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Perhaps I should have written “prior history’s” for the evil of Bolshevik Russia went on to be matched by others: Nazi Germany, Mao’s China, Khmer Rouge and so forth.

But they were all inspired by the event whose centenary is still celebrated today by many Russians, including those who run the country. And the mummy of the syphilitic ghoul Lenin, the principal energumen of the satanic event, still adorns Red Square, holy relics to be worshipped.

The putsch of 7 November, 1917, introduced not just a new regime, but a new concept of a regime: one declaring war on its own people and the rest of the world, and waging that war with inhuman savagery on a scale never even approached before.

Historians are still arguing whether Bolshevism was a denial of Russian history or its natural continuation, which generally follows the line of debate between ‘Slavophiles’ and ‘Westernisers’ in the nineteenth century.

Over the past 30-odd years, the late Solzhenitsyn and his like-minded followers have been preaching the ideas of the first group, according to which Russia was destined to carry out a messianic mission. Granted, she wasn’t perfect in every respect: serfdom, for instance, had few supporters. But on balance Russia was better than the West, more godly, more spiritual, less mercantile.

Had Judaeo-Masonic-Western Marxism not been transplanted onto Russia’s sacred body, the country would have eventually become something like Norway, larger and marginally less prosperous, but with an extra spiritual dimension.

This school sees pre-Revolutionary Russian history as a steady march towards a mystically tinged bright future – suddenly interrupted by alien revolutionaries (many of them Jews, an important factor for the Slavophiles), in no way linked with Russia’s people or history.

The other group, best represented in the West by the Harvard professor Richard Pipes, insists on a steady, organic evolution of the Russian state from its inception to the present day. Most of the Soviet institutions are therefore traced back to their embryos as conceived in old Russia.

The Cheka thus goes back to the nineteenth-century Privy Chancellery or possibly even to Preobrazhensky prikaz (Peter I’s secret police), Soviet internal troops to Ivan IV’s oprichnina, the GULAG to the Tsar’s penal colonies (katorga), collective farms to the peasant communes, and so forth. Underpinning them all is the Russian national character that, though slightly corrupted by some 70 years of bolshevism, has remained virtually unchanged through the centuries.

Both groups are partly right, meaning they’re both partly wrong.

The Russian state has been variably wicked from its inception. The great poet Lermontov’s reference to “unwashed Russia, a land of masters, land of slaves” has pertained throughout history. Thus Russia’s body always carried within itself the cancerous cells of the worst tyranny the world has ever known.

However, pre-Revolutionary Russia wasn’t the worst tyranny the world has ever known, and only a rank determinist would argue that those cells absolutely had to metastasise. It’s a fallacy to think that, because things happen, they were bound to happen.

Russia would never have developed a Western-type state because it isn’t a Western-type country. Its political ethos was formed by a volatile mix of Byzantium and the Mongol Horde, not by Western polity. The resulting millennium of enslavement has left an indelible mark on the national character, corrupting both masters and slaves.

But there’s no reason Russia couldn’t have become a more or less benign autocracy and a decent place for people to live. In fact, it began to show signs of becoming just that towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Then several tectonic plates slammed together, and the volcano of evil tyranny bubbling at Russia’s core erupted. There were indeed several plates: humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, the tsar’s incredible stupidity in dragging Russia into the meat grinder of the First World War – and of course the demonic energy of a small group of cannibalistic ghouls led by Lenin.

Because a similarly evil group had never taken over a major country before then, neither the Russians nor anybody else quite knew what to make of it. Evil is the operative word here, not Marxism.

To be sure, Marxism is an evil ideology, and Lenin’s gang used it almost to its full potential. But for them, Lenin and Stalin in particular, Marxism was a weapon, not the target.

The target was to spread the same brand of evil over the whole world and, when Marxist slogans served that purpose, they were used. When they got in the way, they were abandoned, as, for example, when Lenin introduced the NEP (New Economic Policy), mitigating to some extent state control over the economy.

Once they took over, the ghouls proceeded to do what ghouls do: eat human flesh. They did so figuratively; millions of peasants had to do it literally – murderous famines broke out immediately after the putsch, claiming millions of victims.

Parents were eating their children, scavenging was rife: corpses were routinely used for nourishment. You can find on the net many harrowing photographs to that effect.

The ghouls did their bit by more direct action too: some two million were executed judicially on Lenin’s watch (he died in 1924, but was effectively out of power at least a year earlier), but that doesn’t begin to tell the story.

Untold and uncounted millions were simply shot out of hand or tortured to death without even a travesty of justice; millions more perished of starvation and disease; 10 million died in the war Lenin started against his own people (this is known as the Civil War). And Stalin was still to come.

Slated for total annihilation were the educated classes: aristocracy, intelligentsia, professionals, officers, clergy. Of the latter, 40,000 priests were murdered during the same period.

The official version is that they were shot, but few were so lucky. Priests were crucified, flayed alive, cut to ribbons, eviscerated, turned to ice by having cold water poured over them in minus 20 weather – and I’ll spare you the really graphic details.

The Soviet Union was formed in 1923, and its national emblem provided a pictorial statement of intent: hammer and sickle superimposed on the whole globe. Under Stalin, the ghouls tried to make it a reality, and only Hitler’s preemptive strike stopped them in their tracks. In the end they had to content themselves with only half of Europe, not all of it.

Altogether, during the 70-odd years they were in business, the ghouls murdered some 60 million of their own subjects (the most credible estimate) and, under Stalin, turned the whole country into a blend of concentration and military camps. At least five, but more likely 10, million perished in the famines the Soviets created deliberately in the Ukraine and elsewhere – and don’t think for a second the Ukrainians have forgotten this.

Democide was accompanied by genocide: whole peoples were deported to uninhabitable parts of Siberia and Kazakhstan. Some 25 per cent of the Balts were killed, imprisoned or deported, along with practically all the Chechens and Crimean Tartars – and don’t think for a second any of them have forgotten this.

The untold misery produced by the Soviets is well-documented, but less understood is the moral damage that pure evil has done not only to Russia but to the whole world. For the birthday boy of a state expanded the boundaries of the possible ad infinitum.

The Soviets lit the path for evil to triumph on a scale never before imagined. Murdering people in their millions by category set a fine example to follow, and many did follow it.

The Nazis, for example, were eager and able pupils. Soviet maestros happily shared with them their experience of setting up and running concentration camps, for example. The NKVD and Gestapo even formed a Friendship Society, with Stalin’s and Hitler’s blessing. Amazingly, it remained active, if on a limited scale, throughout the war.

Such an eruption of evil doesn’t just kill bodies; it corrupts souls – and not only at its epicentre. All those fellow-travellers in the West, Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’, proved one didn’t have to be Russian to be morally infected by Soviet wickedness. Churchill correctly identified Lenin as a ‘plague bacillus’, but the spread of the contagion was global, even if it created the worst pandemic in Russia proper.

Such was the regime whose collapse Putin described as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”. It wasn’t. There were two real geopolitical catastrophes on the same site: the birth of Lenin’s satanic regime and its continuous survival in a new incarnation.

Any sin can be forgiven if sincerely repented. Yet no such repentance has occurred in Russia, as it did in Germany. And no wonder: vindicating the First Law of Thermodynamics, the Soviet regime hasn’t disappeared – it has merely changed its form.

And the new form is reverting to the old, for Putin’s propagandists in the media, academy and education are slowly restoring Lenin’s and Stalin’s reputations. Yes, they say, there might have been a downside to the Soviet regime, but think of its pluses.

Woe to anyone who can believe that a satanic regime devouring millions has any pluses at all. Such a person hasn’t just set his moral scales wrongly – he has thrown them out of the window. Vindicators of evildoers become their accomplices.

Stalin’s self-panegyric is repeated ad nauseam: he took the country with a wooden plough and left it with an atom bomb. Personally, I prefer the plough, especially if the atom bomb is used for the evil purpose of blackmailing the world – and if, for it and its equivalents to be created, tens of millions were murdered and hundreds of millions enslaved.

Bolshevik ghouls are officially portrayed in Russia as honest idealists, dedicated if at times misguided nation builders. Admittedly, they might have committed some crimes (this is whispered, not said). But do let’s keep things in balance.

Putin’s mouthpiece-in-chief Kisilev put it in a nutshell on Russia’s main TV channel: “We can’t, nor should, condemn everything Soviet… Our Lenin. And our USSR. Lenin moved Russia to make a megadream come true. He staged a great social experiment… In that sense, Lenin is a hero.”

Now imagine the worldwide outcry if Merkel’s mouthpiece said something similar about Hitler, who also ‘staged a great social experiment’. Yet Kisilev’s harangue went unnoticed and unreported in our press.

Part of the reason is that Putin has his own herd of Western ‘useful idiots’, except that his lot come from the Right. These people, driven to despair by their own governments, are eager to swallow, feathers and all, the canard of a new Russia run by a new KGB (85 per cent of Russia’s leadership including its church hierarchs are career KGB officers or agents).

Because the current evil government advances its cause by using nationalist, rather than internationalist, slogans, it appears to some as a useful alternative to our own globalist spivs. For similar reasons many Westerners saw Hitler as the only viable alternative to Stalin.

Overlooked is the frankly criminal nature of Putin’s regime, different as its criminality may be from the Soviets’ in some details. Unlike Lenin and Stalin, Putin only murders his opponents in their thousands, not millions. Unlike them, he allows Russians to leave – and millions have taken advantage of that laxity, many of them to spread the tale of the present good tsar over the West.

But in every moral sense, Putin and his gang are worthy heirs to the blood-sucking Bolsheviks. They don’t even bother to conceal it: Lenin statues are standing where they’ve always stood; Stalin statues are coming out of warehouses and going up all over Russia; Russian schoolchildren are taught that Stalin was above all an administrator of genius, a fair if stern father of the country.

Putin’s sponsoring organisation, now under a new name if the same management, is involved in global subversion as actively as the Soviets ever were. Just like Stalinists, Putinists viciously pounce on their weaker neighbours. And just like Stalinists, they find themselves on the opposite side to the West in every conflict.

Though seen as a useful laundromat for ill-gotten gains and a source of yachts, good medical care and education, the West is still demonised in Russia, still portrayed as its implacable enemy.

Not only Putinism but even unvarnished Bolshevism still has its fans in the West, the latter at the Left end of the political range. I’m sure, for example, that today’s anniversary is wildly celebrated at our Labour headquarters, with Comrade Corbyn presiding over the festivities. The very thought that his Trotskyist gang may well take over my country gives me the creeps, an allergic reaction that millions of Corbyn voters are spared.

In my childhood, Moscow was adorned with posters saying “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live”. Replace ‘Lenin’ with ‘evil’, and the statement still rings true. It’s the centenary of that satanic evil that so many demons celebrate today, dancing around fires.

The on-going orgy of suicidal sex hysteria in Westminster has attracted much coverage and received many explanations, most of them correct.

People talk about feminism spinning out of control, and they’re right. Others highlight power struggle in Parliament, with sex ‘impropriety’ used as a weapon, and they’re right too. Still others argue that our politicians merely reflect the rapacious decadence of modern Britain, and they definitely have a point.

The more intrepid commentators even mention the possibility of a conspiracy aimed at paralysing the government, forcing a new election, putting Corbyn into 10 Downing Street and derailing Brexit – and, much as one is wary of conspiracy theories, they may have even more of a point.

All such commentators are telling the truth, but none of them is telling the whole truth. They can’t be blamed for that: the whole truth has too many strains to cover in a format short enough to hold the attention of our newspaper readers.

There’s enough material there for a longish book, and I hope some publishers are reading this and taking note. Meanwhile, let me point out another strain that largely goes unnoticed.

Here’s a simple question: why is it that the current hysteria over ‘sex pests’ behaving ‘inappropriately’ or ‘talking out of turn’ affects mostly the US (as represented by Hollywood) and Britain (as represented by Westminster)?

Now Hollywood actresses waxing indignant about powerful men making passes at them scales the heights of hypocrisy that no satire can reach.

From the time the first film was made in Hollywood, there has hardly been an actress who hasn’t slept and/or munched her way to the top. All, well, most, of those enraged Valkyries ought to take a look at their careers, realise how cloyingly phony they sound, and shut up.

But are Americans and Englishmen in general friskier than, say, Italians or Frenchmen? No one who has observed the flirtatious, sex-charged atmosphere at dinner parties in those countries will believe so. Do ‘les anglo-saxons’ have stronger libidos? Oh please.

Compared to, say, Berlusconi, Mitterrand or Hollande, not only a run-of-the-mill Tory MP but even King Priapus is a eunuch. Moreover, most of those chaps’ shenanigans have been lovingly covered by the press in their own countries and beyond.

So were their political careers destroyed by their amply publicised proclivity to stray? Of course not. No one gives much of a damn. People read such accounts for entertainment value, not as lessons in morality.

Then why the US and UK? You’ll notice one common feature in the two countries: both are predominantly Protestant. That is both are predominantly atheist now, but before they realised that man was created not by God but by Darwin, they had had centuries of Protestantism behind them.

By now they’ve produced the worst possible hybrid: religiously atheist and culturally Protestant. Their atheist side wants to lay every woman they see, except perhaps Diane Abbot. Their Protestant side says they’re going to burn in hell for it – and, in this life, may well be punished by bankruptcy.

That most don’t even believe in hell in particular or God’s punishment in general is neither here nor there: the genetic memory of that belief lives on. As a result, they combine sexual profligacy, unrestrained by any universal moral tethers, with revoltingly sanctimonious hypocrisy.

Consequently, they tend to tinge eroticism with the kind of sleaze one seldom encounters in the southern part of Europe. One doesn’t see in Paris, as one does in Amsterdam, seventeenth-century windows decorated with ugly half-naked whores grinning lasciviously at passers-by.

The French these days are no more religious than the British, but they too have genetic, or is it cultural, memory. Thus they tend to treat sex with cavalier insouciance, and are generally relaxed not only about persistent flirtation but also about adultery.

Those who still believe seem to think that the odd confession will wipe the slate clean. The atheists apologise not to God but to themselves, thinking they can absolve themselves.

In spite of widespread and generally condoned fornication, families in those countries tend to be stronger than in Protestant lands. Divorce rates in France and Italy, for example, are 40 per cent lower than in Britain.

Ex-Protestants do do sex – but they do it badly and clumsily. And what goes for actual sex goes tenfold for its prelude: banter, flirtation, courtship.

French women, for example, accept flirtation as a natural part of discourse between men and women. This is as basic, and usually as meaningless, as a man bending to kiss a woman’s hand and stopping an inch before his lips make contact.

Both men and women know the ritual, as they know it may go beyond flirtation, but probably won’t. Equally accepted there is the natural, physiological fact that, though the woman may hint at her interest, it’s the man who must be more explicit in asking for sex.

The question may be posed semantically, in words, or semiotically, in gestures. The words may vary from, say, an invitation to dinner to something less open-ended. The gestures may include brushing or perhaps taking a woman’s hand or – and here we’re approaching our turmoil-riven shores – putting a hand on her knee.

Now my modest experience in such matters suggests that a knee isn’t the most erogenous of zones. Thus touching it, provided the hand doesn’t wander any farther, isn’t a sex act. It’s a question: Would you consider having sex?

French women are as adept at answering such questions as the men are at posing them. They may encourage the aspiring swain or discourage him, but either is usually done with grace, humour and subtlety.

Thus a French woman is unlikely to respond to a hand on her knee the way that journalist rebuffed Sir Michael Fallon, by threatening to punch him in the face. The message would be just as clear, but it would be more civilised. (I hope you and my wife realise that I’m talking strictly as an outside observer, not an active participant.)

If the French regard flirtation, with all its sexual overtones, as natural, the English are predisposed to regard it as suspect and intrusive. That’s why they don’t mind being told that a bawdy joke is ‘inappropriate’, flirtation is rude, a hand on the knee is a mortal insult, a pass is assault, and assault is a crime worse than murder.

The modern ethos, especially in formerly Protestant countries, imposes many inhibitions on sexual behaviour. These are ignored, but profligacy dialectically coexists with treating sex as something inherently dirty and violent. Hence, young British women on the make often have to get fall-over drunk before responding to sexual advances – drunkenness is considered expiatory.

Hence also, when punters are told that, look, our high and mighty abuse women in dirty and violent ways, they nod their understanding – even though nothing worse than a crude pass or a ribald joke has occurred. The French would shrug and smile.

This is an attempt not to countenance loose sexuality proscribed by the founding documents of our civilisation, but to try to understand why accounts of ‘sex pests’ have created such a deafening resonance. Then of course no one has ever accused modernity of a surfeit of taste and restraint.

P.S. A note to Andrea Leadsom: You can take your hands out now; they must be warm enough.

The other day I had to collect my resident’s parking permit from the Hammersmith & Fulham Council.

I resented having to go: they were supposed to post the permit to me, but hadn’t. However, I was amply rewarded for the bothersome trip. Thanks to it I learned what modernity is about, a knowledge I’m happy to share with you for didactic purposes, and I hope you’ll be thankful.

The Council building is an architectural tribute to Corbusier’s fascist brutalism. Hence the building sits on pillars acting as piles, and there’s no ground floor.

Corbusier’s idea was to have traffic moving underneath buildings, which in this case it doesn’t. Since the Council is located at the intersection of two streets, with plenty of traffic on one of them, the architects were plainly after an ideological statement, rather than a functional one.

The Council confirms this impression by using one of the pillars as a sort of poster board. The pillar, about ten feet high and seven wide, serves as a cogent exegesis of modernity.

Each of its four facets is densely covered with poetic statements of the Council’s take on modernity, which word they use interchangeably with modernism. Rather than quibbling about this lexical imprecision, I was so impressed with the messages that I whipped my phone out and photographed them for posterity (and your benefit).

Facet 1

So modernity is about wiping out national borders and universities. The latter will be moved out of campuses and into the streets, where, by the sound of them, the authors of this message were educated. It’s also about magic and Spanish guitar music. What, no rap? I feel deprived.

Facet 2

My poetic sense isn’t acute enough to understand much of this. As far as I can tell, rather than crying in our sleep, we should dream about free education and racial equality. Since I’m unable to police my dreams, I’ll have to go on wetting my pillow every night. Pity.

Facet 3

If the the first part means anything at all, which it doesn’t, it certainly has little to do with modernity: the message does confirm that the Earth is ancient. The second part insists on the beauty of wind turbines (a matter of taste, I suppose, or rather absence thereof) and suggests, in a rather surreal way, that their vanes be used to give Mr Trump a haircut. Since one doubts that the vanes can achieve the requisite accuracy, we must be talking not about coiffure but about beheading, which is fine because Mr Trump is a troglodyte. Alas, he’s a short troglodyte compared to wind turbines, so I see physical problems here. Never mind: the message is pure metaphysics.

Facet 4

In addition to free education and racial equality, we are advised to dream about fair (meaning extortionist) taxation and gender equality. No civilisation is possible without all of the above, and therefore none has so far existed.

I’m so happy to see that not all our taxes are used for crass material purposes. I also now understand why the Council messed up my parking permit. Who can worry about petty practical details when his mind is occupied with higher, philosophical concerns? I certainly can’t, and neither can the Council.

You have your marching orders now. Go and get your dreams in order, modernity commands. And, since none of us is capable of the same poetic subtlety and philosophical depth, we must obey – even those of us who don’t fall under the jurisdiction of the Hammersmith & Fulham Council.

Jeremy deserves my gratitude, as does anyone who refines my understanding of the world.

I’ve often maintained that leftwingers are either fools or knaves. Yet Jeremy has disabused me of this ‘either… or’ notion. He proves it’s possible to be both.

Four years ago he protested against the government spending “shedloads of money” on commemorating the centenary of the First World War. “I’m not quite sure what there is to commemorate about the First World War,” he said, “other than the mass slaughter of millions of young men and women – mainly men – on the Western Front and all the other places.”

Now it goes without saying that every leftie, especially one of the hard variety, despises his country’s past, which he invariably sees as an uninterrupted history of oppression, slavery, bellicosity, homophobia, misogyny, social injustice, racism, ageism, obscurantism, religious bigotry and so forth.

At the hard end of the leftie range, the negative pole of contempt is offset by the positive pole of fondness – for assorted Shangri-las of human goodness, such as the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and Cambodia.

Professing such admiration openly has lost some street cred after the weight of evidence documenting the cannibalistic nature of those regimes reached critical mass. However, a son doesn’t necessarily stop loving his father just because the latter is doing time for murder.

Thus the Corbyns of this world keep fanning in their hearts the smouldering affection for the most murderous, oppressive and dehumanising regimes in history. This is the kindling for their burning desire to transplant the animating mentality onto their native soil, producing as close an approximation of concentration camps as is feasible at the time.

This is evil at its purest, and the word ‘knavery’ doesn’t do it full justice. Yet history’s most evil men weren’t necessarily stupid. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao were clever men of indisputable abilities. Both their cleverness and abilities served evil purposes, but that’s a separate point.

Jeremy, on the other hand, may be perfidious, but he isn’t clever. If he were, he’d mask his unadulterated hatred for Britain much better – and he’d also avoid saying such monumentally idiotic things that his true animus becomes clear for all to see (except for those who won’t see).

This poppy-shunning cretin could have explained his actions in a marginally cleverer way. For example, he could have said that, much as he cherishes the memory of “the millions of young men and women”, this is an occasion not so much for commemoration as for retrospective slings and arrows aimed at Britain’s imperial past.

Yet the way he so stupidly put it suggests he has no clue as to what exactly is commemorated on the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month”.

I’ll give you a clue, Jeremy. Armistice Day? Does that ring any bells? No? How about Remembrance Day? Still not a tinkle?

Fine, let me spell it out for the slow learners. On 11 November we celebrate not the First World War but the end of it, the time when “the mass slaughter of millions of young men and women” stopped. That’s when the Armistice was signed, get it? Hence it’s called Armistice Day, which ought to be a giveaway.

And it’s also called Remembrance Day because we use this occasion to bow our heads to the memory of those millions who perished for their country in that war and all others.

We may not like some of the causes for which they died. But that doesn’t prevent us from cherishing their memory. Nor does it prevent us from praying for them.

Pacifism is a doctrine worthy of contempt on many levels, rational, moral, practical and religious (in the Western sense of religion at any rate). But selective pacifism is much, much worse.

Corbyn can’t climb on the high horse of nonviolence while staying mired neck-deep in the putrid swamp of his ideology, the most violent the world has ever known.

It goes by various names: hard Left, Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, Maoism or even fascism. But by any name it smells as foul. At the heart of it lurks loathing of all those who shun this form of Satanism – which emotion is accompanied by the concomitant urge to exterminate them all.

Years ago I knew a woman, an active member of the Labour Party, who every 22 April held a party for Lenin’s birthday. Nice in every other respect, she felt compelled to commemorate the ghoulish, syphilitic murderer of millions, who set the stage for murdering millions more.

In the same vein, I bet in four days Comrade Corbyn will be celebrating the centenary of the greatest ever eruption of evil, the Bolshevik putsch in Russia. He won’t bother to explain how such jubilations tally with his disdain for his countrymen fallen in various wars. Demons, after all, don’t have to explain why they worship Satan. They just do.

Nor does Corbyn mind belting out the lyrics of such songs as Internationale and Bandiera Rossa, with blood dripping from every word. And he certainly doesn’t mind attending rallies of Muslim organisations with known terrorist links, as he did the other day.

Yet I’m grateful to Comrade Corbyn, and not only for his proving that, when it comes to his ilk, no dichotomy between stupidity and evil exists. I’m also thankful to him for being so transparent about his nature and his plans.

One hopes that as a result the British will get cold feet when next going to the polls with Corbyn’s name on the ballot. A cross next to that moniker may well spell (or rather hasten) the end of Britain as a civilised Western commonwealth – and the beginning of a British Soviet Socialist Republic, complete with violent oppression.

You don’t think evil can triumph here because we’re too civilised? Neither did those civilised denizens of the Weimar Republic, circa 1933 – nor, for that matter, those millions of Russians who in 1917 were duped by evil propaganda.

Our enraged media seem – or, more precisely, pretend – to demand unrealistically high moral standards from politicians. And our brainwashed masses gleefully gobble up stories about who put his hand on whose knee 30 years ago.

Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, 65, resigned yesterday, explaining that his past behaviour had “fallen below the high standards we require of the Armed Forces”. He then attached a temporal aspect to morality by adding that “what might have been acceptable 15, 10 years ago is clearly not acceptable now”.

Since the Armed Forces aren’t universally known for their monastic behaviour, it’s unclear what those expected high standards are. And suggesting that morality changes every few years is tantamount to saying that no morality exists.

I for one don’t care if Mr Fallon (or any other politician) indulges in a bit of unauthorised hanky-panky, provided it’s of a boorish rather than criminal nature. What I do care about is his performance as Defence Secretary.

On that basis, I’m sorry to see him go: by the puny standards of our political life, Mr Fallon isn’t bad at all. But these days that’s hardly the point, is it?

We shouldn’t expect our politicians to be little angels. But we do have every right to expect them to be statesmen possessing the mind, courage and integrity to serve their country. Us, in other words.

It’s those expectations that most of them consistently frustrate – so consistently, in fact, that no one in his right mind can have such lofty expectations any longer. But forget about lofty.

At the lowest, most basic level we still should be able to expect our politicians to do their best in the interests of Her Majesty’s realm. Or, if that’s too much to ask, at least that they shouldn’t act treasonously.

This brings us to the recent Brussels jaunt undertaken by former LibDem leader Nick Clegg, Labour peer Andrew Adonis and Tory backbencher Ken Clarke. What they did was definitely unethical, and in any sane country it would be illegal.

These cross-party spivs are fanatical Remainers, and they’re entitled to such views, much as I find them ridiculous. Moreover, they’re entitled to express their views in whatever medium they can reach: the Commons for Mr Clarke, the Lords for Lord Adonis and presumably any old street corner for Mr Clegg, who couldn’t even hold on to his parliamentary seat at the last election.

And of course they can all mouth their drivel to the press, provided the press wants to hear their sour-grapes animadversions. What they absolutely have no right to do is conspire with foreign powers against their own government.

Their typically mendacious denials to the contrary, their meeting with the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier and commissioner for economic affairs Pierre Moscovici had sinister undertones.

The three spivs joined forces with the EU trying to subvert the policy of the British government, not to mention the will of the British people. One doesn’t have to be a fly on the wall to surmise that the co-conspirators plotted ways to punish Britain so badly that a second referendum would become a reality.

Just think about it: our politicians are colluding with foreigners who wish to do us harm. They want their own people to suffer the better to uphold an ideology the people have rejected. Does this sound like Britain to you?

My friend, MEP Gerard Batten, was absolutely right when saying that: “Having them go to Brussels is like Oswald Mosely and Lord Haw-Haw going to Berlin to negotiate peace terms in 1940”. Gerard could have added that Mosley spent three years in prison, while the Nazi propagandist William Joyce (‘Lord Haw-Haw’) was hanged after the war.

Conspiring with a foreign power against one’s own country has been everywhere treated as high treason since the time God was young. Yet, though this outrage has received some coverage in the press, it was never front-page news. And no one talked about it the next day.

This goes to show how deeply corrupted our whole society is, how warped our notions of morality. Sputtering, on cue, obedient fury at sexual indiscretions comes to us more easily than calling treason by its right name.

Underhanded collusion with foreign governments against our own doesn’t excite our imagination as much as a hand on someone’s knee does. Salacious, voyeuristic, sanctimonious accounts fill our papers, TV screens – and minds. We aren’t even immoral any longer; we’re downright amoral.

If this weren’t the case, that little caper by the trio of spivs would cause a universal outburst of indignation – this irrespective of which side of the Brexit divide our sympathies lie. In a world with morality still extant, people would know to remain loyal to their country even if they disagreed with some of its policies.

I’m holding my hand to my ear straining to hear thunderous demands for prosecuting the three EU stooges. But I’m not holding my breath.

And now, by all means, let’s talk about the really interesting stuff. Do you think Fallon actually bonked her?

It’s New York’s turn now. Yet another truck. Yet another shriek of ‘Allahu akbar!’. Yet another eight dead, 15 wounded.

The Uzbek Sayfullo Saipov seemed like a classic illustration to the notion of the American Dream. In the country for only seven years, he became an Uber driver and already had two trucking companies registered in his name. Another few years, and his American Dream would have acquired the shell of a suburban house complete with a lawnmower, wife and three children.

Except that Saipov looked at that scenario, didn’t like it and tore it to pieces. Instead he chose to drive a pickup truck through a crowded cycle lane in lower Manhattan.

As a driver who has spent countless hours sitting in traffic suffocated by such lanes, I could almost understand, if definitely not condone, this act – if it had been accompanied by a shriek of ‘Down with cycle lanes!’, ‘Freedom from bikers!’ or perhaps even ‘Uber alles!’

But it wasn’t. Instead Saipov shouted the usual Muslim mantra, leaving one in no doubt about the nature of his inspiration. He didn’t kill those cyclists because he hated their specially assigned lanes. He killed them because he’s a Muslim and they are not.

This observation escaped President Trump, who immediately tweeted that the evil deed “looks like another attack by a very sick and deranged person.”

It doesn’t. It looks like an attack by a pious Muslim who takes the tenets of his religion seriously, specifically those 300 Koran verses that call for violence against infidels, such as:

“Slay them [unbelievers] wherever ye find them…” (2:91). “We shall cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve.” (3:151). “Take them [unbelievers] and kill them wherever ye find them. Against such We have given you clear warrant.” (4:91). “The unbelievers are an open enemy to you.” (4:101). “Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush”. (9:5).

Unlike the violent passages in the Old Testament, all such Koran commandments are open-ended, not tied into a particular situation or historical context. Therefore, since good Muslims tend to be rather more devout than Westerners, one can safely say that a moderate Muslim is a bad Muslim.

Bad Muslims go about their daily business like the rest of us. Good Muslims kill.

Ascribing every Muslim atrocity to individual idiosyncrasies, such as madness, is therefore an intellectual and moral copout, underpinned by cowardice. Muslim terrorists may sometimes be deranged. But they’re always pious Muslims. Deranged or not, that’s why they kill.

A little later Trump added another statement: “We must not allow ISIS to return, or enter, our country after defeating them in the Middle East and elsewhere. Enough!”

A laudable idea, that, and one so different from those put forth by Mrs May et al, who feel that such “naïve teenagers” shouldn’t be prosecuted. Instead they should be “reintegrated” by means of free social housing and welfare cheques.

Since these wild-eyed Muslim thugs clearly were never integrated in the first place, the ‘re’ prefix sounds a bit incongruous. Given the choice of housing them in council estates and putting them down quietly, I’d opt for the latter, although more humane possibilities may also exist.

By contrast with the defeatist drivel uttered by our ‘leaders’, Trump’s statement is an exemplar of moral fortitude. Alas, it has nothing to do with Saipov, who never fought with ISIS – and neither did he return from the Middle East.

Trump may be getting gun-shy in his self-expression, having drawn much opprobrium over his policy of banning nationals from six Muslim countries from entry to the US. His detractors gleefully point out that Saipov hails from none of those six, and they’re right. Like the Boston Marathon murderers, he grew up in the Muslim outskirts of the Soviet Union.

But what do those Trump haters want? That he should welcome immigrants from every one of the world’s 50 Muslim countries? Or enumerate every one of them in his decree?

The point is that it’s not geography but religion that matters. The denizens of Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Egypt are so united by their faith that the ethnic differences among them look trivial by comparison.

Trump probably knows this, but, fighting as he is for political survival, is afraid to say so. Since I have no political life to fear for, I’ll say it for him:

Islam and the West are incompatible. The West has been at times aggressively hostile to Islam over the past 1,400 years – off and on, but mostly off. Islam, on the other hand, has always been aggressively hostile to the West, and only brute force has ever limited manifestations of this hostility.

But force, no matter how brute, is impotent in the absence of courage, strong will and a sense of moral rightness. All these are indeed absent in the West today, which is why we’re helpless to curtail Islamic terrorism.

Never mind their country of origin, Mr Trump: the West should ban all Muslims from entry, at least until convincing evidence has been produced of their improved collective behaviour.

Deporting all Muslims already here is unfeasible and probably undesirable. But deporting all those who openly support jihad is both feasible and desirable. So is shutting and ideally razing every mosque or Muslim centre in which a single jihadist word has ever been uttered.

Muslims may be allowed to live in our countries, but only provided they’re indeed integrated. Covering women’s faces or mutilating their sex organs may be held as proof of insufficient integration, along with attending rallies, where the principal slogan is ‘Death to [fill in the blank]!!!’

Muslim children must receive Western education, and if their parents want to teach them the fundamentals of their religion, they can do so at home or perhaps in Sunday schools.

A child growing up in the West must have his country’s vernacular as his first language, with any other tongues strictly optional. Muslim ghettoes must cease to exist, and the practice of Sharia must be outlawed.

Since we’re clearly at war with Islam, a fact unacknowledged even by Trump, never mind our wishy-washy ‘leaders’, Western courts must abolish, or at least loosen, the peacetime standards of proof whenever a suspicion of terrorism activities arises.

We could think of many things along these lines. But none of them will ever be done. So brace yourself for bombs, guns and Muslimobiles. They’ll be coming thick and fast.

At best, the president supped with the devil, having left his long spoon behind. At worst, he colluded with the devil.

In the former case, he exhibited poor judgement and questionable ethics – but probably not bad enough to be ousted. In the latter case, he’s a criminal who should be not only impeached but imprisoned.

Much as I like most of Trump’s policies, I’m afraid there are no other options. He isn’t entirely blameless in either case.

One fact has already been established: Putin’s junta used every dirty trick to swing the election Trump’s way. That attack on the very foundations of the American republic ipso facto makes Russia a hostile power, and any collusion with it is at least ill-advised and at worst treasonous.

Those who, like me, support most of Trump’s policies hope that the Russians were acting strictly of their own accord, with no complicity on Trump’s part, nor ideally anybody else’s on his campaign.

Those who, like the political establishment, hate everything about Trump, including his policies, hope he’s as guilty as Cain.

It’s up to Special Counsel Robert Mueller to find out which hopes are better justified, and he has begun to hand out indictments. Make no mistake about it: for all his denials, Trump knows that the sword of Damocles is hanging over his head.

First, his former campaign manager Paul Manafort and Manafort’s associate Rick Gates were indicted on 12 charges of money laundering, conspiracy and tax evasion. Manafort and Gates are now under house arrest, having posted bail in the amount of $10 million and $5 million respectively.

Trump and his fans must have heaved a sign of relief: his name didn’t come up. But their relief is strictly for public consumption: privately I’m sure they realise how fraught the situation is.

Here’s another fact that won’t be contested by anyone who knows anything at all about Putin’s Russia: all big business in that country is in the hands of organised crime fused with the KGB government.

Hence any large fortune made in Russia, be it by locals or foreigners, is tarred with the brush of gangsterism. Similarly, any large sums of Russian provenance sitting in (or laundered through) Western banks represent proceeds of criminal activity.

The perpetrators are on the right side of Russian law simply because no Russian law exists. Or rather it’s coextensive with Putin’s goodwill, which is dispensed or withdrawn on purely arbitrary grounds.

But the moment big Russian money makes its way to the West, Western laws are breached.

Since all Western governments follow the principle first enunciated by Emperor Vespasian, pecunia non olet (money doesn’t smell), they never adopt such an uncompromising stance. But that only means that criminals are allowed to get away with their crimes, not that they haven’t committed them.

Manafort, who made untold millions in the service of Putin’s criminal Ukrainian stooge Yanukovych, is therefore not innocent on the strength of that fact alone. Neither is his right-hand man Gates. And that’s before the charges on 12 counts.

Manafort’s indictment states that his alleged criminal activities continued throughout 2016, belying Trump’s assurance that they had ended before Manafort joined the campaign. The president must be quaking in his boots, for he too had extensive business dealings with Putin.

That means he isn’t squeaky clean either, even if he never did relieve himself into the bed in which Obama had slept in Moscow. And he knows that, once his close associates have been indicted on financial crimes, he himself won’t be immune to prosecution.

That’s why Trump has so angrily reacted to any suggestions that Mueller may probe into his business affairs. He knows now, even he didn’t before, that dipping into the putrid swamp of Russian commerce will leave no one clean. Those who look for dirt are likely to find it.

Moreover, if found guilty, Manafort and Gates are facing prison sentences that may well defy their realistic life expectancy. That tends to make people extremely cooperative with the prosecutor who’s after bigger game.

If the two gentlemen discover their singing voices under duress, God only knows what songs they’ll sing. Trump certainly doesn’t, but he does know how much they know. If it’s possible that their songs may incriminate the president, he won’t sleep well at night.

Then there’s George Papadopoulos, foreign policy adviser to Trump’s campaign. Having been indicted for lying to FBI agents about his soliciting ‘dirt’ from the Russians on Hilary Clinton, he pleaded guilty.

What kind of punishment will he receive? More to the point, how light is the punishment promised to him in exchange for dirt on Trump or his nearest and dearest? Even as we speak, Mueller must be leaning on the three indicted men with all his considerable weight – and prosecutors know how to sound persuasive.

How many of Trump’s other men will be arrested as criminals or at least subpoenaed as witnesses? Definitely more than these three, and one can only guess how much dirt Mueller has found or will find.

If potential defendants lie under oath, every lie represents a count of perjury. How loyal will they remain to Trump when in the witness box?

Your guess is as good as mine, and Trump’s is better than either yours or mine. In any case, if he does have to go, I’ll feel sorry. But I won’t for a second think he didn’t deserve what he got.

For those whose modern vocabulary isn’t up to scratch, MCP stands for Male Chauvinist Pig. One of this mammal’s characteristics is a tendency to treat all female persons (except Diane Abbott) as sex objects.

That demeans each female person (except Diane Abbott) and, by extension, female personkind in general. And – are you ready for this? – many of the worst MCPs are to be found in the mother of all parliaments.

This not only demeans female personkind, but it also brings into disrepute the very concept of British parliamentarism. As such, it breaks all sorts of laws – and not just those of the misdemeanour variety.

After all, compromising the political foundations of Her Majesty’s realm may in some quarters be classified as high treason. Hence it’s no wonder that Mrs May has decided to take personal charge of stamping out any inappropriate behaviour in Westminster.

The lifelong feminist in me agrees wholeheartedly: our PM has no tasks more urgent than policing the sexual behaviour of her parliamentary colleagues.

And, judging by their 48-point front-page headlines, our newspapers also see sex pests as the greatest threat to Britain’s survival. Quite right too – but judge for yourself.

Mark Garnier, the international trade minister, sent his secretary out to buy two vibrators, possibly one for each orifice. In a similarly appalling incident, he called her ‘sugar tits’. The vibrators were presumably meant for home, rather than office, use, which may be regarded as a mitigating circumstance.

There are none such for the use of the MCP term ‘sugar tits’ or its synonyms, such as ‘honey’, ‘honey-bunny’, ‘honey bunch’, ‘sugar buns’, ‘sweetie’, ‘sweetie-pie’ or ‘sweetheart’. Though metaphorically referring to sweetness, they all leave a bitter taste in my feminist mouth.

Nor was that an isolated incident. Former welfare secretary Crabb owned up to sending sexually explicit messages to a 19-year-old girl seeking employment with his office. If that doesn’t put the country in imminent danger, I don’t know what would.

At least our MPs like women, something not to be taken for granted among graduates of our fine public schools. That’s more than can be said for the actor Kevin Spacey, who finally emerged out of the closet and admitted making unsolicited passes at 14-year-old boys.

Actually, scratch this remark. Having put it down, I realised that it may be misinterpreted as implicitly homophobic, a crime as bad as sex pestering and possibly even worse.

If there exists any moral difference between pestering women or boys, it’s in favour of the latter activity, what with it being more progressive and liberating.

In any case, Harvey Weinstein has proved to the world that red-blooded men are still extant in Hollywood… Well, scratch this remark too.

Facetious digressions aside, Mrs May has her job cut out for her. The reason for this is mainly physiological: our MPs are deficient in every conceivable qualification for their job bar one: powerlust.

That tends to go hand in hand with aggressive libido – as a lifelong feminist I realise that sex is an act of aggression above all. Hence making love to a woman is akin to beating her up, thereby probably falling under the jurisdiction of our courts.

In addition to offsetting the congenital testosteronal aggressiveness of men, Mrs May also has to contend with the extra powerlust of her colleagues. This is a tall task, but it’s good to see that she has taken it head on.

With her natural flair for English, Mrs May has called for a cross-party effort to establish a “mediation service backed by a contractually binding grievance procedure”. I’m not sure I quite understand what that means, but then the addressees of the message are more adept at linguistic intricacies than I am.

Yet something in me says that “a contractually binding grievance procedure” won’t quite do the job by itself. More drastic measures are required, those that may activate the dormant spirit of the Blitz and rally our leaders to protect Her Majesty’s realm from the grave threat it’s facing.

I’d like to make my modest contribution to the task at hand. I propose that, once elected, all male MPs should be surgically castrated.

Before you throw your hands up in horror, allow me to explain.

So far we’ve established two facts: 1) the testosteronal aggressiveness of men is in the case of politicians further enhanced, and 2) this makes them call their secretaries ‘sugar tits’, thus undermining our whole political system.

Now you’re beginning to see the logic of my proposal, aren’t you? Politicians need all the aggressiveness they can muster to get to Westminster, but, once there, that same quality leads them to criminal behaviour.

The conclusion is obvious: they must be castrated after they’ve been elected but before they get the chance to call a female person ‘sugar tits’.

Since they all claim to be committed to serving their country, no sacrifice should be too big. In their case, the sacrifice wouldn’t be too onerous anyway: judging by the way they govern the country, they lack the offensive part of their anatomy anyway – or only ever use it to send their secretaries out for vibrators.

As an interim measure, Mrs May should establish not only “a contractually binding grievance procedure” but indeed a new government department solely dedicated to protecting the country’s female personkind from sex pests.

Perhaps Kevin Spacey, who has lived in Britain for a long time, will agree to lead it.

As a lifelong champion of progress, I welcome the news that, while the crime rate in Britain is the highest in 10 years, the number of arrests has been halved during the same period.

At the same time I indignantly renounce those conservatives – reactionaries! fossils! scum! – who maintain that the number of arrests (and convictions!) should reflect the number of crimes. That only goes to show how far they are behind our enlightened times.

I must admit to my eternal shame that I used to hold similarly revolting views. But then my two appearances on BBC TV shows devoted to this very subject disabused me of such antediluvian notions.

My fellow panellists explained in simple terms even I could understand that society fails some poor innocent lambs and drives them to crime. It’s society that’s at fault, but it’s as impossible to slap the whole society in prison as it’s illogical to punish so-called criminals.

Admittedly, it’s unavoidable that some of those people have failed to realise their boundless moral and intellectual potential so badly that they have to be incarcerated. But that can only happen on the universal understanding that punishment has nothing to do with it.

The function of prison is to help those poor souls re-find their way, thereby realising said potential. This can only be achieved by putting at their disposal Sky TV, PlayStations, exercise facilities and – should they desire them – drugs.

Hence, having done their time, they’ll re-enter society as morally regenerated and intellectually elevated subjects of Her Majesty. Especially since the new law will soon enable them to exercise their rights by voting while in prison. I welcome this development for two reasons.

First, that way those law-and-order reactionaries will have less chance to be elected to the mother of all parliaments. And second, when he was still PM, Dave Cameron said that the very thought of prisoners voting made him “physically sick”. The joy of Dave’s suffering such pain would by itself be sufficient reason to cheer the new legislation.

True, statisticians (reactionary fossils to a man, or rather person) produce data showing that last year 400,000 newly rehabilitated innocents reoffended within a year of their release.

But that can only mean two things. Either, as is probable, statisticians are lying, or the Sky TV available in prison doesn’t have enough channels to ensure speedy moral renewal.

A valid logical point can be made as well, that, if no one ever went to prison, the problem of rehabilitation wouldn’t arise. It’s this logic that must keep our police from investigating petty crimes like robbery, burglary and physical assault.

But that doesn’t mean they’re idle. On the contrary, the police are busier than ever with crimes that have only recently been recognised as such. The most recent footprints left by the march of progress, they require as much police time as possible.

One new category is historic sex abuse, and I blush at the thought that in the distant past I myself wasn’t pristine in that regard.

A typical pattern involves an old dear who, even though she doesn’t remember much of anything else, suddenly recalls that, back in the 60s (or was it 50s?) her bottom was fondled by a man already famous at the time or who has since gained fame and fortune.

Such heinous crimes require thorough investigation, made so much harder by the difficulty of obtaining prima facie evidence.

If the victim’s bottom was clothed at the time it was so egregiously abused, it’s likely that the clothes have since been discarded. And even if not, they’ve probably gone through so many washes that no fingerprints could have possibly survived.

And if the object of crime was naked, so many baths have intervened during the elapsing 50 (or is it 60?) years, that even the most sophisticated dactyloscopy won’t be able to retrieve the prints of the offending fingers.

The less evidence there is, the more time-consuming the investigation. Hence it’s understandable that the police have no time to chase burglars – especially since, as my co-panellists explained, the latter can be as effectively educated and entertained in the community.

Then there are hate crimes, and no amount of police resources must be spared to pursue perpetrators thereof.

Just imagine, if you can do so without fainting from horror, that an evil-doer calls a red-haired person a ginger tosser. Or, even worse, that another monster refers to a person of Afro-Caribbean descent as a black… well, anything.

I for one shudder to recall that, holding a wineglass to the wall 10 years ago, I overheard my neighbour refer to the adherents of the religion of peace as ‘Muzzie-Wuzzies’. To this day I suffer from guilt over my failure to report him immediately.

It’s clear that such fiends must be pursued to the ends of the earth, or at least to the geographical limits of police jurisdiction. And if that doesn’t leave the police enough time to go after a misguided soul who has just clobbered an old woman for her pension money, then so be it.

In any case, the old biddy could always supplement her income by claiming that some celebrity fingered her bottom back in 1959.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who in 1839 first attributed the greater power to the writing implement, got it the wrong way around.

But the writer can be forgiven for that mistake: after all, he didn’t have the shining example of Putin’s Russia to set him straight. If he lived today, he surely wouldn’t underestimate the power of the sword or its functional equivalents.

Bulwer-Lytton, with his artist’s eye, would certainly appreciate the significance of an ad appearing on the site of the gun firm Kalashnikov. The maker of Russia’s most successful product is kindly offering a 10 per cent discount to journalists buying their pistols.

Like all successful concerns, Kalashnikov is sensitive to the market. The company clearly realises that journalists are desperate for its products. Or rather not the profession as a whole, but rather a small segment within it: pundits who ever find anything wrong with Putin.

The gun maker was tipped off about the growing demand by the recent attempt on the life of Tatiana Felgenhauer, who works for the radio station Ekho Moskvy and the newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

Neither organ is really in opposition to Putin. They’re both there merely to fool observers, mostly foreign, into believing that such opposition exists. In that sense, they perform the same role as the sham candidates in Russia’s presidential elections, Prokhorov in the last one, Sobchak in the next.

The results are as predetermined as they were in Stalin’s time, when the butcher so respected by Winston Churchill routinely polled over 100 per cent of the vote. Though Putin, being a more modest sort, contents himself with a mere 75 per cent or so, today’s elections are no less bogus than they were back in the 1930s.

But appearances are important, what with today’s ‘useful idiots’ eager to argue that Russia is a real democracy, if not yet a completely developed one. Similarly Ekho Moskvy and Novaya Gazeta are allowed the odd anti-Putin word, typically drowned by thousands of fawning sentences.

Interestingly, Novaya Gazeta is owned by the career KGB officer Alexander Lebedev, whose son Evgeny nominally owns our Evening Standard and Independent (daddy is the real boss). This opens up the interesting topic of George Osborne, who has retrained as newspaper editor to be able to attack Brexit with the vindictiveness of the ghastly spiv he is.

But that topic will have to wait, for the one that interests me now is those mock-opposition organs. Journalists working there walk a fine line.

One wrong step, and they may cross that invisible, yet very tangible, line separating allowable criticism from the kind that might upset Putin and his kleptofascist clique. That’s why working for those two organs is fraught with dangers – not the immediate dangers facing journalists who talk out of turn without permission, but dangers nonetheless.

All in all, 143 journalists have been murdered during the reign of the KGB tsar, between 2000 and 2017. To that impressive number must be added those who have been maimed, beaten up, imprisoned or driven out of the country.

The last category includes three of Russia’s finest journalists, Andrei Piontkovsky, Arkady Babchenko and Yulia Latynina, who have run for their lives in the past few months.

Before Latynina, who is the closest any Russian journalist comes to a Western conservative, got the message, she had been attacked several times. Latynina had some noxious liquid splashed in her face and then her car was burned. Piontkovsky and Babchenko fled after numerous, and utterly credible, threats to their lives.

All three of them had worked for Novaya Gazeta at various times, and had ample opportunities to admire its office’s walls adorned with photographs of those six of their colleagues who were murdered for overstepping the aforementioned line.

Compared to those three refugees, Tatiana Felgenhauer is a positive conformist, but apparently she hasn’t conformed enough. That point was communicated to her by a chap who sauntered into the Ekho Moskvy office and stabbed the poor girl in the neck, missing the carotid artery by a mere four millimetres.

Now the journalists working for the station and Novaya Gazeta will be able to protect themselves with Kalashnikov’s discounted weapons. After all, the state has made it clear that it has no desire to protect them.

“Such tragic events,” declared Putin’s press secretary Peskov, “are deeply regrettable. But, let’s put it this way: a madman’s act is just that, a madman’s act. It’s absolutely illogical and wrong to link such acts to anything or to paint them all sorts of colours.”

I don’t know: personally, I can’t resist the temptation to link and paint. A whole company of Russian journalists have been KIA, and another regiment are hors de combat. Peskov’s dismissive remark is like refusing to accept a connection between Islam and Islamic terrorism.

And yet our so-called conservatives continue to exonerate, nay to extol, Putin’s kleptofascist regime. You see, he’s opposed to the EU and doesn’t permit homomarriage.

These may be necessary qualifications, but they are definitely not sufficient ones. After all, ISIS murderers aren’t exactly Europhile either and, rather than marrying homosexuals, they throw them off tall buildings. So why not adore ISIS as well?

Those British Putinistas who are particularly useful and idiotic insist that we could do with a strong leader like the murderous KGB colonel. Would they like to see our journalists and opposition politicians murdered? Do they even realise what they’re saying?

Passions have a way of shifting the thought-producing function from the brain to an area a couple of feet lower. That anatomical feat, added to a wonky moral compass, makes such people sound infantile and inane – even if they make sense on every other subject.

Col. Putin should be proud of having such allies: Iran, N. Korea and our useful idiots.