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Or else they use the word ‘religion’ loosely, to denote a sense of something mystical, spiritual and extra-material in nature.

True enough, few Russians, indeed few people in general, ever deny the presence of something that can’t be described in strictly physical terms. Those who do so are sorely unobservant and also illogical. After all, they argue in favour of their obtuse materialism using a manifestly non-material faculty, their reason.

Yet sensing that there is more to the world than just an aggregate of molecules has little to do with religion. By itself, that perception is more likely to lead to superstition, including all kinds of its brutal forms, or else to abstract natural mysticism.

Yet natural mysticism isn’t a religion, though it can be the first step along the way. Mysticism is amorphous; it is a hazy instinct that hasn’t yet reached, nor may ever reach, God. It is content in search of form, not yet sure of itself and therefore uncertain which form will suit it best.

Only religion can steer a man to God, by crystallising a vague longing into faith and offering a moulded shape into which the longing can flow.

The shape is well defined: whereas amorphous mysticism has to remain abstract, religion is always concrete. There exists no religion in general. There are only specific religions, each with its own revelation, dogma and rituals – its own way of looking at God and his world.

Mysticism, on the other hand, can only exist in general, and in that sense it is not only different from religion but indeed opposite to it. That’s why many who flirt with mysticism, including some of Russia’s greatest writers, such as Tolstoy, only ever use it as a stick with which to beat religion on the head.

As religion is both higher and grander than mysticism, it tends to subsume it, channelling it into religion’s own reservoir. Mysticism, on the other hand, sometimes refuses to be diverted into that conduit.

One can say that mysticism relates to faith the way anarchy relates to liberty. When it is particularly recalcitrant, it may rebel against religion to protect what may appear to be its freedom, but is in fact its amorphousness. When such a rebellion occurs, it can be expressed in ways that are not only non-religious but also actively anti-religious. Thus, while ‘an atheist Christian’ doesn’t sound plausible, ‘an atheist mystic’ does.

It is amorphous mysticism, rather than true religiosity, that is a characteristic Russian trait. This could have led to genuine faith first and real religion second, but, alas, disdain for any formal restrictions to their self-expression has prevented the Russians from following such a progression, en masse at any rate.

This anti-formalism doesn’t just affect religion. It also explains why the Russians have never developed a knack for improving the state or any other public institutions. If they can’t destroy such institutions, they are more inclined to run away, preventing the state from destroying them.

In fact, the Russians tend to be averse to any disciplined form that might contain their fluid substance, which is why all those democracies and free markets can never succeed there even when, or rather if, they are ever tried for real.

This tendency extends even to aesthetics. For example, though all Russians hail Pushkin as the greatest poet of all time (“our all”, as the critic Apollon Grigoriev described him), his classicist form and cut-glass Mozartian cadences had no followers.

According to the philosopher Nikolai Lossky, this disdain for form even penetrated the Russians’ gene pool, having produced so many ill-defined, amorphous facial features clearly different, say, from the chiselled Northern European profile. Indeed many Russians, even those from old families, show a certain lack of straight lines in their faces.

It is as if, having drawn a sketch of their features, God then went over it, smudging every line with his thumb. Lossky’s observation may be too sweeping, but it is certainly evident that the Russians’ amorphousness extends to the way they treat every public institution, from justice to religion.

Traditional Russian lawlessness is well publicised, but mostly in the context of the state being bound by no legal constraints. It is less often mentioned that not only do Russian rulers seldom obey their own laws, but they don’t even insist that the ruled do – for as long as the latter don’t mind being ruled.

In that sense, it is Russia herself, and not just her governments, that has always been lawless. Nor do the people define liberty in any legal terms. The old Russian word for freedom, volia, is etymologically related to ‘will’, which stands to reason. Freedom to a Russian means being able to do as he wills, not obeying just laws that protect his liberties.

Many ascribe this tendency to the Asian part of the Russian character. However, lawlessness in Russia is markedly different from that in the traditional Eastern tyrannies.

There the populace was expected to follow every letter of the law, even if the despots themselves ignored its very spirit. But in Russia lawlessness functioned at all levels even under the tsars. At the top the arbitrary will of the tsar was the only law, and he could punish anyone with utmost cruelty for the slightest infraction. At the same time, he could let anyone get away with murder if such was his wish.

For example, Paul I once ordered the promotion of an officer who had had a trader hanged for having refused to sell hay for his company’s horses. On another day the same officer could have been severely chastised.

Those who derive their knowledge of Russia from Kremlin propaganda, refracted through our press, like to repeat the canard about Russians flocking to churches in their droves. In fact, church attendance in Russia is no higher than in Britain, and no one has ever accused the British of excessive piety.

Only between 0.5 and 2 per cent of Russians in big cities attend Easter services, and overall the number of actively practising Orthodox Christians is only marginally greater. In light of what I’ve said about the Russian character, it could hardly be otherwise.

Orthodox Christianity is an apostolic religion and, as such, imposes a strict discipline of dogma, ritual and doctrine. That sort of thing is alien to much-vaunted Russian spirituality, and many Russians, if they ever go to church at all, prefer various Protestant sects, which they find more conducive to free expression.

I don’t know why I felt compelled to write about this. Perhaps the proximity of Easter has made it hard to think about mundane matters. But this is a passing aberration, and tomorrow we’ll be back talking about Trump.

At some time “in the course of human events”, Western statesmen were replaced with politicians, politicians with nonentities, and nonentities with spivs.

Explaining why would take a book-length essay, but suffice it to say in a short article that some regression along those lines is easy to observe. The cited phrase in the first sentence comes from The Declaration of Independence, which hints at the leading role played by the US.

This isn’t an exercise in Americanophobia, but simply a recognition of the country’s role as the leader of the free world. It stands to reason that, if the US leads the West, she does so on a path not only to successes but also to failures.

Hence one doesn’t find among American politicians of today the same human calibre that was taken for granted, say, the 25 years on either side of 1800 – or even of 1900. The same goes for Europe, which makes it hard to escape the feeling that the US leads the free world on its way down, politically at any rate.

Myopia describes the unsavoury political types I mentioned earlier, whereas statesmen’s vision is hyperopic, able to see far into the future. This type of sight isn’t to be found among today’s politicians in the US or elsewhere in the West.

That’s why, ever since the world was cursed with truly satanic regimes, in countries like Russia, Italy, Germany and China, along with their allies and satellites, the West has consistently demonstrated strategic short-sightedeness, exacerbated by declining moral and intellectual standards.

Unable to see much farther than their noses, Western countries, but especially the US, busily built up those regimes to a point where they became a genuine threat to our civilisation. Then, when the threat became impossible to ignore, American and other Western governments would desperately try to snuff it out, exposing their countries to immense losses of money and, as often as not, human lives.

The late Stanford scholar, Dr Anthony C. Sutton, described that folly in a series of copiously documented studies, including the seminal trilogy Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development and also Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. Without going into detail, let’s just say that the piles of documents he cites prove that without US economic and technological help, neither Bolshevism nor Nazism would have grown to its diabolical maturity.

China is another case in point. Her rise to her present status of an economic and military superpower began on 2 October, 1959, when the Sino-Soviet split kicked off with Khrushchev’s outburst and Mao’s reaction. Cold war was in full swing at the time, with America trying to contain Soviet expansion and growing influence.

The Sino-Soviet split turned China into a natural ally of America – our enemies’ enemies, and all that. Myopically, a succession of US presidents didn’t see China as a threat. The country was backward, impoverished, ravaged by communist terror, the people were starving – China was seen as a useful ally able to add her penny’s worth to the anti-Soviet cause, but not as any potential threat in her own right.

American courtship of China began, and it was eventually consummated in February 1972, when a beaming Richard Nixon shook hands with Zhou Enlai at Peking airport. From then onwards the trickle of US assistance to China has been steadily growing into a mighty stream.

Egregious folly, partly springing from an inability to plan for the future and partly from a misguided faith in the redemptive potential of commerce, made the US pump funds and technology into the sclerotic veins of China’s economy.

The picture Nixon and all subsequent presidents saw in their myopic mind’s eye was of China becoming richer and eventually democratic. How could she not? Once the Chinese people got enough rice to eat and wash down with Coca Cola, surely they’d see the democratic light shone by America?

That sort of thinking shows a profound misunderstanding of political evil, in fact an inability to think in such terms. People in general and Americans in particular like to think that deep down everyone is, or desperately wishes to be, just like them.

They know that they themselves are good people thinking of nothing but “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. So the Chinese have the same aspirations, even if they are latent at the moment. All those poor souls need is a little help, and what better way of providing it than through commerce?

This hopelessly naïve and short-sighted view of the world ignored the evil nature of China’s communist regime holding total, not to say totalitarian, sway over its people. Chinese people didn’t matter: they were either brainwashed or browbeaten by the regime. And the regime realised that what was being offered to it on a platter was a chance to dominate the world, that perennial daydream of all communists.

Some US presidents, such as Clinton, meekly tried to link further assistance to some progress in the issue of human rights, but they quickly abandoned such half-hearted attempts. China was steadily built up into the workshop of the West, with more and more products manufactured there.

Westerners would then slap their labels on those products, turning them into respectable brands. But their affection for cheap labour gradually turned into an addiction: if the Chinese could make the same things for less, one would be stupid not to take advantage of that opportunity. Especially since the Chinese could only provide the muscle, not the American capacity for technological innovation.

In 2001 George W. Bush generously welcomed China into the WTO, plugging her fully into the West’s supply chain and, as a corollary, acting as Dr Frankenstein to China’s monster. The evil communist regime was well on the road to global power.

Then, what do you know, the Chinese, who are a talented and industrious people, showed that they can do so much better than just toiling in factories for coolie wages. Their perfidious communist masters wisely loosened the reins a bit, and Chinese scientists and engineers were able to go to work.

Today, 40 per cent of all patents issued in the world go to China, and suddenly she no longer needs American labels on her products. She can put her own on, while continuing to build up her manufacturing base to a point where China can match up to America economically and militarily anywhere in the world.

The communist reins might have been loosened, but the harness is still there, and China’s regime remains as evil as ever. But it’s infinitely stronger than it has ever been.

Much of the debacle visited by Trump on the world has been caused by the belated realisation setting in: as always, America first builds up her evil adversaries and, when they grow strong enough to challenge her, has a Damascene experience.

The worst words in the political lexicon, We must do something!, then thunder from all media and certainly the White House. Rather than preventing monsters from growing to maturity, the West, especially America, weans them first and then tries to slay them when they already breathe fire and threaten to incinerate the world.

Trump is economically illiterate, but some of his advisers aren’t. They must have explained to the president that wholesale sanctions make no economic sense. And if you don’t believe us, Donald, just look at what’s happening in the markets. You used to blow your own trumpet when the stock market went up during your first term, so are you going to eat crow now?

All that is fine and well, but no economic sense doesn’t necessarily mean no sense at all. Even Trump is beginning to understand that there is more to life than just a commercial transaction at the end of which he gets richer.

Progressive, century-long myopia has led to the nurturing of a succession of evil regimes, of which China just may be the most dangerous. So yes, of course it’s cheaper to outsource most manufacturing to countries like China, those that can do manufacturing for less.

But being dependent on our enemies for the supply of strategic goods, from food to steel to electronics to everything else in between, means courting disaster. So America finally perched bifocal glasses on the tip of her nose and saw that she is on the verge of losing her superpower status to a bunch of communists who have stubbornly refused to be guided by the light of democracy.

The world is pregnant with conflict and it may give birth to war at any moment. That’s why Trump is trying to repatriate the manufacturing his predecessors foolishly allowed to go elsewhere. He is doing that in a typically bullyish and heavy-handed fashion, causing more harm than good at the moment.

But at least that dread phrase, We must do something!, is clearly sounding in the back of his mind. Instead of being the John Wayne of the world, kicking doors in and shoving the nasties aside, America is now in a clearly defensive mode.

Aware that the US can no longer afford to be the leader of the free world, Trump is trying to cut his losses by withdrawing, or as near as damn, from all traditional alliances and obligations. He says he isn’t going to lift a finger in defence of a corrupt Ukraine, pathetic and freeloading Europe, and thieving Taiwan.

Let Putin have the first, along with as much of the second as he can swallow, and let China have Taiwan. America needs to buy time to become a manufacturing autarky again, but she now needs too much time.

Even assuming that this goal is achievable, it’ll take years, more likely decades, to achieve it. Rebuilding, say, the steel and aluminium production will take longer than the same 24 hours it didn’t take to end Putin’s aggression against the Ukraine. America might have waited too long, reaping the short-term harvest and leaving the really vital fields fallow.

We should all hope America gets the time she needs, and we must all follow her on the same path, one leading to strategic survival. A quick course of political ophthalmology treatment is sorely needed though.

Trade war can only make us less prosperous. Class war can make us less civilised, and prosperity is much easier to recover.

For all the pseudo-conservative noises Starmer makes, his is a Marxist government that only ever contains its carnivorous instincts for fear of electoral reprisal. And Marxists don’t rationally weigh the pros and cons of class war any more than a dog considers the advisability of chasing a cat.

Both breeds follow the imperatives coded into their DNA, and in doing so they act without a choice. Dogs dislike cats, Marxists hate everything to do with Western tradition.

It’s only in this context that one can properly evaluate the Labour bill to do away with the 88 remaining hereditary peers in the House of Lords. “Hereditary peers are indefensible,” said the Labour manifesto in the latest election, presumably because they’ve been neither elected nor appointed by Labour governments.

Such illiterate idiocy strikes a chord in untutored hearts, which alas constitute an overwhelming cardiac majority in today’s Britain. We are a democratic country, aren’t we? We are. Then those who govern us must be elected or, at a pinch, appointed by those who have been. End of story.

Many of those who mouth such bilge don’t seem to have any problem with having an unelected and hereditary head of state, but that problem will arise sooner or later. The God of Democracy is athirst, demanding more and more sacrifices.

Yet the very existence of a king should have tipped off those people that, a democracy though Britain may be, it’s also a monarchy, albeit a constitutional one. That fact alone points to the essence of Britain’s polity, the oldest and most consistent realisation of the most sound political idea, that of mixed government.

Having analysed the three principal methods of government known at the time, aristocracy, oligarchy and democracy, both Plato and Aristotle found each of them wanting. No political arrangement can exist in its pure form without degenerating into something unsavoury. That’s why the synthetic constitution of Lycurgus in Sparta lasted longer than the purely democratic constitution of Solon in Athens.

Following the Greeks, Machiavelli argued in his Discourses that, when their purity is intransigently maintained, a principality turns into a tyranny, an aristocracy into an oligarchy and a democracy into anarchy. For a political arrangement to last, and for liberty to thrive, a state must combine the elements of all three known forms of government. A division of power, in which none of the estates feels the need to usurp the total power, is thus a proven guarantor of social longevity.

That idea lies at the foundation of most Western democracies, but especially of England and all the countries directly influenced by her. The constitution of England combines the monarchy of the king, the democracy of the Commons, and the unelected fulcrum between the two, the House of Lords, ensuring that neither end of the seesaw shoots up too vigorously.

This system goes back centuries. It was from barons’ councils that our modern parliaments have evolved, and the post-Hellenic system of representation has ancient roots as well.

For example, in England before the Norman conquest it was the Witenagemot, the assembly of the kingdom’s leading nobles, that would convene after a king’s death to select a successor. That was, to name one instance, how Harold Godwinson took the throne, which he then lost to a Norman arrow in 1066.

So yes, Britain is a democracy, but she can’t be a democracy run riot. If she becomes that, she won’t be Britain in any other than the geographical sense. For Britain is defined by her ancient constitution more than any other European country (the US is equally dependent on her own constitution, but it’s just a modification of the English antecedent).

Since the 1789 Revolution, France has had 14 different constitutions, the current one established in 1958. Replace it with a fifteenth, and France will remain France, to paraphrase Maurice Chevalier’s song (Paris sera toujours Paris). Take Britain’s constitution away, and we might as well become an American state – I’m sure Trump would welcome such a development.

I don’t know if Starmer and his merry men understand such ABC things. They may or may not, but that doesn’t matter one way or the other. Visceral hatred of the upper classes has been encoded into their DNA by Marx, and that overrides any rational considerations.

Class war, as far as they are concerned, can have only one end, that articulated by the proto-Marxist Denis Diderot: “We’ll hang the last priest on the entrails of the last aristocrat”. I’m not sure the Starmer gang see that end in similarly sanguinary terms, but that’s a difference of form, not content.

They are fighting their class war on all fronts, by driving wealth producers out of the country, suffocating the middle classes with extortionate taxes, and doing their level best to destroy public schools that alone can be expected to provide a semblance of education.

None of this makes any sense on any level, except one: the Marxist craving for the politics of envy and hatred. But I’ve got news for this lot: class war and trade war have one thing in common. Neither ever produces any winners. Only losers.

Call me an inveterate snob, but I feel an acute sense of schadenfreude when reading about Americans living in England or just visiting.

Lately, The Mail has been publishing articles on the culture shocks experienced by such innocent visitors to our shores, and none of them is a PLU (if you don’t know what this acronym stands for, you aren’t a PLU yourself).

Birds of a feather and all that, it’s natural that the English people those Americans know also come from the lowly strata of society. Visiting Americans may not be aware of our social nuances, and there is no reason they should be, but one would expect Mail journalists to enlighten them.

I’m sure they could if they wanted to, but most of their paper’s readers belong to the same demographic group. They can let The Mail get away with utter, even subversive bilge (Peter Hitchens springs to mind), but they’ll never forgive even a hint of class snobbery.

That’s why the paper allows those culturally shocked Americans to persist in the folly that their comments apply to Britons at large, rather than strictly to those of the proletarian persuasion.

The other day, for example, one perplexed visitor wrote about his confusion over tea. Not only are Britons obsessed with that beverage, he complained, but they use the word to describe the main meal of the day. Go figure.

I don’t propose to write a treatise on the class structure of British society, with its main groups, each featuring any number of hyphenated sub-groups. However, simplifying the structure to just three tiers, low, middle and high, no member of the two top groups would ever refer to a major meal as ‘tea’.

However, when I myself moved from the US to London, I too was taken aback when my advertising colleagues asked what I was cooking for tea that evening. Tea for me was strictly a hot (in America, sometimes iced) drink accompanied by a biscuit (cookie to Americans) or drunk on its own.

Moving up the social scale in the after hours, I referred to the evening meal as ‘dinner’ or more usually ‘supper’. But, being sensitive to the perverse vagaries of English usage, I knew that ‘dinner’ to my co-workers and their class comrades often described lunch.

Thus, when a London taxi driver declines a fare at noon, saying, “I’m going ‘ome to ‘ave me dinner”, he doesn’t mean he is driving to Liverpool to be just in time for his wife’s Lancashire hotpot.

The same chap, by the way, could confuse Americans even more by describing them as either ‘Shermans’ or ‘Septics’, but Cockney rhyming slang deserves a separate essay. (Just this once I’ll help out the outlanders among you by explaining that a Sherman or septic describes a tank, which rhymes with ‘Yank’. Such are the little word games played within earshot of Bow Bells.)

Britons who use such locutions seldom mean them as a compliment. For example, my erstwhile co-worker Barry detested septic tourists.

Truth to tell, Barry didn’t have much time for any foreigners, but he felt he could be more open about his animosity to Shermans. They were a free hit, and one could indulge one’s feelings without being accused of racism or Euroscepticism.

Barry lived for the moments when an American tourist asked him for directions to, say, Hampton Court. Barry’s stock reply was: “Take the Piccadilly Line, go to Cockfosters, then get out and ask again.” Those familiar with London’s geography will know that such a wild-goose chase would take the hapless sightseer at least two hours out of his way.

Another quaint idiosyncrasy spotted by the same confused visitors to The Mail‘s pages is that Britons apologise all the time in situations that don’t call for excuses in America. ‘Sorry’ with various adverbal modifiers, such as ‘awfully’ or ‘terribly’, seems to be the most popular locution.

So it may be, but only in the middle classes, especially the lower reaches therein. As one climbs the social ladder, self-confidence increases, and apologies are heard less and less.

Some Americans are amazed at the absence of power sockets in our bathrooms. This is indeed an abomination, but one motivated not by class but by what’s fondly described as ‘elf and safety.

Our powers that be are concerned that, should sockets be available in bathrooms, an irate husband might plug a hairdryer in and drop it in the tub just as his wife (‘missus’, ‘old lady’ or ‘trouble’ to Mail readers) is taking a bath.

And speaking of that facility, some Shermans have trouble with the word ‘toilet’, as do I, but for different reasons. Their response is TMI (Too Much Information), an offence avoided by their own awful euphemisms, such as restroom, powder room, little boys’ room and some such, all prole, which euphemisms so often tend to be.

Alas, this is the only room in the house for which no non-euphemistic name exists.

The flushing facility we take for granted (but one about 14 per cent of all Russians still don’t have) was invented by the Victorian plumber Thomas Crapper, an aptronymic surname if I’ve ever seen one. For a while, he lent his name to the room, but that didn’t last because of the term’s association with an older and cruder Anglo-Saxon word.

Britons can’t escape excretional euphemisms, but they can arrange them in the ascending order of social acceptability. Thus, ‘toilet’ is strictly prole in the UK (though not so much in the US). Penelope, for example, is physically unable to articulate it.

At the opposite end of the social scale sit words like ‘lavatory’, ‘lav’ or ‘loo’. The first one is a smidgen more PLU than the other two. ‘Lav’ is obviously a shortened ‘lavatory’, whereas ‘loo’ comes from ‘Waterloo’, supposedly because at the time Mr Crapper died British outhouses bore that brand name.

My own theory is that the connection with Waterloo is rather different. That room used to be called ‘water closet’, and the perverse English mind formed an association with Waterloo, later abbreviated to ‘loo’. Just a guess.

Americans also cause the natives’ mirth by struggling with the pronunciation of words like Leicester and Gloucester, both featuring in the name of tube stations. Not only do they laboriously and amusingly articulate every syllable, but they even can’t understand those words when properly pronounced as ‘Lester’ and ‘Gloster’.

Those chaps are lucky they don’t revolve in the circles inhabited by Messrs Featherstonehaugh and Cholmondeley, pronounced ‘Fanshaw’ and ‘Chumly’. If they did, they’d have even more to complain about, but I doubt The Mail would print such gripes.  

This hardly earth-shattering observation makes me even more sceptical about the debacle Trump has visited on the world in general and the US specifically.

Tocqueville pointed out some similarities between America and Russia, prophesying that one day they would rule the world together. But his prediction was based on the two countries’ potential for demographic growth, which has been partly realised in America but not at all in Russia.

Yet Americans and Russians do like to remark how similar they are, even though both are aware of the many traits they don’t share. One salient similarity is their historical animosity to Europe, not necessarily geopolitical but always psychological, cultural and, if you will, civilisational. In such terms, both countries are envious upstarts and rancorous outsiders.

“Repudiation of Europe,” the novelist John Dos Passos once wrote, “is, after all, America’s main excuse for being.” His Russian colleagues, even those better than him, often said something similar about their own nation, as any reader of Dostoyevsky’s or Tolstoy’s diaries will confirm. In his Karamazovs, Dostoyevsky talked about genuflecting before “the sacred stones of Europe”, which didn’t prevent him from loathing every animate European.

A propensity to xenophobia and insularity makes it easy for expert demagogues in both countries to sell the idea of the world ganging up on them. They could all repeat the slogan of the notoriously thuggish football team, Millwall FC: No one likes us, but we don’t care.

The Russians have indeed turned their paranoia into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Their tendency to pounce on their neighbours like rabid dogs, coupled with their persistent threats to conquer or, barring that, annihilate the world, have instilled affection in few foreign hearts.

In America’s case, the Millwall Syndrome isn’t so clear-cut. It’s true that educated Europeans, both Leftists and traditional conservatives, tend to treat the US with, respectively, visceral hatred and supercilious condescension. Yet the uneducated, which these days is to say overwhelming, majorities are tropistically attracted to America.

While both Russia and America talk about their love of the common man, for the former it’s just talk, whereas for the latter it’s reality.

America actually is what Russia purports to be: a country dedicated to the elevation of the common man. Common men around the world sense that and respond with sympathy, if not always with love. Many had the same feelings for communist Russia, having swallowed her canard about equality. However, eventually Soviet beastliness helped most people see through Soviet lies.

But Trump’s economic broadside against the world, including the 20 countries with which America had a free trade agreement, makes his Millwall-like claims more credible. Traditional friends of America are being turned into her enemies and, even worse, friends of China.

The only major country Trump didn’t hit with new tariffs is Russia, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent explained that the US didn’t do business with that sanctioned rogue. That’s not quite true: last year the US did about $3.6 billion’s worth of trade with Russia, but Bessent and his boss can only think in trillions, not paltry billions.

Anyway, my title above suggests that I’m going to talk not about the two nations’ similarities but their differences. These are numerous, but one that seems apposite today is that the Russians are historically used to a life of deprivation and the Americans aren’t.

Such habits have had a formative effect on both national characters, with the austere Russians (en masse, that is) satisfied with having the bare necessities of life and prepared to tolerate even their shortage. Americans, on the other hand, are as different in that respect as different can be.

A country dedicated to the elevation of the common man will inevitably be defined by materialistic desiderata, the prime of which is a guarantee of ever-growing comfort. This is the implicit promise of America, and she can only ever break it at her peril. (The promise first came across in the Declaration of Independence that identified “the pursuit of happiness” as an “unalienable [sic] right.”)

Acting on that promise consistently has produced a hedonistic culture of instant gratification spreading over an infinite number of instances in eternity. That’s why, and not just because of the wily foreigners’ chicanery, Americans tend to consume more than they produce, and that’s why, in the 10 years leading up to the 2008 crisis, personal indebtedness in the US was three times as great as personal income.

This critical difference between the two nations has seeped into the collective DNA. As a result, the Russians are better prepared to accept the message of what we in England call ‘jam tomorrow’, a promise of a bright future offsetting a guarantee of penury at present.

In his Animal Farm, George Orwell wrote a poem lampooning that mass psychosis in the Soviet Union.

It starts with this verse: “Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland,/ Beasts of every land and clime,/ Hearken to my joyful tidings/ Of the golden future time.” And, in the penultimate verse, “For that day we all must labour,/ Though we die before it break;/ Cows and horses, geese and turkeys,/ All must toil for freedom’s sake.”

Orwell would have a field day looking at Trump’s assault on the global – and specifically American – economy. In essence, Trump is making the same jam-tomorrow promise to Americans: you’ll have to suffer in the short term for basking in untold riches tomorrow.

The exact timing of that tomorrow is rather hazy: some time in the future. Well, if you insist, ten years or so. Maybe less, maybe more. This is underpinned by the claim that brings back the fond memories of my Soviet youth.

As a child, I was told that the Soviet Union stands alone against her enemies that include every non-communist country in the world and also at times some communist ones, such as Yugoslavia, Albania and above all China. The worst of them are the US, Britain and other ‘capitalist countries’ that all try to exploit Russia, possibly even occupy and colonise her.

As an old man, I’m hearing similar noises, mutatis mutandis, from the US President. Possible occupation and colonisation haven’t yet been mentioned, but exploitation is the buzz word.

The world is out to “rip off” and “screw” America, as evinced by all those “pathetic freeloaders” having a positive trade balance with the good old US of A. Actually, the Donald forgets to mention that such disparity exists only in goods – the US trade balance in services is hugely positive.

In any case, I’ve often argued, along with Messrs Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and every other conservative economist on record, that a negative trade balance is a sign of a healthy economy. It means that the country can exchange a small amount of exports for a large amount of imports – something akin to a butcher exchanging £10 worth of his meat for £15 worth of a greengrocer’s vegetables. Thus, there exists an equal if not better justification for saying that America is ripping off the rest of the world.

Then Trump came up with a bogus formula derived from trade deficits that supposedly shows that all other countries levy extortionist tariffs on US goods. Now, even if true, the same economists I’ve mentioned agree that, above all, tariffs are a tax that hurts the country’s own consumers. That’s why they advocated no retaliation leading to a trade war.

Trump hasn’t read those economists. Neither, by the looks of it, have his foreign colleagues who, with the exception of Britain, have all hit back with retaliatory tariffs. A full-blown trade war has broken out, and it has already claimed huge casualties.

Economic growth is grinding to a halt, inflation is about to climb high, world markets (including US ones) are in meltdown. The Dow has lost over 2,000 points, the FTSE 280, markets in Asia have registered similarly catastrophic drops. Altogether, in just two days some nine trillion dollars were wiped off the world economy (five trillion of it in the US), and personally I can’t even count that high.

Those losses were registered even before China responded with tit-for-tat tariffs on US goods. What we looking at is the worst crash in history, rivalling the market collapse of 1929. It’s useful to remember that at that time only about two percent of all Americans owned any shares, and foreign trade accounted for only two per cent of a largely autarkic US economy.

Still, when the Hoover administration introduced its Smoot-Hawley tariffs, that became the last straw that tipped the country from a stock market crash into the Great Depression. I don’t want to make apocalyptic predictions, but today some 62 per cent of all Americans are invested in the securities market, and 27 per cent of US GDP comes from international trade.

I rather doubt America will have another Great Depression, but every economist worth his salt is predicting that the world, including the US, will slip into a prolonged recession spiral. Americans (and the rest of us) will be paying more for computers, I-Phones, clothes, food – well, for just about everything.

It’s predicted that the average household income in the US will go $3,800 down. That’s hardly a famine of Holodomor proportions, but then, as I suggested from the start, Americans aren’t Russians.

Part of the reason for the American trade deficit in goods is the rapacious spending of US consumers, an activity they seem to regard as their God-given right. One doesn’t need a crystal ball or any other fortune-telling appliances to predict a backlash.

One intimation of that has already come in Wisconsin, a solidly pro-Trump state, where the Republican Supreme Court candidate lavishly financed by Musk lost the election. What do you know, $20-odd million can’t even buy a lousy State Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin, and Trump is just getting started.

It’s a distinct possibility that newly impoverished voters (impoverished by American standards, that is) will before long take away Trump’s majority in both Houses, turning him into a lame-duck president – or else, perish the thought, a dictator.

One way or another, the consequences of Trump’s ill-conceived actions are unpredictable and therefore exceedingly dangerous. People who call him a conservative should look up that word in a dictionary.

In my article The Court is Mightier than Le Pen three days ago, I commented on the news-worthy verdict in France. Among other things, I wrote that: “I’m sure Donald Trump will have something to say about this case too: after all, he sees himself (with somewhat greater justification) as a victim of a legal witch-hunt too.”

The Donald didn’t disappoint. Yesterday he wrote, with his usual illiterate flair: “In The Witch Hunt against Marine Le Pen is another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech, and censor their Political Opponent, this time going so far as to put that Opponent in prison.”

Trump ended by issuing a peremptory demand: FREE MARINE LE PEN! Such deliverance seems unnecessary, considering that she isn’t in prison and nor is she ever likely to receive a custodial sentence harsher than house arrest. But hey, it’s the feeling that counts.

Talking to reporters later, Trump reminded them that he had a personal dog in that fight: “That’s a big deal. That’s a very big deal… That sounds like this country. That sounds very much like this country.”

Two parenthetic remarks are in order on the form of Trump’s self-expression. I wonder if his tendency to capitalise all nouns is a tribute he pays to his German father. Considering the way Trump uses English, I doubt he can speak any foreign language, but I suppose obsessively illiterate capitalisation is the least he can do for his verstorbener Vater.

The other observation is more serious, and I must run it by my two psychiatrist friends. Trump has a worrying tendency to repeat the same words or phrases several times within a few seconds. Called ‘perseveration’ in psychiatry, this is usually caused by a brain injury or some other organic disorder.

Trump perseverates all the time: for example, he told Zelensky several times in rapid succession: “You aren’t holding any cards.” Not being professionally qualified, I don’t wish to indulge in homespun diagnostics. I just hope the US isn’t cursed with two consecutive presidents who aren’t quite compos mentis.

Trump’s kindred souls echoed his sentiment. JD Vance identified Le Pen’s offence as “very minor” and opined that barring her from holding elective office was “not democracy”. Vlad Putin agreed, mentioning the “violation of democratic norms” that are so dear to his heart.

But the most telling statement came from Georgia Meloni, Italian prime minister. I’d suggest that her surname is a perfect aptronym, but won’t, for fear of being branded a male chauvinist or, perish the thought, gender stereotyper.

Unlike more perfidious politicians, Miss Meloni didn’t even try to couch her thoughts in rhetorical subterfuge.

Speaking from the heart, she too expressed concerns about France’s democratic deficit: “I don’t know the merits of the accusations against Marine Le Pen, or the reasons for such a strong decision. But I think that no one who cares about democracy can rejoice at a sentence that targets the leader of a major party and deprives millions of citizens of representation.”

Like all ‘populist’ politicians, Miss Meloni doesn’t always take the trouble to think before talking. If she did, she’d realise how cosmically awful her statement is.

Allow me to paraphrase. Miss Meloni neither knows nor cares whether Le Pen is guilty or innocent. All that matters to her is that a fellow ‘populist’ has been suspended from politics, which is a blow to democracy whatever “the merits of the accusations”.

What if such a politician were guilty of murder, Georgia? Still a blow to democracy? The underlying assumption is that, simply because he is a ‘populist’, no ‘populist’ can possibly be guilty of any crime. And even if he is guilty, he still should be issued a blanket pardon covering all misdeeds past or future. Have I got it right, Georgia? Donald? Vlad? JD?

The amazing thing about this brouhaha is that none of Le Pen’s defenders, and not even Marine herself, has said she is innocent. No one seems to care about such incidentals, and yet they are the only thing that ought to matter in a country ruled by law.

And the rule of law is one of the few remaining vestiges of our civilisation, one of the very few things that still keep us from descending into out-and-out barbarism. Apparently, some of the West’s political leaders have made that descent already, and they luxuriate in the putrid swamp at the bottom.

A voice of sanity came from the French journalist Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, who occasionally graces our conservative papers with her perceptive comments on the French scene.

Marine Le Pen shouldn’t bother to appeal her conviction, writes Mlle Moutet: “Nobody has any doubt that if she tries to appeal the ban, she will be found guilty again. Le Pen has no chance at appeal. She’s guilty as hell and all her people are guilty as hell… It was an obvious fraud.”

There you have it in a nutshell. Marine Le Pen isn’t a martyr for democracy but a fraudster. The Gaullists Chirac, Sarkozy, both former presidents, and Fillon, former PM, also had their collars felt, and Mélenchon, the Trotskyist leader, is currently under investigation for similar offences. Dura lex, sed lex, as the Romans used to say.

French prosecutors deny that the decision to prosecute Marine Le Pen had a political component. That too ignores the salient legal point, one way or the other.

A man found guilty of murder can’t get off by pointing out that someone else got away with the same crime. Murder is murder, and fraud is fraud. If those prosecutors went after Le Pen for political reasons, they are reprehensible. But that doesn’t make the crime of which she has been convicted any less criminal.

All her champions ought to remind themselves of the rule of law and the vital role it plays in Western polity. It’s not all about ‘populist’ sloganeering.

Speaking of which, has anyone noticed that the slogan Make America Great Again screams insecurity and defensiveness? The word ‘again’ implies that America isn’t great any longer, and I emphatically disagree. She is Great, but I Doubt She’ll Remain Great for Much Longer with that Lot in Charge.  

If I were Peter Hitchens, I’d give myself a contortionist pat on the back and say “I told you so”.

If you believe Hitchens, there isn’t a single development in domestic and foreign politics that he didn’t prophesy years in advance. And when Hitchens does get one guess right, as statistical probability suggests he will sooner or later, he never tires of telling all and sundry of that feat.

Endowed with few of his prophetic powers but more in the way of taste, I shan’t brag about predicting months ago that Musk wouldn’t last long in DC, although I did. Part of my self-restraint is caused by the fact that only lazy analysts failed to make the same prediction.

Now it has been semi-announced by semi-official sources that Elon Musk will be leaving his position as head of DOGE, we all feel vindicated. However – and I’m being self-critical here – making such obvious predictions was hardly sporting.

When the lunatics run the asylum, sooner or later they’ll turn on each other, such is the ineluctable logic of madness. Not being a professional psychiatrist, I can’t diagnose Trump’s condition, although his madcap ideas and erratic behaviour suggest there is one. But Musk is undeniably bonkers.

For a man who self-admittedly suffers from the Asperger syndrome, he certainly has a broad range of interests. Thus Musk has seen few conspiracy theories he couldn’t love, Covid in particular having caught his fancy in recent time.

To counter multiplying conspiracies, he advocates giving the Ukraine to Russia and Taiwan to China. That longing seems to be consonant with Trump’s, but other than that one detects a clear divergence in their principles, inasmuch as they have them.

For example, while Trump laudably wages war on net zero idiocy, Musk sees global warming as the greatest threat to humanity, with AI and declining birth rates running in hot pursuit. Hence he advocates a universal carbon tax, obviously feeling that hoi polloi are grossly undertaxed at present. (Not to worry, Elon, ‘Liberation Day’ will take care of that iniquity.)

I’m not sure what he intends to do about AI, but his proposed solution to the ongoing depopulation of “our planet” strikes me as somewhat illogical. To Musk’s credit, he does his level best to alleviate the problem by spawning as many illegitimate children as he can. Then again, seeing that the world’s population has increased by two billion in the past 20 years, one has to question how bad the depopulation problem really is.

But then what Musk proposes is to turn our civilisation into an interplanetary one by taking millions of people and putting them on Mars, which, as Musk correctly observes, “has zero human population”. One reason for this is that it may not be fit for human habitation, but in any case Musk’s proposal of removing large numbers of people to Mars and other planets would reduce the world’s population, not increase it.

Marching in step with the present administration, Musk describes his political convictions as libertarian. If so, this is a rather recent development, considering that in the two elections before last, Musk voted for Clinton and Biden, who are to libertarianism what Fido is to a lamppost. In between, he endorsed the rapper Kanye West for president, presumably with the ticket also including Eminem as VP candidate.

Also, I wonder how Musk reconciles his newly found libertarianism with his belief not only in the universal carbon tax, but also in universal basic income. Say what you will about such policies but they are about as libertarian as China at the time of the Cultural Revolution. George Orwell, call your office: rampant statism is libertarianism.

Musk’s brief at DOGE was to cut some fat off the federal budget, and he brought to bear on that commendable task the single-track mind of an Asperger sufferer. In the process, he couldn’t quite tell the difference between trimming off fat and cutting through vital organs.

For example, his attempt to fire many air-traffic controllers at a time when that service already had severe personnel shortages was rightly described as sheer lunacy even in the pro-Trump press. Thankfully, Musk’s hand was stayed before airliners began to fall out of the sky like overripe apples off a tree.

In hinting at Musk’s impending departure, Trump said that his job had been done. Of course, it had been. Elon waved his magic wand, and the two-trillion budget deficit melted away, along with the $37 trillion public debt. All in a couple of months’ work, and trust the Tesla maker to have such demiurge powers.

The fact is that during his short time in DC, Musk managed to get up a multitude of noses, including some belonging to Trump’s closest confidants and, as the rumour has it, Trump himself. The Beltway (Washington’s ring road) is only 64 miles long, and the circle it describes isn’t large enough to accommodate two such oversized and half-mad egos.

Yet it’s not all about personality clashes. The first time I wrote about Musk, I pointed out that there is method in his madness. The method can be graphically represented with a capital S having two vertical lines running through it.

Musk’s most passionate beliefs can be traced back to his business interests, and not to any set of political convictions. Thus, his scaremongering about global warming is natural for a major maker of electric cars, a product category that has been brought into existence by falsifying climatological evidence.

China is the major supplier of batteries and other parts for Teslas, hence Musk’s belief that Taiwan should belong to the mainland communists. Hence also, I suspect but can’t prove, must be his disagreement with high tariffs on Chinese products.

And Musk’s Space X company manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft, which adds a nice commercial touch to Musk’s interplanetary lunacy. The chap always has his eye on the main chance, and that has nothing to do with making America great again.

However, over the past few months Musk has been so busy firing air-traffic controllers and, in all fairness, quite a few other state employees who ought to have been fired, that he has let his main interests slip.

For example, Tesla has lost roughly half its value, although I can’t help thinking that its peak value had little to do with reality. Tesla was then worth more than the entire German car industry, but don’t get me going on inflated share values.

The time has long since passed when the market value of a company had anything to do with its commercial performance. Tesla is an example of gross over-evaluation, but also quite a few cases have been reported of companies whose shares were valued even less than their cash reserves.

Be that as it may, such a huge drop diverted Elon’s attention from public to private interests. His pathway to his first trillion has become thornier, and something had to be done. A good job then that during his short DOGE tenure Musk was able to solve the problem that had plagued the US government for over a century.

Now he goes back to what he does best, piling up billions for number one, and never mind disinterested public service. A useful reminder, this, that those who think that a successful business career prepares one for statesmanship are sorely mistaken. But let’s not talk about Trump.

“Remember that you will die,” that’s how the Roman Stoics rendered the recurrent theme of philosophy.

Before the Romans that idea had been articulated by the Greeks, from Democritus to Plato. The latter even insisted that proper philosophy was “about nothing else but dying and being dead”. A couple of millennia later Martin Heidegger added that “the resolute confrontation of death is essential to authentic living”.

In between, every religion worthy of the name contemplated death from every conceivable angle, reaching different conclusions but never failing to assign due importance to the end of physical life.

Roughly at the same time Heidegger spelled out his criterion for authentic living, Mikhail Bulgakov wrote his iconic novel The Master and Margarita about Satan appearing incognito in pre-war Moscow. In the opening scene, the Devil, named Woland in the novel, engages a Soviet editor in a dialogue on that very subject.

His point is that man can’t possibly run his own life because he doesn’t even know what will happen to him in the next few minutes. The editor acknowledges that man is mortal, but Woland cuts him short:

“Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he is sometimes instantly mortal – there’s the trick!”

These scattered snippets of thought and memory came to my mind yesterday, at the very beginning of a doubles match at my tennis club. When our opponents prepared to serve the opening game, my partner collapsed.

My first reaction was that he had slipped, but then he began to convulse and utter hissing sounds. We all rushed to him, but by the time we got there, he wasn’t breathing.

Mercifully, there were two doctors playing on an adjacent court, such is the advantage of living in a decent neighbourhood. A few years ago, I too found out that a high number of restaurants and a low crime rate aren’t the only benefits of such areas.

Penelope and I were walking through local streets when I collapsed and was out cold. I shan’t bother you with the medical reasons for such fallibility, but the point is that there were two doctors among the passers-by. They kept me alive until the ambulance arrived, and the paramedics took me to hospital – but not before wastefully cutting my favourite coat in half.

My tennis partner was similarly lucky. The two doctors pumped his chest and did mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Also, all tennis clubs in Britain are equipped with defibrillators, and the coaches are trained in using them. Ours started to apply electric shocks to my fallen partner, and he began to breathe, after a fashion.

The play stopped on all ten courts, and everyone was shaken. As is my wont, I tried to relieve pressure, mostly my own, with a silly joke: “I suppose we’d better play a let”. Another chap laughed in a somewhat strained fashion and asked if I remembered what the score was. No one else as much as cracked a smile.

The ambulance came, the paramedics diagnosed a heart attack and took the poor chap away. After some time, play resumed on most courts, but no one felt like hitting fuzzy yellow balls very much. I suppose our confronting death wasn’t as resolute as Heidegger prescribed.

Actually, as I write this, I still don’t know whether my tennis partner has survived. I hope so, but any brush with death, one’s own or someone else’s, fills one’s head with all sorts of macabre thoughts that are hard to chase away.

Every Sunday I recite the Creed that ends with the words “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come” (or rather, if you wish to be technical, Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi saeculi). This is a core belief of Christianity: just as there is death in life, there is also life in death.

Yet faith in immortality is one thing and subcutaneous dread of death is another. In some lucky people, the core belief absorbs the visceral feeling and they become one and the same. Such people have no fear of death, and I’ve read about many such saintly individuals. But I’m not sure I’ve ever met one.

They say that, when two people part at a railway station, the one who gets on the train bears only a fourth of the parting grief. The one left behind suffers the remaining three-fourths.

This rings true in reference to the more permanent departure as well: because it’s possible to love another person more than oneself, the death of such a person is a greater tragedy than one’s own. Still, both of you are going to die at some point and the only unknown is the order of your going.

Also the manner of it, one must add. It’s possible to keel over and go out like a light like my tennis partner (who I hope will live to tell the tale), or else to succumb to a long, sometimes painful, illness, dying a little every day.

A few years ago, a good friend of mine, Ken Minogue, the token conservative professor at the LSE, died on a plane flying home from a conference in Latin America. He was talking to someone and stopped, for ever, in mid-sentence.

Most people who heard the story said they envied him: one moment you’re alive, the next you’re dead, but you don’t even know about it. In a way, one can say that any death is like that: you may know you’re dying, but you’re still alive until that last heartbeat – and then you don’t know you no longer are. In that sense, death doesn’t exist, not in our consciousness anyway.

Yet that, to me, sounds like treating death without the respect it deserves. Plato would certainly disapprove: if death is the essence of all philosophy, then surely one must prepare for it with appropriately solemn and thoughtful contemplation.

Christian rituals acknowledge the same necessity, mutatis mutandis. Preparing for death is serious business, requiring reflection, confession, absolution and whatever else brings spiritual comfort and sets one up for the encounter with one’s Maker.

Whether you think such a slow passage is worth the concomitant physical suffering is a matter of taste. I suppose most people would rather go Ken’s way, but then not everyone is most people.

Sorry about inflicting such gloomy thoughts on you, but I suppose yesterday I was shaken more than I let on. Tennis matches are sometimes a matter of life or death, but only figuratively so. One doesn’t expect crude literal reality to barge in.

One way or another, I doubt the poor chap will be up to playing in the foreseeable future. I suppose I need another doubles partner, such is the conclusion of this melancholy story.

Nationalist demagogues of every hue are screaming bloody murder, or rather judiciary activism. Everyone is talking about the political implications of the verdict banning Marine Le Pen from French politics for five years, the assumption being that the law had nothing to do with it.

Yet from what I can surmise, the legal argument for her conviction was solid. Miss Le Pen was found guilty of embezzling millions in EU funds, and serious jurists in France don’t think she has good grounds for appeal.

Messrs Trump, Orban and Wilders may regard the judgement as yet another example of the pernicious deep state at work, but then they would, wouldn’t they? This ignores the fact that France has form in convicting politicians of corruption, including more illustrious establishment figures than Miss Le Pen.

Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, both former presidents, also found themselves on the receiving end of guilty verdicts, and no one saw them as courageous anti-establishment figures. If the deep state existed, they’d be among those running it.

Without delving into the legal niceties, the strongest, if indirect, argument in favour of the verdict came from Moscow. According to the Kremlin it was a “violation of democratic norms”, and fair enough: Putin and Le Pen interpret said norms in a similar vein, the former blatantly, the latter surreptitiously.

The Russians have been known to bankroll Le Pen’s campaigns, and accepting such funding should have been treated as sufficient corpus delicti by itself. After all, Putin wasn’t indulging his charitable impulses by financing Le Pen’s National Rally. He evidently saw the subversive potential of NR’s fascisoid demagoguery, and for once I agree with his judgement.

The papers are writing about Miss Le Pen’s efforts to detoxify the party founded by her father, Jean-Marie. A great admirer of Marshal Pétain, old Jean-Marie insisted that, regrettably, the Holocaust had never happened but it still might if he was elected president. And that was the softer end of his rhetoric.

A party weaned on such venom can’t really be detoxified; it can only be dressed up for PR purposes. That’s what Marine has done, successfully pretending that the leopard has changed its fascisoid spots. This beast may indeed have undergone a cosmetic makeover, but its DNA still betrays a predator red in tooth and claw.

As a linguist, I often tend to ascribe political confusion to misused language. Thus politicians I usually call nationalist or fascisoid demagogues are often described as right-wing populists.

Now, under universal franchise, all politicians are populists by etymological definition. If they have no popular appeal, they won’t be in politics, it’s as simple as that. Hence, to merit the sobriquet of ‘populist’, a politician has to be all about such appeal, and never mind anything else.

Such a politician will identify the broadest swath of voters and tell them whatever they want to hear. Any relationship to reality will be purely coincidental.

Perhaps, ‘tell’ is a misnomer – such politicians tend to scream at the top of their voices. Since it’s impossible to strain one’s vocal chords for too long without getting hoarse, they tend to reduce their messages to sloganeering soundbites. Because the slogans are aimed at the broadest and therefore the stupidest strata of the population, they have to be punchy in form and primitive in content.

Marine Le Pen is good at that sort of thing, but this ability doesn’t appear high on my list of political virtues. As to the ‘right-wing’ part of it, this is laughable. If you look at her economic agenda, you won’t discern many differences from the ideas flogged by the Trotskyist Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Le Pen is both a nationalist and a socialist. Put those two words together, and you’ll know why she isn’t my favourite political flavour.

That, of course, doesn’t mean that she should fall innocent victim to politically biased lawfare. But beyond all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in certain like-minded quarters, one doesn’t hear any legal arguments against the conviction. For the ‘populist’ crowd, one of their own kind is innocent even after being found guilty.

This sort of malaise is reaching pandemic proportions. It seems as if the nationalist demagogues of the world have taken a leaf out of the communists’ book and formed a sort of International of their own.

Thus Elon Musk and a few other MAGA chaps have whipped up a campaign in defence of our own dear Tommy Robinson, whom they depict as a courageous fighter for free speech. Now, not to mince words, Tommy is scum. But to that lot he is their scum.

Robinson has a list of crimes as long as my arm, or rather longer because my arms are quite short. His previous (what Americans call ‘sheet’) includes convictions for physical assault, financial and immigration frauds, cocaine possession with intent to supply, public order offences, and I’m sure I’ve left a few out. Tommy started out as a football hooligan and then graduated to political hooliganism.

He is currently serving a prison term for violating a court order to shut up on the subject of some young Muslim Tommy falsely accused of being a violent thug. As far as Elon Musk is concerned, that makes him a martyred freedom fighter.

Marine Le Pen will also doubtless be hailed as a martyr – this regardless of the legal merits of her case. The noble cause of nationalist demagoguery can never be championed by convicted criminals, only by martyrs.

I’m sure Donald Trump will have something to say about this case too: after all, he sees himself (with somewhat greater justification) as a victim of a legal witch-hunt too. Now, one would think that, an aptitude for nationalist demagoguery apart, Le Pen and Trump have nothing in common.

Say what you will about the Donald, but a socialist he ain’t, as he’d put it. Neither is Geert Wilders, who responded to the verdict by declaring that Marine is “100 per cent innocent”, and never mind the circumstances of the case. Yet all such politicians seem to feel a kinship that runs deeper than any political differences.

And that kinship is more seminal to them than anything else, including the rule of law and such trivia as telling the truth or behaving in a civilised manner. That’s tribalism at its most harebrained and hence dangerous – this kind of mentality has more to do with Mafia gang wars than with Western politics.

My fear is that these ‘populists’ will queer the pitch for better people who oppose some of the same things. Marine Le Pen’s principal appeal is to those Frenchmen who are appalled at the sight of their country being turned into a kasbah by immigration, legal or otherwise.

This is a legitimate fear, but stoking it up by demagogic means isn’t. This issue must be seen in a broader context, and the case against it should be made by conservatives, not loudmouthed ‘populists’. Rallying the populace mainly behind this issue may become successful politically, but it will be disastrous civilisationally.

The upshot is that Marine Le Pen broke the law and has been justly punished. By all means, if the verdict is overturned on appeal, we should all celebrate the blow struck for the rule of law.

But spare me the talk of her political martyrdom: I wouldn’t want to live in a France run by the likes of her.

Will the Ukraine be raped by Putin or robbed by Trump? Both, say the two predators as they prepare to gnaw on the carcass of a proud and heroic nation.

The Ukraine finds herself caught between the rock of America and the hard place of Russia, with the two powers eyeing her freedom, sovereignty and what’s left of her wealth. Make no mistake about it: Trump and Putin aren’t just friends but also allies, an axis about to be driven through the heart of the Ukraine.

First, I don’t know if Trump is deceiving himself when talking about a peace ‘deal’, but he is certainly deceiving everyone else. There is no peace deal, and there won’t be because Putin doesn’t want it.

Trump’s alter ego said as much yesterday, when talking to the crew of the Archangelsk submarine.

“Russia doesn’t understand what and with whom she should sign anything in the Ukraine,” said Putin. “There will be new leaders there tomorrow. Civil powers in the Ukraine aren’t legitimate – if Zelensky is illegitimate, then so is everyone else.”

Both Trump and Witkoff seem to agree. And an illegitimate government isn’t authorised to conduct any negotiations or sign any treaties, that much is clear. Full stop.

“To be discussed is the creation of a provisional government in the Ukraine under the UN aegis,” continued Putin, “with subsequent elections.”

In other words, no treaty is possible until a Putin puppet, such as Yanukovych or Medvedchuk, has been ensconced in Kiev. The Ukraine’s sovereignty is incompatible with peace, as far as Putin is concerned.

“Russia has a strategic initiative along the entire front,” added Putin. “There’s every reason to believe that the Russian army will finish the Ukrainians off.”

Therefore, any talk of a ceasefire is pointless. After all, since Russia is at the threshold of victory, it would be foolhardy of her to stop firing.

“Russia isn’t going to make mistakes based on trusting her so-called Western partners,” – now that seems to be a slap in the face of the great deal artist.

Trump has made a big show of talking to the Ukraine and Russia, with the aim of forming a partnership for peace. Now Putin has told him and other Western leaders exactly what they can do with such partnerships.

While Putin is planning to rape the Ukraine, turning her into Russia’s political colony, Trump wants to rob her, turning the Ukraine into America’s economic satrapy. The beauty of this double whammy is that the two jaws of the same vice are acting in perfect harmony.

In a leaked document, Trump makes extortionist demands on the Ukraine, offering nothing in return. No defence clauses, no security guarantees, no peacekeeping presence – nothing at all. The last time such a diplomatic coup was successfully achieved was in 1938, when Hitler dictated his terms to Czechoslovakia.

Trump is demanding huge reparation payments, even though no agreement exists stipulating the Ukraine’s indebtedness. He is also laying claim not just to the Ukraine’s rare-earth metals, but all other metals as well, along with the country’s hydrocarbon resources and much of her infrastructure.

This is much worse than the previous demands, panned by all European countries as neo-colonialist extortion. But, as the French say, appetite comes with eating.

The new draft provides for the setting up of the United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund that will control the Ukraine’s “critical minerals or other minerals, oil, natural gas (including liquified natural gas), fuels or other hydrocarbons and other extractable materials”. Since ‘liquefied’ is misspelled, I suspect Trump wrote this ransom demand himself.

Registered in Delaware, the Fund will be under American control. The US will have first refusal rights on all projects and also veto power on any trade between the Ukraine and other countries. Among other things, this will make it impossible for the Ukraine to join the EU or any other alliance with European countries.

The US will contribute no investment capital to the Fund – that, as far as Trump is concerned, has been taken care of by American military aid. No agreement on such reciprocity was signed, but the Donald isn’t going to be held back by such incidentals.

Moving right along, the draft says the US will control infrastructure linked to natural resources “including, but not limited to, roads, rail, pipelines and other transportation assets; ports, terminals and other logistics facilities and refineries, processing facilities, natural gas liquefaction and/or regasification facilities and similar assets”.

Will Zelensky be allowed to keep his wife, or will she have to become Trump’s concubine? That’s the only asset so far left out of that demand for expropriation.

At the same time, Trump’s administration is seeking a comprehensive energy partnership with Putin’s Russia, with Siberian gas again flooding Europe and turning it into an energy dependency. To that end, talks have been going on in Switzerland for weeks to reopen the Nord Stream 2 pipelines, sabotaged at the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, confirmed that this deal is in the making: “There is talk about Nord Stream. It would be interesting if the Americans put pressure on Europe, to make them stop refusing our Russian gas.”

You can bet on that, Sergei. Part of Trump’s deal artistry is putting pressure on America’s friends while kowtowing to her enemies.

Nor is it just gas. Trump has agreed to help Russia restore its “access to the world market for agricultural and fertiliser exports, lower maritime insurance costs, and enhance access to ports and payment systems for such transactions.” That’s the least he can do to reward Putin for graciously agreeing to stop hostilities in the Black Sea, the only part of the war Russia was losing.

Meanwhile military experts insist that Russia won’t be able to wage war past this year. She is running out of all requisite resources, especially money. A massive inflow of war materiel to the Ukraine could roll back Russian advances, putting the Ukraine in a much stronger negotiating position.

But that outcome clearly isn’t on, not with the two vultures dead set on tearing up the Ukraine’s independence, carving up her territory, and creating a partnership against vital European interests.

This arrangement is every bit as revolting as the 1939 Pact between Hitler and Stalin. That one came to grief eventually, but not before millions of lives had been lost. I wouldn’t like to make a prediction for the love affair between Trump and Putin, but if I did, there wouldn’t be a single optimistic note there.

Meanwhile, I suggest that the Ukraine replace her national anthem, The Ukraine Hasn’t Perished Yet, with the 1977 song Torn Between Two Lovers. It seems to be more appropriate.