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The title of Françoise Sagan’s 1959 novel asked this question of Brahms, not Burke. But, as an alliteration junkie, I couldn’t resist the temptation of a little verbal playfulness.

Yet the question I ask myself is dead-serious, as is the reply: yes, I do like Burke, passionately. But not unequivocally. Actually, the only person in history other than Jesus Christ whom I do love with no reservations is Bach, but then I’m not much given to hero worship.

Neither, I suspect, is Daniel Hannan. Yet the general tone of his thought-provoking article Tax is Theft suggests that he’d be willing to make an exception for Edmund Burke, whom Lord Hannan calls “the grandfather of Anglophone conservatism”.

I agree with Lord Hannan on most things, including most points he makes in his article, but my understanding of conservatism differs from what I infer to be his.

To begin with, there is no such thing as ‘Anglophone conservatism’, although it’s true that people who call themselves conservatives in English-speaking countries have much in common. However, the differences between, especially, English and American conservatives are as salient as the similarities.

Lord Hannan identifies the similarities precisely and correctly: commitment to localism, not centralism; small, not big, government; low, not high, taxation; free, not corporatist, economy; free, not protected, trade; enlightened patriotism, not obtuse nationalism; limited, not promiscuous, public spending – and I’m sure there are quite a few others.

However, I do have a semantic problem there. All these undoubtedly good things circumscribe libertarianism, but they don’t circumscribe conservatism. Lord Hannan seems to use those terms interchangeably, which obviates the need for one of them. If they are identical, why do we need both words? That’s not how language works.  

Thing is, they aren’t identical. The principal difference between libertarianism and conservatism is their attitude to the Enlightenment and its dicta. Conservatives reject them more or less wholesale, and libertarians don’t.

The former correctly see the Enlightenment as a systematic and, alas, successful attempt to destroy Christianity. That knocked out the cornerstone of our civilisation, which used to be called Christendom, but no longer is.

What English conservatives seek to, well, conserve is the last survivals of Christendom still not expunged or debauched by post-Enlightenment modernity. The primary ones are the monarchy and the Church, with the two inextricably linked.

If this type of conservatism still held sway in Britain, Burke would indeed be one of the formulators (not sure about the ‘grandfather’) of British conservatism. He regarded religion, specifically Christianity, as the bedrock of civil society.

An unrelenting critic of deism and atheism, Burke saw an established religion as the guarantor of constitutional liberties and the upholder of moral and political tradition. And while remaining a lifelong adherent of his father’s confession, Anglicanism, Burke also campaigned for the rights of those who, like his mother, remained Catholics.

It’s from that premise that Burke wrote, prophetically, his scathing pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France that came out three years before the worst excesses of the Terror, including regicide. That book was more than just a polemic.

When castigating what was wrong about the French Revolution, Burke managed to convert homespun traditionalism into a coherent political philosophy. That makes Reflections one of the most significant works of conservative thought, which no self-respecting bookshelf should be without.

Yet Burke was a Whig, not a Tory, and nothing illustrates the difference more vividly than a contrast between his hailing of the American Revolution and Dr Johnson’s opposition to it.

The editor of Burke’s works, EJ Payne, summarised Burke’s account of it as “a revolution not made but prevented.” In common with most Whigs, Burke didn’t recognise the divine right of anointed kings, and hence didn’t reject the principle of replacing a monarchy with a republic – provided the ancient principles of government were thereby upheld.

Burke didn’t detect the slippery slope he was stepping onto: the political (or any other) culture of Christendom ultimately couldn’t survive Christendom. America and France started a downward slide, but then, unlike us, Burke didn’t have the benefit of hindsight.

Burke’s friend, Dr Johnson, a Tory to the core, pointed out a telling, if not especially profound, paradox: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

That was excellent knockabout stuff and a strong rhetorical point. It’s true that Messrs Jefferson, Washington, Madison et al. saw no incongruity between their pronouncements and owning (in Jefferson’s case also procreating) chattel human beings. However, the real issue lay even deeper than that.

The Founding Fathers were deists or agnostics almost to a man, and some of them, specifically Thomas Jefferson, detested Trinitarian Christianity. After the First Amendment proscribing an established religion was passed, Jefferson gloated that it put up “a wall of separation between Church and State”.

Implicitly, this was a dig at England, which Jefferson and most of his colleagues cordially loathed. They wanted to transplant onto American soil the trees of the English Common Law, while severing their roots nourished by England’s Trinitarian faith.

Dr Johnson realised that the American Revolution was inspired by Enlightenment ideas and therefore dismissed it. Edmund Burke didn’t realise that and therefore hailed it.

That’s why throughout the next, nineteenth, century Burke became a seminal figure in what Americans called conservative, but was in fact libertarian, thought. In Britain, however, he remained a marginal presence, with the Whigs seeing him as not Whiggish enough, and the Tories too much so.

The latter understood conservatism in its proper sense, as an upholder of social, political and cultural tradition above all else, but not to the exclusion of all else.

The Victorian Whigs, while also respectful of tradition, believed in laissez-faire economics at home and free trade abroad. They were opposed to protectionism, and their success in having the Corn Laws repealed spelled Britain’s economic success.

Whig ideas put into practice created in the Waterloo-to-Ypres century the greatest economic growth Britain has ever enjoyed, though at some cost to traditional institutions. At the same time the rearguard action by Tory aristocracy was modestly successful in alleviating the pains of this rapid growth and keeping the now threadbare social fabric from being torn to tatters too quickly.

All that ended with the First World War. Out went the Tory aristocracy, gassed in Flanders, taxed in Whitehall. In barged the twentieth century, with the key political confrontation in Britain now being not one between Tories and Whigs, but between Whigs and socialists, or, if you’d rather, the Right and the Left.

The word ‘conservatism’ lost its true meaning, just as the concept it designated lost its true base. It was at that point that Burke came into his own, with Whiggery ruling the roost to the right of the political divide. Modernity took some elements out of Burke and conveniently discarded what really was conservative about his thought: the first two parts in the quintessential conservative triad of God, king and country.

That was no hardship in the US, where post-revolutionary Tory conservatism never existed, nor could have existed. The US polity was and remains essentially an Enlightenment project, however different it may be from its more radical offshoots, such as socialism.

In America, the cocktail of Enlightenment anthropocentric egalitarianism and laissez-faire economics shaken with a measure of Burke has produced what Americans call ‘conservatism’, and Lord Hannan calls ‘classical liberalism’, aka Whiggery.

Conservatism in its true sense is dead in Britain as a dynamic political and intellectual force, but some individual conservatives are still extant. When they try to enter the public arena, they have no choice but to accept the trans-Atlantic political taxonomy.

Thus Margaret Thatcher, a Whiggish radical through and through, is worshipped as a conservative icon. And Lord Hannan has no choice but to create a terrible mishmash of words like ‘conservative’, ‘libertarian’ and ‘classical liberal’.

This is meant as no criticism of either Lady Thatcher or Lord Hannan, good sorts both, although one wishes the latter could have found a way to use the word ‘Christian’ once in a longish article about conservatism. Still, he is realistic enough to recognise that Thatcherite Whiggery is the best we can hope to get in today’s Britain.

That, to him and American libertarians, comprises such excellent notions as free trade, small government, low taxation, minimal regulation. Real English conservatism, on the other hand, may welcome all such lovely things. But they aren’t what it’s all about.

Edmund Burke, that sagest of all Whigs, would dislike the world ‘conservatives’ try to construct, partly in his name – and he would abhor other facets of modernity.

I’m sorry though that, prophetic as he was in most other respects, Burke failed to see that the political ideal he saw in his mind’s eye was incompatible with the Enlightenment – in either its French or American variants.  

President Trump didn’t listen to Tulsi Gabbard, his Director of National Intelligence, and he was right.

A few days earlier, Tulsi listened to President Trump, and she was pathetic.

Back in March, Miss Gubbard, having reviewed piles of intelligence information, testified before Congress that yes, Iran had stockpiled nuclear materials, but no, Iran wasn’t building nuclear weapons.

Since I haven’t read her entire testimony, I don’t know how she explained what Iran was stockpiling those materials for, and building secret facilities to refine them.

As the country is one of the world’s top oil producers, its need for nuclear energy doesn’t seem especially urgent. Even if it were, the country was already producing uranium refined to 60 per cent. That strikes me as a bit of an overkill (pun intended): nuclear power stations don’t need anything purer than 3.5 per cent.

But hey, I have no access to heaps of intelligence provided by half a dozen US services, and Tulsi does. Nor do I have at my disposal, as she does, a huge staff of analysts who go through the data with a fine-toothed comb. Hence, I have to bow to superior expertise.

But then, a few days ago, President Trump who had already made the decision to wipe out Iran’s nuclear facilities, said Tulsi was “wrong”. What intelligence really showed was that Iran had a “tremendous amount of material” and could have a bomb “within months”.

Tulsi instantly concurred, and actually went the president one better. Iran, she said, could have nuclear weapons “within weeks”. Her congressional testimony had been taken out of context by “dishonest media”.

The media may be dishonest but they do understand English, especially the primitive variety of it spoken by Miss Gubbard. I can’t imagine they lied when reporting her assurance that no nukes were in Iran’s pipeline. Nor could they have possibly misunderstood a simple binary proposition: Iran either developing nuclear weapons or not.

I have a much better explanation for this little mishap. Tulsi Gubbard is an incompetent sycophant who regularly commits the deadliest sin of an intelligence officer: telling her superiors only what they want to hear.

For example, she makes strong pro-Putin noises because she knows that’s what pleases Trump at the moment. If Trump changes his tune, Tulsi will sing in chorus, possibly citing new intelligence. Back in March, it suited Trump to believe that Iran wasn’t trying to build nuclear weapons, so that’s what she told him.

For the president then to say that intelligence really showed something very different was tantamount to agreeing with my description of Tulsi as an incompetent sycophant. Sycophancy Trump clearly doesn’t mind, but sometimes it no longer makes up for incompetence in his eyes.

Let’s remember that US presidents get daily briefings from top intelligence officials. Hence Trump saw exactly the same data as Tulsi had seen, and read exactly the same conclusions drawn by the analysts.

Discounting the idea that Iran wasn’t over-refining uranium beyond any peaceful application in March but has since begun to do so, Trump a) knows that Tulsi misleads him and b) is no longer prepared to tolerate that because he now wants to hear the truth.

The truth is that the ayatollahs have been working towards developing nuclear weapons – there is absolutely no doubt on that score. It’s also true that they are crazy enough to use such weapons on Israel, especially since we now know her Iron Dome is rather porous.

That could happen within months, as Trump said, or within weeks, as Tulsi changed her mind to admit. But either way, that’s not a chance either Israel or the US could take.

For it can’t be gainsaid that such a scenario would be mortally dangerous not just for Israel but for the whole world. Israel would doubtless respond in kind, and a nuclear war would break out in the Middle East, with a good chance of its spreading outwards.

The ayatollahs’ hatred of the West in general is only exceeded by their hatred of Israel, and if their missiles can break through Israel’s defences, I doubt the defences of France or Britain would be more impregnable.

With a little help from her Russian ally, Iran could even conceivably get ICBMs with enough range to hit America’s eastern seaboard. After all, ‘Death to America’ rivals ‘Allahu Akbar’ on the list of popular Iranian chants, and the mullahs sing it from their minarets with the same febrile conviction.

That’s why Trump made the decision to join Israel’s attempts to defang Iran’s nuclear capability. I don’t know whether it has been obliterated, as the president claims, or only badly downgraded, but in any case the decision was morally correct and strategically sound.

As a side benefit, even if Trump may not see it as such, Iran will no longer be in a position to offer meaningful help to her military ally, Russia. Having lost his Syrian foothold in the Middle East, Putin will now be deprived of an even more powerful ally, one capable of supplying weapons for the war on the Ukraine.

As for Tulsi Gubbard, she was one of Trump’s eccentric appointments inspired by his seeing loyalty to him personally as not only a necessary condition, but at times also a sufficient one. Giving her the world’s most important intelligence brief was a mistake, but I’m sure the president will now correct it.

In that context, I remember the story of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, whose cantankerous nature had had him shunted to a purely administrative post before the Second World War.

However, after Pearl Harbour, Roosevelt instantly brought King back and gave him the second-highest command in the US Navy. “When the shooting starts,” commented the old warrior, “they send out for the mean sons of bitches.”

In other words, the roar of guns heralds the arrival of able people good at their jobs, and the dismissal of those good only at advancing their careers. If I were a betting man, I’d bet a small fortune on Tulsi being sacked soon. But I’m not, so I won’t.

What I will do is take this rare chance to utter words that don’t often cross my lips: well done, Mr President.  

The Daily Mail is supposed to be conservative, and by and large its editorial content is, in the sense in which conservatism is understood these days.

Or rather misunderstood. Conservatism in its proper, English, meaning is above all about style, manners, temperamental predisposition, prudence, self-restraint and common sense.

It’s emphatically not a political philosophy, economic theory or, God forbid, ideology. That doesn’t mean that conservatives don’t care about politics or economics. They do. However, such quotidian concerns are strictly derivative.

People arrive at conservative views because they are conservatives. They don’t become conservatives because they hold conservative views.

Since so few people understand this, the term ‘conservative’ is routinely misused these days to denote, inter alia, an economic libertarian or a populist. Thus, for example, some MAGA Americans who derive their concept of English conservatism from MailOnline at best, or from Steve Bannon at worst, regard Tommy Robinson as every inch conservative, which he every inch isn’t.

And they fail to understand why I don’t see their current president as a fellow conservative. Isn’t he trying to stop illegal immigration? He is. But there’s more to conservatism than that.

English conservatives don’t suffer from such misapprehensions, or at least shouldn’t. The problem is that many Britons accept things American uncritically, including fast food, revolting soft drinks, verbs made out of nouns – and the definition of conservatism.

Back to The Mail now. It’s an axiom that mass publications should cater to the masses. If they don’t, they won’t remain mass publications for much longer. This explains why I had to qualify my description of The Mail as a conservative paper.

It can only be as conservative as its readers, which, to me, means not very. The paper still employs a couple of truly conservative columnists, but its general thrust is vectored more and more towards the populist end.

(In spite of that, the paper has lost some two-thirds of its circulation in the past five years, but I suspect on-line offerings have more to do with that than a slide towards populism. Yet the slide is noticeable.)

Yesterday I looked at two articles in The Mail, one about Royal Ascot, the other about the euthanasia vote in Parliament. Each had a feature asking the readers to vote for or against the simple propositions based on the stories covered.

The instantly available poll results prove that The Mail is becoming less conservative, as I define the word. Alas, conservatives seem to be a minority in the paper’s readership.

The first article dealt with Royal Ascot, a five-day racing event that’s the highlight of the summer social calendar in Britain. The outing is truly royal: it was founded by Queen Anne in 1711. Since then, the monarchs have been appointing representatives to administer the Royal Racecourse on their behalf.

The event is always graced by the monarch’s presence, emphatically including our late queen, herself a breeder of thoroughbreds. King Charles was in attendance this year in spite of being poorly, and God bless him.

Such a royal pedigree turns Ascot into a magnet for inveterate social climbers. While in our aristocratic past the races used to be the playground of nobility, today they also attract socially insecure individuals hoping that some of the royal glitter will rub off on them.

The moment the event draws to a close, the wives of accountants, sales managers and stockbrokers begin to campaign for next year’s pass to the Royal Enclosure. There a strict dress code going back to Beau Brummel still holds sway: morning dress and top hats for men, formal daywear and elaborate hats for women.

Hoi polloi outside that area, mainly the less enterprising accountants and their wives, still tend to follow suit more or less, with men dressed, and women undressed, formally. Both sexes watch the races with half an eye, the rest of their sight scanning the Royal Enclosure hoping to spot pop stars, retired footballers and other celebs hobnobbing with the princes and princesses.

Champagne gushes in a steady torrent in both areas, but by and large those in the Royal Enclosure handle it better than the accountants and sales managers. Their natural habitat isn’t so much Ascot as the local boozer, and they do their utmost to turn the former into the latter typologically.

Once the combination of drink and hot weather takes effect, the atmosphere develops that magic je ne sais quoi that has English stag and hen parties banned from bars around Europe. And, both last year and this, fisticuffs broke out, as they invariably do on the grounds of Millwall FC.

This year two suited and booted gentlemen went at it hammer and tongs, with the one less handy with his fists ending up bloodied on the ground. All par for the course, I dare say, although in the past that particular course was spared such entertainment.

Having covered that unsightly brawl in a lengthy article complete with gory photographs, The Mail asked its readers: “Are you shocked by this behaviour?” And what do you know, 53 per cent answered no. This means that over half of the paper’s readers don’t have a conservative bone in their bodies.

Another poll appeared in the article about Parliament’s having passed a bill empowering our sainted NHS to offer suicide services to patients not expected to live beyond six months.

Any proper conservative would be appalled by this legislation for any number of reasons, moral, religious, aesthetic – and practical. As I can testify from personal experience, doctors can get such forecasts terribly wrong. In my case, a Scottish haematologist told me “your prognersis is pure” (as best I can reproduce his accent), yet here I am, chuckling about this 20 years later.

I’ve written about this abomination many times in the past, citing examples of the Netherlands and Oregon, the only US state where assisted suicide is legal.

In Holland, doctors have been known to kill even patients who tried to change their mind at the last moment. This reinforces my belief that, once euthanasia becomes legal, sooner or later it’ll become compulsory.

And both in the Low Countries and Oregon, many patients choose accelerated death for fear of being a burden on their families. Shame on the families who go along with that, and shame on the doctors who kill people not to fritter away their estate on bothersome care.

This was a free vote, with the Whips putting their lashes aside. Still, I would have expected the vote to go along party lines, and Labour enjoys a 156-seat majority. Yet the bill only got a majority of 23, with even the Labour Health Secretary Streeting voting against it.

Where the outcome wasn’t paper-thin was in the Mail poll, with 61 per cent replying yes to the question “Do you agree with legalising assisted dying?”. I wonder what Mr Hippocrates would have to say about this bill.

But just think about it: even over a hundred Labour MPs voted more conservatively than almost two-thirds of The Mail’s readers.

Considering that another bill, abortion on demand at any stage in pregnancy, had sailed through Parliament only a few days earlier, our Labour and other socialist MPs aren’t overly concerned about such outdated notions as the sanctity of human life.

Still, many of them found the euthanasia bill unsafe, correctly anticipating its practically guaranteed potential for abuse. No such compunctions among most readers of a supposedly conservative paper.

If this is what British conservatism has become, include me out, as they say in Oregon.    

Peter Hitchens has added another string to his bow. In addition to regurgitating Kremlin agitprop for the benefit of his gullible readers, he now regales them with deranged drivel on the subject of Iran and Israel.

Moreover, he has found a way of weaving the two subjects together into some sort of synthesis. If we lived in a sane world, the result would attract the attention not of a critic bearing arguments, but that of the men in white coats bearing a straitjacket and heavy sedation.

But the world we live in isn’t sane, so let’s pretend Mr Hitchens is and take his turgid musings at face value. In that spirit, let’s begin with this statement that sets the stall:

“For instance, it is pretty much agreed by everyone (except the Kremlin) [and Hitchens himself, I’d be tempted to add] that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a wicked and blatant breach of international law. But when Israel launched huge bombing raids against Iran,… the silence from those in the West who have angrily condemned Russia for years was so dense you could have cut it into cubes.

“How can this be? There may be a technical difference between invading a country’s territory with tanks and troops, and invading its airspace with showers of high-explosive bombs and rockets, but there is not much difference if you are on the receiving end.”

And so forth, in the same vein. You tell me, is the man sane?

Just imagine an English journalist writing immediately after D-Day, that he couldn’t understand how the same people who had decried the Nazi invasion of Normandy in 1940 welcomed the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. “There may be a difference between invading France from the sea and invading her on land,” he would have written, but the difference is merely technical.

Someone less familiar with Hitchens’s oeuvre might think he is merely criticising Israel’s actions, not vindicating Russia’s. But someone cursed with such familiarity would easily detect familiar notes.

In case the author is not only deranged but also dumb, allow me to elucidate the difference that so baffles Hitchens. Putin’s fascist regime invaded a neighbour that presented no threat to Russia whatsoever, violating every international and moral law.

One could say that even Hitler’s grievances against France had more substance to them than Putin’s against the Ukraine. And yet his hordes of murderers, torturers, looters, kidnappers and rapists, have been terrorising the Ukraine for over three years, reducing her cities to rubble.

Even if the Ukraine weren’t our ally, anyone with a modicum of moral sense (a category that demonstrably doesn’t include Hitchens) would agree it’s our moral duty to support this victim of aggression. But the Ukraine is indeed our ally, so supporting her makes sense not only morally but also strategically – especially since Putin doesn’t even bother to conceal that he regards the Ukraine as part of his long-term war on the West.

Still, let’s read on: “Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has also openly said that he intends, by his attack, to overthrow the government of Iran. How is this his business?”

Someone who can ask that question won’t understand the answer. This, though the reply is simple: the government of Iran has been industriously working towards its self-proclaimed goal of murdering every one of the seven million Jews residing “between the river and the sea”.

As part of achieving that objective, the ayatollahs have been busily developing nuclear weapons, credibly promising to use them on Israel once they are ready. The Israelis, on the other hand, have always explained to the world, sensibly, that the size of their country leaves them no margin for error.

They can’t just sit back and wait to be incinerated by Iranian warheads. The Israelis are prepared to do whatever it takes to defend the lives of their brothers and sisters. If that involves bombing Iran into the Stone Age, the direction in which the country has anyway been moving since 1979, then so be it. And if Iran’s fascist government falls as a result, so much the better.

Of course, Russia couldn’t stay out of the narrative for much longer: “Some defenders of Israel’s behaviour respond that it was provoked by various actions by Iran…

“Russia was also provoked by years of eastward Nato expansion and the siting of new missiles in Europe by the USA. But the same sort of people who now excuse Israel’s action –  because of Iranian provocation – have always idiotically claimed that Russia was not provoked, despite all the evidence that it was.

“In any case provocation… is not a justification for aggressive violence, in law or morals. Only fools react to being provoked. It just helps to explain it, and to show that morality in foreign policy is so much bunk.”

God bless him, the man can find moral equivalence everywhere he looks, not just between Russian bestial aggression and Israel’s desperate self-defence, but even between different kinds of provocation. Again, this kind of moral and intellectual numbness is borderline psychotic, at least.

Let’s put this in everyday terms.

Situation A: A man wearing a business suit walks through a bad part of town at night. The local thugs, provoked by this apparition from another world, knife him.

Situation B: The same man happens to be armed. When knife-wielding thugs come at him, he brandishes a gun and shoots them.

In both cases, provocation could be cited. But in Situation A, it was made up for criminal purposes, while in Situation B it was real and called for a legitimate response.

I’m sure you can see the difference. Hitchens can’t, or won’t.

He then inveighs against the very idea of a regime change brought about by external force. Essentially, he is saying be careful what you wish for. Weren’t Saddam’s regime in Iraq, Gaddafi’s in Libya and Assad’s in Syria followed by something even worse?

They were. However, that doesn’t mean that any forcible regime change is ipso facto detrimental. Back in 1944, the Allies were dead-set on forcing a regime change in Germany and Italy, and I’d suggest that worked out pretty well.

Iran is different from the countries so dear to Hitchens’s heart. She has a strong, if suppressed, opposition not only to the ayatollahs but even to Islam, which many educated Iranians see as an alien religion thrust down their throats. The older people among them still remember the reasonably civilised life under the Shah

It’s extremely unlikely that, should the present regime be overthrown, it will be followed by crazed Hezbollah types. And a certain measure of outside control over Iran’s armament programme wouldn’t go amiss either.

Yes, well, you see, Hitchens denies that the ayatollahs are trying to develop nuclear weapons. Who, Iran? Not on your nellie.

“Then there is the complaint that Iran is planning to build nuclear weapons. Well, it may be. But back in 2015, with the blessing of the then US President Barack Obama, the West made a deal with Iran to prevent this from happening, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)… The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Tehran was abiding by these and other conditions.”

And anyway, “Even if the Iranians could enrich enough uranium to make warheads, it could still take another year for them to make a deliverable nuclear weapon.”

I’m sure the Israelis are heaving a sigh of relief even as we speak. They aren’t going to wonder what will happen after the year is out.

“But in [2018] Mr Netanyahu declared that Iran had been hiding a secret nuclear weapons programme, putting it in breach of the deal it had signed.

“Very soon afterwards Donald Trump, then in his first term as President, pulled out of the arrangement. He said it was ‘a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made’.”

The reason Trump did that awful thing was that Iran was blatantly cheating on that agreement. For once, I say “well-done, Mr President”.

Hitchens says something else: “Mr Trump yesterday repudiated the recent assessment, by his own hand-picked Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, that Iran has not been building a nuclear weapon. US intelligence agencies have quietly been saying this since 2007.

“It is extraordinary for a President to have such an open quarrel with the intelligence establishment. The row suggests that Mr Trump has in fact decided to join Israel’s attack on Iran.”

I certainly hope so. Only US B2 bombers carrying Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs are capable of destroying the Fordo nuclear complex located deep under a mountain range.

As for the intelligence that inspired Israel’s action, I doubt the Israelis solely relied on the information provided by a US agency led by a silly Putin admirer with no background in either intelligence or global politics.

It’s commonly believed the Mossad is the world’s best intelligence agency. Moreover, as the past few days have proved, it runs a wide and effective spy network in Iran. Surely they had some intelligence of their own, and acted on it because they had to?

But even supposing that Iran was close to obtaining nukes, it was only fair: “But the great irony is that Israel itself has been hiding a secret nuclear weapons programme, which it began in face of strong American hostility (especially from JFK), and has done so since 1966.

“So Mr Netanyahu’s shocked outrage at Iran’s nuclear secrecy seems a little overdone, even hypocritical. So does Mr Trump’s outrage against Iran.”

It’s that moral equivalence again, this time between a country planning to use nuclear weapons for unprovoked mass murder, and one relying on such bombs as last resort to prevent or, worse comes to worst, avenge such a crime.

“And so the double standards go on,” laments Hitchens. I should hope so.

What prompted Israel’s action was hard intelligence showing that Iran’s reactors are already achieving a uranium purity of 60 per cent. Considering that peaceful uses of nuclear energy require a purity of only about 3.5 per cent (bombs take about 90 per cent), one wonders what the ayatollahs have in mind.

In fact, the very same IAEA whose old report Hitchens saw fit to cite, has recently produced another one, concluding that Iran has already stockpiled enough enriched uranium to produce 10 nuclear warheads. It would have been criminally negligent for Israel not to have taken appropriate action.

One can only wonder how The Mail is continuing to publish such blatant misinformation steeped in bad faith and insane paralysis of mind and morals. Hitchens belongs either in the Kremlin or the loony bin, and I’d magnanimously leave the choice to him.   

Since I started putting my thoughts into the public domain some 35 years ago, I’ve been on the receiving end of many accusations, none of them just.

For example, I’ve been called a racist, which isn’t true. I genuinely believe that all men are brothers and feel no discomfort when meeting someone of a different race.

This is an intuitive feeling I had acquired long before I read Paul’s teaching about “neither Jew nor Greek”, although I’m grateful to the saint for putting into such poignant words something I’ve always sensed to be true.

However, while I believe that fundamentally all races are equal, that doesn’t mean they are the same. They all produce different cultures, and I happen to prefer the one produced by white Europeans.

That doesn’t mean I consider myself superior to, say, an Indian or an African. As I said, I’m not a racist. But I have to admit I’m a culturist, or would be if this word existed. I’m absolutely certain that European culture is better for me and – yes, I know the slings and arrows are about to come my way – better than any other in general.

It’s certainly the only one that’s indigenous to the West. Others sharing our living space should be welcome to live their lives according to the tenets of their own culture – as long as they realise that it’s a guest within ours, and guests should respect and accept the customs of their hosts.

Having cleared myself of the charge of racism, I must now state that neither do I deserve another charge sometimes levelled at me, that of misogyny. “Neither male nor female…” continued St Paul, and he wasn’t prophesising our epicene modernity.

On a personal note, I’ve always preferred the company of women to that of men, and nothing bores me more than an evening out with the lads. That’s one of the reasons I’ve never sought membership in any Pall Mall club (another reason is a near certainty that I wouldn’t be admitted).

Women, I think, are as good as men, and I’d even be willing to entertain the thought that they are better. However, it takes a uniquely unobservant, or else obtusely ideological, person to insist men and women are equally capable of performing the same tasks.

Women can take their innate house-keeping talents to the broader arena of business or public administration. The best post-war prime minister of Britain, and arguably her best monarch ever, were women, for example.

Even when women didn’t rise to the throne themselves they often had a civilising effect on their men, helping them climb to higher rungs on the cultural and spiritual ladder. It was often women who dragged many a royal husband from paganism to Christianity.

France, to name an obvious example, could have remained pagan way beyond 509 had Clothilde not put her foot down and forced her royal husband Clovis to see the light. (England went Christian a century earlier, as I don’t mind mentioning for the delectation of my French readers.)

Yet it’s hard not to notice that women, a few notable exceptions aside, such as Hildegard von Bingen, Héloïse and Elizabeth Anscombe, aren’t as good as men at more theoretical pastimes, such as philosophy, theology and mathematics.

The usual explanation that women have been historically barred from such fields doesn’t cut much ice. At the time the first two ladies I mentioned were leaving their glorious mark, at least as many women as men led a monastic life of contemplation. And Elizabeth Anscombe (d. 2001) certainly wasn’t the only contemporaneous woman with a PhD in philosophy.

It’s just that women’s and men’s brains are wired differently, which, I insist, certainly doesn’t mean that men are superior. Just, well, different.

Neither am I a homophobe, a charge once brought on me courtesy of the Press Complaints Commission that was responding to hundreds of complaints (some accompanied by death threats). I did lose my job at a national paper as a result, yet the charge was false.

I was simply suggesting that heterosexuals, even if they have the misfortune of being Christians, should enjoy equal rights to publicise their take on sexuality. At the time, homosexuals advertised their messages on London buses, whereas Mayor Boris Johnson said no to Christian groups that demanded equal time. Fair is fair, I wrote. Ideally, neither side should use such vulgar media to air its views, but if one is allowed to do so, then so should be the other.

My view of homosexuality is that it’s a sin. But then so is adultery, and he who is without sin… . Adultery is actually worse: after all, God mentioned it in His Ten Commandments, while leaving it for commentators like, again, St Paul to express opprobrium of same-sex hanky-panky.

I’m not going to parade the old cliché about some of my friends being homosexuals, although it is so. Let’s just say that the only moral teaching I recognise as valid says we should hate the sin but love the sinner, and again I accept it intuitively, not just rationally.

That, however, doesn’t mean we should love the sin and teach our children that there is nothing wrong with it, and there’s no such thing as sin anyway. Therein lies the kind of decadence that ushers in civilisational demise, and I don’t think you need me to cite historical examples of such downfalls.

Transphobia? Same again: I certainly don’t hate, and neither am I irrationally scared of, people suffering from gender dysphoria. I’m genuinely sorry for them – but I feel even sorrier for any society that promotes sex change as an inalienable human right to be upheld from the public purse. I don’t hate transsexuals, but I certainly hate teachers who indoctrinate little tots to ponder their sexuality and change it should they find it wanting.

Again, this is another charge to which I emphatically plead not guilty.

However, there is another accusation, that of ageism, that I’ve never had thrown in my face. People must assume that, as an old man myself, I can’t possibly be guilty of that awful failing.

Yet I am, M’lud, guilty as not charged. And it’s specifically because I identify with other old men, understand their strengths and weaknesses, that I don’t think – as a general rule – that men in their 70s or older should be allowed to hold a public office of any import.

Just as I mentioned Elizabeth Anscombe as an exception in another context, you may mention Winston Churchill who led his country through a world war in his 70s, or Konrad Adenauer, who presided over the German economic miracle in his 80s. But you know what they say about exceptions that prove the rule.

Old men accumulate wisdom and experience that can make them invaluable advisors to princes, presidents and prime ministers. That’s why countries have throughout history had councils of elders keeping the rulers on the straight and narrow.

But it takes more than just wisdom and experience actually to be princes, presidents or prime ministers. It takes physical strength, stamina, energy and cognitive sharpness, and such faculties always decline with age.

Thus I can trust myself to write an essay on political philosophy, but not to run a country day to day. My short-term memory isn’t what it used to be: if a few decades ago I could read a long poem once and memorise it for ever, now it would take me hours if not days to do that.

Physically, when I lived in Houston, in my 20s and 30s, I could outlast most tennis players in 100-degree heat and 95-per-cent humidity. I still play tournaments, but have to default when the temperature tips into the 90s.

If in my 40s and even 50s I could more or less go without sleep, now I can’t function without my six hours at night and, ideally, a short snooze in the afternoon. That alone should disqualify me from a serious public office, for presidents and prime ministers can find themselves in national emergencies that can’t be handled by the “old and grey and full of sleep”.

I’ve learned to compensate. For example, I now use bookmarks, which I never had to do in the past. When buying food, I have to write down a shopping list, something I never used to do.

When speaking in public, I nowadays rely on having the text in front of me – gone is the time when I could deliver half a dozen different lectures a day without ever once consulting any notes.

All things considered, I know I wouldn’t trust myself to run a country, even though – and I hope you’ll forgive such arrogance – I’m in better mental shape than Joe Biden ever was or (and I know the skies are going to open and the MAGA god will smite me with his wrath) Donald Trump now is.

Biden’s cognitive decline was plain for all to see, and it took criminal shenanigans on the part of his colleagues and family to insist that old Joe was fit for office. Trump’s age-related problems are so far less severe but just as obvious.

Geriatric decline is a gradual process, and the best way to diagnose it is to compare the way a person was to the way he is. So try to compare Trump in his first term with Trump in his second.

Five years ago, he was unpleasantly eccentric, but he was sharp as a tack. One could agree or disagree with Trump’s policies and ideas, but one couldn’t in good faith question his mental health or indeed common sense.

Alas, the 2025 vintage of Trump is different. In his off-the-cuff speeches he sometimes talks incoherent gibberish, often saying mutually exclusive things within five minutes of each other. I understand and sympathise: although a year and a bit younger, I too sometimes forget things I said five minutes ago.

Trump’s erstwhile narcissism has degenerated into what looks like delusions of grandeur. Hence he says things – and repeats them more than once in what psychiatrists call perseveration – that no sane US president would even think, such as conquering Canada and a good part of Denmark.

Trump changes not just his words but also his policies from one day to the next, and then back again. Remember that his words and policies cause an instant shockwave in the world, with markets collapsing, businesses going under, nations allied with America quaking in their boots.

In an eerie reminder of Joe Biden, Trump stumbled on the steps of Air Force One the other day, and I sympathise. I too am less firm on my feet than I was even a few years ago.

Just in case there is a groundswell of opinion that I should become the prime minister of Britain, I can only repeat the words of the American Civil War general Sherman, who dismissed suggestions he should make a run for the presidency by saying: “If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve.”

I’m just too old for the job, quite apart from a whole raft of other disqualifying characteristics. Mercifully, no one will be crazy enough to moot the idea of me at 10 Downing Street.

My point is that Biden was and Trump is also too old for his job, quite apart from a whole raft of other disqualifying characteristics. Yet the former was and the latter is the US president. This is no job for old men – take it from me.

Please don’t get me wrong. I realise it’s hardly sporting trying to hold President Trump to account for anything he says.

The Donald tends to run off at the mouth before, usually instead of, taking the trouble to think things through. As a result, he often changes his mind back and forth kaleidoscopically, with one lurid verbal picture ousting another, often with little gap in between.

Yet whenever the subject of Russia comes up, one leitmotif remains constant. Trump likes Putin and doesn’t really mind what he does to the Ukraine, whose president he doesn’t like. The Donald may at times be mildly critical of the Russian chieftain, but this is only an ornamentation on the main theme: Putin is a man after Trump’s own heart, and neither Zelensky nor America’s European allies are.

Hence, against my better judgement, I propose you join me in the ungrateful task of interpreting Trump’s remarks at the G7 meeting that drew to a close yesterday. I’ll be happy to entertain any conclusions that may diverge from my uncompromising statement in the previous paragraph. So here goes:

“The G7 used to be the G8. Barack Obama and a person named Trudeau didn’t want to have Russia in. And I would say that that was a mistake. Because I think you wouldn’t have a war right now if you had Russia in.”

What conclusions can one draw from these remarks? First, Trump doesn’t have much time for Barack Obama and ‘a person named’ Justin Trudeau, and for once I share his view. Obama was a bad excuse for a president, and Trudeau for a prime minister.

Justin in particular was a joke, but then he had a bad heredity pulling him down. His mother used to bestow her favours on all and sundry, mainly pop stars and Hollywood actors. And snapshots of her billowing skirt delighted tabloid readers by proving that Margaret Trudeau eschewed a certain undergarment that many ladies in her position would have found indispensable.

Her husband, Pierre, himself Canada’s PM, had the same ideological bend and intellectual vacuity as his son, but unlike him he also possessed quite some panache.

Once, I recall, he received a delegation of workers who had been on strike so long they complained they couldn’t even afford bread. Taking his cue from the apocryphal statement ascribed to Marie-Antoinette, Pierre said: “Mangez de la merde”. I’m not sure that was an improvement on the original, but you be the judge.

Getting back to Trump, things went downhill fast after that dig at politicians he justifiably dislikes. For one thing, Trump got his facts wrong, or at least their causal and temporal relationship.

Why was it a mistake to expel Russia from the G8? The reason Trump cites makes no sense at all. That action was taken in response to Putin’s having started a war with the Ukraine by illegally annexing the Crimea in 2014.

So is Trump saying that, had Putin been allowed to stay in the G8, he would have immediately sued for peace? Sorry, but that just doesn’t add up. Another thought comes more naturally: realising that Western powers are incapable of taking any punitive action, Putin would have escalated the war to a full-blown invasion even sooner.

Still, Trump’s next statement, that Putin “was insulted”, rings true, coming from Trump. It takes one hypersensitive egomaniac to know another, and Trump understands a mind so similar to his own.

“This was a big mistake,” Trump continued. “I can tell you that [Putin] basically doesn’t even speak to the people that threw him out, and I agree with him.” [My emphasis.] The implication is that Trump himself would have reacted to a personal slight in the same criminally irresponsible manner, and I believe him.

“Putin speaks to me. He doesn’t speak to anybody else,” added Trump, paraphrasing himself, as is his wont. Birds of a feather and all that, but what’s astonishing is that he seems proud of his unique status with that mass murderer.

Not that his rapport with Putin has done Trump’s diplomacy much good. Vlad puts his KGB training to good use by leading the US president up one garden path after another, while the criminal war goes on and Ukrainian civilians keep dying.

One would be forgiven for getting the impression that perhaps the best way to speak to Putin isn’t in ego-stroking words. Take it from someone who grew up in a city crawling with Putin types: a punch in the snout works much better. In this case, that pugilistic act can take the shape of imposing tougher and strictly enforced sanctions, while increasing supplies of armaments for the Ukraine.

Trump’s art of the deal doesn’t seem to include an aspect of once bitten, twice shy. Had he allowed his business partners to dupe him commercially as often as Putin dupes him politically, the Donald would have had to declare even more bankruptcies than he did.

Yet the man is nothing if not persistent. Dealt a bad hand, he decided to double down: Trump knows of no better candidate than Putin to mediate the Israel-Iran conflict.

That idea is insane on more levels than one finds in a Trump Tower. For one thing, since Iran and Russia are military allies, one suspects Putin would be ever so slightly biased in his mediating capacity.

Still, credit where it’s due, Trump’s suggestion succeeded in making even Manny Macron sound like a statesman. “Moscow could not be a negotiator because it had started an illegal war against Ukraine,” he said. I couldn’t have put it better myself, even though I do favour the definite article before ‘Ukraine’, for old times’ sake.

Trump also managed to make Sir Keir Starmer look good, which task had until then proved impossible for Labour publicists. Sir Keir manfully rejected the idea of readmitting Putin to the forum, saying he was “happy with the make-up of it.”

If it were up to Trump, all sanctions against Russia would be lifted, Putin would take his seat at the next conference of world leaders, and the Trump Organisation would finally be allowed to build tasteless towers all over Moscow and Petersburg.

Happiness all around, except in the Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe. They’d know exactly what was coming.

Two wars are raging in the world, 1,600 miles apart. One is in the Ukraine, the other in, or rather over, Iran, and either has a potential to escalate into a global Armageddon.

This means that it’s not just the parties directly involved but all of us who have a vested interest in the outcomes. We must join our efforts to help the victims and defeat the aggressors, and the starting point should be a clear understanding of which is which.

Unfortunately, much confusion reigns in that department, with both the strategic and moral implications of the ongoing wars woefully misunderstood or perverted. Most annoyingly, one hears a lot of pacifist noises about the awfulness of any war.

However, lumping all wars together is as unsound as speaking of religion in general. There is no such thing as religion in general – there are only distinct religions, each with its own way of looking at God and man. And there are no wars in general – each can be just or unjust, noble or criminal, holy or diabolical.

This used to be universally understood in the West. Christianity, while accepting that war is evil, still believes that there exist evils that can be even worse. If such evils can only be stopped by violence, then in that instance violence is to be condoned.

That’s why the Church, including such seminal figures as St Augustine of Hippo (whose The City of God first expressed the concept of just war in Christian terms) and St Thomas Aquinas, has always blessed righteous war for as long as it stayed righteous – and damned unjust war for as long as it stayed unjust.

When it comes to Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine, some Western leaders see that war as a schoolyard squabble between two naughty boys both of whom are equally at fault. Worse still, a few of those leaders (fine, you got me, it’s Trump I have in mind) go so far as to blame the Ukraine for starting the hostilities.

It takes a virulent case of moral impotence to see that war in such terms. Russia’s fascist regime invaded the Ukraine with the stated intention of dragging her back into the empire, whatever it happens to be called at the moment. To that end, Russia’s declared objective is to wipe out not only the Ukraine’s statehood but indeed the Ukrainian nation.

Putin and his ideologues have said a thousand times if they’ve said it once that, as far as they are concerned, Ukrainians are merely second-rate Russians; their language is but a dialect of Russian; their history is a sub-set of Russian history; their culture is on the margins of Russian culture. And if it takes disposing of millions of Ukrainians to drive that point home, then so be it.

Thus the war being fought by Ukrainians against Russian invaders isn’t one waged for a piece of territory. It’s a war of national survival, which makes it not only just but existential. Russia’s aggression, on the other hand, isn’t merely unjust but downright criminal.

Anyone who sees that war in terms of moral or any other equivalence abets that crime; anyone who sides with the Ukraine thereby proves that his moral compass is in working order.

For the moment, it’s just the Ukraine that’s the victim of Russian fascism. Yet if we take Russian chieftains at their word (always advisable when dealing with totalitarian dictators), they have in their sights not just the Ukraine, but also all the former Soviet republics.

That’s just for starters: the next step is to rebuild the Russian-Soviet Empire to its former grandeur, which includes conquering not only the whole of Eastern Europe but also Finland. This idea of gradually escalating fascist aggression lacks novelty appeal: just a couple of generations ago Hitler put it into gruesome practice.

If the Russian version of that kind of ideology isn’t stopped in its tracks early, the time will come when it will be too late to stop it by any means other than a cataclysmic war (of course, there’s always the option of capitulation too). Hence the West’s moral and strategic interests converge, and no ambivalence is possible. The Ukraine is us, Russia is them. As clearcut as it gets.

Now what about the brilliant Israeli strikes on Iran? Under attack there is a fascist, theocratic regime whose self-proclaimed objective is to annihilate Israel. This is even worse than Russia’s intention to destroy the Ukraine as a sovereign nation.

The Russians want to enslave the Ukraine, but they don’t wish to murder every Ukrainian. Granted, if they win the war, thousands, possibly millions, of Ukrainians will be exterminated. But most Ukrainians will be allowed to live.

Iran, on the other hand, doesn’t just want to extinguish Israel as a sovereign state. The mullahs want to massacre every Jew between the river and the sea, and the Israelis know exactly which river and which sea, even if many of their demonstrating Western enemies don’t.

Hence Israel’s cause, though as just as the Ukraine’s, is even more vital. If Iran, along with her allies and proxies, is allowed to have her way, every one of the seven million Israeli Jews will die the same deaths 1,200 of them suffered at the hands of Iran’s proxies on 7 October, 2023.

This ought to be clear to anyone with an IQ above room temperature (Celsius). As should be the realisation that demonstrating against Israeli’s strikes on Iran is tantamount to complicity in the mullahs’ crimes, past, present and future.

The crimes are monstrous. Iran has been promoting sanguinary instability in the Middle East since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and especially since the fall of Saddam in 2003. Hezbollah, Iran’s Shi’ite proxy in Syria and Lebanon, murdered hundreds of thousands and kept Assad in power for two decades.

Iran’s Sunni proxies, Hamas, kept running up their own score of corpses, mainly Israelis, until the 7 October massacre proved to be the last straw. By the way, the battle cry of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas isn’t just “Death to Israel”. It’s also “Death to the West!” or more specifically “Death to America!”

Nor is it just words. Iran used her Houthi proxies to cut off global shipping through major Middle Eastern waterways. This ought to be taken as a hint that, should the mullahs be allowed to develop a nuclear arsenal, it won’t be just Israel in mortal danger. Iran’s missiles can carry nuclear warheads to London and Paris as well, perhaps also as far as New York.

Iranian media have been bragging for a while that their country is within weeks of developing nuclear weapons. And anyone who doubts that, the moment they get those bombs, they’ll use them to incinerate Israel first and possibly Western cities second is either a fool or a knave or, as is the case with all those demonstrators, both.

In that connection, I’d like to propose a moratorium on Donald Trump’s use of the word ‘deal’ in any other than the purely commercial sense.

Two of our bravest allies are fighting wars of survival, not only their own but conceivably ours as well. Yet yesterday the US president had the gall to suggest that Israel and Iran strike a deal. Surely he must know that any ‘deal’ allowing Iran to keep even some of its nuclear facilities will sooner or later, probably sooner, enable the mullahs to get their hands on nukes.

Donald Trump lacks any capacity for self-reflection and learning from his mistakes. He has already made himself the world’s laughingstock by first promising to secure a ceasefire deal between Russia and the Ukraine within 24 hours.

That deadline was then extended to a fortnight, later to Trump’s first 100 days in office. Since then, he has been issuing ultimatums to Putin to agree to a deal within a fortnight — or else. These ultimatums have been ignored by Putin and renewed by Trump every fortnight with metronomic regularity.

With Israel too, rather than advertising his much-vaunted art of making a deal, Trump should provide IDF with B2 bombers and the unique bunker-busting ordnance they carry. Better still, the US Air Force should fly those bombing missions itself. That would put paid not only to Iran’s nuclear facilities but also to the country’s fascist theocratic regime.

Which, incidentally, is adopting the tactics of its Hamas clients, but on a much larger scale. All those criminals are aware of the political capital they earn with every Muslim civilian killed. When the pile of bodies grows high enough, Western cities will be overrun with thousands of mostly youthful cretins who seem to think that Israel should just sit back and wait quietly for its impending demise.

Hamas’s puppet masters are doing exactly the same in Iran. Knowing for years that an Israeli attack would come eventually, they’ve decided not to build any bomb shelters and not to install any raid-alert sirens. Instead, they’ve adopted the Hamas trick of siting their military facilities and command centres in residential quarters, hoping to end up with enough dead children to rally those Western cretins against Israel.

So far, Israeli strikes have been delivered with surgical precision, with laser-guided bombs hitting the bedrooms of their targets without damaging the rest of the buildings. Yet some civilian casualties have inevitably occurred, and there will be more.

Here it’s worth remembering that the anti-Israeli rallies started in London and Paris on 8 November, 2023 – before the Israelis even responded to the Hamas massacre the previous day. Since then, Palestinian, effectively Hamas, flags have been flying everywhere every day.

I expect nothing else this time, and Israel had better work fast before the weak-kneed Western governments bow to what is called ‘public opinion’ and start exerting intolerable pressure on Israel to desist. Really, the West has become too spineless, probably also too stupid, to survive.

Anti-Polish propaganda in Russia has reached a hysterical pitch, and its general tone is worryingly similar to the shrieks coming out of the Kremlin in the runup to the 2022 invasion of the Ukraine.

Since such poisonous seeds fall on a ground happy to receive them, some historical background won’t go amiss. So let’s just say that this sort of thing didn’t start with Putin, although he is doing his level best to uphold the fine tradition of hostility.

Russians tend to dislike Poles, a feeling fully and justifiably reciprocated. So fine, this is a generalisation, and I for one know a few Russians who feel no animosity towards their western neighbours.

Yet the Russians who matter, the ruling elite, aren’t, and never have been, in any way similar to my friends. For details, I suggest you read Dostoyevsky’s Diaries. You’ll find that the writer’s hatred of the Poles was only exceeded by his loathing of the Jews.

To Dostoyevsky, along with Russian chauvinists both before and after him, the Poles betrayed the holy (and wholly mythical) cause of pan-Slavic solidarity by adopting Catholicism, not Orthodoxy. A different confession produced a different ethos, with the Poles heavily leaning towards Western Europe, especially France.

Dynastic and cultural exchange between the two countries has been brisk throughout history. Poles would become kings or queens of France, a French woman was once the queen consort of Poland. And luxuriant flowers of Polish arts, such as Chopin, Mickiewicz and Apollinaire, blossomed in the soil of France.

They still retained their Polish patriotism though, which by the 19^th century had left little room for affection towards Russia. Three partitions of Poland, in 1772, 1793 and 1795, put paid to Polish independence, with a great part of the country incorporated into the Russian Empire.

Any geopolitical grievances the Russians may have about Poland are more ancient, going back to the early 17^th century, specifically the blood-soaked interregnum known as the Time of Troubles.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth played a role in what was effectively a Russian civil war. Taking sides with one party against the other, the Commonwealth tried to put its own man on the Russian throne, and Polish troops even occupied Moscow in 1610-1612.

Since then, hostilities between the two countries have been mostly one-sided, and never more so than during Soviet times. When the Russian Civil War was winding down in 1920, the Bolsheviks launched a massive assault on Poland, which they declared was the first stage in their march on Berlin and Paris.

Such plans weren’t totally madcap. Lenin sensed, correctly, that the demob-happy masses in Germany, France and Britain had little appetite for another war. Luckily for the West though,  the Polish cavalry frustrated those plans by routing the Russians in the Battle of Warsaw.

That added fuel to the fire of Russian anti-Polish sentiments. The crimes the subsequent Stalin regime committed against Poland and Poles are well documented, but some are better known than others.

In 1939, Stalin and Hitler agreed to divide Poland between them, with Stalin claiming his half just 16 days after Hitler claimed his. The subsequent execution by the NKVD of over 20,000 Polish prisoners taken during that short campaign has since received much publicity, and even the Soviets eventually disavowed their lying denials of the massacre.

Less known are the mass, often deadly, deportations of ethnic Poles in Russia throughout the 1930s, before the war started. That didn’t do much to endear the Russians to the Poles, and neither did the decades of post-war Soviet domination after Poland had been delivered to Stalin at Yalta.

When communism collapsed, Russia and Poland adopted different trajectories in their development. Russia converted its communism into a fascisoid fusion of KGB and organised crime, while Poland stayed her traditional pro-Western course, if not without some hiccups caused by the post-Soviet reflux.

Russia’s ruling KGB elite found that intolerable. If former Soviet colonies do better than the metropolis, what kind of signal does that send?

Anti-Polish propaganda picked up momentum, and it was backed up with action. In 2010, Lech Kaczyński, the fiercely pro-Western President of Poland, along with 95 other passengers, was killed when his plane crashed outside Smolensk.

Subsequent analysis has proved irrefutably that the plane was blown up by a bomb, with the cui bono principle pointing an accusing finger at Putin and his clique. The Kremlin is naturally denying any involvement, just as it took Putin’s Soviet predecessors 50 years to acknowledge their Katyn massacre.

But Poles know what’s what, just as they know that, once a ceasefire has been agreed in the Ukraine, their turn may come next. Russia can’t exist without focusing the nation’s passions on some external enemy, and historically Poland has done nicely.

The three Baltic republics may well be the most immediate target but, with their combined population one-sixth of Poland’s, the Russians see them as small fry. Poland, on the other hand, has become a flourishing Western power since shaking off the tethers of Russian bondage. The Kremlin clique finds that offensive, especially since the Poles show little sympathy for the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.

Even though historically relations between Poland and the Ukraine have never been especially cordial, putting it mildly, ever since the full-scale Russian aggression started in 2022, the Poles have been among the Ukraine’s staunchest supporters. In contrast to most Western countries, they have no trouble realising that the Ukraine is fighting not only for her own freedom, but also for that of Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe – at least.

That’s why, unlike her Western European NATO allies, Poland’s defence spending not only meets the miserly target of two per cent of GDP, but more than doubles it. The Poles know what to expect from a fascist Russia, and they are doing their best to be prepared.

The Russians sputter sputum at the defensive measures taken by Poland. Each is described as a “manifestation of Russophobia”, a vice defined as resisting Russian imperial expansion in any way. When Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk recently announced the military training of 100,000 volunteers, sputum burst out in a geyser-like eruption.

Putin’s stooge, Medvedev, former president of Russia, leads the chorus of abuse by branding Poland as “a hysterical, rude, arrogant, and ambitious enemy”. Threats of nuclear retaliation thunder out of the Kremlin and in the Russian media.

Meanwhile, Poland finds herself on the receiving end of what the Russians call ‘hybrid warfare’, including subversion, sabotage and cyberattacks. And Kremlin propaganda is whipping up hostility towards Poland in what looks like an attempt to rally its own population for another war.

Whenever smaller nations dare resist Russian aggression, they are always described as proxies of a West historically bent on subjugating (enslaving, annihilating, colonising, exploiting, take your pick) Russia. But, as believers in the old principle of divide et impera, the Russians tend to particularise that overall enemy.

Thus, until recently both Poland and the Ukraine had been proclaimed as “US satellites”, proxies in the unrelenting war the dastardly Yankees have been waging against Russia since time immemorial. America was designated as “Enemy Number One” under the Soviets and kept that exalted status until Donald Trump became president.

Since then, the US has lost her top ranking in the enemy stakes, which honour has passed on to Western Europe, mainly Britain and France. Threats to “turn America into radioactive ash” and create a strait between Canada and Mexico have been replaced with detailed explanations of how Britain could be sunk with one superbomb, while other types of ordnance would inflict more terrestrial devastation on France.

In that spirit, Poland is now portrayed as the attack dog of London and Paris, an “aggressive neighbour” that “is being prepared for war with Russia”. As proof of such preparations, the Kremlin cites the recent agreement Poland has signed with France, Italy and Spain. That treaty has according to the Russians effectively turned Poland into an instrument of Macron’s “anti-Russian” policy, and I never suspected Manny of such bellicosity.

This reminds me of the thief screaming “Stop thief!” at the top of his lungs as he runs away from his pursuers. Russia has traditionally blamed others for harbouring aggressive plans just as she herself was mobilising for a massive invasion.

That happened in the early 1800s, the early 1900s, the 1930s, throughout the Cold War, and it’s happening at present. Putin is merely picking up the relay baton from, respectively, Alexander I, Nicholas II, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev.

I doubt Russia will be in any position to launch a full assault on Poland for at least a couple of years after a ceasefire in the Ukraine, whenever that comes. After all, the Poles are forewarned and they are forearmed, or trying to be. And, Article 5 or no Article 5, they are likely to receive support from at least some other NATO members.

However, the shift in the focus of Kremlin propaganda is interesting, and it merits serious strategic analysis, provided the West still possesses the requisite know-how.

Russia has stepped on a militant merry-go-round, and it’s gathering speed so fast that jumping off may well become impossible. As Macbeth says, “I am in blood. Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

Less poetically speaking, crimes may multiply to a point where the perpetrator has to go on since changing his ways is no longer possible. Hence allowances must be made for Russian leaders acting irrationally. Should it come to that, an attack on Poland may well happen even if we feel the odds may be stacked against Russia.

The Poles certainly think so, and more power to them. They saved Europe once, in 1920, and they may well have to do so again.

Like any siblings, the two allied countries share much of their DNA.

Both are governed by totalitarian regimes preaching a violent ideology with mystical overtones.

Both are bent on murderous expansion, although for the time being they go about that task differently. Iran does her murders mostly by proxy, whereas Russia is happy to do the dirty work herself.

Both seek to exterminate adjacent nations, to extend their own power and also just for the ideological hell of it.

Both have the strength of their criminal convictions. However, and this is often ignored, both show weaknesses common to many totalitarian regimes.

Since such contrivances rely on violence and propaganda to control their populaces, they know that large groups within their own countries despise their propaganda and detest their violence.

That’s why, when totalitarian leaders promote officials to prominent positions, they don’t necessarily go by the candidates’ intellect, industry and professional expertise. Coming to the fore instead are such qualifications as unwavering loyalty to the leader and a knack for paying gluteal obeisance.

Even aspiring authoritarian leaders of democratic countries, such as Donald Trump, may suffer from the same weakness, putting loyalty to them personally before competence.

Thus a chap whose sole experience lay in the area of flogging New York properties got the world’s most sensitive diplomatic job of negotiating with Russia, the Ukraine and Iran. Or a half-crazy anti-vaxxer got the health brief. Or a bibulous, heavily tattooed TV journalist was put in charge of defence.

But at least a civilised country has (one hopes) mechanisms in place to protect itself from excessive damage such incompetents can cause. Totalitarian regimes have no such mechanisms, which makes them vulnerable to otherwise preventable disasters.

Thus, within the space of less than a fortnight, both Russia and Iran suffered strategic damage at the hands of their smaller but ingenious and intrepid adversaries.

On 1 June, Ukrainian special services executed Operation Spider’s Web, using drones to destroy some 30 per cent of Russia’s strategic bombers. These were sited in remote airfields, some of them thousands of miles away from the Ukraine’s border. And yesterday, the Israeli Air Force hit Iran with Operation Rising Lion, targeting the country’s nuclear facilities and killing some of Iran’s top military leaders and nuclear scientists.

The scale of Rising Lion was greater than that of Spider’s Web. But the two operations shared one aspect that has to do with the inherent weakness of totalitarian regimes. Both relied on large networks of operatives on the ground.

The logistics of the two operations seem different in other respects. The Ukrainians only used drones launched from within Russia’s territory. They had to be no farther than some five miles from their operators, and their range to target was roughly similar.

This means Ukrainians had to drive those drone-launching lorries across the vast expanses of Russia, park them within 10 miles of the targets, launch the projectiles and then return to base undetected and unharmed.

The Russians actually suspected that something along those lines was afoot, which is why they had moved those bombers to remote airfields. And yet they failed to protect that strategic resource from that daring raid. One gets the distinct impression that Russian security forces are at their best roughing up dissidents, not doing a vital wartime job.

Ukrainians can pass for Russians easily enough, but that operation would never have succeeded without logistic support provided by local networks. Those lorries had to take days to get to the Siberian airfields, meaning that the vehicles had to be hidden overnight, while their drivers and drone pilots needed refuge and extensive guidance.

All of this points to a massive intelligence effort overlooked by Putin’s lackeys adept at praising their leader’s genius but themselves lacking most basic professional skills. The same goes for Operation Rising Lion.

Unlike those Ukrainian drones, Israeli planes took off from airfields within their own country. But they wouldn’t have scored such a remarkable success without a huge network of Mossad spies and – as important – local opponents of the mullahs.

Iran’s nationalists, monarchists, Westernisers and other implacable enemies of the Islamic Republic formed resistance groups that have for years collaborated with their natural ally, Israel.

Working hand in glove with Mossad and IDF, these courageous people identified a long list of strategic targets and also pinpointed the exact location of the officials slated for elimination. There was also much work done on the ground that was similar to Operation Spider’s Web.

The operatives created a drone base within reach of the targets and assisted in getting launching vehicles in position, which then went on to paralyse Iranian air defences. And, like their Russian colleagues, Iranian security services slept through all those extensive preparations.

Moreover, the Russians have had to contend with Ukrainian and pro-Ukrainian resistance only since 2014, and especially since 2022. The Iranian security services, on the other hand, have had almost half a century since their 1979 Islamic Revolution to root out resistance. And yet they’ve failed spectacularly – in spite of having no legal or constitutional constraints on their gruesome work.

Western security services do operate under such constraints, and they too sometimes suffer from incompetence. That’s why they often fail to protect their countries from terrorist attacks. As I never tire of repeating, in this world we aren’t blessed with perfect institutions, including security services.

However, in the West such lapses aren’t symptoms of a structural malaise, and most Western countries at least try to promote capable and intelligent people to sensitive positions. Totalitarian regimes select their personnel on different principles, and this is part of the reason all of them come crashing down sooner or later. Alas, if it happens later rather than sooner, they manage to run up a horrific score of death and devastation.

For the time being, we must congratulate the Ukrainians and Israelis for planning and executing operations that will be studied at military academies around the world for decades. I hope that, having exposed the weaknesses of the two allied totalitarian regimes, they can now also hasten their demise.  

As someone with a strong luddite streak, I am always sceptical about new technology and especially the grandiose claims made for it.

Such naysaying must have something to do with my latent humanism, understood in this case as love of people, flawed as they may be. When machines begin to encroach on human prerogatives, such as thought, knowledge and understanding, I’m prepared to man the epistemological barricades.

In terms of using new-fangled appliances, my approach is to go only for things I couldn’t do without, not those I could do with. Thus, though I’m writing this on an Apple computer, I must be the only man in His Creation who doesn’t own a smartphone.

The other day, when I pulled my antediluvian Nokia out at my tennis club, the coach asked me what on earth it was (he actually used a stronger word). Oh, it’s that outdated contraption, I explained. One that lets people talk to one another, rather than exchanging enciphered electronic monosyllabics. The young man’s expression reflected his genuine compassion for someone so obviously inadequate.

Years ago, when chess computers were making their first tentative moves, people argued whether the machines would ever be able to beat human masters. For once in my life, I belonged to the majority: most people were sure the human mind would always prevail over chips, diodes and wiring.

Well, we were wrong. Today’s chess software packages can wipe the board not just with masters but grandmasters, indeed world champions. They can beat human players as easily as a car can outpace a human runner, even if he happens to hold all sorts of records.

Now Artificial Intelligence is all the rage, and my misgivings are as strong as ever. If people expect Artificial Intelligence to make up for their lack of the natural kind, I keep saying, they are likely to come a cropper. An AI programme may translate a thoughtful article into Urdu or whatever, but it’ll never be able to write one.

And then, this very morning a good friend sent me an e-mail that has left my heartfelt convictions tottering if not yet collapsing. Even worse, I saw an imaginary redundancy note flashing before my eyes, a feeling of dread only assuaged by the realisation that I have no job to be fired from.

This is what my friend wrote: “I continue to be amazed by the burgeoning capabilities of AI, even though it’s still in its infancy. In response to the question ‘Can you write a few polemical paragraphs in the style of Alexander Boot, about a subject of your choice?’, it replied as below. Not a bad attempt, but clearly nowhere near as good as the real thing!”

Thank you for that last sentence but, having read the damn thing’s effort, I’m not so sure. Oh well, you be the judge. Here is that work of the devil trying to be me:

“Certainly. Here is a short polemical essay in the style of Alexander Boot, who is known for his acerbic wit, erudite prose, and unapologetic traditionalism. The subject: The Infantilisation of the Modern West.

“There was a time – recent, but now remote – when adulthood was both a state of being and a state of mind. Today, it is neither. The modern West, in its terminal stage of civilisational decline, has chosen the nursery over the academy, emotion over reason, and self-expression over self-mastery. We are governed not by statesmen, but by emotionally incontinent adolescents in ill-fitting suits, squealing about ‘lived experience’ as if feelings were epistemologically authoritative.

“Every institution, from the classroom to the cathedral, has become a playpen for perpetual children. Our universities, once crucibles of reasoned thought, now serve as daycare centres for hypersensitive ideologues, where the only dangerous idea is the suggestion that not all ideas are equal. The cathedral has not fared better: where once incense rose with solemn chant, we now get rainbow flags and sermons on recycling. There is more dignity in a Punch and Judy show.

“Responsibility – once the hallmark of the mature citizen – is now seen as oppressive. The idea that one must subordinate personal impulse to transcendent order is not merely foreign, but offensive. In this brave new infantilised world, the adult virtues – discipline, duty, self-denial – are recast as psychological pathologies. Stoicism is ‘repression’. Tradition is ‘trauma’. Orthodoxy is ‘violence’. One is reminded not of the Enlightenment, but of the spoiled brat on the floor of a supermarket, shrieking because he has been told ‘no’.

“The modern West, having rejected the authority of God, nature, and history, now genuflects before the altar of the Self – a god far less merciful and infinitely more capricious. Our civilisation, once built by grown men with spines of oak, now totters on legs of jelly, infantilised and insipid, afraid not of war or want, but of disapproval. And like all overindulged children, we may very well find that the nanny state cannot save us from ourselves.”

This kind of spooky parody can drive one to drinking earlier in the day than usual, if not yet to suicide. The electronic plagiarist writes with verve and in perfectly measured cadences. There isn’t a thing that Artificial Intelligence wrote that my natural, but obviously stale and formulaic, intelligence couldn’t have churned out.

Moreover, if my friend is right that AI is only in its infancy, what will it be able to do when it reaches maturity? Will future writers just tap in the subject, push the button and watch impeccable prose take shape before their very eyes?

Push another button, and the artificial piece instantly lands on the desk of an artificial editor equipped to enunciate in a perfectly censorious voice “You can’t say that”, “Take it easy on the God thing, will you?” and “I don’t want to have the PCC on my arse.” (That’s the Press Complaints Commission, for those of you in a different line of work.)

Actually, I’ve misled you: the e-mail in question wasn’t the first one along the same lines I’ve serendipitously received over the past couple of days. Another friend had already horrified me with her own efforts, but she sent them in a PDF format I can’t reproduce here.

Other than that, her AI output was as scary and its similarity to my style as uncanny. Where will it all end? If AI can cannibalise my writing so easily, will it set itself much loftier targets next? Aquinas? Shakespeare? Burke? Peter Hitchens?

My heart screams no, while my mind smirks yes, perhaps, can’t put it past that blasted thing. Yet that cloud isn’t without its own silver lining.

I stand convinced that even a prepubescent AI could do a better job of running the country than our government of nincompoops, as feeble of mind as they are febrile of ideology.

Given the choice of Labour, Tories or AI, I know which way I’d vote. AI couldn’t do any worse and, on the evidence of my friends’ missives, it can do a whole lot better.