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As I write this, Chairman Xi must be asking himself “And what am I, chop suey?” If Trump can launch in his own backyard an attack on a regime he dislikes, why can’t Xi do the same to Taiwan?

After all, though the Chavez-Maduro regime has dubious legitimacy, Trump and just about everyone else accepts that Venezuela is a sovereign country. China, on the other hand, offers no such recognition to Taiwan, which she regards as a rogue split-away province of the mainland.

And Xi hates Taiwan viscerally, at least as much as Trump hates Maduro and his gang. Moreover, Taiwan is only 250 miles from mainland China, whereas Venezuela is 2,800 miles from the US. If Venezuela is in the US sphere of influence, then Taiwan really must be ripe for plucking.

I can’t claim to be a reliable mind reader, but it’s unimaginable that such thoughts wouldn’t cross Xi’s mind. And Putin may be following the same train of thought.

Unlike the US and Venezuela, Russia and the Ukraine used to be the same country. The post-Maidan Ukraine is every bit as repulsive to Putin as Madura’s Venezuela is to Trump. So what, are we going to say quod licet Doni, non licet Vladi? Not on your nelly, Donald, Putin must be thinking. You’re no more Jupiter than I’m a bull. If Venezuela is your sphere of influence, then the Ukraine is mine, ten times over.

This is a caricature, but all caricatures are based on reality. The brilliant and daring raid of US commandos is worthy of admiration, and Maduro certainly deserves all he gets. But, as Newton taught, every action has a reaction. So will this one, but I can’t second-guess what it’ll be. More to the point, neither can anyone. Even more to the point, neither can Trump.

One could argue persuasively that Venezuela, that beachhead established in the Western Hemisphere by the evil axis of China, Russia, Iran and Cuba, presented a threat to US strategic interests.

Therefore, Trump must be praised for acting more decisively and successfully than JFK did in 1961. Then the US armed, trained and landed a Cuban exile force sent out to unseat the Castro regime. But then Kennedy got cold feet, didn’t deliver the promised air support and abandoned the landing party to its gruesome fate.

Trump, on the other hand, decided to dirty his hands on Venezuela, having first washed them of the Ukraine. Could this link be not only temporal but also causative?

The strategy document issued the other week spells out a non-interventionist, US-centred, practically isolationist policy. Trump evidently doesn’t regard bombing Caracas and kidnapping Maduro as a deviation from that policy – it’s more or less America’s domestic housekeeping.

Given Trump’s transparent contempt for all those jumped-up little countries pretending they can play in the global arena, it’s possible that there was some international deal struck that we know nothing about. The big boys, the US, China and Russia, may have agreed to give one another a free hand in their own bailiwicks: Eastern Europe for Russia, Taiwan and most of Southeast Asia for China, North and South America for the US.

Such a geopolitical deal could have been followed by a series of commercial ones, allowing US oil companies to claim back their assets Venezuela nationalised 50 years ago. In exchange, Russia and China would be allowed to ‘nationalise’, respectively, the Ukraine’s natural resources and Taiwan’s electronic industry. It goes without saying that the Trump family would get a slice of the action in all three cases.

This is, of course, conjecture, but it’s not groundless conjecture. Such an arrangement would be consistent with Trump’s statements and, more important, his actions over the past year.

Meanwhile, he has announced that the US would “run” Venezuela for a while, possibly quite a long while. This, though for the time being Trump has ruled out any further use of US military force.

How is he proposing to run Venezuela without GI boots on the ground? Judging by the rather understated resistance by the Venezuelan army, the great deal maker might have found some accommodation with the Maduro government, without Maduro.

But Quisling governments may create popular resistance, especially since the people of Venezuela detest Maduro and all his accomplices. And popular resistance may mean that Trump will have to use American troops, if only to secure the oilfields.

That would give further encouragement to China and Russia. If Trump can ‘run’ Venezuela by, for example, appointing Rubio as the country’s governor general, then why can’t Putin do the same with the Ukraine, only using, say, Lavrov in place of Rubio?

Many commentators reject appeals to international law, which they regard as a fiction. So it may be, to an extent. And anyway, neither European countries nor the US recognised the Maduro government as legitimate. Hence the only countries that insist on invoking international law are those belonging to what George Dubya Bush used to call the axis of evil.

Still, whatever we may think of international law, a series of multilateral treaties did create a quasi-legal framework for a global post-war order. Its principal precept is that countries shouldn’t attack one another, nor grab pieces of one another’s territory.

Say what you will about this arrangement, but at least it managed to preserve relative peace in Europe for almost 80 years. Russia has always placed herself outside that framework in word, but it more or less played along for decades, her occasional punitive expeditions to Eastern Europe notwithstanding.

Now not only Russia and China but also the US are governed by people who see no value in the post-war world order. The first two traditionally, and the US currently, see international relations in terms of undiluted exercise of naked power. It’s Kissinger’s realpolitik, but with a sinister and even more cynical dimension.

If my hunch is correct, and Trump has decided to reshape America as a regional, not global, superpower, and his foray into Venezuela is an extension of this new vision, then what we saw the other day was a show of weakness, not strength.

The US seems to be signalling her intention to divvy up the world – and its riches – among herself, China and Russia. Taking control of Venezuelan oil may be a way of strengthening America’s position in the hope of securing parity with China and superiority over Russia.

Much of this is guesswork – we don’t really know what goes on, nor what Trump’s plans are, nor whether he does have any plans worthy of the name. But do let’s remind ourselves of the time element: Trump only has three more years in the White House.

Moreover, when it comes to invading and ‘running’ other countries, the US is a sprinter, not a stayer. In Iraq, Libya and Syria, the Americans moved in at full pelt, got rid of some unsavoury rulers, tried to introduce American-style reforms to tribal societies, failed – and went home, leaving behind a blood-soaked chaos and swarms of desperate people fleeing to sunnier climes, mostly in Europe.

The US already has some 800,000 Venezuelans living there – would they like to have another million? Or does Trump intend to send the original 800,000 back to their Maduro-free homeland?

The Donald is hard to second-guess, even harder to understand. He doesn’t seem to have any discernible philosophy of life other than enriching himself and his family. That makes him unpredictable, which at times could be a strength, but more often a weakness.

Let’s wait and see, shall we? And as we do so, let’s place bets on which Latin American country will be next. Cuba? Colombia? I’m talking specifically about Latin America because I’m sure the Donald wants to leave Canada until last. And Greenland is only just in the Western Hemisphere, which is probably why James Monroe didn’t include it in his doctrine.

The time has come to rebrand it as the Trump-Monroe Doctrine, don’t you think? Yes, this does have a ring to it. So would Washington D.T., but those initials have unfortunte implictions.

America just isn’t the same as she was 37 years ago, when I last lived there.

Having become an outsider looking in, I don’t recognise the country I used to know well. And many of the changes can be explained with a single word: Trump.

Today’s news is all about Venezuela, whose capital was bombed yesterday, and whose president, Maduro, was captured by US special forces. ‘Captured’ was the word Trump used in his public announcement, but perhaps ‘kidnapped’ would be more accurate.

Neither I nor, by the sound of it, most Venezuelans will shed too many tears. In just a few years, that self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist, Maduro, did what Marxists-Leninists can be confidently predicted to do in any country they govern: beggar it.

Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, which by itself ought to be enough to keep the population in food. So it was, until first Hugo Chávez and then Nicolás Maduro got into the act. The country’s economy quickly collapsed, but there has been excellent growth in other areas: starvation, hyperinflation, disease, crime, mortality rates and emigration.

However, before we rejoice in the couldn’t-have-happened-to-a-nicer-guy capture of Maduro, one wonders on what grounds Trump feels justified to treat a sovereign country that way, no matter how awful that country is.

He likes to mention the Monroe Doctrine, but the last time I looked that document didn’t say the US could invade at will any unpleasant country in the Western hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine was a stay-away message to European powers, mainly England and France.

The hemisphere was declared to be America’s sphere of influence, and no trespassing, thank you very much. But a sphere of influence is one thing, and kidnapping presidents of other countries is quite another.

The desire to stem the flow of drugs sounds like a pretext, not the reason. If Trump managed to curb the flow of illegal immigrants across the Mexican border without bombing Mexico City and kidnapping the country’s president, surely he could have found less violent ways of dealing with Venezuelan drug smugglers.

More likely is that Trump feels that his macho image as the world’s master has taken some beating, what with his pathetic efforts to force the Ukraine’s capitulation. Even at the risk of being known as a flat-track bully, he is prepared to flex his biceps, suck in his stomach and remind the world who is running it.

Still, if he had to do something like that, one can only wish he had targeted Starmer and Sadiq Khan, not Maduro. Yanking them out of England would have been harder logistically, but somehow more satisfying.

However, this isn’t the first time that the US has invaded a Latin American country. From Nicaragua in 1912 to Granada in 1983 and Panama in 1989, the US established some form in such undertakings.

I’m only mentioning direct involvements, not various coups the US inspired, underwrote and welcomed. Hence, when I talk about America changing under Trump, I can’t credit him with pioneering such a hands-on approach to politics in the Americas.

I mean something else, specifically the country’s Puritan, Bible-thumping heritage. One good thing about that legacy was America’s heightened sensitivity to fiscal impropriety in public office.

In my day, congressmen would get prosecuted for taking a few grand to lobby some dubious project. When greater sums were involved, all hell broke loose. I especially remember the ABSCAM scandal in the late 1970s, when congressmen, senators, mayors, city councillors and other politicians were convicted for bribery and corruption.

Yet the highest sum mentioned then was $50,000. Even adjusted for inflation, this is the sort of amount Trump’s family probably uses to tip waiters and parking attendants every month.

During his first year back in the White House, Trump has doubled his net worth to $6.6 billion. His son-in-law, Jared ‘Nepo Baby’ Kushner has become a billionaire, largely thanks to his burgeoning business in the Middle East following Trump’s visit there.

I’m not suggesting that any of those dealings were illegal, but they certainly would have been regarded as immoral back in the 1980s. The words CONFLICT OF INTEREST would’ve been emblazoned in 60-point type on the front pages of tabloids.

Trump’s accepting the gift of a 757 Boeing from Qatar, a prime sponsor of terrorism, would then have been regarded as a bribe in some quarters. But I can understand why the Donald couldn’t turn the gift down. The Qataris had thoughtfully decorated the plane in the style of the late King Farouk, which struck a deep aesthetic chord in the president’s heart.

Much of Trump’s new wealth comes from the cryptocurrencies flogged by his three sons and wife Melania. One advantage of a cryptocurrency – or, depending on how you look at it, a disadvantage – is that it’s short on accountability. Large purchases could easily be veiled bribes, and the air is thick anyway with allegations of Trump’s shady dealings with some unsavoury foreign leaders.

Grassroots Americans would have been aghast at that sort of thing back when I lived among them – even if there was nothing indictable unearthed. It was assumed that a US president faced stricter moral requirements than, say, an Atlantic City property developer.

The latter only had to be concerned with the letter of the law; the former, also with the dignity of the office. Of course, the word ‘dignity’ doesn’t belong in the same sentence with ‘Trump’ any more than the word ‘taste’ does.

For example, the president regularly appears in TV commercials, peddling his Trump Watches that cost between $500 and $3,000. This surely brings the presidency into disrepute. After all, there used to be a certain grandeur associated with the office, a certain aura of sagacity and probity.

That might have had to do more with perception than with reality, but perception matters with public figures who personify the country. And what kind of perception results from a US president going on TV to shill for products he endorses, “the same deal I’d give my own mother, I’m gonna give you”?

Had Carter or Reagan done all those things, there would have been a thunderous public outcry, transcending party affiliation. Americans, descendants of those Puritan Mayflower refugees, wouldn’t have stood for seeing the aura of presidency punctured by crass commercialism.

Yet, from where I sit, and I did tell you I’m an outside observer these days, criticism of Trump’s fiscal behaviour in the US is confined to the Democrats. The Republicans seem to be closing ranks behind the president, with no cross-party ethical standards anywhere in sight.

Oh well, if someone leaves a country for 37 years, he ought to be prepared to see some changes. So I was, but I never expected that changes could run so deep.

P.S. This comment by one of my readers makes me sorry I didn’t think of it first: “I await Queen Camilla’s uniquely profound understanding of the recent terrible fire in Switzerland, based on her having once burnt her finger while lighting a fag.”

This is my wish to myself, not to you. No, I’m not planning to grow a beard, don a poncho, get high and pester strangers with offers to buy a flower.

The silly pun is based on the hip replacement surgery I’m getting in three weeks. That’ll put me on crutches for a month or two, much to the relief of my tennis partners who’ll be given a reprieve from having to carry me in doubles matches.

Looking on the bright side, I’ll never have to suffer the same misery again. I only have two hips, and the other one was done seven years ago. This is me all over, always positive, always looking for a silver lining on a dark cloud – not, as my detractors will have you believe, the other way around.

That wallowing in egotistical self-pity out of the way, I’m now going to marshal that positive spirit to wish you all a Happy New Year, with no puns anywhere in sight. May your 2026 be marked by good health, good cheer, good fortune – and good taste.

I assume that all my readers have impeccable taste, but – and I know you’ll find it hard to believe – not everyone out there reads my scribbles. Hence some people show a most lamentable deficit of that commodity.

It pains me to include in that number Queen Camilla, who seems to have set out to prove that Buck House can match the White House for armour-piercing tastelessness.

I’ll say one thing for the Donald though: at least his crudeness has no woke aspect to it. Thus, when he utters one of his endless vulgarities, most people understand them for what they are. Some are appalled, some are indifferent, some may even be appreciative. But no one thinks he’s trying to be fashionably nice.

By contrast, Camilla’s performance the other day and especially the public response to it show that large swaths of the British population have their minds anaesthetised and their taste buds cauterised by massive doses of wokery.

The Queen is active in various campaigns to curb domestic violence and sexual abuse. This is certainly a worthy cause, although I have to doubt such public-knowledge campaigning will do much good. It’s not as if woman beaters and rapists didn’t know such things are wrong. Nor are their victims likely to take such abuse in stride.

I suppose one could argue that shouting about sexual assault from the rooftops will prompt more victims to come forward and seek justice. Yet the downside is that moral – perhaps also legal – discrimination may fall by the wayside. Lasciviousness may be confounded with boorish behaviour, boorish behaviour with assault, assault with rape.

When such confusion is put into the framework of woke feminism, any woman who has ever been kissed against her will, which is to say just about any woman, may be encouraged to consider herself a victim of vicious assault.

She’d thus join a sorority of victimhood, sitting next to women who were actually raped or even killed. And, even if that unwanted kiss occurred decades ago, she’d lovingly cultivate the feeling of lasting emotional trauma that no intervening experience could ever erase.

This is just some background to, perhaps even an explanation of, Camilla’s unspeakable tastelessness the other day. She appeared on the Radio 4 Today show as part of her campaign to eradicate sexual violence.

Her guests were BBC racing commentator John Hunt and his surviving daughter. Mr Hunt’s wife and two other daughters were brutally murdered in 2024 by the former beau of one of the girls. He stabbed the mother to death, raped his former girlfriend, then killed her and her sister with a crossbow.

You may be able to fathom the depth of tragic despair suffered by the surviving members of that family – I can’t. Even the most callous of individuals would indeed be traumatised for life, with the darkest of glooms descending and no ray of light shining through. It would take real courage to carry on, and if the Hunts feel that showing their grief in public can help themselves and others, who am I to argue.

But there was our Queen, who showed real empathy with the suffering family. She too had suffered sexual assault when a young girl, she said; she too had had to live with that memory all her life.

When Camilla was 16 or 17, meaning over 60 years ago, she was reading a book on a train. A boy about her age tried to feel her up without permission, and a snuggle struggle ensued. “I did what my mother taught me to,” recounts Camilla. “I took off my shoe and whacked him in the nuts with the heel.”

That settled the issue. The train arrived at Paddington, Camilla got off and had her assailer arrested. I don’t know what happened to him in police custody but I doubt his heinous crime led to a prosecution. Sixty years ago, the cops probably just gave him a clip on the ear and sent him home with a warning not to be naughty again.

I find it hard to visualise that scene as Camilla remembers it. Clearly, that wasn’t much of an assault, if she could reach down, take off her shoe and use it as a striking weapon. Since she was sitting, for her to connect with the target she mentioned, the boy had to stand upright in front of her, his feet apart. Hence, not only was he a yob, but he wasn’t even very good at yobbery.

Then again, 60 years is a long time, and Camilla’s memory might have played some tricks. The Queen admitted as much by saying she had “sort of forgotten” the attack, which, however, had “lurked” at the back of her mind all that time. And only after seeing the courage of the Hunt family was she encouraged to speak out.

Am I the only one to see that Camilla scaled heights of woke tastelessness unimaginable even in someone of the lowliest of births, never mind a minor aristocrat who later became the Queen of the United Kingdom?

Even talking about that train incident 60 years after the event in any other than a jocular manner would be in poor taste. Seeing herself as a victim of an awful crime and speaking out about this in public is even worse. But doing so side by side with people who had suffered what the Hunts had suffered, implicitly equating her ordeal with theirs, takes us into a new territory still unnamed.

That story spoilt my New Year’s Eve, and I hope it won’t do the same to your New Year’s Day. Just it case it might, let we wish you again a very happy new year, unsullied by the woke grossness of our powers that be.

When an artillery commander told Wellington at Waterloo that he had a clear view of Napoleon and could take him out, the Iron Duke replied: “No! I shall not allow it. It is not the business of commanders to be firing upon one another.”

The story may be apocryphal, but not impossible, given the contemporaneous zeitgeist. Though the ethos of chivalry was on its way out in 1815, it hadn’t quite left yet. There were still certain things then that commanders wouldn’t countenance.

Fast-forward to 2022 and, at the very start of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, Putin sent a murder squad out to Kiev. The task was to kill Zelensky and, ideally, his whole cabinet.

Different times, different mores and all that, and the same goes for civilian casualties. For both Wellington and Napoleon, they were an unfortunate fallout of the war, not its strategic objective.

Tempora do bloody well mutantur. Never mind targeting opposing commanders – these days Putin’s stormtroopers happily hit residential areas, schools, hospitals and kindergartens. Foreign observers, specifically those in the US administration, react to such brutality with fulsome regrets followed by shrugs of understanding.

How very unfortunate, all those people dying under the rubble of their houses. But let’s face it: this is war and both sides are to blame.

Not equally though: unlike Russia, explains Trump, the Ukraine has it in her power to stop the war in an instant. All Zelensky has to do is capitulate, and the few surviving apartment blocks in his country will remain standing.

And when that jumped-up comedian refuses to bend over and take it like a man, Trump is irate. Remember that ugly scene in the Oval Office? Both Trump and his poodle Vance were incandescent. They were barking and howling at Zelensky like wolfhounds, and it was only by an exertion of will that they refrained from pouncing on him like those ferocious dogs.

Putin is spared the same treatment. When he transparently gives Trump a run-around, bouncing his peace proposals back to Washington and showing no desire for peace on any other than his terms, Trump is never angry. At most, he is ‘disappointed’.

See the difference? Enemies enrage; friends disappoint. You like them, you respect them, you expect them to do the right thing. When they don’t, you are frustrated, upset, perhaps saddened. But you aren’t irate: friends’ feelings must be spared angry outbursts.

Getting back to the Wellington episode, the other day Putin claimed, and Zelensky denied, that 91 Ukrainian drones had targeted Putin’s residence in Valdai Hills.

Since Putin is Trump’s friend, it’s him that the Donald believed – and he was furious. Though Trump probably has never studied the Battle of Waterloo and possibly has never even heard of it, he channelled his inner Wellington: “It’s one thing to be offensive. It’s another thing to attack his house. It’s not the right time to do any of that. And I learned about it from President Putin today. I was very angry about it.”

If President Putin said it happened, it did. Like another celebrated general of the past, Washington, Vlad never tells a lie. So yes, that wicked Zelensky sanctioned an assassination attempt on Trump’s friend. The Donald’s sense of propriety is so deeply offended that no wonder he is angry – very angry.

So is Foreign Minister Lavrov, who’d be the odds-on favourite to win the Nobel Prize for cynicism, should that category exist. Lavrov accused the Ukraine of “state terrorism”, said the Russians were selecting targets for retaliatory strikes and added that Russia’s negotiating position now had to change.

How? What negotiating position? The Russians, with Trump’s acquiescence, are using sham negotiations as a delaying tactic only. This supposed raid on Putin’s house serves that purpose nicely.

What Trump doesn’t understand or, more likely, refuses to acknowledge is that Putin doesn’t want peace, the way the word is commonly understood.

He wants peace the way Tacitus understood it: “They make a wasteland and call it peace”. Putin is out to wipe the Ukraine off the map, not just the geopolitical one, but also cultural, national and even ethnic.

This represents a novel approach to Russian conquests, adding an interesting refinement to Stalin’s desiderata. Stalin would brutally invade countries like Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, incorporating them into his empire. But he never denied their people’s right to consider themselves Latvian, Lithuanian or Estonian.

Stalin came up with a new nationality, a new ethnopolitical entity: Soviet Man. In that sense, all those people at the outskirts of the empire acquired dual nationality. They were Soviet first and whatever else they wished to be on the side, provided it wasn’t Jewish.

Those constituent republics were Russified, Russian politicians were installed as nominally second secretaries but in fact Stalin’s viceroys, the Russian language was a compulsory school subject. But no one ever denied that Azeris remained Azeri, Estonians remained Estonian – and Ukrainians remained Ukrainian.

In the 1990s, during the quasi-democratic interregnum, an old word, Rossiyanin, gained new currency side by side with the word Russki. Both words are rendered in English as ‘Russian’, which erases an important difference. Russki stands for the simon-pure ethnic Russian, whereas Rossiyanin means any citizen of the Russian Federation, regardless of ethnicity.

The overarching, superethnic term thus replaced ‘Soviet’, which had gone out of fashion. But Putin’s Nazism leaves no room for ethnic diversity and hence for superethnic terminology. He doesn’t just want the Ukrainians to stop being independent. He wants them to stop being Ukrainian.

The tsarist term, Malorossy (Little Russians) is no longer used, but its time will come. A pecking order of Russianness has to be maintained, and the difference between Velikorossy (Great Russians) and Malorossy will eventually rear its head.

But to that glorious end, the Ukraine must capitulate, agree to submit to civilisational euthanasia in lieu of civilisational murder.

That’s why Putin will reject any ‘deal’ so beloved of Trump unless it leads to the disappearance of the Ukraine as a country and Ukrainians as a people. If Trump doesn’t understand this, he is stupid and hence unqualified to be president. If he understands it and still acts the way he does, he is Putin’s man and hence unqualified to be president.

At the risk of incurring Trump’s anger and Wellington’s posthumous disapproval, I hope that an attack on Putin’s palace did happen, and that such attacks will intensify, eventually to succeed. The time of gentlemanly warriors has passed, never to return.

The two sides in the on-going war are a fascist aggressor and his innocent victim fighting for existential survival. Anything the Ukraine does to avoid her death is justified – morally, legally and every which way.

And Trump would be well-advised to reserve some of his anger for the side that started this war of extermination and is pursuing it with feral, indiscriminate cruelty. If all his ire is aimed at the victim, Trump may find himself on the receiving end of ugly accusations, like those levelled at him in this space.  

Every Christmas season in France, we follow the local tradition of gorging ourselves on that ‘controversial’ delicacy.

(The quotation marks here mean there’s no real controversy involved. The word ‘controversial’ these days merely modifies anything woke cretins – sorry, I mean neo-pagans – dislike.)

Every time we’ve been to friends’ houses for dinner, we’ve been served foie gras as a starter. It has also been used to stuff various birds, including those it originally came from. And no, foie gras hasn’t yet been used as pudding, so there’s still something to look forward to.

Some of our friends buy foie gras at the local deli, others make their own. All supermarkets around us have been selling raw foie gras for weeks now, and last week we presciently pre-ordered ours, anticipating our favourite store to run out. (British supermarkets no longer sell it, having succumbed to yet another modern perversion.)

Sure enough, it did. As we collected our order, some woman, one of those who leave everything until the last moment, enviously peeked into our trolley and wondered what made us so privileged. When we explained the pre-ordering trick to her, she sighed and made a mental note for future reference.

I do all the cooking in our abbreviated family, but foie gras is what Penelope contributes to the gaiety of Yuletide life. Every year she makes a scrumptious terrine with all sorts of ingredients, including an almost whole bottle of port.

Now, this isn’t a cookery column, and I only use that liver delight as a peg on which to hang my contempt for what I called neo-paganism earlier.

Refusing to accept the supernatural, modern people still feel the need for the superpersonal. To that end, though they call themselves progressive, they revert to the most primitive pagan practices of worshipping animals, inanimate objects and nature in general.

When the notion of any kind of divinity became infra dig, pantheism developed into romantic, secular adoration of nature. This led to a gradual disappearance of the line separating man from beast.

Such anthropomorphism run riot is progressive, in the same sense in which a disease can be progressive. By now it has progressed to a point where vegetarianism, which used to be regarded as a psychological quirk, is believed to occupy a high moral plateau.

Interestingly, this and other forms of hysterical secular sentimentalism have strictly urban origins. Those who are in day-to-day contact with nature, farmers and peasants, even if they aren’t familiar with Genesis 1:25-31, treat animals in exactly its spirit.

I remember our Italian landlord, a farmer who did agriturismo as a side line. One day Sergio proudly took Penelope and me through his farm.

He led us to a fat cow and outlined with his finger where different cuts of beef came from: “This is filetto di manzo, this is bistecca alla fiorentina…” Sergio then picked up a cute little rabbit by its ears and explained with a gentle smile: “Al forno con patate.” How many British youngsters would wince at such heartless utilitarianism?

These days every perversion has to find a political expression. Hence we no longer just love animals: we see them as political entities endowed with rights.

All this is badly at odds with our civilisation. It’s only various polytheistic cults that worship creatures like cats or cows, anthropomorphising them first and deifying them second. Modern pagans borrow either from ancient cults or else from Buddhism a tendency towards vegetarianism and ‘animal rights’ or some such destructive nonsense.

Destructive, that is, to our civilisation whose approach to such matters is governed by Genesis 1:25-31, stating unequivocally that all plants and animals were created to serve man. Yet modern ‘progressives’ take to Buddhism and its eastern offshoots with alacrity because they welcome a slight tinge of mysticism on their own purely materialistic creed.

Buddhism and other Eastern cults thus give modernity a metaphysical dimension, however flimsy. In that way, Eastern monism makes modernity more self-reliant for longer, which is dangerous to Western holdouts.

Regarded in this light, an Eastern-style vegetarian presents a greater threat to us than even a murderer. The latter can kill the body; the former may destroy the soul, and never mind his sunny, flower-child smile.

It’s shocking that these days even at some of Britain’s best schools up to a third of the children are vegetarians, having been corrupted by their teachers into contemplating the morality of eating meat.

Yet even the carnivores among ‘progressives’ turn their noses up at foie gras, which they regard as an unethical violation of animal rights. Chaps, animals can’t have any rights, properly defined. Rights dialectically co-exist with responsibilities – since animals don’t have the latter, they aren’t entitled to the former.

Still, veggies and other defenders of animal rights whip themselves up into frenzy like some Middle Eastern dervishes. They come up with all sorts of cock-and-bull stories about ghastly experiences that traumatised them for life.

Some claim they visited an abattoir and were horrified by the sanguinary spectacle. What did they expect to find there? Mary and her little lamb? Anyone with any imagination at all would have known what to expect and could have predicted his reaction. Why not just stay away and save one’s nerves?

Others cite a similar experience obtained vicariously, by watching animal slaughter on TV. That’s even sillier. Sets these days come equipped with a remote, enabling the viewer to switch at the flick of a finger among the hundreds of programmes available. So what morbid fascination kept those traumatised persons glued to the screen showing blood and gore?

Animal worship isn’t just about what we eat. It’s also about what we hunt, especially if it’s foxes.

For centuries, riding to hounds has been the favourite country sport in England. Originally, it was practised almost exclusively by the upper classes, which made hunting propitious for modern vandals. They could use it to indulge both their hatred of the ‘capitalists’ and ‘colonialists’, and also their neo-paganism.

To that end they cultivated their phony adoration of foxes, the bane of all farmers whose lambs and chickens foxes kill en masse. If the Lefties’ love of foxes was put on, their hatred of the upper classes was genuine. Never mind that by then riding to hounds had crossed all class barriers, and even people of common birth and average incomes happily enjoyed that traditional sport.

That, however, didn’t absolve them of guilt by association with the erstwhile aristocratic provenance of hunting. Thus, Tony Blair’s government banned the sport in 2004.

Now Starmer’s government is planning to ban the surrogate sport of trail hunting with dogs. The hounds merely follow a scent laid across the countryside, with huntsmen galloping in pursuit.

Still, insist modern vandals, some foxes may be killed inadvertently, which offends the delicate sensibilities of woke cretins – sorry, I mean neo-pagans. Even they agree that no more than the odd hundred pests are murdered in that egregious fashion, but, hey, numbers don’t alter the principle.

The urgent desire to save ‘our planet’ from the very chemicals that make biological life possible comes from the same source, and the same root impulse. Modern ideologues have replaced the Western acknowledgment of Original Sin with their hatred of what they see as our inherently wicked civilisation.

Hence they try to demolish every tradition, every core belief, every founding tenet. Nothing is too stupid or too insane if it can be used as a battering ram to punch another breach in the crumbling walls of Christendom.

Chesterton expressed this with his usual epigrammatic brilliance: “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing – he believes anything.”

Since I haven’t stopped believing in God, I happily stuff myself with foie gras during this festive week. Cocking a snook at modern neo-pagans admittedly adds to my enjoyment of the taste.

Similarly, every time I put my foot down to get the best out of the 330 horses under my bonnet, I don’t just feel the exhilaration of speed and the lure of an open road. I also rejoice at the carbon footprint I leave behind, knowing it won’t harm ‘our planet’ but may infuriate neo-pagans — sorry, I mean woke cretins.

These aren’t commendable feelings, I know. But who says we can’t have some innocent fun at the expense of those who are far from innocent?

Citing mass murder of Christians by Muslims, President Trump has laudably ordered surgical strikes on ISIS strongholds in Nigeria.

This calls for applause, but as my palms were about to strike each other, they were stopped in mid-air. The brakes were applied by a question that popped up in my mind.

How come Trump, who is so concerned about the massacre of some 50,000 Nigerian Christians by the Muslims, doesn’t seem to be unduly bothered by the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Christians by the Russians?

Moreover, he unmistakably takes the side of their mass murderer, Putin. Is it because Nigerian Christians worship according to the Western rite, and most Ukrainians are Orthodox? No, that doesn’t quite work.

I somehow doubt that Trump is overly concerned with such theological conundrums as the double versus single procession of the Holy Spirit. Nor does he probably have sleepless nights struggling with the question of whether the Pope is merely primus inter pares or primus, full stop.

I’ve explored some possible reasons for Trump’s almost maidenly adoration of Putin many times, most recently in my article of 30 August, 2025. Not to repeat myself – and yes, I know that repetition is the mother of all learning – I’d now like to look at this from a different angle.

Every investigation starts from a question, and this one is no exception. The question is: What does Putin want to get out of his invasion of the Ukraine?

All sorts of commentators have offered variously inane answers, most of them prompted by the Kremlin. Putin wants to protect the Russian-speaking minority in the Ukraine, some suggest. Others insist that the Russians couldn’t stand seeing Ukrainian streets named after Bandera and other nationalist leaders of the past.

Still others, and these are in a majority, opine that Putin was bothered by NATO’s westward expansion, which he saw as a strategic threat. This is just about correct, but it raises an attendant question: Why did he feel threatened by mighty powers like Estonia (p. 1.4 million) joining NATO?

Surely, only a clinical imbecile would think that NATO would ever use Estonia (Latvia, Romania, Albania etc.) as a springboard for a massive assault on Russia, and Putin, for all his faults, isn’t stupid. This brings me to the previous question: Why did he attack the Ukraine? What are his strategic objectives?

Unlike the nature of Trump’s affection for Putin, answering this question involves no conjecture. Putin himself, along with all his acolytes, has provided an unequivocal answer on all sorts of occasions, from 2007 onwards.

He is out to reverse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century”, the collapse of the Soviet Union. This means reincorporating all the breakaway Soviet republics into Russia, to begin with. The next stage is extending the same domination over Eastern Europe that the USSR had. And – tomorrow ze world.

Essentially, this is the same plus ça change objective declared and pursued by the Soviet Union from its inception. Putin is merely treading in the footsteps of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and so on, all the way down the list.

Now, what has prevented such ambitions from being fully realised since 4 April, 1949? That was the founding date of NATO, a bloc of civilised countries that came together to keep that barbarian regime in check. They were led by the US, the only Western country to emerge from the war stronger, richer and bristling with moral rectitude.

Understandably, NATO was the object of virulent hatred on the part of Soviet chieftains and especially their dog of war, the KGB. Since then KGB has become FSB, but neither its methods nor its goals have changed. The prime one is to remove that obstacle from its path to pan-European domination.

So yes, Putin did feel threatened by NATO expansion – but not because he feared Western aggression. What he – and Soviet chieftains before him – feared was that NATO would be able to stop the Soviet/Russian aggression against Europe.

Since the FSB, as represented by Putin himself and some 80 per cent of his entourage, now runs Russia, it has dedicated itself mostly if not solely to the task of degrading and destabilising NATO. Ideally, the Russians want to see that pernicious organisation disbanded, a task to which the FSB devotes its considerable skills.

Is there proof that Trump is a Russian agent? No, there is no proof. But there are numerous indications, and one of them is his pursuing exactly the same goal as one so close to Putin’s heart: neutering NATO. This didn’t start yesterday.

In 1987, when Putin was still stuck in a dead-end KGB job, Trump first visited Russia. He was invited by the Soviet ambassador to the US, Anatoly Dobrynin, and all Trump’s expenses were paid by the Soviet tourist office, Intourist, which is to say by the KGB.

There can be no doubt whatsoever that the KGB then tried to develop Trump as an asset – it wouldn’t have been doing its job if it hadn’t. Whether or not the KGB succeeded is open to conjecture.

However, immediately on his return to the US, Trump paid over $100,000 to place a full-page ad in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. Written as an open letter to the American people, the ad essentially said that America should leave all her defence alliances.

The so-called allies were ripping America off by relying on her to fund their defence, which cost Americans billions and billions. Trump didn’t even call on America’s allies to spend more on their defence – that came later. In 1987 he merely tried to whip up isolationist and transactional passions he knew would find a sympathetic audience.

Considering that America reached unprecedented prosperity in the decades following NATO’s founding, the rip-off must have worked both ways, but that wasn’t the point. Trump was essentially saying that alliances America had formed with her European and Asian partners had become obsolete.

That established his recurrent theme, repeated time and again, especially since 2000, when Trump first dipped his toe in the water of presidential campaigns. Throughout, and here I again refer you to my article of 30 August this year, Trump had extensive commercial links with the Russians.

They, in their turn, were trying to do all they could to bolster Trump’s presidential ambitions. Putin clearly saw Trump’s ascent as a long-term benefit to Russia’s strategic aims. Thus, the Russians threw no-holds-barred support behind Trump’s presidential bid.

The subsequent Mueller investigation revealed nothing illegal, but that could simply confirm that the FSB knows how to cover its tracks. Perfectly legal assistance was bad enough anyway. For example, Trump openly begged Russia to blow the whistle on Hillary Clinton’s infamous 30,000 e-mails, and Putin duly obliged.

When Trump was elected, champagne corks were popping all over Russian government offices, including the Duma. They had much to celebrate: Trump was generous about appointing to key positions people tarred with the FSB brush.

Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser, for example, had been paid vast sums by the Russians to do lobbying work for them and to appear as an advocate on RT and other propaganda channels. At the gala celebration of RT’s anniversary, he sat next to Putin at his banquet table.

Eventually Flynn was indicted for holding secret meetings with the Russian ambassador, but Trump issued a presidential pardon in 2020. Meanwhile, Trump was as disparaging about his European allies as he was effusive about Putin, describing his annexation of the Crimea as “genius” and “savvy”.

All that was merely a rehearsal for Trump’s second term at the White House. He could now afford to throw caution to the wind, and his parroting of the Russian line became blatant.

Under his tutelage, America has withdrawn from NATO de facto, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she soon did so de jure as well. Trump has already said he saw Article 5 as non-binding.  

His attacks on America’s European allies have increased in both frequency and virulence – Trump has clearly set out to demolish the post-war order, reorienting America away from an effete Europe and towards muscular tyrannies, mainly Russia and China.

All presidential ‘peace’ plans amount to attempts to blackmail the Ukraine into capitulation. All such plans, manifestly including the notorious 28-point document, were compiled in the Kremlin, transferred to Trump by Steven Witkoff (whose own commercial links with Russia are extensive) and then passed for Trump’s own.

American military aid for the Ukraine has dwindled away to almost nothing since Trump’s inauguration, and ‘almost’ is on the way out. He and his poodle Vance are making fiery speeches about the indolent, sponging Europeans without ever mentioning the massacre of Ukrainians perpetrated by Putin’s frankly fascist regime.

Ukrainian capitulation is vital to Putin because, while the war is going on, Russia has no resources to move in on NATO countries on her border, mainly the Baltics. Equally vital is an enfeeblement of NATO, and there Putin and Trump are working hand in glove.

“Ye shall know them by their fruits,” said the book I doubt Trump has ever read. This isn’t the kind of evidence one can take to court, yet. But there’s no doubt that Trump sees a fascist Russia and not Europe as his natural ally. As Andrew Neil perceptively pointed out the other day, we are on our own.

P.S. Data just published show that hybrid cars are three times as likely as petrol to be involved in fatal accidents. Could this be God’s way of telling us not to play silly buggers with faddish ideologies?

This is how Tacitus described in 109 AD the people who’ll tomorrow celebrate one of the two great dates in their calendar:

“Nero… punished with every refinement the notoriously depraved Christians (as they were popularly called). Their originator, Christ, had been executed in Tiberius’s reign by the governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilatus. But in spite of this temporary setback the deadly superstition had broken out afresh, not only in Judaea, where the mischief had started, but even in Rome. All degraded and shameful practices collect and flourish in the capital.”

Given the religious tolerance of Rome, this is strong stuff indeed. Clearly, the Romans saw Christianity as a subversive threat, and this attitude didn’t spring from their objection to all-encompassing charity.

It’s conceivable that those Romans who didn’t know better detested not so much the Christians’ beliefs, about which they couldn’t have known much, as their clandestine meetings which were in themselves punishable offences in Rome.

But why did those meetings have to be clandestine? Possibly because the Romans sensed that a new, dangerous breed was making its historical debut, a breed to be nipped in the bud out of self-preservation.

It certainly was so to Pliny the Younger who three years later, in 112 AD, was sent to investigate the catacomb congregations. In his subsequent letter to Emperor Trajan he reported no evidence of Christian cannibalism rumoured by those who had heard about the Eucharist but hadn’t understood its meaning.

So what exactly was so “depraved” about Christians? One thing only: they refused to acknowledge the divinity of the Emperor, thereby serving an early notice that the city of man and the city of God exist in different realms. Peter founded the Roman church with no assistance from the state.

Still, we must be grateful to Tacitus, Pliny, Josephus, Suetonius and other non-Christian sources that put paid to all the doubts about the historicity of Jesus. In fact, such doubts surfaced much later, when Europeans decided they had no further use for God. As Laplace (d. 1827) put it, “I have no need of that hypothesis”.

At around that time, it wasn’t just Christ’s divinity that was doubted but his very historicity. The scarcity of contemporary accounts was highlighted by those who had an emotional need to insist that the absence of evidence was the evidence of absence.

Those critics ignored that contemporaneous pagan and Jewish writers, including those who hated Christianity, never denied the existence of Jesus. At the same time, there were 14 direct testimonies supporting the essential facts of His life.

In fact, we know a lot more about Jesus than about any other figure active in the region at the time, and no one has ever doubted their historicity. For example, neither Josephus nor any other non-Christian sources mentioned Paul.

Paul himself never mentioned John the Baptist and Philo. Josephus didn’t mention Rabbi Hillel, his influential contemporary. And even a contemporaneous account of the Bar Kochba revolt omitted his name altogether.

If there is no historical reason to doubt the existence of Jesus Christ, there is plenty of ideological animus to do so. One widely practised trick is to claim that any references to Christ in ancient sources are later interpolations.

How, for example, could Josephus have written this in his Antiquities: “Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles.”

Clearly, this has to be a dirty trick played by the Church. There is no way on earth that Josephus, a Jewish turncoat and faithful servant to the Flavian emperors, would have acknowledged the divinity of Jesus. Well, he didn’t. He simply repeated a view popular in Jewish circles at the time.

Many Jews, those who would have stoned for blasphemy anyone claiming Jesus was God, still believed that He was the Messiah. And the Messiah of Judaism isn’t God. He is, however, a divine man capable of being “a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure”.

Paul’s epistles are the earliest account of Jesus’s life, written as they were some 15 to 30 years after the Crucifixion. Paul offers quite a few autobiographical facts, partly to establish his bona fides. Thus we know that he was personally acquainted with Peter, John and James, Jesus’s closest disciples.

Quite apart from his own Damascene experience, Paul knew Jesus intimately from the apostles’ accounts. The biographical details he recounts and reconstructs are undoubtedly accurate, and they tally with the synoptic Gospels written a few years later.

(The exact dates are a matter of scholarly debate but, since none of the Gospels mentions the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, they were probably written before that date.)

Those accounts, especially the Gospel of Mark, show the influence of earlier Aramaic sources that didn’t survive. Some scholars believe John the Evangelist was himself the “beloved apostle”, others disagree. But it’s undeniable that all four evangelists were either eyewitnesses of Christ’s life or wrote on the basis of the testimony provided by the apostles.

You notice that so far I’ve been writing about the man Jesus, not Christ, God’s son. Yet tomorrow Christians will be celebrating not just Jesus’s birthday but the Incarnation of Our Lord.

Now the Gospels document numerous miracles, including the ultimate one, the Resurrection. Most of the miracles were witnessed by crowds of people, and many of them were still alive when the Gospels, and certainly Paul’s letters, were written. Yet, to use the legerdemain favoured by atheists, we have no records denying the authenticity of the miracles.

But we have no need for such cheap polemical shots. Instead, we can repeat what Tertullian said: Credo quia absurdum (“I believe because it’s absurd”).

In other words, you couldn’t make it up, and CS Lewis built on that argument beautifully. He pointed out that the Gospel narrative uses novelistic techniques not developed until the 18^th century.

Hence we either have to assume that hiding behind those four names were writers of the greatest genius ever, who were millennia ahead of their time, or that the evangelists reported what they had seen. Those who say that the Gospels are fairy tales, wrote our greatest fairy tale writer, aren’t familiar with the genre.

I could keep you up until next Christmas, talking about the rational reasons to take the Gospels at their word. All I’d have to do would be quote from a whole library of Christian apologetics produced by some of history’s greatest minds. Then, at a vainer moment, I could add a few deductions of my own.

Yet any such rationalisation can only ever be post-rationalisation: an intellectual structure erected on the foundation of something already felt intuitively. Proving the divinity of Christ by purely logical arguments is impossible even in theory: a higher system can understand the lower one, but not vice versa.

However, if we start from the hypothesis of which Pierre-Simon Laplace had no need, then everything clicks into place. Reason reclaims its place and fills in the blanks one after another, until few blanks remain unfilled. Man, God’s greatest creation, drifts from the haze of enigma into the sharp focus of understanding.

For, though our minds can’t fathom God, they can, thanks to His gift of reason, understand much of His world. Provided, of course, that we accept that gift with gratitude, never doubting its source.

Merry Christmas to everyone!

When Michael Nazir-Ali, former Bishop of Rochester, converted to Catholicism in 2021, that came as a shock.

I knew Bishop Michael, as he then was, and he once even kindly wrote the preface to one of my books. What surprised me about his conversion was that he was on the evangelical, practically Calvinist, end of the Anglican church.

Most converts to Catholicism tend to come from the High Church, Anglo-Catholic end, a tendency that goes back to the Oxford Movement of Victorian times. One of its founders, John Henry Newman, later became a cardinal and a prominent Catholic theologian.

For him, however, the path to Rome was much shorter than for Bishop, now Monsignor, Michael. Yet even he found the confinement of the Church of England too suffocating.

Nazir-Ali was one of the several Anglican bishops who converted that year, but the C of E has been haemorrhaging priests ever since 1992, when it decided to ordain women. This is a case of not just post hoc but definitely also propter hoc – in fact, more than a third of all Catholic ordinations since 1992 have been of former Anglican priests.

The vote of the General Synod to ordain women pushed the button for a mass exodus of Anglican priests and laity, but things have got much worse since then. The C of E has been doing its level best to keep up with every secular perversion going, at a cost to traditional liturgy and doctrine.

Its two great texts, the Prayer Book and the King James Version, the mainstays not only of scriptural worship but also of the English language, have fallen by the wayside, to be found now only in a handful of churches. In fact, I’d venture a guess that there are more Latin Mass Catholic churches in London than 1662 Anglican ones.

The problem has been not only with the ordination of women as such, but specifically with the ordination of woke, Left-wing women, which describes every female priest I know of. This emphatically includes Dame Sarah Mullaly, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

According to Dame Sarah, her “eyes have been opened to the harm we have done LGBT+ people.” Her eyes no longer shut, she is prepared to bless same-sex marriages, something some other Anglican bishops have been doing since 2023.

Meanwhile, younger female priests are unhappy with the baggy clerical vestments concealing their womanly charms. That demand has created its own supply, with designers appearing who specialise in making more than 2,000 female priests look more alluring.

“Today more than ever women in ministry are complaining about the boxy, shapeless shirts on offer,” commented one such designer, Camelle Daley. She didn’t say whether she’d go as far as slitting cassock skirts to the hip, but my guess is she would.

Such desperate clinging on to the coattails of woke modernity convinces many conservative vicars in both wings of the C of E that it’s no longer a branch of the true Church. They are leaving it in droves, as are many individual communicants and even whole parishes.

One such Anglican priest led 72 of his parishioners to Rome, lamenting that the C of E is now “holed under the waterline because it is beholden to the state, and the state no longer likes Christianity”.

However, the very concept of an established church presupposes its being “beholden to the state”, which is a serious problem regardless of how the state feels about Christianity. The demise of the English Church started not in 1992, but in 1534, when Henry VIII declared that he, not the Pope, was the head of the Church of England.

Though by all accounts Henry remained a Catholic to his death, he did his realm a bad turn by ushering in the Protestant heresy and pushing the Church on the road towards servitude to the state. Much blood was spilled along the way, and militant Protestantism was inscribed on Roundhead banners during the English Civil war (1642–1651).

It was at that time that Thomas Hobbes wrote a death note to English Catholicism in his Leviathan. Obviously shaken by that “war of all against all”, he nationalised religion by coming up with the concept of a commonwealth in which the nation and the church are fused together by some mysterious contract.

By eliminating the open, universal structure of the Christian ecclesia, Hobbes deviated as far as was conceivable from Christ’s teaching about the hierarchy of realms. “My kingdom is not of this world,” said Jesus, meaning that his realm was not only different from worldly kingdoms, but superior to them.

Hobbes’s concept of sovereignty was centred on the state as the “Mortal God” on whom mankind must rely for peace and security. The commonwealth becomes a closed entity within which the state, ideally absolutist but at a pinch also parliamentary, has dominion not only over political life, but also over the people’s mind and spirit. It’s the state that decides not only what the people should do but also what they should think, say and worship. The church acts within the commonwealth, serving its needs.

That put to the sword the Pauline concept of the sacrum imperium, later developed by Aquinas into the notion of the hierarchical ecclesia, an entity that possessed a universal personality in which the spiritual realm was higher than the temporal one. Hobbes’s church was no longer the impersonation of Christianity, and its claim to spiritual superiority was invalid.

According to him, that divine personality belonged not to the church but to the commonwealth, effectively a tribe. If to Paul, the ecclesia was the body of which king, political institutions, clergy and their flock were parts, to Hobbes the ecclesia didn’t really exist as an overarching supranational institution.

In addition to venting Hobbes’s rabid hatred of Catholicism, Leviathan laid the philosophical foundation for a church “beholden to the state”, one at the mercy of the state’s feelings about Christianity. When a state and a church hug, there is always a kiss of death implicit in that embrace – and it’s the church that becomes moribund or, even worse, corrupted.

Anglican priests, real ones that is, want to preach God’s truth, not fly-by-night woke superstitions. However, our non-Christian, increasingly anti-Christian state, whose head is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, has subsumed the church, turning it into a conduit of assorted woke heresies. The priests become despondent, and their mood isn’t improved by the sight of empty pews.

People don’t need churches to be exposed to transient fads – they need them for keeping in touch with transcendent truths, and they feel betrayed by the C of E. At the same time, London’s Catholic churches are bursting at the seams every Mass, and even disestablished churches in communion with the C of E in other countries are doing much better.

In the five centuries that have passed since English Christianity decided to go it alone, the Anglican Church has woven itself into the fabric of English culture, language – of Englishness. Anyone who loves England, whatever confession he belongs to or none, must feel sad seeing the church destroyed.

Yet that egg was laid by Henry VIII, and the chickens have now come home to roost. In addition to the general secularisation of life, the C of E suffers from its congenital flaws, and the combined effect is devastating.

So yes, will the last Anglican to leave please lock the door and turn off the lights. We don’t want those wind farms to start working overtime.

This question has to conclude the sequence of other questions, none of which are either answered or, typically, even posed by natural science.

What is consciousness? What is thought? What is a mind? What is innate moral sense? What is love? Because such questions are metaphysical they demand metaphysical answers.

Historically, there have been many options, but over the past few centuries they’ve noticeably boiled down to two. Each, however, is an umbrella covering multiple gradations; each can act as the starting point of our life’s choices.

The first metaphysical premise is Christian, or Judaeo-Christian if you’d rather: we were created by God in His image. This makes man qualitatively different from all other animals.

Man alone was singled out to fulfil a mission assigned by God. Since this mission is eternal, it doesn’t end with physical death. Thus, there is no such thing as a happy ending to one’s life. If it’s to be happy, it’s not the ending.

The second metaphysical premise is materialist: the living cell, which over billions of years was to become man, appeared as a biochemical accident of some kind, we aren’t quite sure which. A man lives his three-score and ten or whatever and then becomes fertiliser. In that he is no different from other living organisms, though while still alive he is cleverer than most.

We may choose one metaphysical premise or the other, but the choice won’t stay merely theoretical for long. Metaphysics has far-reaching practical ramifications, affecting, for example, our economic behaviour.

Though, compared to eternity, our existence on earth is risibly short, every little thing we do may mould our life in infinity – a daunting thought. Yet it’s also a glorious thought: life will never end. It will only be transformed into a different kind of life and, if we don’t mess up too badly while still here, it’ll be blissfully happy. There is death in life, but then there is also life in death.

Thus our economic activity, though variously important, can’t become all-important. If it does, we’ll run into many moral dilemmas that will surely gore us with their horns.

Yes, we want to live without much deprivation, we’d rather be reasonably comfortable while still on earth – but only if the pursuit of such comfort doesn’t jeopardise our life in eternity.

If, on the other hand, we believe that our life starts at birth and ends at death, then we may act in a different way. Our lives will be committed not to serving an outside authority infinitely higher than ourselves, but only to satisfying our own passions.

If our existence is an accident ending in death, then, illogically, it’s the process of life that is its highest meaning. The aim then is to squeeze as much as possible out of every moment.

Any self-limitation of appetites becomes illogical. Anything that restricts one’s pleasures goes against the essence of one’s life.

The polarity of good and bad is replaced by useful and useless. The worst sin stops being sinful if it brings much pleasure. (Hemingway, for example, put ‘daemon’ into eudaemonia : “What is moral is what you feel good after.”). And since what we’ll define as the best things in life are far from free, we’ll have to pursue aggressively the happiness expressible in money.

How do people choose their metaphysical premise? Neither theists nor atheists can claim scientific rigour and irrefutable proof. Neither of them observed the root processes, meaning that both have to proceed from a hypothesis they believe is true.

Thus, the opposition of the two metaphysical poles isn’t one between religion and science but between two faiths. One of them is based on God’s revelation given by methods both natural (through the possibility of perceiving much of His creation experimentally) and supernatural (through the Scripture and church tradition). The other is based on nothing but man’s own speculation. As such, it’s not even so much faith as superstition.

Even scientists declaring themselves to be atheists, and trying to use science to vindicate their atheism, nonetheless start from the metaphysical premise of accepting the existence of rational and universal natural laws. If they wish to be logical, then, while rejecting the existence of a rational and universal law-giver, they are forced to ascribe rational behaviour to nature itself.

That’s the most primitive pantheism, discarded as serious thought centuries ago. Strip their claims bare of scientific cant, and they descend to the intellectual level of a prehistoric shaman.

It would be foolhardy to deny that, whichever metaphysical option we may choose, we are guided in our choice by emotional need, not just a cold-blooded weighing of intellectual pros and cons. But theocentric metaphysics offers much greater rewards in either area.

The idea of having been created and guided through life by a loving, merciful and self-sacrificial God sounds more emotionally appealing than the notion of man’s descent from a single-cell organism via an unsavoury mammal that looks like a ghastly caricature of a human being. And intellectually, a thinker who starts from the theocentric premise will be able to explain next to everything that matters, while his anthropocentric counterpart will explain next to nothing.

The choice of a metaphysical premise starts from an intuitive predisposition, but then so does any search we undertake. A scientist knows intuitively where truth lies before he embarks on his experiments. He calls this knowledge ‘hypothesis’ rather than ‘faith’, but that’s a distinction without a difference. A Christian may ascribe his intuition to divine grace, but that simply indicates how he came by his intuitive hypothesis, aka faith.

If a man’s intuition leads him to the materialist metaphysical premise, he relinquishes the right to ask what Dostoyevsky called “the accursed questions”, of the kind I posed at the beginning.

That is, he may ask, but he’ll never come up with even remotely satisfactory answers. If he insists that man is just so many atoms arranged in a recognisable shape, and that man’s thought is merely a discharge of electrical impulses, he’ll only succeed in sounding childish.

Such a man puts a voluntary ceiling on his thought, allowing it to rise so high but no higher. He may still be supremely intelligent, but his mind will never dare rise above the ground. If he does try to gatecrash the area reserved for the first metaphysical premise, he’ll sound inadequate no matter how erudite and bright he may be in all other areas.

This observation vindicates Jacques Maritain (d. 1973) who argued for a hierarchy of sciences. Natural science was to him but a subset of philosophy, with the latter deferring to the overarching science of theology. Messrs Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Pascal, Newton, Leibnitz, Maxwell, Gauss, Heisenberg and most other great minds of history would have agreed with him.

I tend to regard atheism as a lamentable failure of intellect and imagination. Yet God tells us not to despise such people, but to love them and pray that they are released from their self-imposed confinement. And if this is what God says, we must listen – especially during this season.

No, I don’t mean the worship of God’s son Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour, the second hypostasis of the Holy Trinity. This is such a minority pastime nowadays that it’s hardly worth mentioning.

Anyone who insists that Christmas is about Christ lives in the distant past, possibly away with the fairies. But that doesn’t mean that this season is free of religious rites.

On the contrary, today’s Britons go their ancestors one better by worshipping, and making sacrifices to, not one god but two: Hermes, the god of trade, and Bacchus, the god of booze.

That’s why shops, off-licences, restaurants and pubs expect to make enough profit in the fourth quarter to remain solvent the whole year. Since their usual Yuletide turnover is some £42 billion, shopkeepers and publicans have always looked forward to Christmas with greedy anticipation.

Yet our Marxist government doesn’t wish to encourage greed. The only thing people are expected to worship is our Marxist government or at a pinch, if they choose to break off just one of its fragments, the NHS.

Any other worship, be it of Christ, Jehovah, Hermes or Bacchus, must be nipped in the bud. The government only makes an exception for Islam, and the same Labour politicians who’d never call Jesus Christ ‘Our Lord’ happily refer to Mohammed as ‘The Prophet’. Even so, they genuflect to their ideology, not Allah.

It’s from the stronghold of that ideology that they set out to uproot the veneration of Hermes and Bacchus at Christmas. Specifically, Starmer and friends are desperately trying to prove Napoleon wrong retrospectively.

They don’t want England to remain a nation of shopkeepers and, consequently, shoppers. They want to put shops, eateries and boozers out of business, what with such establishments being notoriously difficult to nationalise.

And in this undertaking if in no other, the government is succeeding famously. Keir and Rachel have launched a £30 billion tax raid, taking out of people’s pockets roughly three-quarters of the money they used to spend at Christmas.

That by itself would be sufficient to increase the number of boarded-up windows in the High Street. But those blood-sucking retailers were hit from other directions too, just to make sure.

Business rates went up more steeply than ever, and the pinch turned into a tight squeeze. The squeeze became truly strangulating when employers were made to pay much higher National Insurance taxes.

The rise in the minimum wage delivered another debilitating blow, felt much more keenly by small businesses, such as bars and restaurants. They simply can’t afford to pay £25,000 a year to their cleaners and dishwashers. Nor can they afford to hire them in the first place, what with a whole raft of new workers’ rights empowering employees and debilitating employers.

All things considered, Black Friday sales at the end of November, traditionally a cornucopia of shop receipts, proved disastrous (and online sales didn’t fare much better). The same goes for December and, according to all forecasts, January.    

It’s not just that people have less money to spend. They also expect things to get worse, not better, which makes them reluctant to spend freely. Britons seldom believe promises of jam tomorrow, but they treat prognoses of doom and gloom with credulity.

These are numerous: anyone with a modicum of economic nous knows that Labour are beggaring the country at the lightning speed one expects from Marxists. We are already paying higher taxes than the French, our borrowing costs keep going up, and our growth is at best stagnant.

Unemployment, especially among the young, is edging upwards, predictably: when employers can’t fire, they are reluctant to hire. The cretinous rush to net zero is driving the cost of energy upwards, which has a knock-on effect on the entire economy.

Mercifully, this hasn’t yet affected Christmas lights, and all our cities are ablaze with these traditional tributes to the season. This has led to an amusing episode involving the Russian government.

Maria Zakharova, spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, went on television telling her brainwashed audience that the absence of Russian gas had plunged all European cities into darkness, with nary a lit Christmas tree anywhere in sight. Mischievous émigrés created and uploaded their own video by superimposing Zakharova’s talking head on the kaleidoscopically changing images of London, Manchester, Vienna, Paris and other cities bathed in Christmas lights.

This is one Christmas tradition inspired by the worship of Christ, not Hermes or Bacchus. Who knows, there may be a silver lining to the cloud of Labour’s economic and social vandalism after all.

Unable to express their festive spirit with charge cards, people may recall what this season is really about. Unlike shops, pubs and restaurants, church services are free and impervious to Marxist depredations – in a marginally free country, that is.

I’m sure Labour vandals would love to do to churches what they’ve done to shops, perhaps by pulling the same economic levers. But they are still not strong enough to do so.

Give them time, but for now they are doing their level best to hit the worship of Hermes and Bacchus where it hurts. Britons are guaranteed to hit back, but they have to wait until 2029 to do so.

They may not do the right thing even then, judging by their random comments on their ruined Christmas. “I’ve voted Labour my whole life,” said one aggrieved gentleman. “But no more: next time I’ll go for the Greens.” More of the same, in other words.

Frailty, thy name is man. Especially one of the Left.