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You know how it is. All sorts of petty concerns get in one’s way, and somebody’s birthday slips one’s mind. So here’s a belated happy birthday to Russia’s beloved statesman.

Vlad Lenin, the founder of the very same Soviet Union Vlad Putin wants to recreate, thereby reversing “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”, was born on 22 April.

There’s no date of death, for Lenin never died, at least not in the hearts of his grateful countrymen.

That godlike immortality was promised by posters providing the backdrop for my childhood: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!” Sure enough, Lenin’s canonised mummy still adorns Red Square, much to the delight of an adoring nation.

A birthday poll conducted by Levada Centre, Russia’s sole credible pollster, proved Lenin’s enduring popularity: 56 per cent of Russians rate him favourably, only 22 per cent negatively and as many neutrally.

As a lifelong champion of arithmetical democracy, I know the majority is always right. Therefore I shan’t say anything against the great man, instead allowing him to speak for himself through his letters:

“It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy.”

“Superb plan!… Pretending to be ‘greens’ (we’ll pin it on them later), we’ll penetrate 10-20 miles deep and hang kulaks, priests and landlords. Bonus: 100,000 roubles for each one hanged…”

“War to the death of the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intelligentsia… they must be punished for the slightest transgression… In one place we’ll put them in gaol, in another make them clean shithouses, in a third blacklist them after prison… in a fourth, shoot them on the spot… The more diverse, the better, the richer our common experience…”

“…In case of invasion, be prepared to burn all of Baku to the ground and announce this publicly…”

“Conduct merciless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and White Guard; if in doubt, lock them up in concentration camps outside city limits.”

“Comrades… this is our last and decisive battle against the kulaks. We must set an example: hang (definitely hang, for everyone to see) at least 100 known kulaks, fat cats and bloodsuckers; publish their names; take all their grain away; nominate hostages…; make sure that even 100 miles away everyone will see, tremble, know that bloodsucking kulaks are being strangled.”

“Suggest you appoint your own leaders and shoot both the hostages and doubters, without asking anyone’s permission and avoiding idiotic dithering.”

“I don’t think we should spare the city and put this off any longer, for merciless annihilation is vital…”

“As far as foreigners are concerned, no need to rush their expulsion. A concentration camp is better…”

“Every foreign citizen resident in Russia, aged 17 to 55, belonging to the bourgeoisie of the countries hostile to us, must be put into concentration camps…”

“Far from all peasants realise that free trade in grain is a crime against the state. ‘I grew the grain, it’s mine, I have a right to sell it,’ that’s how the peasant thinks, in the old way. But we’re saying this is a crime against the state.”

“I suggest all theatres be put into a coffin.”

“I’m reaching an indisputable conclusion that it’s precisely now that we must give a decisive and merciless battle to the Black Hundreds clergy, suppressing their resistance with such cruelty that they won’t forget it for several decades… The more reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we shoot while at it, the better.”

“…Punish Latvia and Estonia militarily (for example follow the Whites in a mile deep and hang 100-1,000 officials and fat cats).”

“Rather than stopping terror (promising this would be deception or self-deception), the courts must justify and legalise it unequivocally, clearly…”

In setting up history’s unique state, the recent birthday boy made full use of his legal training. He knew how to make laws sufficiently open-ended not to limit the state’s self-expression.

For example, Lenin once amended the proposed text of the USSR Criminal Code, one of whose articles stipulated the death penalty for “aiding and abetting the bourgeoisie or counterrevolution.” The great legal mind knew instantly that something was missing, but at first he didn’t know exactly what.

Then it dawned on him: the article wasn’t broad enough. Lenin took his trusted blue pencil out and inserted, after the words ‘aiding and abetting’, an invaluable amendment: “…or capable of aiding and abetting.” And behold, it was very good: anyone could now be deemed so capable and shot.

The same broad sweep shines through the excerpts above, something that was beyond the reach of such small-scale copycats as Hitler. Comrade Hitler identified the main enemy with narrow demographic precision: the Jew.

Hence there was a natural genetic and demographic limit on Nazi murders. They knew who was and who wasn’t Jewish, and how many people had drawn that short straw. Comrade Lenin regarded such restraints as amateurish, nay suicidal.

His bogeymen were identified as ‘the bourgeoisie’, but identified doesn’t mean defined. Who were they? Factory owners? Definitely. Landlords? Of course. But what about teachers, engineers, doctors, artisans? Those too, unless they proved otherwise.

Add to them the clergy and the kulaks (peasants, successful or otherwise, who resisted new serfdom), and you realise that the enemy slated for extermination was anyone Lenin didn’t like very much, the kind of people he called “particularly noxious insects”.

That cherished legacy was supposed to have been lost with the demise of the Soviet Union. But Lenin’s namesake is well on his way to restoring it at least partly. As another poster used to say: “Lenin’s cause lives on!”

The world, as we know, is governed by beastly cabals operating in the shadows. They must all be parts of a single network.

So far we’ve been unable to prove any such links, which only goes to show how good those ghouls are at covering their tracks. Yet we can expose those cabals one by one.

I’ve done just that with the dastardly Leather-Trousers Cabal (LTC). The evidence for it is irrefutable, but no one but me has been able to see it – they saw but they didn’t observe, in Sherlock Holmes’s phrase.

Just look at the facts. Who’ll become France’s president in a fortnight? Manny Macron. Who is and will remain Britain’s PM? Theresa May.

Do you get it now? No? Slow on the uptake, aren’t you?

Manny is, as you know, married to Brigitte Trogneux, a woman 25 years his senior, who used to be his teacher at the Lycée Saint-Louis de Gonzague. The school is commonly known as ‘Franklin’, but for the moment we’ll overlook the obvious allusion to freemasonry.

According to Manny’s classmate, all the 15-year-old boys at the school were instantly smitten by the 40 year-old-mother of three because she – brace yourself – wore leather trousers. That’s the LT in the LTC!

It’s unclear why post-pubescent boys would be so impressed by that garment in a country where pornography was readily available at every corner. Yes, leather emphasises the part of a woman’s body the French call cul, as in cul-de-sac. But that by itself can’t explain the hypnotic effect.

Note that Brigitte, now looking every one of her 64 years, still sports leather trousers even though her cul is best left deemphasised. Obviously, that garment has another, secret significance, that of symbolising LTC membership.

Obviously Brigitte wangled her way into Franklin to talent-spot and cultivate a future political leader, one she could control like a puppet on a string. It’s to that end that she seduced the 15-year-old Manny, dumped her husband and three children for him and gradually elevated him all the way to the Palais de l’Élysée.

Still unsure? Then get your head around this: another sixtyish woman, Theresa May, was during the leadership campaign taken to task by her fellow Tories for wearing – you get it – leather trousers.

Nicky Morgan and her other colleagues knew perfectly well what that garment signified, but they couldn’t come out and say it outright for fear of LTC reprisals. So they singled out for criticism the £955 price of the trousers, pointing out that the Turkish workers who had made them earned £1.49 an hour.

But you and I won’t be blinded by this smokescreen. We know that the fiendish LTC is gaining control of two major European countries on the way to world domination. However, according to some key members of the Liberal Democratic party, it’s facing competition from another cabal.

In 2010, Mr Ashuk Ahmed received a British Community Honours Award at the House of Lords for being an “inspirational role model for British Muslims as part of mainstream society”.

Mr Ahmed proved he was just that by improving “social cohesion”, but that wasn’t his only contribution to Britain’s political health. That’s why the LibDems selected Mr Ahmed as their parliamentary candidate.

That honour has now been withdrawn, obviously because his party got cold feet about Mr Ahmed’s earth-shattering revelations. For, like me, he has uncovered another nefarious plot – and, like me, vouchsafed his findings to public media.

Both the Labour and Conservative parties, he found, are controlled by “Zionist paymasters”. And not only they: Mr Ahmed shared a video produced by a respectable group called AshkeNazi in which it exposed “the current takeover of the United States by the Jewish Ashkenazi tribe”.

ISIS, explained Mr Ahmed irrefutably, was created by “Jewish media and their gentile pawns” in order to “justify more slaughter”. Not many people know this, he continued, but ISIS actually stands for Israeli Secret Intelligence Service, which calls itself Mossad only as a subterfuge.

Remembering that a picture is worth a thousand words, Mr Ahmed published an authentic photograph of Israeli PM Netanyahu eating children, with blood running down his chin. The caption stated the obvious: “blood sucking leech”.

Mr Ahmed isn’t the only politician who has added a whole new dimension to the party devoted to liberal democracy. Former MP David Ward has also been purged for stating the obvious:

“At long last the Zionists are losing the battle – how long can the apartheid state of Israel last?” “The Jews,” he explained, are “inflicting atrocities on Palestinians”. Mr Ward wasn’t going to take this lying down: he said he’d “probably” personally fire a rocket at Israel given half the chance.

Messrs Ahmed and Ward have joined a long list of martyrs suffering for their convictions at the hands of the Jewish conspiracy that, by the looks of it, controls not only the two main parties but also the LibDems.

And if you think the Jewish plot has nothing to do with the LTC, consider this fact. Before entering politics, Manny Macron, expertly guided by his LT controller, had made millions working for – are you ready for this? – a Rothschild bank! Say no more.

Actually, I shall say more. Watch this place for upcoming articles “Donald Trump, a secret Hassid”, “Jews go hell for leather” and “Isn’t modern politics fun?”

Banning the burka is a plank in UKIP’s electoral platform, and that structure is tottering under the impact.

The party is suffering the slings and arrows of outraged liberals and libertarians alike, yet another situation in which the two join forces.

In fact, such situations arise so often that one is tempted to ponder if there’s really much distance between the two. Semantic proximity notwithstanding, I suppose there is. Yet they are almost equidistant from conservatism.

Liberals, and I’m using the term in its modern rather than classical sense, are outraged for multi-culti reasons. To them, all religions are equally off limits for any restrictions, except perhaps Christianity.

Such egalitarianism means that all religions, especially Christianity, are equally irrelevant. No reasonable person can seriously believe that man was created by anyone other than Charles Darwin.

Yet all religions, except Christianity, have their uses. Prime among them is acting as a vehicle for expressing PC, multi-culti rectitude. Hence a woman wearing her black Halloween costume strikes a blow both for and against something.

For: she’s reasserting the ultimate equality of all before Notting Hill and Islington liberals. Against, here the list is much longer: she’s a walking attack on racism, Islamophobia, Christianity as the formative creed of our civilisation, the ‘establishment’, little-Englandism, the evil of conservatism, monarchy, social and cultural tradition – even implicitly homophobia, although the burka religion explicitly favours tossing homosexuals off tall buildings.

In other words, support for the burka isn’t worth taking seriously when it comes from such quarters. These quarters are only inhabited by fools or knaves, or typically those who combine these two aspects to the exclusion of all others.

The libertarian opposition to a ban on the burka merits a discussion, if only because libertarians, as distinct from liberals, somewhat overlap with conservatives. Unlike modern liberals and like modern conservatives, they are committed to individual liberty, which is good.

One can argue that ensuring and guarding liberty is the prime – some will say only – legitimate function of the state. That’s how it was seen by the great Whig Edmund Burke, who somewhat paradoxically is the spiritual founder of modern conservatism.

Yet there’s absolutely no doubt whatsoever that, if he were alive today, this unwavering champion of liberty would enthusiastically support the ban. For Burke, like every significant political thinker in history, from Aristotle onwards, understood the value of balance and moderation.

He knew that any political desideratum would turn to its opposite if pursued to the bitter end. That’s why he advocated limiting, rather than abolishing, state power, whether exerted through crown or parliament.

For Burke, sage government rested on three foundations: prejudice, which is intuitive knowledge; prescription, which is truth passed on by previous generations; and presumption, which is inference from the common experience of mankind.

Unlike Margaret Thatcher, our nominally conservative heroine, Burke would never have said that there’s no such thing as society – whatever the provocation (Mrs Thatcher was indeed provoked). He didn’t equate liberty with social atomisation and behavioural free-for-all.

Libertarians preach individual rights über alles, and society be damned, along with its traditions, tastes and its own right to self-defence. To them any restriction on any other than manifestly criminal behaviour is intolerable.

An individual is well within his rights to do anything that doesn’t hurt other individuals. Society, on the other hand, if it exists at all, has no right to censure anything it finds abhorrent – such is a libertarian tenet.

The belief that extreme views tend to converge is platitudinous but not invariably wrong.

Like the liberals, the libertarians have no time for custom and tradition – these to them have only antiquarian significance, if any. Like the liberals, they oppose only acts that are physically, rather than socially, harmful. Like the liberals, they are materialists who generally have no time for religion: religion, after all, is bound to impose restrictions on individual liberty (as opposed to individual freedom, a critical distinction that doesn’t exist in less precise languages, such as French).

However, they support unlimited liberty of religious expression not because they have much respect for faith of any kind, but because this liberty falls within the rubric of individual liberties in general. Hence their opposition to a ban on the burka.

An individual, they say, has every right to espouse whatever religion he fancies and therefore display in public any paraphernalia of his faith. What the religion is, what standards of behaviour it imposes, who espouses it, what crimes are routinely committed in its name, what offence it causes to ancient public customs – such considerations are immaterial to them.

Libertarians will oppose some Muslim customs, those they see as impinging on the rights of other individuals. I doubt many libertarians would welcome such Islamic practices as female genital mutilation, honour killing, the stoning of adulterers or tossing homosexuals off tall buildings. At the same time they’ll refuse to acknowledge the social and aesthetic offence caused by persons walking around with their faces covered up.

Yes, Muslims have an inalienable right to believe whatever they want. Society should have no say in the matter of private convictions. However, when such convictions are manifested publicly, society is no longer disfranchised.

In this case, it’s within its right to say that any British resident isn’t only a sovereign individual but also a social and legal entity. To act in that capacity, such a resident must be identifiable as distinct from other residents. Since a resident’s face is the most obvious and reliable means of identification, it should be open to inspection at all times.

Such elementary logic is beyond the libertarians. As is the simple truth that individual liberties, important though they are, shouldn’t be allowed to become a suicide pact.

Having said that, Marine and Manny still have ways to go before they catch up with our own Tony Blair.

This most revolting personage, himself a Labour politician, ever to reside at 10 Downing Street has called on traditional Labour supporters to vote for Tory candidates as long as they’re anti-Brexit.

That means membership in the EU – and eventually in the euro, which Blair has always wanted to join – is the only thing that matters to this Euro-spiv. Never mind all other principles espoused by the Labour party, objectionable though I may find them.

Why, some Labour voters are even patriots who don’t like the idea so close to what passes for Tone’s heart, that of the UK becoming a semi-autonomous province of Germany. And even those who feel differently still may take exception to the implicit statement that Britain’s domestic affairs don’t matter – only the EU does.

Marine and Manny still have something to learn about cynicism from Tone, but they’re able pupils, and the gap is closing fast.

Yesterday Marine issued an announcement that must have brought an approving smile on Tone’s shifty face. “National Front? Who, moi?” she exclaimed with indignation.

Rien can be further from the truth. Marine is no longer the leader or indeed a member of that diabolical organisation. She’s now just Marine, an independent candidate for the French presidency, one who – I’m paraphrasing only slightly – wants to raise her own powerlust above “partisan concerns”.

She stopped just short of claiming she’s not Jean-Marie’s real daughter – in fact, she was jointly sired by de Gaulle and Mitterrand on the wrong side of the blanket.

Jean-Marie must be aghast. Unlike his wayward daughter, he’s committed to his principles. The chief among them is that there was no Holocaust but, if those sales juifs don’t shut up about it, there will be.

But his prodigal offspring clearly sees her party, which after all raised her to her present position, as a ballast to jettison. If I were an FN member, I’d be upset.

This isn’t just cynical politics; it’s bad politics. Candidates may want to broaden their appeal, but while at it smart politicians avoid alienating their core support. To use the language of polling, breadth mustn’t come at a cost to depth.

Yet, rather than just alienating her core support, Marine has relieved herself on it through every available orifice. Naturally, she’ll try to wink at her fellow fascists and whisper that it’s only an ad hoc ploy designed to get her in power. But such a stage whisper will resonate throughout the country, and she’ll lose her depth without gaining any breadth.

Manny performed similar, if marginally less blatant, turnarounds twice. The first time was in 2009, when he ostensibly left the Socialist Party to continue serving it as a quasi-independent. The second time was in 2016, when he quit his post as Economy Minister in Hollande’s government, realising that any further association with François would put paid to his own political ambitions.

Unlike Marine, Manny has a record of having a top government job, which experience he holds up as a qualification for presidency. Nowadays people have an exaggerated faith in experience, but I’d suggest that no track record is better than Manny’s.

Under his tutelage, the French economy became a veritable basket case, featuring a soul-destroying unemployment rate of 11 per cent tout court and 25 per cent for young people. Manny also presided over an anaemic growth, exports stifled by the euro, unsupportable social costs made catastrophic by uncontrollable migration, constant strikes and riots – you name it.

It was under Manny’s expert guidance that Hollande introduced a marginal tax rate of 75 per cent, driving many enterprising young Frenchmen away and turning London into the world’s fifth largest French city.

As a fanatic of Germany-dominated European federalism, Manny supported – and still does – every harebrained economic policy practised by the EU, emphatically including its protectionism.

Hence he professed welcoming Britain’s departure from the EU because it spelled “the end of an ultraliberal Europe that the British themselves have pushed for, the end of a Europe without a political plan, centred on its domestic market.”

That an economy minister can be so catastrophically ignorant of basic economic concepts, not to mention political history, is most refreshing. So until our referendum the EU had had no ‘political plan’, Manny?

The EU has always had nothing but a ‘political plan’, which was communicated loud and clear by its founders. Jean Monnet, for example, explained that the economic jargon would only be used to camouflage the political goal:

“Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation.”

As to Britain having imposed her ‘ultraliberalism’ on Europe, Manny clearly confuses this concept with protectionism. That’s like confusing communism with civil liberties, a debt-riddled economy with fiscal responsibility and Manny Macron with statesmanship.

Such experience is worse than none, I dare say. However, Marine strikes a less than convincing argument in favour of economic virginity. Her own policies, if they rate the name, would knock the bottom out of the basket into which Manny’s ‘experience’ shoved the French economy.

The only area in which the candidates’ credentials are incontestable is the stratospheric heights of their self-serving cynicism. Tony Blair may not remain unrivalled for long.

Having topped the first round of French presidential elections, Manny Macron delivered a rousing oration stressing his patriotic, as opposed to nationalist, credentials.

No one pointed out that Manny’s pathos sounded, well, pathetic because he spoke against the backdrop of the EU flag. If you can stand a piece of avuncular advice, Manny, try le tricolore next time. That’ll offset the message better, believe me.

Actually playing lickspittle to Angie is the only discernible conviction Macron possesses. Angie acknowledged this by being effusive in her congratulations:

“It’s good that Emmanuel Macron was successful with his course for a strong EU and social market economy. All the best for the next two weeks.”

I must ask Angie to explain to me over a stein of Bier what a ‘social market economy’ is. If it’s what I think it is, a socialist economy stopping just short of wholesale nationalisation, then I can understand her enthusiasm for Manny.

He describes his policies as liberal and pro-EU, oblivious of the glaring oxymoron. Perhaps, not being excessively bright, Manny doesn’t realise that the EU is a protectionist bloc, which is as far from economic liberalism as it’s possible to get without turning the EU into the EUSSR.

Or else he’s bright enough to realise that people have been so thoroughly lobotomised by decades of meaningless twaddle, that they no longer understand what political terms mean.

The other day, for example, I was talking to my French tennis partner, who explained in simple terms that even a rosbif can understand that Fillon is right-wing and Le Pen is extreme right-wing.

‘Does this mean she’s like Fillon, only more so?” I asked. “Exactement,” was the reply. “Well, in that case, could you name a single policy of hers that’s an extreme version of Fillon’s?”

He didn’t even try, but his expression reflected the universal French conviction that les anglo-saxons can never grasp the intricacies of the subtle Gallic mind.

In fact, Marine and Manny represent two branches of socialism, national and international. This emphasises their chromatic unity, for brown is only a hue of red. For Marine’s economic ideas are indistinguishable from Mélenchon’s, meaning they’re to the left of Mao’s.

Macron is also a clear-cut socialist, who, by way of subterfuge, makes some vaguely libertarian noises about cutting the corporate tax and giving companies more leeway in loosening the stranglehold of the 35-hour work week.

At the same time he promises a €50 billion additional ‘investment’ (meaning government spending) into welfare and renewable energy, without bothering to specify where the money is going to come from – especially if British billions dry out – and how wind farms are going to replace nuclear power stations, which at present supply 85 per cent of France’s energy needs.

At a guess there will have to be further raids on wealth producers, driving most of them out of the country. If this time around there are 72,000 registered French voters in London, next time there will be twice as many.

This development is hinted at by Manny’s slogan “France should give everyone an equal chance”. I must again put on my translator’s hat: that means the government’s cut in the country’s wealth will exceed today’s 60-odd per cent.

Higher taxation will be augmented by Angie’s generosity, who knows how to turn impoverished countries into German protectorates.

The lesson was taught by Prussia in the nineteenth century by the expedient of the EU’s trial run, the Zollverein. Ostensibly only a customs union, the Zollverein was designed to use bribery, threats and (as in the case of Schleswig-Holstein) violence to bring all sovereign German principalities under Prussia’s sway.

To celebrate the success of that project, newly muscular Prussia gave France a chronic Stockholm syndrome by humiliating her in the 1870-1871 war. This time around no rape is necessary, what with Manny gagging for it.

The relationship between Germany and France is purely consensual. And under Manny’s presidency it’ll become passionate, with France in the female role.

There’s little doubt he’ll win the second round, what with all other major parties throwing their support in his corner – or so says conventional wisdom. Of course conventional wisdom may be wrong, as witnessed by US President Hillary Clinton.

Frankly, I don’t care one way or the other: choosing between the rock and the hard place has never been my favourite pastime. In the short run, I suppose Britain would be better off if Le Pen won the second round.

Unlike Macron, she isn’t on record as a Britain hater, and she’s likely to bloody the EU’s nose even if she doesn’t pull France out. That would strengthen Mrs May’s hand in what she calls negotiations, which seems to mean negotiating the best terms of surrender to the EU without officially being its member.

On the other hand, Marine’s campaign is financed by Putin, and the KGB doesn’t loosen its purse strings without other strings being attached. What they are I have no idea, but I know exactly what kind they are: lethally dangerous to the West.

How a formerly respectable country can face the choice between two such unsavoury characters escapes me. But then again, this is an inevitable consequence of modern democracy run riot, which unfailingly vindicates de Maistre’s remark that every nation gets the government it deserves.

When people ascend to government by arithmetic, rather than, say, birth, wisdom or even common sense, they’ll reflect mob sentiments at their basest. Vox populi may be vox dei, but in politics it’s definitely not the voice of prudence, morality and sagacity.

A tossup between a fool and a knave has become the most widespread choice in Western politics, the important nonentity the dominant type of politician. Manny, promising an equal chance for all, and Marine, undertaking to “put France back in order” are stark examples of this unfortunate situation.

It’s St George’s Day today, and we must all hope that the saint hasn’t yet withdrawn his patronage from England.

This is sorely needed, for the country is under attack from all sorts of dragons. This format doesn’t allow compiling a complete taxonomy, so I’ll just focus on the political monster.

Mrs May has called a snap election, which she, along with just about ever pollster, confidently expects to win by a landslide. She probably will at that, but not on the strength of what she is.

Mrs May’s principal attraction is what, or rather who, she isn’t. She isn’t Jeremy Corbyn, which is a gigantic feather in her cap.

One can safely assume that the average intelligence of the electorate is abysmally low, but, even if it were even lower, it’s hard to imagine anyone but a misanthropic, subversive retard wishing to install Corbyn at 10 Downing Street.

I’ve watched two of his recent interviews, and the man stakes a claim to the same political territory that is in France occupied by Mélenchon, a plot overlapping with Kim Jong-un’s holdings.

Jeremy wants to tax the rich (anyone earning the middle-class income of £70,000 year) into poverty, increase public spending and foreign aid, nationalise the economy and keep Britain’s borders hospitably open to all and sundry.

This take on domestic policy is exacerbated by his plans for foreign relations. Jeremy is in favour of unilateral disarmament, abandoning our nuclear deterrent and leaving NATO. Should the USSR be restored, I’m sure he’ll want to join it.

Scoring a landslide over this Marxist loony is almost unsporting. Yet Mrs May is desperately trying to meet him halfway in her policies.

This strengthens my belief that real conservatism is no longer possible in the West, certainly not in Britain. All Western states are socialist now, and the difference is only that of degree.

Mrs May has set out to vindicate this melancholy assessment by announcing her intentions should she continue as PM.

First, she has ‘refused to rule out tax rises’. Allow me to translate from political to human: this means she’ll definitely raise taxes. She also keeps her mind open on raiding our pension funds yet again, meaning she’s guaranteed to do so.

She has also gone back on her promise to abandon Cameron’s commitment to spending 0.7 of our GNI on foreign aid. This includes hundreds of millions going to such global nuclear powers as China and India, along with a more modest but no less reprehensible £20 million contribution to the Palestinians. You know, the multi-culti gentlemen who the other day murdered a British subject.

She’s committed to Brexit in a way that resembles a young girl who’s in love with a dashing swain but is forced by her family to marry an ugly old man. Mrs May campaigned for Remain before the referendum, yet laudably stated her intention to abide by the result.

This intention is good, but one hopes it won’t be yet another flagstone on the road to hell. Mrs May clearly wants to remain of the EU even when Britain is no longer in it.

She obviously lacks the clarity of thought so epigrammatically communicated by (the actor!) Sir Michael Caine: “I’d rather be a poor master than a rich servant.”

In other words, leaving the EU shouldn’t boil down to petty haggling about the exit fee or anything else. Nor should we ponder the economics of it too much. The issue is freedom and, like pregnancy, it isn’t quantifiable. We either are free or we aren’t.

I’d submit that continuing to pay money into EU coffers, obeying most of its laws, following most of its policies and failing to regain sovereign control over our borders – not to mention dragging on ‘the negotiations’ indefinitely – compromises Britain’s freedom almost as much as full membership in that vile contrivance does.

Such seem to be Mrs May’s plans. I don’t know by what part of her anatomy the EU has grabbed her, but her heart is clearly following. She’s decent and astute enough not to abandon Brexit altogether, but she may well dilute it to a point where the mass is no longer worth the candle.

Her commitment to the referendum result was partly forced by the political pressure exerted by Ukip that threatened to bite into the Tories’ slim majority. Alas, Ukip seems to be in meltdown, which isn’t really surprising.

Whatever some of my Ukip friends are saying, it’s a single-issue party. Now that the Tories seem to have appropriated the single issue, Ukip has lost its raison d’être. In every sense other than leaving the EU the party is too broad a church, bringing together roughly equal swathes of true blue Tories and true red Labour.

One would hope Ukip will still have a role to play in enforcing compliance with Brexit. But it takes power to enforce anything, and Ukip’s appears to be dwindling away. In has been overtaken in all polls even by the useless, previously moribund LibDems, which is saying a lot.

All in all, we’re badly in need of St George’s prayers – and his help in slaying the political dragons that are otherwise invincible.

Happy St George’s Day!

Some 300 years ago, Peter I set out to westernise Russia, “to chop a window into Europe” in Pushkin’s phrase.

The mission has been variably successful. While there’s no gainsaying the glory of Russia’s literature, manifested for roughly 100 years between the third decades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, neither can one deny that her propensity to murder and enslave millions is more indigenous to other continents.

So much more the reason to be proud of the ease with which my former countrymen are adapting to Western ways in some vital areas of quotidian life.

When in the West, it takes Russians no time to grasp the essence of their adopted civilisation: money. For example, when I arrived in America 44 years ago, even bank accounts didn’t exist in Russia, never mind credit cards.

Yet I was amazed to see how quickly my fellow émigrés learned the basics of credit card fraud and related financial activities. They brought to the task their nimble minds combined with the kind of fresh outlook that was beyond jaded locals.

One popular trick, simple like most greatness, was to acquire a full pack of credit cards, then give them to a friend departing for Europe. The friend would then buy up as much valuable merchandise as the card limits would allow, after which the owner of the cards would report them stolen.

I was observing such shenanigans with a mixture of squeamishness and envy: it took me several years to obtain my first credit card, and even then I only ever used it in most uncreative ways.

When the iron curtain was lifted, I doubted that the Russians would ever learn the ways of the West, especially in business and finance. Today I’m both proud and humble to admit I was wrong: the Russians’ native ingenuity has triumphed over all practical obstacles.

Trillions in beautifully laundered cash have travelled from Russia to various offshore havens, London taking pride of place. Before finding a secure home, the money meandered through such an intricate labyrinth of bogus holding companies and brassplates that even a Sherlock Holmes would be unable to trace its origins.

Yes, everybody knows that the trillions originated with Putin’s kleptofascist regime. But knowing is one thing and proving is another – especially since the urge to find proof is understated. Contrary to Emperor Vespasian’s famous statement, when counted in the trillions, money smells very sweet indeed.

Yet it’s the small entrepreneur who drives the economy, and Russian immigrants show the requisite private initiative blended with fecund creativity.

Even Russian terrorism displays Western pragmatism rather than Eastern fanaticism. Not for them Muslim ‘Allahu akbar!’ fanaticism. When a Russian blows up a bus, it’s strictly business – and isn’t that what the West is all about?

Witness the enterprising German Russian so far identified only as Sergei W. I’m proud of Sergei. He’s an astute businessman, uniting in his person the Russian understanding of business and the Western techniques of conducting it.

Sergei got a legitimate bank loan that he used to short the shares of Borussia Dortmund football club. To spare you the tedious details of financial trivia, that means he bet on those shares taking a plunge.

The bet was heavy: if successful, it would have made Sergei €3.9 million – not Putin’s institutional trillions but better than the proverbial poke in the eye. He then set off three bombs near the Borussia team bus, injuring three people and sending several others into shock.

With their characteristic bias based on racial prejudice and statistical probability, the German police at first thought that the crime had been committed by jihadists.

I’m sure they were as relieved as I am to find out that the motives were pecuniary rather than ideological. Having established that, they nabbed Sergei, who has been charged with attempted murder. I think he deserves a medal for being the quintessential New Russian hero.

Another such champion of Russo-Western free enterprise is Roman Seleznev, who has just been sentenced to 27 years in the US.

Roman has made millions by hacking into retail point-of-sale systems and installing software devices that enabled him to steal millions of credit card numbers. He then sold the data on the so-called dark web, proving that the Russians can master the latest technological advances with the best of them.

Incidentally, Roman’s father Valery is a member of Russia’s parliament, the Duma. He protested vigorously against his son’s imprisonment, which to him is tantamount to “cannibalistic torture”. I agree: rather than being imprisoned, his son should be awarded a Hero of New Russia medal, if there is any such thing.

Wherever Peter I is, he must be looking on Putin’s Russia with pride. The westernisation programme hasn’t been quite completed, but such things take time. True, the Russians haven’t yet grasped such aspects of the West as the rule of law, pluralism, civil liberties and the difference between free enterprise and gangsterism.

But, as their Western fans will tell you, one has to start somewhere. The Russians have made an auspicious start in Western-style crime. Give them another couple of centuries, and they may well learn the rest of it. Or not, as the case may be.

No, this isn’t about those photographs of Mrs Trump naked in bed with another woman. Let bygones be bygones, I say, and anyway she wasn’t Mrs Trump then, much less America’s First Lady.

Nor do I intend to discuss Mr Trump’s bizarre insistence on securing a woman’s docility by grabbing her feline companion. Whatever works, I say, although personally I’m allergic to cats.

The nudge that attracted my attention at Easter wasn’t at all figurative. It was a very physical poke delivered by Mrs Trump’s elbow in Mr Trump’s ribs.

The couple were at the time on the White House balcony, kicking off the traditional paschal egg roll, which I understand is a big event in the US. So big in fact that a rousing rendition of Stars and Stripes was called for.

However, when the military band launched into the anthem, Mr Trump committed the ultimate sacrilege of forgetting to put his hand over his heart. Yet it’s the lot, nay sacred duty, of any good wife to keep her man on the straight and narrow.

Hence decorously patriotic Mrs Trump, née Melanija Knavs, delivered her elbow strike, that standard blow from the repertoire of violence and, it seems, of mnemonic devices. The poke focused Mr Trump’s senescent mind, and his right hand immediately shot up across his body to the left side of his chest. Propriety observed; face saved.

Now my sympathy is in this case with Mr Trump. Not only he but any male subsisting in the happy period between puberty and senility would rather put his hand on Mrs Trump’s heart than on his own.

Such a gesture would have real meaning, physical, lyrical, amorous – even respectful, for beauty has been venerated ever since the time of Greco-Roman antiquity. Mens sana in corpore sano, they used to say, and Mrs Trump’s corporis is very sano indeed, as those photographs prove.

Having thus got my vicarious jollies, I’d now like to strike a less frivolous note by reiterating my sympathy for Mr Trump. For the ritual that slipped his mind isn’t particularly praiseworthy.

Standing up for a national anthem, not only one’s own, is a simple courtesy, as is keeping silent while it’s being played. Thus one ought to rebuke English football fans who accompany the visitors’ anthem with synchronised shouts of “If it wasn’t for England, you’d all be krauts”.

But also insisting on various salutes is, well, rather un-English, for lack of a better word. (One of the scariest documentaries I’ve seen is that of the England football team greeting Hitler with the Nazi salute at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.) Actually, better words do exist, such as insecure, provincial and neo-pagan.

This is akin to a middle-aged married couple who feel compelled to demonstrate how much they love each other by engaging in public foreplay. Real love, like real patriotism, needs no such displays.

I’m treading a fine line here since it would be silly to deny the significance of some institutional symbols and rituals. As with most other things, however, this is largely a matter of balance and taste.

A married couple demonstratively unable to keep their hands off each other are often trying to prove to others and themselves something that ideally shouldn’t need proof – provided they’re secure in their feelings. The same goes for countries.

You’ll notice that old European commonwealths keep their patriotic gesticulation down to a minimum. It’s unthinkable, for example, that a crowd of Englishmen would parade hand-over-heart reverence when God Save the Queen is played.

Nor can one easily imagine, say, Theresa May ending a speech with “God bless the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland!” – and she’s probably more religious than Donald Trump, who wouldn’t dream of omitting the equivalent lapidary phrase.

States deriving their legitimacy from centuries of tradition don’t require such outward manifestations of piety – only upstart states in need of self-assertion do. Most of them are nasty, and they demand patriotic fervour pari passu with their nastiness.

All you have to do is look at the newsreels of Soviet, fascist or Nazi pageantry – their respective styles have much more in common with one another than with any practised by civilised countries.

I’m not equating the USA with the USSR, Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany. But they do have one thing in common: they’re all products of post-Christendom modernity. As such, they tropistically reach for pagan totems – more than commonwealths whose roots are deeper.

The commonality was rather visible until December, 1942, when the Americans hastily ushered in the hand-over-heart salute to replace another one: an extended right arm, palm down. That Roman ritual had been in use since 1892, but half a century later the Americans realised that some recent associations had made it untenable.

Why did the Americans have to wait a whole year after Pearl Harbour to abandon the compromised salute? After all, the country had been at war with the contemporaneous practitioners of it since 11 December, 1941.

Perhaps the feeling was that it wasn’t the ideology of Nazism and fascism that was to blame for the ongoing carnage, but some individual Nazis and fascists. You know, those alienated loners on cannabis, precursors of today’s Muslim – nay Islamist! – murderers who supposedly have nothing to do with their religion.

Or else coming into play was the philistine relief that the carnage was happening elsewhere. Still, a year after America joined the war was an inordinately long time to ponder such matters.

Perhaps Winston Churchill was a bit reticent when suggesting that America and Britain were “two nations divided by a common language”. The watershed may be much deeper than that.

“I needed to have the confidence and the courage to say this is fine, in fact it’s better than fine,” said Education Secretary Justine Greening.

Now I for one expect government ministers to enlarge mostly on their remit. Since for Miss Greening that’s education, one would expect, reading the above statement out of context, that she has done something in her area that required ‘confidence and courage’.

There’s no denying that something needs doing. Our predominantly state education is cranking out functional illiterates, and I only say ‘functional’ out of politeness. In fact, most pupils leave school not only completely detached from our civilisation but indeed unable to fend for themselves in the rough-and-tumble of economic life.

So let me guess. What gave Miss Greening the chance to display those marvellous qualities? I get it.

She must have started by identifying the problem, which is that 50 years ago our education stopped educating. Instead, cross-party subversives turned it into a workshop for social engineering, otherwise known as the comprehensive system.

Children were no longer supposed to be educated well – they were all to be educated equally. And in any field of endeavour, equality is the opposite of quality, for all their consonance.

So one would be forgiven for supposing that Miss Greening has committed the resources of her department to getting rid of that abomination, along with the demotic (demonic?) National School Curriculum.

Instead she must have reintroduced the old two-tier system that in the past made our education the envy of the world, instead of its laughingstock. She then must have declared that, rather than being seen as the aim of secondary education, universal literacy and numeracy are to be achieved at elementary school level.

Subsequent grammar schools will then concentrate on real academic subjects, such as maths, foreign languages, science, history, philosophy and theology – while secondary moderns will put more of an emphasis on skills useful in various trades.

Undoing half a century’s worth of educational subversion indeed must have taken much courage, and Miss Greening ought to be applauded. But alas that’s not at all what she announced.

Instead she vouchsafed to the gasping populace the invaluable information that she’s lesbian. That’s what to her isn’t only fine but ‘better than fine’.

Coming out, Miss Greening continued, was “the best thing I’ve done in many, many, many a year. And actually it gets better every day.” If so, her girlfriend should receive our congratulations, and British children our condolences. If the best thing the person in charge of education has done is airing her sexual proclivities, the tots are in big trouble.

A few questions are in order. Such as, why announce it at all? Most people, especially those reaping the harvest of our brain-washing comprehensive education, see nothing wrong in this or any other aberrant sexuality.

For them, the announcement is at best uninteresting. For others, those fossils who stubbornly stick to the standards accepted in our civilisation since Romans 1: 24-27 or, even further back, Leviticus 20: 13, Miss Greening’s confident and courageous revelation will sound mildly irritating.

So what’s the point? Miss Greening’s own explanation is rather unsatisfactory: “I needed to be true to myself about who I am, and I also felt I did and I do have a responsibility to the broader LGBT community.”

You don’t, love. You have a responsibility to your constituency and a broader one to your country, whose future largely depends on preparing children for adulthood. Let the ‘LGBT community’ look after itself; it has been doing rather well in that department lately, homomarriage and all.

According to Miss Greening, her aim was also to educate, as it were, her parliamentary colleagues: “You will only ever normalise this frankly when nobody is in Parliament feeling it is something they need to not be clear about. It does not and should not matter, but the reality is, for too many politicians they feel like it really does.”

I’d suggest that nobody expressing herself with such disregard for style and grammar is fit to be Education Secretary, but that’s a separate matter. At least now we’re getting warmer: Miss Greening’s reasons for her newly acquired honesty probably were indeed political.

Exactly what they were I don’t know. Perhaps her boss told her that, if she wanted to keep her cabinet position, she should come out before the opposition drags her out. Or else that her upmarket Putney constituency would regard sexual deviancy as a plus rather than a minus.

The earth-shattering announcement was first made last summer, attracting no attention whatsoever. Could it be that Miss Greening chose, or was instructed, to revive the issue in time for the snap election on 8 June?

Possible. I just hope that she doesn’t really regret, as she has indicated, the absence of homosexual role models at school: “I think it would have been really helpful for people like me growing up.” It would have been more helpful for all sorts of people to learn how to write English properly.

A lunatic in charge of the asylum. An arsonist running a fire brigade. And Justine Greening as Education Secretary.

Say what you will about state control over the media, but it offers one undeniable benefit: by watching, say, a state TV channel, outsiders can learn exactly what the sponsoring government is thinking.

Extrapolating ever so slightly, outsiders can also learn what the sponsoring government is – if they wish to learn, that is.

Putin’s Westerns fans demonstrably don’t fall into the category of such inquisitive souls. However, the rest of you may be curious to know how Putin’s government, speaking through its official mouthpieces, comments on the mounting tension in the Far East.

The mouthpieces in question are Vladimir Soloviov, who hosts an almost daily TV talk show on Rossiya 1, and Dmitri Kisilev, a weekly presence on the same channel, whom the Russians affectionately call ‘Putin’s Goebbels’.

Here – without my comments and in no particular order – is what the viewers of their shows heard on the same day, 16 April.

“Deng Xiaoping… sorted out the Tiananmen brouhaha brutally, and quite right too.”

“They send the troops in. Four hundred thousand! Tanks! There was a horrible carnage, several thousand died. But a wonderful China emerged as a result!”

“Does it bother America that, as a result of her actions, North Korea may obliterate South Korea? Quite the opposite: that would be one economic competitor less. Same thing with Japan – they don’ care about it. They’ll just rebuild it afterwards – and make out like bandits.”

“Americans pretend to support democracy, but where were masses of people blacklisted for ideological deviations? In America during McCarthyism! They deported Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein and Leonard Bernstein.” [I promised no commentary but, just to keep the record straight, Messrs Einstein and Bernstein suffered no such fate. But hey, what are facts if the story’s good?]

“Gorbachev was incapable of pulling the nuclear trigger – Putin can do it. That’s why, even though we’re weaker economically, we can withstand any pressure.”

“The North Koreans once had to hide their rocket, so they cut a huge tunnel through rock – in one night and with pickaxes. That’s how motivated their soldiers are!”

“We realise anyway that they [US] don’t understand any other language: we must arm ourselves and our partners. And I wouldn’t say they won’t attack: they have lots of missiles. So the Koreans are replying properly: you touch us, we’ll respond.”

“Let Seoul and Pyongyang go up in smoke – the country will be united!”

“North Koreans have created a unique society, consolidating within itself the energy of victory over the whole mankind… Theirs is an apostolic army that will unite Korea.”

“North Korea will start the fighting, then we’ll deliver a preemptive strike – and there goes your vaunted America! I’d also pull Chinese troops to the 38^th parallel…”

“Kim hasn’t sent an armada to the shores of America. Donald Trump sent a carrier strike group to North Korea, adding he’s ready to send in nuclear subs as well.”

“Kim hasn’t committed a single aggressive act towards any other country. His missile may have been launched but never at specific military targets. However, Donald Trump launched missiles at Syria… Thus Trump is more impulsive and unpredictable than Kim.”

“North Koreans are demonstrating their latest achievement, the Naro-2 missile. It’s capable, they say, of reaching the US bases in Guam and Hawaii. Their Vice-Marshal says: ‘If America stages a provocation, we’ll immediately respond with a devastating attack. Total war in response to total war, a nuclear strike in response to a nuclear strike’.”

“The parade in Kim Il Sung Square is the pride of every North Korean. The moment the North Korean leader appears on the dais, the square explodes in applause. The party leaders rise to their feet, the people weep and shout. This year is particularly festive: it’s the 105^th anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth, the founder of the republic who even 23 years after his death still holds the post of eternal chairman. Units of the North Korean army are marching past the stand of the party leaders. Traditional world-renowned Korean goose-stepping, with a slight hop. Amazing synchronicity and so powerful that the earth appears to be shaking. Only the best of North Korea’s 1.3 million soldiers are in this square.”

“North Korea life is unique, based on Kim Il Sung’s ideology and the ideas of so-called juche. Its most important part is an original way of life with powerful centralisation, a huge public sector in the economy, official atheism and – most important – self-reliance. North Korea is based on the communist principle: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

“If you want to know my opinion, Trump is more dangerous than Kim Jong-un.”

“From their childhood North Koreans are imbued with the certainty that Pyongyang can defend itself. The North Korean army is regarded as one of the world’s strongest.”

“Great North Korea is a wonderful country that punched the USA in the snout.”

This, and only this, is what the Russians hear round the clock, day in, day out. Such rhetoric and tone haven’t been heard there since 1953, when another great leader, Stalin, died – bequeathing, unbeknown to himself, the country to a one-year-old baby who’d grow up to see Kim as his best friend and role model.