you do. If he tells you to get out of the car, you do so. If he doesn’t tell you to do that, you stay put.

You see, being a police officer in the US is a more dangerous occupation than in Martin’s native land. Cops there carry guns, as do many criminals and “the most law-abiding citizens”. (I’m not going to discuss the Second Amendment here, other than saying it’s on the books as part of the US Constitution.)

A policeman’s trigger finger itches when he approaches a car. Too many of his colleagues have asked for licence and registration, but got a bullet instead. Or else they’ve been run over by a reticent driver who wished to keep his identity to himself.

This fate befell Jon Ross, the ICE officer who shot Good, a couple of months ago. He stopped a car driven by an illegal immigrant suspected of sex crimes (I’m guessing it wasn’t just complimenting a woman’s body). The chap refused to come out and, when Ross tried to grab him through the window, accelerated, dragging the officer 50 feet and injuring him gruesomely.

This time around, he was more alert, and, when Good accelerated towards him, did what any American policeman would do under the circumstances. This provides a useful object lesson to Martin: if you’re stopped by a cop, do what I used to do, don’t do what Good did, and you’ll be fine.

Another lesson for Martin to heed is not to do something else Good did: become an activist in a group actively trying to sabotage ICE going about its lawful business. Good and her accomplices used phone apps, whistles and car horns to alert illegal residents of a neighbourhood whenever ICE was on the prowl. In another exercise of illegal activities, they also tried to block ICE vehicles.

The World Cup schedule being as dense as it is, I doubt Martin will have the time to follow his heart and start parking his Avis across the streets where ICE officers are trying to round up illegals. However, just in case a gap is opening up, Martin, don’t do what Good did.

Also, if at all possible, try not to write about things you don’t really know and understand. It’s not enough to be ‘liberal’; you must also be able to think. Having said all that, I look forward to your explanations of why England lost in the quarters.

P.S. According to the papers Good and her wife “have a six-year-old child together.” Who was Mummy and who was Daddy? The public has the right to know.