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Don’t know why, but the 1967 song The Last Waltz has been stuck in my mind ever since Kamala Harris announced her choice of running mate.

Of the foursome now vying for the top two jobs in Western politics, only Trump is old enough to remember the song, and at some point I fully expect him to say something like: “This last Walz won’t last for ever.” I know from personal experience that puns based on people’s surnames are as irresistible as they are silly.

So, by the evidence of the on-going campaign in the US, are personal attacks. That’s most unfortunate because both Harris and Walz are less vulnerable to slings and arrows than Trump and Vance.

Harris hasn’t done enough in her personal life to cancel out the advantages conferred by her sex and race. That these incidentals are seen as advantages raises uncomfortable questions about the American electorate and indeed about the very idea of universal franchise. But such things are what they are, and an ethnic woman gets a head start in any race.

As to Walz, he comes across as everyone’s favourite uncle and has a CV to match. A Midwesterner, educated at a state college, married to the same woman for 30 years, NCO in the National Guard, schoolteacher and football coach, a long political career as first a congressman, then Minnesota governor. Though raised Catholic, he later converted to evangelical Lutheranism, a more mainstream religion in the US. If there has ever existed a set of chinkless armour, Walz is wearing it.

Any personal attacks against him, or Harris for that matter, are bound to backfire. For example, saying, as Trump does, that Harris discovered her black identity only to score political points is counterproductive. So what else is new?

Of course, Kamala had to play the only two cards in her hand, race and sex. What else could she boast of? A record of statesmanship? Success at securing the border? Towering intellect? Oratorial talent? Don’t make me laugh.

And Vance is making a bad mistake by attacking Walz’s military record, which, unlike his own, included no combat postings in 25 years. If I were Walz, I’d barge through the door thus opened by mentioning Trump’s rather iffy deferments during the Vietnam war.

In short, neither Harris nor Walz has any glaring personal weaknesses that can be exploited for political gain. Yet that doesn’t mean they have no exploitable weaknesses altogether.

Trump and Vance should take their cue from the recent general election in Britain. Starmer won his landslide by the strategy of doing nothing, but doing it well. He pointed out every weakness in the Tory record, and there were many. But at the same time Starmer was reticent about the policies he’d adopt if elected, and how they’d make things better.

Instead, he was mouthing woke platitudes and bien pensant generalities, studiously avoiding any specifics. He even refused to give a straight answer to the question of whether or not women have penises, saying instead that 99.99 per cent don’t. That slandered some 35,000 British lasses who didn’t deserve such calumny. But the Tories failed to drag Starmer out into the open and bombard him with demands to specify his policies on everything that matters.

Since the media in the US are even more left-wing than in Britain, the Republican ticket must be extra-sharp to counteract all the free publicity the Democrats are getting. Shouting that Kamala isn’t as black as she paints herself or that Walz never fired a shot in anger isn’t going to do it. Attacking them on policies may – and should.

For example, Walz, good all-around egg that he is, has had an appalling record as Minnesota governor. Under his tender care, per-capita GDP went down (dropping below the national average for the first time) and crime went up.

When Minnesota police were being overrun during the 2020 BLM riots, they pleaded with the governor to send in the National Guard. Yet Walz sat on his thumbs for three days, and only managed to stop himself from taking the knee by a huge mental effort. (Starmer succumbed to that temptation at the same time.)

His wife, meanwhile, went on record claiming that, in the midst of the riots, she stood by an open window, breathing in joyously the aroma of burning cafés and shops. If that’s Minnesota’s first family, I wonder what its last family is like.

As to the religious faith Walz wears on his sleeve, I’d be curious to know how he reconciles it with his secular policies and beliefs. For example, he signed a law permitting abortion up to the moment of birth, which even evangelical Lutheranism must see as infanticide.

Under his aegis, Minnesota hospitably invited children from all over the country to come for “gender-affirming care”, meaning puberty blockers and castration. He also ordered that tampons be provided in the boys’ lavatories at all high schools. That has earned him the nickname of ‘Tampon Tim’ in some quarters.

I’d relish watching him squirm when asked how many American boys have periods. That’s one of those questions to which there are no good answers, sort of like “Mr Smith, when did you stop beating your wife?” or, for that matter, “Do British women have penises?”

During her tenure in the US Senate, Kamala Harris was rated as its most left-wing member, which is saying a lot in the context of the overall leftward shift in US politics.

Then it should almost go without saying that both Harris and Walz are exponents of the critical race theory and the DEI catechism. This means that, if he’s to be consistent, Walz ought to hate himself. After all, he is a straight white male, and a Christian Midwesterner to boot, which is to say the bogeyman of his ideology.

Many Americans regard Trump as toxic, and they’d vote even for Che Guevara if he were the Democratic candidate. Nevertheless, however low my opinion of the American (or any other Western) electorate may be, I don’t believe most voters are as extreme Left as Harris and Walz.

The task Trump and Vance face is forcing their opponents away from generalities and out into specifics. Both men’s records stack up favourably against Harris and Walz, much more so than their personalities. And Donald? No puns of Walz’s name, please. That’s neither grown-up nor clever.

P.S. Speaking of left-wing politicians, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo displayed her cosmopolitan savvy by slipping the ubiquitous English word into her otherwise French-language diatribe.  

“F*** reactionaries, f*** the extreme right, f*** all those who want to shut us in a war of everyone against everyone,” she said in an interview to Le Monde, the French answer to The Guardian. One can only regret the paucity of the French language, with politicians having to rely on English to express their innermost convictions. Still, it’s good to see that the much-vaunted French sense of style extends even to Lefties.

When I talk to my French or American friends, I go out of my way to object whenever they mention British citizens.

To them, the difference between citizens and subjects is trivial. To me, it’s vital.

In republics, heads of state are elected. In monarchies – real monarchies, that is – they are anointed. In some mysterious or not so mysterious ways, a monarch isn’t just a symbol of continuity, a link between generations past, present or future. He’s also the embodiment of metaphysical unity between God and nation.

A nation so constituted can have any number of laws protecting life, property and the rights of every subject. The government guarantees such protection in exchange for its subjects’ allegiance. But the government’s claim to legitimacy derives from that transactional arrangement only to some extent. To a greater extent, a monarch establishes his sovereignty at a level high above such factors.

Today’s France and America started out as revolutionary republics, whose claim to legitimacy was based on repudiation of subjecthood and assertion of citizenship. Repudiation of subjecthood went hand in hand with repudiation of God as the origin of sovereignty. Assertion of citizenship went hand in hand with assertion of man as the subject of sovereignty.

Man was now the master of his own destiny, and hence the sole giver of his own man-made laws with no claim to divine inspiration or lineage. The life, property and dignity of an individual were now protected not because this was God’s will, but because it was a good idea.

That led to a different understanding of nationhood. In a country like France, where a republican revolution overthrew the ancient monarchy, most of the old adhesives of nationhood (language, culture, customs, an intuitive sense of belonging) still held. But man-made ideas now reigned supreme.

The problem is that man’s thinking is fickle. What seems like a good idea or a just law today, tomorrow may draw widespread opprobrium. And if the government consistently failed to come up with good or at least popular ideas, its claim to sovereignty was weakened. A sovereignty that lives by ideas may die by them.

In America, the post-revolutionary problems were even greater. The country’s language came second-hand, so did most of its laws; its population was a mishmash of arrivals from various European countries. Thus, if the founding ideas of the French republic were added to a nationhood of long standing, in America the founding ideas became more or less coextensive with nationhood.

One can hear many intelligent Americans say even these days that Americanism isn’t a nationality but an idea. Hence anyone sharing that idea and legally entitled to settle in America can become an American the moment his feet touch the tarmac at JFK.

Every American knows that, whenever he was born as a person, he was born in 1776 as a citizen. The French have something similar but to a lesser extent: they had been French for centuries before 1789.

In both countries, as well as in any other republic built on the ideas of the Enlightenment, politics has to play a much greater role than in ancient monarchies. And republics’ presidents have infinitely more political power than a British monarch, who has next to none.

But he has something no president can have: a lineage that goes back so far in time that one may as well accept that it was originated, not just anointed, by God. That acceptance went into the making of Englishness, and it was perceived either consciously or intuitively by every English subject for many centuries. Even in our godless time, it still is.

However, over the past century or two, that self-perception came under a concerted and ever-accelerating attack. At present, one may think it has been expunged, but that conclusion would be too hasty and superficial.

England is no more pious than France and perhaps even less so than America. But the link between nation and God, with monarch as its conduit, was too deeply wired into the national psyche to disappear overnight or even over a century.

That’s why an English monarch, no matter how much he may be ridiculed and dismissed as an irrelevance, draws something no president can ever have: residual if understated love and filial devotion. These may only slightly etch today’s sense of nationhood, but they do add a vital touch.

That’s why poll after poll shows that the English don’t want to become a republic. Not yet at any rate. Good thing too, for the monarch sits at the very centre of a constitutional ganglion of interlacing synapses, and removing him would create a chaos the nation might not be able to survive.

Such is the rational argument in favour of the monarchy, but it’s insignificant compared to the irrational ganglion of loyalties, ancestral affections and intuitive kinship also centred on the monarch. That’s what makes subjecthood profoundly different from citizenship, for all the external features they have in common.

One can become a citizen legally, by being born or naturalised in a country and pledging allegiance to it. One can even become a citizen who passionately shares the founding ideas of the country. But sharing the intuition passed on from generation to generation for centuries is a different proposition.

Both America and France have to look for slightly different national bonds, and they find them in man-made ideas and practices all converging on collective amour propre. Since repetition is the mother of all learning, ideas must be constantly reiterated lest they may weaken their grasp on the national psyche.

That’s why every public building in France prominently exhibits the founding triad of the republic. But whatever the French think of that tripartite slogan, and whether or not they realise that the middle element, égalité, makes the other two untenable, they still crave extra-rational bonds.

Religion has been legally disqualified from acting in that capacity since 1905, and monarchy is no longer an option. Hence the French have found their metaphysical surrogate in their culture and especially language. Any native speaker of French, regardless of where he comes from, is accepted as French to a much greater extent than a native speaker of English from, say, Canada or South Africa, is accepted as English.

Americans too need constant reminders of their nationhood, and those are almost exclusively civic and political. Schoolchildren reciting the pledge of allegiance, hand over heart whenever the national anthem is played, Stars and Stripes flying outside people’s houses – these are all reiterations of nationhood.

Britain is different from them and also from England. Britishness is a civic identity that can be acquired in ways not that different from an equivalent process in France or the US. Englishness, however, isn’t something that can be acquired, not without a total immersion for decades and usually not even then.

A parallel distinction between civic and ethnic identity doesn’t exist in France and America or, if it does, it’s not reflected in terminology. A naturalised American is an American, a naturalised Frenchman is French, but a naturalised Englishman doesn’t exist.

Subjecthood plays a critical role in that sense of both British and, more subtly, English identity. Unlike the truths declared self-evident in the American Declaration of Independence, this identity is indeed self-evident, and hence not in need of constant reassertion and reiteration.

A British politician ending his speech with “God bless Britain” would be laughed out of Westminster, and not just because most MPs and their constituents are atheists. They just know, some consciously, most subliminally, that an anointed monarch is an eternal conduit between them and God. Their personal beliefs don’t really matter in that regard.

English identity is like the English language. It’s easy to acquire good command of it for everyday purposes – but acquiring perfect mastery is harder than in most other languages. There are too many nuances that have to be sensed and can never be explained.

In the context of the on-going events, it would be interesting to consider how all of the above relates to the issue of integrating and assimilating new arrivals. But that discussion is for another time.

Mike Tyson, former world heavyweight champion, is to make a comeback – as a woman.

He has begun to train for the 2028 Olympics, where he plans to compete as a superheavyweight. “I’s the baddest woman on the planet, see,” he told me in an exclusive interview.

Mr – or rather Miss – Tyson specified he isn’t coming back for the money or fame. It’s just that she feels her CV is incomplete. Although, fighting as a man, she won WBC, WBA and IBF titles, she never triumphed at the Games.

Mike, or rather Mirabel as she now calls herself, will be 62 when the next Olympic Games come along, but she doesn’t see that as an obstacle. “I be young enough to kick any bitch’s ass,” he said.

But the real story unfolded when I asked Mirabel since when she had seen herself as a woman. “Since I was born, man,” she replied.

True enough, many observers have remarked on Tyson’s high-pitched voice that indeed sounds more feminine than masculine. That voice, explained Mirabel, belonged to the woman trapped in a man’s body.

Why then has she had to wait so long to come out? Mirabel explained that it was as a boy named Mike that she had been incarcerated 38 times before she was 13. “You try telling those bad mofos at the juvy you’s really a girl,” she said. “They do you in turn and then you get the shank.”

As was inevitable, the issue of chromosomes came up, and Mirabel had a ready answer. “Ain’t about no chromosomes, man,” she said in her mellifluous tremolo. “Is about how you feel, see. And I feel like, well, you know, giving’em bitches the old one-two.”

In addition to filling that lamentable gap in her boxing record, Mirabel acknowledged that the idea of violence towards women had always held certain attractions for her. “Now I ain’t got to marry them bitches to punch their lights out,” she explained.

When I reached the IOC to get their take on the story, they commented that, apart from Tyson having lived the first 58 years of his life as a man, there are issues with his eligibility, as a professional, to fight in an amateur event.

“Ain’t no problem,” insisted Mirabel. “That license, it be given to Mike, not Mirabel. And it lapsed anyway. Ain’t no longer valid, see.”

The interview then turned informal, we cracked a bottle of the Olympic spirit and had a few shots to toast Mirabel’s new career. As the evening progressed, she was getting a bit amorous and I decided to beat my retreat. We parted as just friends.

Welcome back, Mike – sorry, Mirabel. Olympic boxing needs you. Pierre Coubertin is smiling at you from wherever he is.  

The walls of Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham were yesterday adorned with two graffiti.

One of them said “Get out England”, which was upsetting. It should have been “Get out of England”, which would have satisfied the pedant in me, if not the realist.

The other inscription was a colloquial rendering of ‘copulating persons from the Indian subcontinent’, which failed to satisfy any of my constituent parts. All in all, I have to return to the subject of rioting – the issue just won’t go away.

Yesterday, I wrote that “uncontrolled immigration is a serious problem. By all means, we must discuss it – but not with the likes of Tommy Robinson.”

So let’s pick up where I left off and try to discuss it – the way all serious problems should be discussed: dispassionately, analytically and without name-calling rancour.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper describes the rioters in uncompromising terms: “’They are thugs, criminals and extremists who betray the values our country is built on.” I can’t argue with her epithets, but the second part of her sentence raises all sorts of questions.

Prime among them concerns the values Britain is built on. What exactly are they? The question is too broad, and it would take many a volume to cover adequately. So let’s narrow the enquiry down and look at the British values that are immediately relevant to the unfolding mayhem.

All such values ultimately boil down to the matter of British, and specifically English, identity. Miss Cooper, poor Ed Balls’s wife, evidently thinks that these values are identical with those espoused by the woke consensus. But she is wrong.

All modern nations are ethnically synthetic, and neither England nor Britain is an exception. The indigenous population of the British Isles boasts numerous inputs: Celtic, Basque, Germanic from various tribes, Norse, French, Norse-French – and these are just the most obvious ones.

However, while such groups were ethnically heterogeneous, they were racially homogeneous. Moreover, they all shared the same religion and hence the bulk of the same culture over many centuries, folkloric variances apart.

That’s why Englishmen hardly ever qualify their ethnicity the way Americans do. You are unlikely to hear people describing themselves as, say, Norse English or Saxon English the way Americans routinely qualify their nationality with their ancestral origin.

Neither will you hear many Scotsmen stressing, say, their Danish, Pict or Irish origin. Their ethnic identity is Scottish, their civic identity is British, and most of them won’t repudiate the latter by advocating separatist particularism.

Hence national identity was never a problem until the disintegration of the British Empire after the Second World War. Suddenly millions of people of different ethnicity, race, religion and culture began to insist that citizenship in any Commonwealth country entitled them to live in Britain.

Now, about 2.5 billion people currently have Commonwealth citizenship. At that time, the number was smaller, but still undeniably too large for unlimited admittance. Hence the Commonwealth Immigrants’ Act was passed in 1962, stripping most Commonwealth citizens of the right to settle in the UK.

The inflow of immigrants consequently slowed down, but not to a trickle. Racial, ethnic and religious tensions appeared, and further restrictions were deemed necessary. In 1968 Enoch Powell delivered his famous speech warning against the dangers of mass immigration, and three-quarters of all Britons agreed.

As a result, the Labour government passed the Commonwealth Citizenship Act, which effectively put a moratorium on immigration from the former colonies. Still, many people found legal or illegal ways of circumventing such restrictions. The door was still cracked ajar – until another Labour government, that of Tony Blair, flung it wide-open.

If until then Commonwealth immigrants had been coming in their thousands, they now began to arrive in their millions, and the “foreboding” with which Enoch Powell was “filled” was coming true. Multiculturalism became the official ideology and, like all ideologies, it exacted a frightful cost.

British identity gradually became, or rather was presumed to be, ill-defined; English identity almost shameful. Both were assumed to carry the stigma of colonial oppression, racism, jingoism and everything else that was rotten in life.

The new ideology demands that indigenous Britons see themselves as just one group among many, with none entitled to any special status. Now, ideologues tend to be as strong of conviction as they are weak of foresight. They naively expected Britons to do an Esau and happily trade their birthright for a pot of message.

That was never going to happen. British identity in general and English identity in particular were forged over so many centuries that they have entered the nation’s psychological and mental DNA. When that core found itself under attack, tectonic plates began to move, tensions grew, cracks appeared.

Out of those cracks crawled the kind of creatures both Yvette Cooper and I abhor. But even every moderate, conservative Briton I know is in broad sympathy with the rioters’ declared grievances, even if he’s contemptuous of their methods and indeed personalities.

Thuggish ideologues like Tommy Robinson were always likely to fish in troubled waters. However, much as we despise that lot, we shouldn’t deny that the waters are indeed troubled.

It’s possible that at some point decent Britons will join the indecent Yahoos because no legitimate recourse seems to be on offer. If – or rather when – that happens, social order may disintegrate altogether, with consequences as awful as they are unpredictable.

Britain was indeed built on certain values, and one of them is disdainful distrust of any ideologies. All of them are seen as alien and threatening, and Yvette Cooper lives in cloud cuckoo land if she thinks that the ideology she cherishes, that of multi-culti self-righteousness is any exception.

Britain is becoming a powder keg of identity, and the likes of her are playing with fire.

Having left Britain while out on bail, peripatetic thug Tommy has been floating around Europe, posting videos from variously exotic and expensive locations.

His 800,000 followers watch, listen and evidently pay attention. Tommy is living proof that an expert rabble-rouser doesn’t have to be physically present in the country to stoke up mayhem.

Following the Southport stabbings, masked thugs inspired either by Tommy or just by their own monstrous instincts, have gone on a rampage all over the country.

Bristol, Stoke, Liverpool, Manchester and Hull are on fire, and dozens of police officers who tried to stop the mayhem are in hospital. Today, similar riots are planned in Rotherham, Weymouth, Middlesborough and Lancaster, and police are spread thin.

English flags are flying, Nazi salutes are made, shops are being looted and burned. And not just shops: Liverpool’s new library was also torched, adding a nice touch to the practice popularised in Germany, circa 1933.

There the typological precursors of our ‘patriots’ yanked books out of libraries and burned them in the street. Our lot have introduced the time-saving innovation of burning the whole building, books and all. That’s one way to stop the boats, I suppose.

Meanwhile, Robinson continues to lay it on thick: “The British have been pushed too far. Once you start f***ing with their children, taking away their safety. What do you expect to happen?” Why, looted shops and burned libraries, of course. Did I get it right, Tommy?

Our papers and TV channels are having a field day, sputtering righteous indignation at such ‘far-right’ outrages. Yet anyone with a passing knowledge of geometry and some understanding of dialectics would expect that a spectrum that features a far right would also have a far left.

Yet our media refuse to countenance such a Hegelian equilibrium. Hence when BLM, Just Stop Oil or pro-Hamas fanatics do their own spot of rioting, they are never described as ‘far left’. The political spectrum our hacks envisage is oddly lopsided.

I often comment on the inadequacy of our political nomenclature. If you disagree, then you must believe that Margaret Thatcher and Tommy Robinson are political twins. After all, both are routinely described as ‘far right’.

Yet politics, right, left or centre, is usually a mere pretext for mass violence, hardly ever the reason. The reason is human nature, shaped as it is by original sin and unchecked by civilisation. Given the right motivation, propitious circumstances and a realistic hope of immunity, most people are capable of looting, arson, rape and murder.

When such cards fall into place, an inner voice thunders inside people’s skulls: Now you can! And when they get together in mobs, the collective scream is synergistically louder than the sum of its individual parts. Now we can! roars the crowd inwardly – and Muslim shops burn as bright in England, circa 2024, as Jewish shops did in Germany, circa 1938. Our own Kristallnacht is happening all over the country.

Riots can’t be stopped by rational arguments or by satisfying the mob’s political grievances, because their gripes are neither rational nor political.

A Jew set upon by SA thugs in Berlin would have wasted his breath trying to argue he didn’t really want to destroy Germany, and neither did he feast on the blood of Aryan babies. Similarly, the yobs who looted and destroyed a Sainsbury’s supermarket in Manchester, wouldn’t have been stopped by the management’s assurances that they had never run an illegal immigration ring.

If civilisation can no longer contain the beast inside man, the beast pounces, singly or in packs. When that happens, the time for cajoling, pacifying and assuaging has passed. The button for counterviolence has to be pushed.

Yet so far I’ve seen no reports of police acting decisively. No water cannon, no tear gas, no – God forbid – firearms. We are proud of our police going unarmed, which feeling is grossly misplaced.

It would be something to be proud of if Britain were so civilised and law-abiding that our cops didn’t need guns to protect the public and themselves. Alas, as all those photographs of bloodied policemen lying shellshocked on the pavement prove, that’s not the case.

Yet meeting violence with superior violence requires an inner conviction of being in the right. The frenzied mob has its evil spirits expertly whipped up by the likes of Tommy Robinson, and they have no trouble telling themselves that every time they hit a cop they strike a blow for England.

No one inspires our policemen the same way, and their own motivation doesn’t appear to be strong enough. If anything, some cops secretly (or not so secretly) sympathise with the causes assorted rioters claim as their own. We all remember the photographs of policemen ‘taking the knee’ during BLM mayhems, with the media winking at that dereliction of duty with avuncular approval. I wouldn’t be surprised if, likewise, many other cops think Tommy Robinson has a point.

Law enforcement is the cutting edge of civilisation, or else its bulwark keeping at bay the savage beast lurking in barbarians’ breasts. When the cutting edge is dulled and the bulwark collapses, there is no limit to what can happen.

Both civilisation and barbarism tend to leave their marks on people’s faces. Looking at the feral mugs of Tommy Robinson and his ilk, and also of the BLMers, Just Stop Oilers, anti-nukers and pro-Hamasers, one sees plenty of fodder for a future breakdown of order and civility in Britain.

And yes, uncontrolled immigration is a serious problem with severe consequences to the fabric of society. By all means, we must discuss it – but not with the likes of Tommy Robinson.

Common criminals like Tommy and extremists of any kind or hue, right, left, pink, red, brown or green, are to be excluded from civil discourse because they aren’t civilised. Their place is in prison, not at a negotiation table or in a debating studio.

Having spent 15 years in Russia as ambassador of the Sardinian king, Joseph de Maistre (d. 1821) summed up his experience by saying that every nation gets the government it deserves.

Two centuries later, Vladimir Kara-Murza disagrees. He is one of the 16 Russian prisoners involved in the swap the other day. That operation flies in the face of the old proverb about fair exchange being no robbery.

Russia sends out FSB hitmen and spies, electronic or traditional, to do in the West what such people are trained to do: spy, hack and murder.

These are high-risk jobs, but those agents receive a solemn promise that, should they get nabbed, a grateful Russia will trade them back. The FSB then arrests foreign journalists and businessmen or else Russian dissidents known worldwide, sentences them to the kind of prison terms that haven’t been seen since Stalin, and uses them as a sort of exchange currency.

This is done with the cynicism characteristic of Russian secret services and the government behind them. Correction: these days the secret services are the government, led and staffed as it is by career KGB officers.

Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin are perhaps the best-known among the released dissidents, and they are remarkable men. Having been sentenced to 25 and 8.5 years respectively, they accepted their martyrdom with courage and dignity.

Both refused to cooperate with their jailers which earned them long stints in punitive solitary confinement. They also didn’t give Putin the satisfaction of pleading for mercy, even though they knew they’d be unlikely to survive their ordeal, the way their friend Navalny didn’t survive it.

Now they are in the West, and whatever is left of the free world should rejoice. But Messrs Kara-Murza and Yashin aren’t rejoicing. On the contrary, they insist that they didn’t want to be exchanged, and they certainly wanted to stay in Russia – even in Russian prison.

The swap, they insist, is banishment and exile, not liberation. They’ll go back at the first opportunity because Putin should be opposed from inside the country, not from Germany, Britain or America.

Alas, their first press conference in the West proves that, while Russia continues to produce heroic people ready to give their lives for the cause, the country still lacks effective opposition. For any successful resistance must start with an accurate, dispassionate assessment of the situation – not with consuming and purveying a diet of red herrings.

Kara-Murza, incidentally, is an historian educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is a fluent speaker of English and holds dual British-Russian nationality. Yet, as I mentioned earlier, he disagrees with de Maistre.

“I care about my country,” said Kara-Murza, “and I think Russia deserves better than a corrupt KGB dictator. I want to make sure that Russia becomes… a normal, modern, democratic country.” He also wants “to remind people in democratic countries that Russia and Putin are not the same thing”.

If I didn’t admire Kara-Murza’s heroism as much as I do, I’d think that he and his fellow dissidents weren’t just released by Putin but sent out as his secret emissaries.

That’s the time-honoured strategy of the Russian and Soviet governments. While raping their own population and pouncing on their neighbours, they inundate the West with conciliatory messages sent through private channels.

Pay no attention to what our government is saying and doing, the messages go. These are just a few ghastly hawks who in no way represent the people. The good and freedom-loving people of Russia are staunchly opposed to whatever their leaders are perpetrating. So if the West could kindly ratchet down the tension, the opposition will triumph and Russia will become a worthy member of the Western family.

This sort of thing, a sustained campaign of disinformation designed to dupe the West into acquiescence, has been going on for over 100 years. A case that springs to mind is that of Nikolay Berdyayev, one of the Russian thinkers exiled from Russia onboard the notorious Philosophers’ Steamers in 1923.

His first stopover was Prague, at that time the nerve centre of the Russian emigration. The night after his arrival, Berdyayev found himself at a gathering in the flat belonging to Anton Kartashev, the last Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod. He and other prominent émigrés were discussing ways of fighting the Bolsheviks.

To everybody’s surprise, Berdyayev preached a different message. The Bolsheviks, he said, are the true practitioners of the Russian idea. Hence all Russians living abroad should renounce opposition and wait for the glorious Russian people to sort themselves out.

Once the initial shock subsided, Kartashev uttered his severe verdict: “We thought you were exiled, but it turns out you were infiltrated.” (It’s more poignant in the original: Мы думали вас выслали, а вас оказывается заслали.)

I wonder what Kartashev would say about the message delivered by Kara-Murza and his friends. Please, they said, stop sanctions against Russia because they hurt the good Russian people who are opposed to Putin and his dirty war. Instead, target specific officials with personal sanctions.

The Russians know they don’t deserve Putin and they certainly want to have no part in the war. Give them time, and they’ll create a democratic heaven on earth.

I don’t know what kind of history they teach at Trinity, but analysis of historical continuity and dynamic tendencies doesn’t seem to have been part of Vladimir’s curriculum. What does it mean that “Russia and Putin aren’t the same thing”?

This seems to suggest that Russia has had a long history of just government reflecting the people’s sterling quality and only occasionally put on hold by evil exceptions. But this suggestion is false.

Which just rulers would that be? Ivan the Terrible, the first Russian tsar, who only ever laughed when watching people being flayed or fried alive? Peter the Great, a sadist who personally tortured and beheaded dozens of people? His daughter Yelizaveta, who had society ladies knouted and mutilated for daring to wear the same dresses as Her Majesty’s? Catherine the Great who spread serfdom to the Ukraine? The tsars of the 19^th century under whom Russia became known as ‘the prison of nations’ and ‘the gendarme of Europe’? Lenin? Stalin? Khrushchev? Andropov? Yeltsyn? Who?

The newly released heroes woefully misunderstand Russian history, politics and indeed people. The problem with the country isn’t that it lacks democracy but that it lacks civilisation (not to be confused with culture).

In fact, Russian liberals have learned their misapprehension from their Western counterparts, who believe that democracy is a panacea able to cure the ills of the world. Yet civilisational problems have no political solution. Giving barbarians democracy is like giving a Stradivarius violin to savages. They’ll just use it for firewood.

Every attempt to disprove this observation is doomed to failure, as the Americans found out in Iraq. Egged on by neoconservative (in fact, nonconservative) liberals, the US invaded, set up a chain of voting booths and embarked on a programme of nation building. In short order, that created a blood-soaked chaos rapidly spreading over the whole region.

There are indeed a few thousand Russians who oppose the war, which isn’t many for a country of 140 million. And most of those protesters object not to the war as such but to its cost in lives and money. More Russians, perhaps as many as 30 million, are directly involved in the war effort, some in the military, others in the armament industry and related businesses.

Spontaneous support for the war – and Putin – is huge, which isn’t surprising given the state’s monopoly on propaganda. Democracy, on the other hand, has a bad name among the masses weaned on the notion of imperial chauvinism.

They still remember the 1990s, the only decade of supposed liberty in Russian history. Few people still recall the previously forbidden books that became easily available. Yet everyone remembers looking at shops full of goods – and having no money to buy them, what with rampant inflation and devaluations having wiped out people’s savings, and pensions and salaries sometimes not paid for months.

Kara-Murza and his friends doubtless love liberty, even though they are prepared to sacrifice their own at the altar of woeful misconception. Their heroism will be in vain: democracy may sometimes contribute to a civilisation, but it can’t create it.

The Saturn of the Russian state will avidly devour all the sacrifices offered to it, but it won’t change its essence – even if it may pretend to change its ways. This state is exactly what the Russians deserve. De Maistre was right, and Kara-Murza and his friends are wrong – much as I’m happy that these heroic if misguided people are now free.

As far as pick-up lines go, this one doesn’t go very far. In those half-forgotten days of my youth, I never relied on it as the starting point on the road to a girl’s heart.

Moreover, I despised those men who did and those women who fell for such overtures, but then young people are good despisers. They recognise other people’s foibles more easily and surely than their own, and contempt comes naturally to them as a form of self-assertion.

And what could be more despicable to a budding rationalist than astrology or anything occult? Materialists poopoo everything magical, while Christians look down on anything that breaks God’s monopoly on magic.

As a youngster, I was neither of those two extremes, but I certainly hadn’t yet realised the limits of reason, especially my own. It took something paranormal to put a dent in that self-perception, something that I was sure didn’t exist.

I was in my early 20s, doing a stint in a Soviet hospital, my customary habitat during my last 15 years in Russia. Altogether, almost two of those years were spent in hospitals.

One didn’t just stay at Soviet hospitals. One lived there, in my case months at a time, because things medical developed at an excruciatingly slow pace, typical of natural forces. Even a simple blood test took two or three days to deliver results, and seldom had less than a fortnight passed before treatment could even begin.

As an experienced patient, I always looked for temporary friends, those who could play chess or cards, talk on interesting subjects or at least tell jokes. That time my friend was named Stas, an old man of about 30 obsessed with paranormal phenomena, such as telepathy.

I knew nothing about it, other than being certain that all such things were nonsense. Instead of trying to convince me otherwise, Stas offered a demonstration. He blindfolded himself and asked me to put a chess piece on the board.

He then told me to concentrate as hard as I could on the occupied square, my mind acting as a transmitter of mental waves. He himself was to be the receiver, and receive he did. A minute or two later, he announced: “D5!” – and so it was.

I insisted on repeating the experiment several times, and each time Stas either got the exact square or one adjacent to it. We then swapped roles, with him sending and me receiving. My results were somewhat less impressive, but not by much.

That was my first brush with the paranormal, but it didn’t make much of an impression. I was too focused on trying to dodge the KGB to worry about such incidentals.

Fast-forward a few years, and I was living in Houston, having got out of Russia and made a seminal, if yet unrecognised, contribution to medical science.

My polyarteritis nodosa, to which I owed the pleasure of meeting Stas, mysteriously cleared the moment I left the Soviet Union. That enabled me to come up with a ground-breaking hypothesis on the aetiology of collagen diseases: they are caused by communism.

Anyway, I found myself at a party where I knew everyone, except one man who was someone else’s friend passing through Texas. We struck up a conversation, and he said he was a professional astrologist.

Again, I expressed scepticism bordering on contempt. I refuse to accept, I said, that stars determine our fate.

My new short-term friend was patient with me. We don’t claim, he said, that stars determine anything. All one has to accept is that life is by its nature cyclical. If so, stars are the clock by which one could time various phases of the cycle.

That’s a hell of an assumption, I objected. I wasn’t yet a Christian but I was already thinking like one. Hence I insisted life was linear, not cyclical, expressing in crude terms my understanding of teleology. And he couldn’t really believe that one’s star sign affected one’s personality, could he?

Yes, he could. Well, in that case, I said triumphantly, he ought to be able to guess a man’s birthday just by talking to him. Yes, he said, I suppose that’s true. So what’s mine then, I asked, again demanding empirical proof.

He didn’t hesitate. “August 9^th or 10^th,” he said. My high horse bucked and threw me off. “How did you know that?” I asked. “Simple,” he replied. “You are a quintessential Leo, which means you were born right in the middle of that sign”.

I suspected legerdemain of some sort, perhaps our hostess having told him in advance what my birthday was. To put such suspicions to rest, he then proceeded to guess the birthday of everyone present, never being a day or two off. Once again, he was passing through and didn’t know anybody there except the man who had brought him in.

Push the fast-forward button again, and now we are in the late 90s. Penelope and I had been married for some 10 years, and she insisted that we travel to Moscow for her to see where I had spent the first 25 years of my life.

It was winter, the best season in Moscow, when snow acts as makeup concealing the blemishes on the city’s skin. We arrived at night, dumped our bags at my friend’s place about a mile northeast of Red Square and went for a walk.

We took Miasnitskaya Street that in my day was named after Kirov, but had since recovered its ancient name. Let me reemphasise that Penelope had never been to Moscow before, and had little idea of the city’s geography.

As we approached the top of Miasnitskaya. Penelope suddenly stopped and pointed at the back of the massive building on our right. “There are awful vibes emanating from it,” she said. “Some horrible things must have happened there”. So they had. That was the KGB headquarters in Lubianka Square.

Penelope had no way of knowing that. Even if she might have seen photographs of that sinister building, the pictures would have featured its façade, not its back. Yet, as an extremely sensitive artist, she possesses an emotional conduit to knowledge residing in the ultra range above reason and hence superior to it.

On another occasion, a few years later, we were staying with friends in Amsterdam. Our bedroom was in the loft of a typical 17^th century Dutch house, tall and narrow.

On our first night there, Penelope couldn’t fall asleep. She seemed anxious, tossed and turned, keeping me awake too. When I asked what was bothering her, she again mentioned awful vibes. Something terrible had happened there, she was sure about that.

In the morning, I laughingly mentioned that little quirk to our hosts, but they didn’t laugh. They happened to have a written history of the house, and sure enough, a family of Jews had been hiding there during the war. They were then betrayed, arrested and taken away to a concentration camp, where they perished.

If you expect a conclusion to such recollections, I haven’t got one. The best I can do is quote Shakespeare: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

This morning, Sky News reporters said a hundred times if they said it once that the murderer’s identity can’t be revealed because he is under 18 and hence a child in the eyes of the law. And children must be protected from damaging publicity even if they can’t be protected from mass murderers.

Sky even refused to vouchsafe to its audience the snippets of information mentioned in the print media. These informed us that the murderer’s family comes from Rwanda, thus having travelled in the opposite direction to that advocated by the previous government. The family has “no known links to Islam”, and in fact the murderer’s father is “active in the local church”.

There, you Islamophobes you (on this evidence I’m part of that group), the moment you hear of a terrorist act you jump to the conclusion that the offender is Muslim. The fact that you (and I?) are usually right is no excuse, and I for one am suitably contrite. It’s Christianity that’s to blame for Southport, and trust you not to have figured that out for yourself.

Of course, even if it’s true that the father is a church-goer – and none of those snippets looked especially credible – that doesn’t necessarily mean the son can’t be a Muslim. Such things happen. For example, and I hope you’ll forgive a bit of solipsism, my religion is different from my father’s and my son’s (atheists, both of them).

Anyway, Sky circumspectly refused to jump the gun and only told us that the stabber is 17 and male. However, one reporter inadvertently let another important fact slip out, and I may be the only viewer who caught it.

So here’s that cat jumping out of the bag: the 17-year-old suffers from multiple personality disorder, or dissociative identity disorder, as it’s known nowadays. I just hope the correspondent who accidentally spilled the beans won’t be reprimanded or sacked.

She probably didn’t even realise her careless mistake, but it was egregious by media standards. Having identified the murderer as a 17-year-old boy, the reporter then said that “they will be transported” to such and such facility later today.

Do you get it? I did. Obviously, the ‘boy’ has at least two personalities to go by, a sort of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The plural personal pronoun might have also meant that the murderer had an accomplice, but that’s unlikely.

If my first guess is correct, then there’s the defence strategy mapped out. The defence counsel can claim that it was his client’s Mr Hyde personality that wielded that knife. The Dr Jekyll part, which is the real essence of his client, was unaware of the monstrous act perpetrated by his alter ego and hence can’t be held responsible for it.

Then, of course, there’s another possibility, and it fills me with dread. That reporter is a woke illiterate who refuses to use the masculine personal pronoun even in relation to someone whose male sex has already been established.

Now, you may think I’m making a cultural mountain out of a verbal molehill, but this sort of thing is a harbinger of a civilisational catastrophe. When language goes, everything goes. A glossocratic attack has our whole culture as its target.

I use – and might have even coined – the term ‘glossocratic’ because an attempt to control and dictate language for political ends is a naked power grab. As Orwell showed in his 1984, he who has the power to impose usage has the power to impose anything.

Our ruling elite is after self-perpetuation, and it’s prepared to sacrifice everything at the altar of that goal: taste, grammar, semantics, literacy and so on. Those who impose glossocracy don’t really care what words we use – they only care about their power to impose usage. It’s as if they are saying to us: “Yes, we know and you know that saying ‘they’ about one man is ugly and stupid – and we know that you know. But we can force you to do such things, and all you can do is shut up”.

That’s not to say that good old common-or-garden ignorance is alien to Sky News, and it doesn’t always have to be glossocratically motivated. Thus, later this morning, a presenter reading from the teleprompter spoke about the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

Though obligingly describing him as a “moderate” and “pragmatist” (everything is relative, I suppose), the newsreader then said that Haniyeh was “one of Israel’s most important counterparts”.

Thinking that either he or I had gone crazy, I went into the dictionary to check the meaning of ‘counterpart’. And sure enough, it was defined as “a person or thing that corresponds to or has the same function as another person or thing in a different place or situation.” It doesn’t mean ‘enemy’, ‘foe’, ‘opponent’ or ‘adversary’.

Let me see if I can backtrack to the root of that error. The prefix ‘counter-’ can mean not only ‘corresponding’ but also ‘opposed’. The late Mr Haniyeh, for all his moderation and pragmatism, was staunchly opposed to Israel. Therefore, decided whoever wrote that news report, he was Israel’s counterpart. An easy mistake to make – if one happens to be an ignoramus.

And speaking of ignoramuses, yet another reporter described a handshake between Haniyeh and Iran’s ayatollah as ‘fulsome’. That word doesn’t mean ‘wholehearted’ or ‘enthusiastic’. It means ‘insincerely effusive’, and contextually that’s not what the reporter had in mind.

At this point, you may think I’m a pedantic nit-picker, but let me assure you that I’ve never picked a nit in my life, nor have ever even seen one (has anyone?). The matter isn’t trivial. It’s as serious as a coffin lid closing.

The systematic destruction of English, whether undertaken out of institutional ignorance or for glossocratic reasons, spells a full frontal assault on our whole civilisation – I’d even go so far as to say it undermines the very essence of humanity.

God gave us the gift of language so that we may give shape to the output of our reason and consciousness. What we are doing is throwing that gift back into God’s face, and the deity punishes such slights severely.

Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat, was how the Romans translated Sophocles who wrote, in Greek, that “Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason” – and hence of language.

We seem to have forgotten what the Greeks already knew 2,500 years ago. That’s a punishable transgression, and the penalty notice is on its way.

P.S. Sky presenters also mentioned approvingly that Home Secretary Angie is considering banning the EDL. This simple idea never crossed their mind: what’s sauce for the EDL goose should also be sauce for the Just Stop Oil gander. And there I was, thinking the spirit of fair play is still alive. 

On Monday, the town of Southport in Greater Manchester witnessed a horrific crime. A young Muslim broke into a children’s dance class and began to lay about him with a knife.

Three little girls died, eight others, along with two adults, were stabbed. Six of those victims are in a critical condition.

A reaction came within hours. A report appeared on Twitter/X saying that the murderer was an illegal migrant who had arrived in Britain by boat. He now sought asylum and was on an MI6 watch list. That report was as false as the criminal’s name it circulated.

Never mind. Two million people read the news, and hundreds of them, mostly in Manchester and Liverpool, got on Southport-bound trains. Many of those travellers were either members of the English Defence League or its supporters.

The EDL was co-founded in 2009 by Tommy Robinson, a thug with a long list of convictions for crimes ranging from mortgage fraud to football hooliganism and a drunken assault on a police officer. Since then, he has shown a knack for organisational activities, and the activities he organises are mostly riots.

Eventually Tommy decided the confines of the EDL could no longer contain his bubbling personality and struck out on his own. He is currently out on bail after showcasing his talents yet again in Folkestone and London.

A curious aside: Americans supporting Trump, those who regard him as the messiah and not just the lesser evil, see Tommy as their own. There are only two possible explanations there: one is that they are ignorant of British realities, the other is that there is indeed some kinship between Donald and Tommy. I sincerely hope it’s the former.

Anyway, Tommy had no hands-on involvement in the riots that broke out in Southport following the knife attack. He was there only in spirit, and it did what spirits are supposed to do: inspire.

So animated, the mob besieged the local mosque and the fun started. Yobs were pelting the mosque with stones, bricks and everything else they could get their hands on: privately owned wheelie bins, parts of the garden wall they tore apart, fireworks. Windows shattered, worshippers cowered inside, cars burned.

When the police arrived, the same weapons were turned against them, their vehicles and even their dogs. Eight cops suffered serious injuries, as fires broke out all over the town centre. To keep up with the fine tradition of such outbursts, many shops were looted.

Three police dogs were also injured, one of them supposedly bitten. If so, this shows that fair play isn’t alien even to our thugs. Eschewing indigenously human achievements, they chose to fight their canine enemies only with the same weapon the dogs had at their disposal.

The masked or hooded yobs were shouting “No surrender!” (a Unionist slogan popularised during the strife in Ulster), “Stop the boats!” and “English till I die!” That last one upset the pedant in me because it was a bowdlerisation of the football song England Till I Die, typically sung at international matches together with the immortal classic If It Wasn’t for England, You’d All Be Krauts.

The police issued their own report, denying the criminal had arrived by boat. In fact, they said, he was born in Britain, Wales to be exact. However, since they hadn’t denied he was Muslim, the mob felt that was a moot point, and they may be right.

Unlike some other ethnic and religious groups, Muslims, wherever they were born, have trouble assimilating, or even integrating, into British society. Many perceive themselves as strangers in a land they refuse to see as their own, and one can’t deny the accuracy of that observation.

Islam is incompatible with the West, even in its present secular incarnation. Individual Muslims can become perfectly British, but only if they are Muslims in name only, not ardently devout followers of Mohammed. That’s why I often say that the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim.

As you may have gathered, I detest any violent mob, whether it’s described as far-Right, far-Left or far-anything. They are violent not in support of a cause, but in search of a cause.

The same people who scream “Stop the boats!” today may well use their mobiles to set up football brawls tomorrow. And the same ‘protesters’ who block motorways in defence of ‘our planet’ may the next day scream “From the river to the sea!” as they clash with police outside the Israeli embassy.

A civilised society is civilised partly because it offers its members many legal ways of venting their grievances and demanding restitution. We can write to our MPs, petition the whole government, demonstrate in an orderly fashion. If we feel the government isn’t listening, we can vote it out. And so on, so forth – I can keep spinning out truisms till the ministers come home.

Yet there may come a moment when people – and I mean civilised, law-abiding subjects of His Majesty – feel that an intolerable situation is getting worse, and licit protest isn’t making any impression on the government.

Such people then decide they have no recourse and try to put up with the situation as best they can. Yet there exist whole swathes of the population to whom such docility is alien.

They are the creepy-crawlies lurking in the woodwork and looking for any opportunity to come out. Anomic violence is boiling inside them and, given the right pretext, it blows the top off.

Such people then act as illegitimate catalysts of potentially legitimate protests, as they are in this case. For, while no decent person can treat Tommy Robinson types with anything other than squeamish contempt, the cause in the name of which they parade their feral tendencies has merit. They give it a bad name, but the cause is real.

The situation with Muslim immigration, legal or illegal, has become intolerable – and not just in cities or boroughs that have become predominantly Muslim. For example, Southport’s population is only about 5.5 per cent Muslim, which is the national average.

When hundreds of thousands feel that Sharia has precedence over the English Common Law, and when many children born in Britain honestly believe they live in a Muslim country, the rest of the population becomes restless.

Some feel new arrivals put severe pressures on jobs and public services. Others justifiably fear the ensuing increase in crime rates. Still others cast a glance at Bradford, Leeds or Leicester and see something that resembles a kasbah more than the Britain they used to know.

Most deplore the collapse of legality and HMG’s failure to protect the country’s borders, which is after all one of the few fundamental functions of any government. Yet all such civilised people justifiably feel helpless to do anything about it.

They may not know the details, but they sense they are up against not just an ineffective policy or an incompetent ministry, but what’s called ‘the establishment’. That term used to stand for an upper-class elite, predominantly Tory, who saw themselves and were seen around the world as the quintessence of Englishness.

Today’s establishment is different. It’s a nomenklatura of Left-wing, internationalist apparatchiks who seek to incorporate Britain into some pan-European socialist utopia. They correctly see any vestiges of genuine Englishness as obstacles to overcome. Diluting such oases with an influx of cultural aliens is an effective way of eliminating them – and any mass resistance to the creeping subversion.

Lord Mandelson, cabinet minister in the Blair and Brown governments, openly admitted that some 10 years ago, when he said Labour had sent out “search parties” to get immigrants to come to Britain.

This outrage isn’t party-specific. During their 14 years in power, the mock-Tories did nothing to stem the influx.

Hence Britons have a legitimate grievance, which is unresolved by the government and taken advantage of by illegitimate thugs like Robinson and other EDL types. When civilisation fails, barbarians come out in force.

My own view is that thuggery can’t and shouldn’t triumph. Any victory won by them is defeat simply because they are the ones who have won it. The cause of controlling our borders is just, but we should still deplore the thugs who champion it. If they are our only hope, the hope is already forlorn.

A Britain more Islamised than it is already will be nightmarish, but then so will be a Britain run by Tommy Robinson types. If our civilisation can’t avoid such extremes, it’s no longer civilised.       

…the more you beat them, the better they’ll be” – so goes the old ditty. Before I proceed, I want it on record that I unreservedly repudiate this sentiment as utterly objectionable (Penelope agrees).

But apparently the International Olympic Committee (IOC) doesn’t share my distaste for the message of that rhyme. I don’t know what position that august body takes on dogs and walnut trees, but it wholeheartedly approves of men beating women.

That’s why it sees nothing wrong with Algeria’s Imane Khelif, and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting competing in the Olympic boxing competition – for women.

Now that I’m sharing with you my tastes and distastes, women’s boxing definitely falls in the latter category. Call me an inveterate romantic or, if you’d rather, a male chauvinist and report me to the Equalities Commission, but my ideal of femininity doesn’t leave much room for two damsels pummelling each other to a bloody pulp.

That said, those dainty creatures fight against my stereotypes with gusto, in pubs. According to a recent statistic, women are involved in pub brawls more often than men. And they take up boxing with alacrity – why, even our French friends’ daughter is a pugilist.

However, as far as I know, she only fights other women. The opponents of Khelif and Lin don’t enjoy the same privilege. Because – how can I put this without offending anybody – those two boxers are, well, men.

That’s why they were both disqualified from last year’s World Championships for having XY chromosomes, which makes them biologically male. That decision was taken after the International Boxing Association (IBA) introduced what the press unanimously called controversial DNA tests at its championships.

IBA president Umar Kremlev couldn’t quite understand what was so controversial about those tests. They were introduced, he said, to expose “athletes who were trying to fool their colleagues and pretend to be women”.

That troglodyte is well behind the times if he thinks that men identifying as women pretend to qualify for that honour to cheat their way into women’s competitions. Doesn’t he know they are women, bred if not necessarily born?

We are what we say we are. If someone with a black great-grandparent identifies as black, that’s what he is. And, as the American teacher Rachel Dolezal insisted some 10 years ago, even having no black ancestry whatsoever didn’t mean she wasn’t genuinely black if she said she was.

Now, you can think whatever you want about such abominations, but I’ll say one thing for them: they’re unlikely to have lethal consequences. That sort of thing may offend the sensibilities of people of taste and conservative disposition, but at least no one will die.

Biological men boxing against women is something entirely different. Research shows that, all other things being equal, men pack 162 per cent more punching power than women do. As anyone who has ever laced on a pair of boxing gloves will tell you, that difference may well be a matter of life or death.

But hey, any revolutionary movement must have its heroes, and so must every religion. Sanguis martyrum semen Ecclesiae (“the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church”), as Tertullian wrote.

The current transsexual madness barely makes it to a pagan cult, never mind religion. Yet it too demands the lives of its adherents as a building material of its ethos. So if men pretending to be female kill a few women in the ring, those girls will die so the ideology can live.

In that spirit, the IOC has withdrawn its recognition from the IBA, citing good and bad reasons for that censure. The good reason is that it’s apparently funded by Russia. The bad reason is that the IBA has those antediluvian ideas about men and women.

The primary sex characteristics are these days seen as irrelevant details getting in the way of a creed that towers over mundane concerns. The chief of them is that men and women aren’t just equal but, barring some architectural fixtures, the same.

This is a self-fulfilling ideology, for men are growing increasingly feminised, with women meeting them halfway. The hope is that eventually the differences will disappear, and if those appendages get in the way, well, it’s nothing that an expert surgeon can’t handle.

This is just one reason the Paris Olympics look more and more obscene from where I’m sitting. That started with the opening ceremony that belied the French reputation for good taste. I wrote about it the other day, but I forgot to mention one nice touch.

By the looks of it, one athlete set out to prove, consciously or otherwise, that some physical differences between the sexes still survive. During the ceremony, he wore such skimpy shorts that one of his testicles fell out for all to see. The public gasped and applauded, and the press treated that testicular episode as a major sensation.

Not as major, however, as its burst of hysterical enthusiasm about the French diver Jules Bouyer, whose tiny swimming trunks emphasised his bulging masculinity. Judging by the reaction in the media, Pierre Coubertin’s Olympic slogan, citius, altius, fortius (“faster, higher, stronger” should now be augmented with et maxima (“…and bigger”).

I wonder if the French have made such a big deal out of this because they see Bouyer as a reassertion of national virility, an asset that lately has been somewhat compromised by their president. If so, more power to them – and to Mr Bouyer.

Meanwhile, the triathlon competition has had to be cancelled because the water in the Seine is too polluted for the swimming part of the event. That’s not surprising because in France, unlike Britain, both sewage and drainage use the same conduits. (A few years ago, we found that out the hard – and malodorous – way in our own house, but I’ll spare you the details.)

Just before the Games, Anne Hidalgo, Paris mayor, publicly swam in the Seine to prove its water is pristine. Now all our Parisian friends hope she drinks it next.

One last detail before I get off the subject of the Olympics. I haven’t seen any statistics on the number of tattoos per competitor, but the briefest of looks suggests it’s higher than one – even if we regard a whole tattooed arm as just one such ornament rather than several of them together.

Treating the human body as a canvas to paint on has traditionally been associated with the primitive tribes inhabiting faraway fragments of the earth in various oceans. Now Olympians are making a visual statement asserting that all tribes on earth have become primitive.

Conversion is proceeding apace not only between men and women, but also between civilisation and barbarism. Actually, the two processes are parts of the same thing.