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Neither does talent. Neither does courage. Neither does loyalty. Neither does self-sacrifice. Neither does any other fine quality.

All such ostensibly good things only mean something positive if they are applied to a good cause. If someone puts such qualities to an evil end, I’d much rather he were stupid, giftless, cowardly and disloyal.

This seems like an elementary thought, but it escapes many people. That’s why, for example, pundits whose IQ leaves the average level in the rear-view mirror often describe suicide bombers as ‘cowardly’.

Now, the English language boasts hundreds of thousands of adjectives, and hundreds of them can be appropriate to describe a suicide bomber. But if there’s one adjective that can under no circumstances be applied to such a fanatic, it’s ‘cowardly’.

A man who sacrifices his life for a cause he holds dear is certainly not a coward. By any sensible standards, he is a hero. But his heroism serves an evil cause, which makes him evil. Now that adjective fits him like a latex glove.

The core of a man’s personality is his character, which can be anything between noble and rotten. And when it’s manifestly rotten, the natural human tendency is to deny such a man any qualities that are good in the abstract.

Thus, I’ve heard it said, for example, that Stalin was stupid and ignorant. He was neither. He was a highly intelligent man and better-read than most people I’ve ever met. Yet, when assessing him, many commentators activate a simple yet erroneous syllogism: intelligence is good – Stalin was bad – therefore, Stalin was stupid.

Because you and I aren’t evil, we find it hard to comprehend the deeds committed by evil people. On our plane of reference, everything they do is irrational and hence dumb. We don’t realise that they exist on a different plane, where our standards are null and void, and where everything they do makes perfect sense.

A topical illustration hot off the press:

Yesterday it was announced that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose hard-Left coalition won the French elections, is planning to introduce a wealth tax of 90 per cent on all income above €400,000 a year. Thus a man earning €1.4 million annually will clear only about €300,000, if he’s lucky.

Commentators are up in arms, and not just dyed-in-the-wool conservatives and libertarians. This isn’t a tax, they shout, it’s confiscation. True. So?

So it doesn’t makes sense, they reply. Wealthy people, especially businessmen, aren’t going to grin and bear it. They’ll up their sticks and leave for sunnier economic climes, taking their businesses – along with the jobs and tax revenue they produce – with them. Again, true. But so what?

What do you mean so what? The net effect of that measure will be negative, that’s so what.

Irate commentators whip out their trusted calculators and do some serious number-crunching. I can follow neither their fingers nor their calculations, but I’m more than happy to accept their conclusion: introducing that tax will lose money for the public purse.

The only people to benefit will be tax lawyers and accountants. They’ll devote thousands of billable hours to finding more loopholes than one can see in the walls of all the medieval castles in France combined, and there are hundreds of them.

Couldn’t agree more. However, my recurrent question still stands. So what? All such arguments make perfect sense only on the plane where decent, rational people operate.

Such people may have never heard of the Laffer Curve, but they’ll find the logic behind it easy to grasp. There are two tax rates that will produce no tax revenue whatsoever: 0 per cent and 100 per cent. The former rate means not taxing the income people earn; the latter, people deciding not to earn any income if it’s going to be confiscated anyway.

There has to be an optimum tax rate that will give people an incentive to work hard and produce more income both for themselves and the public treasury. Most economists believe that figure to be somewhere between 15 and 20 per cent, but whatever it is, it’s nowhere near 90 per cent.

You understand it, I understand it, my neighbour’s spaniel understands it. Does this mean Mélenchon doesn’t? Is he dumber than that annoying dog who keeps barking at odd hours?

Not at all. He’s smarter than the spaniel and, for all I know, he may even be smarter than you and me. It’s just that he inhabits a plane so different from ours that anything he does seems senseless to us. Yet it all makes perfect sense from where he’s sitting.

Mélenchon is hard-Left. As such, he is driven by an all-consuming hatred of the rich, Jews, conservatives, Americans, even the soft-Left – all the traditional bogeymen of his ilk. He, or his fellow socialists like Starmer, will talk your ear off speaking about their affection for ‘working men’. But in fact, they don’t give two flying francs about working men, especially those who are successful at what they do.

If anything, socialists much prefer the unemployed, those who depend on the state’s largesse to survive. People who are good at their jobs run the risk of becoming wealthy and hence Mélenchon’s enemies.

He’ll suffocate them with taxes and possibly run them out of the country not because he thinks the state will be better off as a result. He knows as well as you and me that won’t be the case, but he doesn’t care one way or the other. His aim isn’t to extract more tax revenue for the state. It’s to punish those who are or may become independent of the state.

Evil men like him aren’t driven by the rational calculations of an accountant. They are driven by febrile hatred and insatiable thirst for power. These are their prime motives, and confiscatory tax rates serve both.

The tragic tendency one observes in today’s world is that evil, as personified by Mélenchon et al., is on the march. The masses have been sufficiently dumbed-down to shrug with indifference or even to go along with enthusiasm.

But the evil-doers themselves aren’t necessarily dumb. They are just evil, which makes all else irrelevant.

It wasn’t the Tories who lost the election last Thursday. It was a socialist party clinging on to its traditional name while betraying its essence.

The media are dissembling when claiming the Tories have been in power for the past 14 years. They haven’t. The last time the Tories governed the country was in 1990, only for an internal socialist coup to oust Margaret Thatcher and smother the last gasp of conservatism.

British politics since then has boiled down to a contest between the soft Left and the hard Left. The latter claimed their victory this time around, but it’s the Left of various consistencies that have dominated every public sphere for decades (and not just in Britain).

I’d suggest that the Left’s political dominance is perhaps the least critical fragment of the general picture. And that picture is bleak: one struggles to name a British institution painted any colour other than different hues of red.

Our schools and universities are solidly Left-wing. Only 20 per cent of British academics describe themselves as remotely conservative, and in the humanities and social sciences that proportion drops down to 10 per cent.

The most influential media are as anti-Tory as it’s possible to get without losing any claim to impartiality, however tenuous. The principal TV channels, BBC, Sky News, ITV and Channel 4, are all Left-wing. So are most newspapers and magazines. So are most on-line publications. And even former bastions of Toryism, such as The Times, endorsed Labour, paving the way to power for the hardest-Left government in British history.

The few conservative voices in the arts and entertainment industry are drowned in the flood of Left-wing propaganda masquerading as books, theatre productions, films and even music, supposedly the most apolitical of all arts.

The police and the judges have become instruments of wokery, not justice. Medical and social services collude in enforcing Left-wing diktats, even at a huge cost to their mission in life. And even the army bases recruitment and promotions not so much on any battle-worthiness as on diversity and inclusion.

The civil service, the administrative branch of the British establishment, remains just that. But it’s Left-wing now, because such is the way of the new establishment. It’s no longer the same class that British comedians so love to mock. It’s now made up not of tweedy, clubbable gentlemen, but of the top slices off the Left-wing groups I’ve mentioned.

This raises two questions: Why has the Left won? and Why has conservatism lost? The first one is easier to answer.

The Left have triumphed by being patient and smart. Such qualities have enabled them to replace a strategy based on a frontal assault, aka revolution, with one the Russians call ‘hybrid warfare’. Revolutionary violence has been mothballed, not abandoned. It’s still used sporadically, but only as one prong among many, and not the sharpest one.

The Left are winning not by overthrowing traditional institutions, but by infiltrating them, undermining them from within and eventually taking them over. That strategy goes back to Lenin and the secret service he created, but in the West it was developed by clever Left-wing thinkers, such as Gramsci and those belonging to the Frankfurt School – Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin et al.  

In 1967, it was Marcuse’s disciple, the socialist activist Rudi Dutschke, who coined the phrase in the title (der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen in the original) inspired by Mao’s takeover of China. Dutschke’s mentor approved: “Let me tell you this: that I regard your notion of the ‘long march through the institutions’ as the only effective way…”.

In his letter, Marcuse especially emphasised “the development of radical, ‘free’ media”, but he and his fellow Frankfurters envisaged an offensive on all fronts. They came up with an 11-point programme, which to the best of my knowledge never appeared as such in any of their writings. But it can be gleaned from any number of their works, each highlighting one or several of these points:

1. The creation of racism offences
2. Continual change to create confusion
3. The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children
4. The undermining of schools’ and teachers’ authority
5. Huge immigration to destroy identity
6. The promotion of excessive drinking
7. Emptying of churches
8. An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime
9. Dependency on the state or state benefits
10. Control and dumbing down of media
11. Encouraging the breakdown of the family

It’s remarkable to observe how that programme, first concocted three generations ago, continues to be put into effect at an ever-accelerating rate throughout the West. If Marcuse were still with us, he’d keep all 11 points intact with only minor embellishments.

For example, he’d add a few -isms to Point 1, transsexuality to Point 3, drugs to Point 6. He’d then flash an avuncular smile of pride in his descendants’ achievements. They’ve done exceedingly well.

Looking at Britain’s public life, one can easily see that it has unfolded according to the plan outlined by the Frankfurters. The incoming Labour administration only has to remove the pseudo-Tory varnish from the plan, not to change it fundamentally.

Of especial interest to me is Point 9, turning widening swathes of the public into dependants of the state. This is the essence of socialism, as conceived by Marx and executed by all Western governments, albeit to various extents and by different means.

The guiding light here was another socialist, Benito Mussolini, a contemporary of the Frankfurters. He expressed his philosophical credo with the brevity that was usually beyond Marcuse and his comrades: “Everything in the state – nothing outside the state – nothing against the state.”

This is the ideal towards which most Western countries strive regardless of who is in government, but especially when the socialists gain political power in addition to their control of all public institutions. And Starmer’s government will add lurid touches to the canvas of statism.

Starmer and his jolly men welcome only one method of acquiring wealth: membership in the nomenklatura. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the government itself. Some 300 quangos already in existence are also acceptable, and Starmer is guaranteed to increase their number.

Anyone seeking financial or other independence from the state is fair game. Under the soft-Left Tory administration, the tax burden already was the heaviest in history. The new hard-Left government will add weight to it as a way of levelling down (the only direction in which it’s ever possible to level). Personal income, inheritance, businesses will all come under extortionist attack.

At the same time, the government will launch a devastating raid on anything else that can make people independent of it. Taxes will be used to raid private pensions yet again, and also to discourage people from using private medicine and private education.

Members of the nomenklatura, on the other hand, will be offered an intricate pattern of loopholes to get around such extortion. For example, when Starmer himself stood down as Director of Public Prosecutions in 2013, he was granted a ‘tax-unregistered’ pension scheme by an act of Parliament.

Such is my schematic answer to the question of why Labour won. Its sails have been billowed with the wind of zeitgeist – which also happens to be the answer to the other question I posed above: Why did the Tories lose?.

As any reader of my book How the West Was Lost will know, I regard the collapse of conservatism as a logical by-product of modernity, inaugurated by the Enlightenment.

The edifice of Western conservatism rested on the pillars of church, monarchy and aristocracy. These have either been blown up in one fell swoop or gradually eroded. All Western countries are now democratic republics or at best democratic-republican monarchies.

They are devoted to the advancement of the common man, a notion they all interpret publicly in the crudest materialist terms, and privately in terms of state paternalism. Paternalism is impossible to practise without a continual effort to manipulate the masses, making them responsive to state control.

The most direct route to such control is for the state to dangle the carrot of elevating the masses or, barring that, at least pulling the erstwhile elites down to their level. The more people become direct clients of the state, the better – social freebies create a dependant class tricked into believing the state serves its best interests. In fact, the only interests the nomenklatura serves are its own.

This creates a vicious circle of corruption: the nomenklatura corrupts the masses; they in their turn corrupt the nomenklatura. As the Frankfurters knew, the main battlefields of this war on what Tony Blair called “the forces of conservatism” are cultural and social. A decisive victory there makes political gains as inevitable as they are irrelevant, if cordially welcomed.

Both Britain and France have now delivered political power to the hard Left, which is merely an endorsement of the status quo. But the status quo was established in different arenas and by methods other than voting.

I happen to think that this process is irreversible, which is why I’m amused by Tory pundits promising that the party will eventually come back. It very well may, but Toryism won’t. It’s dead and buried.

The long march will gather momentum, and everyone will have to fall into step.

Joe Biden is good, very good. For a laugh, that is.

Yes, I know it’s wrong to laugh at people’s disabilities, but I figure a man standing for the world’s most important political post is free for all. And anyway, at a time of our own political doom and gloom, we must look for comic relief wherever we can find it.

President Biden is happy to oblige. In yesterday’s radio interview, he claimed to be a black woman, specifically a black vice president. This is what he actually said:

“By the way, I’m proud to be, as I said, the first vice president, first black woman… to serve with a black president. Proud to be involved of the first black woman on the Supreme Court. There’s so much that we can do because, look… we’re the United States of America.”

No doubt about that. Mr Biden’s country is indeed the United States of America, the land of opportunity. Including, by the looks of it, the opportunity to change sex.

People who refuse to countenance that particular opportunity are quick to jump at Biden’s throat, claiming he has lost his marbles. Perhaps he has. But it’s also possible that he now identifies as a black woman and, come to think of it, Jemima Biden does have a certain ring to it.

Who’s going to say he can’t? Not you, Mr Racist. Not you, Mr Misogynist. Not you, Mr Transphobe. And certainly not me, the founder and chairman of the Charles Martel Society for Diversity.

If Joe Biden, as he used to be, has indeed chosen a new identity, then his statement is spot-on accurate. He indeed served with a black president as his VP. And if we accept his new identity, as we must on pain of ostracism, then he definitely was the first black woman to claim that distinction.

I’m not sure what Jemima meant when she said she was “proud to be involved of the first black woman on the Supreme Court”. Did she mean ‘involved with’? If so, then there’s a hint of a lesbian relationship there, and if you find anything wrong with it, you’re also a homophobe – in addition to being a racist, misogynist and transphobe.

To be on the safe side, I’m willing to accept that in this case it was merely an unfortunate slip of the tongue. Joe Biden, as he then was, did appoint the first black woman to the Supreme Court, and I don’t think anyone spoke of any amorous impropriety there.

It has to be said that Joe Biden, as he then was, tried to assume a black identity even in the previous election. Addressing a black audience, he then said: “If you vote for Trump, you ain’t black.” By inference, people who voted for Biden, including, one assumes, the man himself, were entitled to identify as black.

I’ll allow that his statement of identity wasn’t as straightforward as I’m depicting it, nor my logic irrefutable. But what’s investigative journalism if not an attempt to connect the dots? And now Joe-Jemima hasn’t just connected the dots but also crossed the Ts.

I’d root for Joe-Jemima to win a second term if I thought he’d be able to last the course. That, alas, is looking increasingly unlikely. That’s a shame: as our own dour leader takes a sledgehammer to everything decent still remaining in Britain, we’ll desperately need some entertainment on the other side of the Atlantic.

I don’t know what to suggest to my American friends. Perhaps they should campaign for putting a professional, witting comedian into the White House. Eddie Murphy would be my favourite, but I’m open to suggestions.

If anyone able to add two and two looks at Labour’s spending plans, he’ll see they’ll have to raise taxes. But which taxes?

They’ve pledged not to raise income tax, National Insurance tax and VAT. Taking them at their word, we have to look at the areas left for them to plunder.

This explains the headline in today’s Mail: Labour Will Target Pensioners, Drivers, Savers and Homeowners. Adding businesses and council taxes to that, we get your starter for six.

In the interests of full disclosure, my score is five out of six (I no longer own a business). What’s yours? I’d suggest that few families in Britain would be untouched by this six-pronged offensive.

And yet those very families are marching to polling stations where they are predicted to give Labour the biggest majority a single party has won for 200 years. The words ‘turkeys’ and ‘Christmas’ spring to mind.

I’ve been banging on about the same subject for weeks: the decision to vote against the ruling party has to be a two-part process. The first part is deciding where the government has gone wrong. The second is believing that the other lot would have done better – or will do better, given the chance.

Considering the legacy of Gordon Brown’s economics that left Britain with the greatest deficit in history, and also the global economic downturn and especially the Covid force majeure, the Tories haven’t done as badly as they could have done, although not as well as they should have done.

For example, bringing inflation under control was an impressive achievement, in view of the billions that had to be printed to cover the emergency cost of Covid and the resulting pandemic of state-funded slacking that infected millions of Britons.

Realigning the economy after Brexit was another challenge, and I can only repeat the same thing: the Tories could have done better, but it was easy to do a whole lot worse.

The government’s efforts to curb illegal immigration have oscillated between non-existent and inadequate. And here we get to the second part of the decision process that any responsible voter with half a brain has to go through.

What would Labour have done better? Its immigration policy is based on the old concept of the more, the merrier. They have a vested interest in an inflow of migrants, most of whom would become the state’s dependents and hence supporters of Labour, the big-state, big-spend party.

Johnson’s government exacerbated the Covid damage by locking the country down for the best part of two years. But Labour campaigned to extend the lockdown for another six months, which would have made the damage even worse.

The Tories haven’t taken full advantage of the liberties won by Brexit. Specifically, they made immigration control well-nigh impossible by cravenly refusing to leave the jurisdiction of the European Court and ECHR.

Yet the Starmer government – and also the grassroots of his party – are predominantly Remainers. They’ll seek closer ties with the EU and hence a tighter noose on the throat of British sovereignty.

Tory grandees were mostly Remainers too, but upward pressure from the rank and file in their party forced them to call the 2016 referendum. The British then voted for shaking the EU dust from their feet in greater numbers than they’ve ever voted for anything else. The Tories have played fast and loose with that popular demand, but Labour will ignore it altogether.   

The spending policies mooted by Labour will guarantee a climbing inflation rate, and their taxation policies will stunt growth, such as it was under the Tories. This is a matter of fact, not opinion. In line with their ideology, every Labour government in history has increased spending, raised taxes and pushed the national debt up to suicidal levels.

The Tories have done nothing to stop wokery, that blight that threatens to destroy what little is left of British civilisation. Yet Labour will do much worse: they’ll use wokery to stifle any freedom of expression and promote every idiotic cause, the more perverse the better.

Again, this isn’t a matter of opinion. Just look at their leader, the knee-taking Starmer who believes that some British women (34,000, to be exact) have penises. Tory ministers are wishy-washy on wokery, but at least Sunak never paid genuflecting obeisance to revolting masses and he seems to be sure about which sex has which primary characteristics.  

To sum up: the Tories are rubbish. But it takes a huge amount of irresponsible idiocy to believe that Labour could have done, or will do, better. They won’t. They’ll do immeasurably worse, and they won’t waste any time doing it.

Everything in public life is fundamentally interrelated, so my next comment is on a different but not unrelated subject. This morning’s Sky News, a solidly Labour channel, devoted its longest segment to the plight of Palestinian babies.

Television being a visual medium, the channel helpfully provided a kaleidoscope of most distressing images. Skeletal babies dying of hunger because no formulas are available, and their mothers can’t breastfeed because they themselves are undernourished. Old people barely able to stand up. Weeping and wailing everywhere.

All that is heart-rending, but Sky’s commentary is mind-numbing. Without saying outright it’s all Israel’s fault, the correspondents achieved the same effect by squeezing the word ‘access’ into every other sentence. Yes, access to any war zone is always difficult, but who created the war zone?

The most rudimentary analysis would have been welcome. Yes, the plight of Gaza residents is awful, and no decent person wants to see images of dying babies. But elementary integrity would have demanded a short statement saying that those people only have Hamas to blame for their misfortunes.

Moreover, what we see on our screens is exactly the effect Hamas counted on when launching its stomach-churning attack on Israel. The plan worked: the Israelis responded as any self-respecting country would, the consequences were blamed on Israel, and that heroic country is rapidly running out of friends.

Hamas monsters are gleefully rubbing their hands: every dead baby is a blow delivered to Israel. QED.

Another news item has caught my eye. On his visit to the Ukraine, Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán offered a peace plan to President Zelensky.

To smooth the path to peace, the Ukrainians should lay down their arms unilaterally and hope the Russians will do the same. Now, since Orbán is Putin’s staunchest supporter among European leaders, I’m surprised the Ukraine invited him to visit in the first place. So far he has tried to block every tranche of supplies flowing to that suffering country, and Zelensky correctly sees Orbán as nothing but Putin’s henchman.

It takes a staggering amount of naivety to believe that Orbán came up with that incendiary idea on his own. He is clearly but a conduit of Putin’s plans, which couldn’t be clearer. For Orbán-Putin’s proposal is nothing but a demand for surrender.

That’s how Zelensky took it and, after taking a second or two to catch his breath, he rejected the ultimatum out of hand. It’s that causality again: it was Putin, not Zelensky, who started the war. It’s up to Putin, not Zelensky, to lay down his arms and sue for peace.

But Orbán is relaxed about that. He has done his bit. Now every Putinversteher will scream that Zelensky is a warmonger who rejects peace. And Orbán’s hot air has been paid for by Putin’s gas.

The warning was issued by Robert Walpole, 1^st Earl of Oxford, the dominant political figure in the first half of the 18^th century. (Does anyone know why he was 1^st Earl of Oxford? After all, the title goes back to the early 12^th century.)

The facts of his life are widely known. Walpole was de facto the first Prime Minister of Great Britain, and the longest-serving one in history. He was also the first PM to move into 10 Downing Street, making this address synonymous with the office.

What’s less known is something I pride myself on discovering. Walpole was a seer who saw the future more clearly than most people see the past. In that capacity, he cast a prospective glance over tomorrow’s elections and passed his verdict.

Labour politicians and their fans are more triumphant the day before the General Election than few parties have ever been the day after. As far as they are concerned, the biggest landslide in history is just around the corner, and Britain is about to become effectively a one-party state. The Tories will be too marginalised to offer any meaningful opposition, and Labour will unerringly steer the ship towards the rocks of socialism.

Walpole himself was no stranger to marginalising the Tories. Under his leadership the Whigs ran practically unopposed for at least 20 years, with the Tories reduced to a handful of seats.

In general, this sort of arrangement is rarely beneficial to the country. But in particular, the country may still do well if the dominant party pursues good policies. Walpole did: he lowered taxes, strengthened exports, promoted tolerance and moderation, established a solid working relationship between Crown and Parliament.

Today’s Labour Party may well achieve the same domination as Walpole’s Whigs, but their policies are exactly the opposite. They will raise taxes with suicidal abandon, stifling Britain’s competitiveness and hence her exports. They will treat the monarchy as a mildewed artefact belonging, next to the House of Lords, in what an earlier socialist called the “rubbish bin of history”. And instead of tolerance and moderation they’ll impose tyrannical rule by woke fiat.

Listening to their jubilant shrieks on the eve of the elections, Walpole is smiling wryly. “They may ring their bells now; before long they will be wringing their hands,” he says, repeating his adage of some 300 years ago.

So they will, but our constitution says that wringing their hands will be about the only thing they’ll be able to do about it. It’s extremely hard to replace a government before its five-year term has run out. The people will have to take to the streets, French-style, but this political stratagem doesn’t come naturally to the British.

Even when the country comes to a standstill, as she did in the 1970s, Labour still completed its term. They were only ousted in the 1979 General Election, leaving Margaret Thatcher with the Augean stables of a country to clean out.

Barring a cataclysmic internecine revolt, a party with any majority in Parliament rarely has problems passing the laws it desires. And if the Labour majority is as vast as predicted, Britain will remain a multi-party state only technically. In essence, Starmer will have almost as much power as Xi has in China, and he won’t even have to rely on the secret police to get his way.

Anyone with a modicum of political nous realises that the policies Labour will be likely to pursue will quickly take Britain to the brink of disaster, and ‘quickly’ is the operative word. Effective opposition will come not from the Tories but from the markets, which don’t like socialism any more than I do.

Once the socialists start implementing their time-disproven policy of high tax, high spend, the markets will push the SOS button. Wealthy people who have to share their wealth around even if they aren’t especially charitable will flee, taking their businesses with them. Global corporations based in Britain will move to sunnier economic climes. The pound will collapse.

Again speaking in generalities, that last development is supposed to make our exports more competitive. But Walpole knew that British producers could only take advantage of that if domestic taxes were low enough to give them some freedom of movement. That won’t be the case under Labour.

Our economy will be further crippled by Labour’s fanatic commitment to net-zero madness. The Tories are feigning the same psychiatric disorder, but upward pressure from their grassroots may force them to be more flexible. No such pressure from the Labour rank-and-file: they are much more doctrinaire than they were even under Wilson and Callaghan.

The economic damage Labour will cause in the first few months (only my natural prudence prevents me from saying ‘weeks’) will be dire. But it’ll be minor compared to what they’ll do to the social fabric of British society. Not to cut too fine a point, they’ll rip it to tatters.

Alien immigrants, both legal and illegal, will flood in, and Labour will do all they can to make sure the mighty stream will flow unabated. During Blair’s tenure, so far the most disastrous in history, Labour politicians learned how to perpetuate their power by importing ready-made Labour voters owing their livelihood to social handouts.

Once those sluice gates are flung open, the stream will be difficult to stop even if the ruling party wants to, which Labour won’t. The Tories would want to, in theory, but in practice they lack the nerve and gumption to introduce the kind of measures that can succeed. Still, half-hearted efforts to stem the flow are better than none – and certainly better than concerted efforts to do the opposite.

Our armed forces will be degraded even more than they are now, and we won’t be forearmed even though we have been forewarned. So far Starmer has promised to start spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence “when conditions allow”. That’s the Labour for never.

Though incapable of waging war on foreign predators, a Labour Britain will be plunged into aggressive class warfare domestically. So far, Starmer has only hinted at the offensive he has in mind, but the hints (such as the plan to impose a 20 per cent VAT on private school fees) are clear enough. What Corbyn extolled, Starmer will do.

Blair taught his socialist brethren how to throw a camouflage net of centrist phraseology over their essentially subversive nature. Starmer learned the lesson well and, having ousted Corbyn, he has assiduously cultivated the image of Walpole-like moderation.

Yet nothing in his political life paints him any colour other than red. When he was Director of Public Prosecutions, Starmer never saw a criminal he couldn’t free. What do you suppose his stand on law and order will be when he’s PM with virtually a single-party majority?

Incidentally, extremists of the whole spectrum of hues have learned the same trick. In France, for example, Marine Le Pen has worked tirelessly to change the image – not the essence – of her party, shifting it (the image) away from its original neo-fascist design. And Mélenchon has been doing exactly the same with his Trotskyists.

It doesn’t take much perceptiveness to see what’s lurking underneath the camouflage, but, alas, more than the voting masses possess. That’s why the sage people who lovingly nurtured Britain’s constitution for centuries knew how vital it was to counterbalance the elected power of the Commons with the hereditary power of king and aristocracy.

Walpole, for example, was rather the opposite of a populist. He now listens to the ringing bells in the mournful knowledge that the future points to a lot of wringing hands. Alas, there’s nothing he can do about it now. Neither can we, come to think of it.

When it comes to satanic rituals, the British have a lot to learn from the Dutch and their neighbours.

The best – or rather the worst – we can do is get some S&M babes before a mob of drug-addled retards, turn the amplifiers up full whack and let’em rock to pro-Palestinian, anti-royalist shrieks half-muffled by incoherent electronic cacophony.

Music in any aural sense of the word doesn’t come into it – it’s strictly a visual spectacle staged as a pagan rite. I wrote about the Glastonbury festival the other day, and I really have nothing much to add to it.

But the Dutch, Belgians and Germans do, and what they add is a new concept hitherto unexplored by our progressive modernity. They show how to combine satanic rituals with music, and I do mean real music: classical, acoustic and performed by properly trained musicians.

As I write, I’m looking at a brochure advertising a unique concert to take place on 28 July in Amsterdam. Called Klassiek Fetish, it’ll feature performers and audiences clad in the kind of gear… well, I’d better let the brochure speak for itself:

“Amsterdam will be filled with high notes during the launch of its first classical music event for the Fetish & LHBTIQ+ community in the capital following the example of Fetish concerts in the cities of Berlin and Antwerp.

“Celebrate beauty, freedom and wonder while enjoying classical masterpieces performed by amazing musicians.

 “Dress to impress: Leather-Rubber-Uniform-Superhero-Gala-Sportswear-Drag.”

Lest you may think this is just a gimmick, a regular concert with some kinky kit thrown in to spice up the proceedings, the brochure emphasises the transcendent aspect of the experience:

“Classic 4 Fetish is not just a concert, but a celebration of individuality and artistic expression. It is an opportunity to show yourself as you are, in a setting that is both respectful and inspiring. Put on your best fetish gear and be enchanted by the beautiful sounds and visual beauty. Let yourself be carried away by the timeless melodies and enjoy the beauty of classical music in an environment where freedom and expression are central. Buy your tickets now and experience a day full of musical splendor and visual magic in the enchanting surroundings of the heart of Amsterdam.

“The programme offers a breathtaking selection of music pieces by Tchaikovsky, Bosmans and Fauré, among others, supplemented with many other surprises.” I shudder to think what these might be. Public flagellation? Human sacrifice?

This is worse, much worse than Glastonbury – in the same sense in which a heresy is a greater threat to a religion than that posed by atheism. A fortress may be able to withstand a battering ram, but it will succumb to the vandals inside its walls.

Christianity and music, its closest approximation in the lay world, can best resist perverse vulgarisation by putting up a wall around themselves and letting the outside world get on with its vulgarity. Both Christianity and music may venture on outside forays to convert the heathen, but they must not on pain of death open their doors to unconverted barbarians.

Churches commit this mistake by downplaying the mysteries of their creed and seeking sleazy popularity, the kind provided by raves and services accompanied by pop excretions. Musicians – or, to be more exact, concert organisers – do the same thing by mixing serious music with trashy muzak best suited to shops, lifts and restaurants. (BBC Proms are a good example of this stratagem.)

Yet both religion and music can succeed only on their own terms – or not at all. When they sell their soul for the mess of popularity, they betray their mission and ultimately become irrelevant.

However, what’s going on in Antwerp, Berlin and Amsterdam is even more sinister than all that. It’s an extension of a continuous effort to sexualise real music, thereby lowering it to the sewer of pop. In this case, the sexualisation is of a perverse kind, but that’s merely a development of a long-standing tendency.

Several generations of people have been raised on the crudely erotic content of pop music, conveyed both through the lyrics and, more typically, rhythm. So trained, people seek the same thrills in real music written to appeal to the higher faculties of man rather than to his lower regions.

Much of Wagner’s oeuvre is overtly sensual (one of my many problems with it), but his operas are too long for pop junkies to get their jollies. They want their fix short and sweet, which explains why Ravel’s Bolero is the most popular classical piece among young people.

Its monotonous coital rhythm produces a most enjoyable response that has little to do with its understated musical content. (Ravel himself once said that there was no music in his Bolero.)

All this was hilariously illustrated in the 1979 film 10, where the Bo Derek character always puts on Bolero before making love (she uses a more direct term). And in 1984, the British figure skaters Torvill and Dean won the Olympics with their elegant copulation on ice performed to the unremitting beat of Bolero.

But at least Torvill and Dean did their bit in elegant clothes, and Bo Derek in no clothes at all. They didn’t take that quasi-classical piece into the ‘Leather-Rubber-Uniform-Superhero-Gala-Sportswear-Drag’ territory.

We’ve had to wait 40 years after the British Olympic triumph for this musical development, but, as Galileo and Newton discovered, falling objects accelerate. The same is true of modern life: processes that used to take centuries or decades to develop, these days take years or months.

That’s why I can confidently predict that things will quickly sink even deeper than the bottom-feeding Klassiek Fetish. I’m not sure, alas, that my imagination is vivid enough to imagine what those lower depths could look like.

It’s possible, for example, that the fetish gear that so far is optional will in due course become compulsory at all classical concerts. Or that the audience will be given Ecstasy and fentonil rather than glasses of bubbly at the interval. Or that we’ll be regaled with a performance of, say, St Matthew Passion by nude singers.

The possibilities are endless, and I’ll leave you to explore them on your own. Let’s just say that Klassiek Fetish shows a promising way forward.

P.S. If you wish to attend Klassiek Fetish, I’ll be happy to provide booking information.

Let’s start by stating that Gennady Rakitin has something in common with Homer and Shakespeare. At this point you’re supposed to ask, “Who’s that?” and “What do they have in common?”

Assuming that the first question is about the first name I mentioned and not the other two, Rakitin is a superpatriotic pro-Putin poet cum doggerel writer, whose verses have flooded Russian social media.

The poet has won numerous accolades, and thousands of followers befriended him electronically, including 100 MPs and 30 senators. One of his poems has even won a literary prize.

Impressive though this is, it’s still not enough, you’d think, to mention Rakitin in the same breath as Homer and Shakespeare, the greatest literary geniuses in history. However, Rakitin does have something in common with them and no, it’s not his mastery of versification.

Many unorthodox scholars doubt that Homer ever existed. They ascribe his work to anonymous collaborators, and the same posthumous fate befell Shakespeare. Though Will Shakespeare of Stratford did exist, his plays and sonnets are supposed to have been written by someone else, and the list of candidates is long.

Rakitin shares this enigmatic quality with the two geniuses, but that’s where his path diverges from theirs. For, while doubts about the identity of Homer and Shakespeare still persist in some quarters, those about Rakitin have been dispelled. He doesn’t exist.

Rakitin is a hoax expertly played by anti-Putin Russians on the gung-ho public. And his jingoistic verses are slightly adapted translations of Nazi poems from the 1930s and 1940s.

Thus the poem The Leader, describing Putin as “a gardener who harvests the fruits of his heavy labours …” was originally entitled Der Führer. It was written by Eberhard Möller, who way back then was churning out anti-Semitic verses and film scripts for Dr Goebbels.

Another poem, The Faceless PMC Soldier, glorified a Private Military Company mercenary killed fighting against Ukrainian Nazis. That work’s maiden name was The Faceless Stormtrooper, and its protagonist died fighting for, rather than against, Nazism.

Then there was an elegy entitled Before the Portrait and illustrated with a picture of Putin. The original by the Nazi writer Herybert Menzel was inspired by the portrait of another leader, a typological precursor of Putin.

The Rakitin affair makes yet another addition to the list of notable literary hoaxes. For example, the 18^th century literary world welcomed the discovery of the blind Scottish poet Ossian from the 3^rd century.

The epic poetry produced by ‘the Homer of the North’ thrilled Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson, and it inspired Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and the whole Romantic movement. Alas, Ossian never existed – he was the product of a clever literary hoax.

Neither was this literary genre unknown in Russia. In the 19^th century, A.K. Tolstoy and the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers created Koz’ma Prutkov, the 18^th century author of pretentious verse, diaries and aphorisms. Most Russian readers were taken in, and the authors enjoyed a good laugh at the public’s expense.

The Bolshevik takeover, on the other hand, was no laughing matter. However, the need for plagiarised material became acute, what with proletarian poets and composers unable to keep up with the voracious appetites of Russia’s growth industry, propaganda.

During the Civil War, Bolshevik hacks ripped off many march songs of the tsarist and White armies. For example, one of the most popular songs of that period eulogised the Red Army storming a White stronghold in the Far East. In fact, that was the song of the Drozdov regiment in the White Army, and the new version changed only one word, replacing the Red colour of the stronghold with White.

Moving along this timeline, we get to the 1930s, a period most relevant to my today’s theme. As both the Nazis and the Soviets were preparing for war, they formed a sort of alliance based on ideological kinship and similar goals. Both predators were also stepping up their propaganda efforts, with patriotic songs in high demand.

At that time, the Red Air Force acquired its own theme song, which every Soviet child knew by heart well into the 1970s (I still remember all the blasted lyrics). The first line of its refrain went: “Still higher, still higher, still higher…”.

As it turned out later, that song was plagiarised from a Nazi original, whose first line was “Mein Führer, mein Führer, mein Führer…”. Birds of a feather sing together, to paraphrase ever so slightly.

The Rakitin hoax demonstrates the inherently Nazi nature of the Putin regime, for German hand-me-downs wouldn’t fit so snugly if the Russian body politic were fundamentally different. I’m still awaiting the arrival of Russland, Russland Über Alles in Russian, and I hope the wait won’t be too long.

This is all especially telling because officially Russia pounced on the Ukraine to de-Nazify her regime. Even though Gennady Rakitin never existed, he managed to provide a perfect illustration of the boot on the other foot, leaving one in no doubt as to which country needs de-Nazifying.

It’s wrong to ignore the differences among various fascist regimes, but ignoring the similarities is even worse. Because, if we don’t understand where such a regime comes from, we won’t know where it’s going. And when we finally determine that destination, it may be too late to do anything about it.

 

 

   

 

 

 

Glastonbury Festival is the closest England comes to staging a Nuremberg Rally pretending to be an orgy. Or is it the other way around?

Currently underway, Glastonbury has attracted tens of thousands of retarded children of all ages between 15 and 80. They’ve pitched their tents on a vast lawn, producing a credible set for a film about the plight of the homeless.

They then jam-pack into various arenas, some of them seating 35,000, to see music. That’s the verb they used when talking to Sky interviewers, who happily adopted the same lingo. “Which music have you come to see?”

Now, music used to be listened to, but no longer. Now it’s seen, or rather obscene. One thing I can say for that crowd: they are honest.

For the cacophony they come to see and, presumably see to come, has no musical element whatsoever. Like a Nuremberg Rally, it’s a grandiose show of cult worship, albeit somewhat more chaotic, more obviously erotic, and more dependent on the recent advances in pharmacology.

All one can hear is incoherent, electronically enhanced din, with the lyrics and the ‘musical’ noise equally unintelligible and lacking rhyme or reason. The show has nothing to do with anything that can even remotely pass for music one listens to, and everything to do with a pagan rite stopping just short of human sacrifice.

One interviewee explained that it’s possible to have a fab time at Glastonbury even without seeing any music, and again he gets top marks for honesty. I don’t know about fab time, but one can have plenty of fun, especially after scoring some decent stuff.

However, if one does get inside those arenas, there is indeed plenty to see. Half-naked women clad in de rigueur S&M gear go through acrobatic gyrations, some of them clearly designed to provide visual evidence that they haven’t yet transitioned to men.

One such S&M acrobat, the Anglo-Albanian singer Dua Lipa, combined her contortions with a political message. She waved a Palestinian flag that read “Glasto for Palestine”, and used it as an enhancer of her vocalism.

As is common with music seen rather than heard, the young lady kept bellowing her eardrum-shattering words drowned in the kind of noise one has to be high as a kite to be able to listen to… I mean see. Amazingly, most of the public knew the words and, when invited to do so, happily scraped themselves off the ceiling and screamed along.

Rock band Idles also demanded such audience participation, and thousands of throats obligingly echoed their scream of “Sieg heil!!!”… sorry, wrong pageantry. The actual chant was “F*** the king!!!”, which was difficult to mistake for a pledge of allegiance to the country and her civilisation.

The crowd was then treated to the spectacle of a blow-up boat surfing around to register pro-immigration protest. This suggests that neither the band nor its crazed audience will be likely to vote for the Reform Party in the upcoming elections.

Yet, as if to dispel all doubts about their voting intentions, the band belted out an anti-Farage song. Just like similar events at Nuremberg, circa 1935, the visual elements of a pagan rite formed a synergistic relationship with a political message.

Then came the turn of Charlotte Church, whose loose scarlet dress didn’t hide the lamentable failure of her diet regimen. Charlotte was at her ebullient best, greeting the crowd with an affectionate intro: “Hiya babes – lots of love from Wales my darlings.”  

She then explained to the mob made up of screaming humanoids with bulging veins in their necks that it’s they who should really do her job: “I sort of want to give you the mic today… there’s so much untapped singing potential in you guys which we’re going to explore.”

Explore the untapped singing potential she did, by donning a keffiyeh and leading the drug-addled crowd in a rousing rendition of “Free free Palestine, free free Palestine, free free Palestine, free Palestine.” Since repetition, as we know, is the mother of all learning, there was no need to vary the lyrics.

The Sky segment focused on another performance, by the group called the Sugarbabes. The performers emphasised their more pendulous attractions by jumping up and down on stage and inviting the crowd to scream along to Freak Like Me. I don’t know the lyrics of that song, but the title betokens a heightened self-awareness, which is such a rare commodity nowadays.

The political significance of Glastonbury didn’t escape Gurinder Chadha, the director of the film Bend It Like Beckham. In a BBC interview she praised the festival for bringing people together.

That herding function is important, explained the director, “especially when we have this s*** 14 years of Tories who have totally taken the heart out of the country and squeezed it. F***ed us all over.”

Upholding BBC’s much vaunted standards of impartiality, the presenter Anita Rani agreed wholeheartedly: “It’s what we need…”

Allow me to complete the sentence for her: “… to annihilate what little is left of British culture, civilisation, decency and taste.” Don’t mention it, Anita. Happy to be of help.

Both ends of the age spectrum have come into focus on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the US presidential debate, President Biden came across as Patient Biden. The poor man stumbled over words, lost the thread repeatedly, went through an obvious agony trying to remember his aides’ instructions – and even his golf handicap.

It’s easy to sneer at that sort of thing, but, as a man only five years younger than Biden, I sympathise. Just yesterday, I had to default in a tournament tennis match I was winning.

Unfortunately, it was played during the first heatwave of the summer, with the temperature at 32C (about 90F) – and quite a bit higher on the red-hot court. Having won the first set, I had to call it quits in the middle of the second. Carrying on seemed dangerous, and a tennis match isn’t the kind of noble cause one should sacrifice one’s life for.

Two lines from American films flashed through my mind as I shook hands with my delighted and astounded opponent: “I’m getting too old for this shit” and “A man should be aware of his limitations.”

Now, I have more energy and stamina than Joe Biden had even five years ago, but still not enough to occupy a high political office, never mind one of the Leader of the Free World. Moreover, I don’t think I show too many signs of cognitive decline, while Joe croaks senility with every word he struggles to get out. But, unlike me and the object of Clint Eastwood’s scorn, he isn’t aware of his limitations.

Everyone else is though, and even Democrats are beginning to realise that having an obviously demented man in the White House would be playing with fire, possibly the kind generated by a nuclear blast. There’s talk about getting Joe out of his misery and replacing him as a candidate at the last moment, though no one is sure how to do that.

Crossing over to our side of the pond, one is smacked in the face with another age concern, this one caused by youth rather than senescence. This morning, Sky News scaled new heights of idiocy by hailing a political travesty called ‘Our generation. Our vote.’

They devoted a long segment to a mock election among children under the voting age of 18. Dozens of British youngsters were interviewed, not a single one of them white. As the founder and chairman of the Charles Martel Society for Diversity, I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit more, well, diversity there. I’m also worried that foreign viewers might get a wrong idea about the demographic makeup of British society.

That aside, the interviewed youngsters, most of them around 16 or so, were more articulate than Joe Biden, which might have determined their selection for the programme. Sky News probably found it hard to locate enough white children able to enunciate a coherent sentence in an intelligible accent.

However, what those children – and their Sky interviewers – were saying so articulately still didn’t make sense. They all insisted that children of 16, for starters, should vote because they are the ones who’ll bear the brunt of the policies put forth today.

This doesn’t add up even at the level of basic logic. Following this line of thought to its logical conclusion, babies should be given the vote. After all, statistically speaking, they’ll have to suffer the consequences of today’s politics for longer than the 16-year-olds.

Now Labour is pledging to lower the voting age to 16, using the same crepuscular logic demonstrated by Sky News. If you think their motives are disinterested, just look at the outcome of the ‘Our Generation. Our Vote.’ rehearsal ballot.

Labour came in first, Greens second, LibDems third, Tories a distant last. Labour outscored Tories four to one, which should give you a fair idea why the Lefties of the world constantly want to expand the franchise ad nauseam. People whose brains aren’t yet wired properly are more likely to swallow the socialist gibberish passed for serious political thought.

“No one is listening to us,” complained one young lady of Subcontinental descent, and the grownups in the Sky studio nodded their sympathetic agreement. They couldn’t get their minds around the idea that listening to children isn’t the same as letting them shape a nation’s life.

How many Sky presenters will let their children decide serious issues in their own households? A lot fewer, I’d suggest, than those who’ll support any woke idiocy as long as it keeps the Tories out.

Sorry to carry on about age so much, but it is a concern. Yes, William Pitt the Younger became a pretty good PM at 24, and Konrad Adenauer was still a commanding Chancellor well into his eighties. Yet Pitt still didn’t vote as a child and, even when Joe was young, his own mother would have agreed he was a pygmy compared to old Konrad.

One way or another, a nation should make an individual decision on whether or not an old man is sufficiently compos mentis to run its government. On the other hand, the issue of voting age has to be based on statistical probability, not case-by-case assessment. And anyone who thinks children must vote should himself be barred from the ballot box.

And… er… age… I like, you know, whiskies of some age… at least sixty… or maybe six, like my golf handicap… and you’re not getting younger… you’re getting better… or is it worse – but enough of my Joe Biden impersonation.

I’m going to commit an act of double plagiarism by quoting Enoch Powell misquoting Virgil: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.

Replace the River Tiber with the River Seine, and the warning seems apposite. For France is in real danger of severe social unrest, perhaps even a civil war.

Before you shrug your shoulders, suggesting that what happens to assorted amphibians has nothing to do with you, I beg you to take another look across the Channel.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you are wrong: it’s quite possible that the trouble bubbling just underneath the surface in France won’t burst out violently. It’s also possible that the problem is strictly confined to the space between France’s borders.

However, it would be foolhardy not to consider another, very real possibility that Europe is on the brink of trouble not just with a capital T, but indeed with the T as an extra-bold drop initial. And if we reverse the entire history of mankind and try, for a change, to heed lessons of history, we’ll see the links in a chain of begets clasping together.

Trouble in one major European country can beget trouble all over the Continent, which in turn can affect Britain and then the rest of the world. The current situation bears an eerie resemblance to the 1930s, when fascists and communists clashed in the streets of Berlin, Paris – and London.

Eventually, the radical left-wing parties in France formed an alliance called the Popular Front (Front populaire). That happened after a massive campaign of propaganda and subversion run throughout the 20s and 30s by the Soviets and organised by the German communist Willi Münzenberg.

Münzenberg, described by Walter Laqueur as a “cultural impresario of genius”, flooded Europe and the US with a stream of brainwashing unleashed by numerous newspapers, journals, radio stations and cinema studios he put together with Stalin’s funds. NKVD chiefs had a point when they referred to Front populaire as “our operation Popular Front”.

Münzenberg also organised worldwide protest movements, anti-fascist and anti-capitalist rallies, and anything else that could wreak havoc on social tranquillity. That paved the way for the rise of extreme-left parties in Spain, which led to the Civil War, and the rise of Nazism in Germany, which led to you know what. The two political extremes succeeded in undermining the existing order in key European countries, making a mockery of ‘collective security’, a 1930s term that was proved to be a grotesque misnomer.

I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but when France goes to the polls this Sunday, it’s likely that Le Pen’s crypto-fascist National Rally (RN) will come in first, closely followed by a hard-left alliance nostalgically called Front populaire.

Macron’s supposedly centrist coalition was trounced by the other two in the European Parliament elections, and pollsters confidently predict the same result nationally. Yet it’s not just Macron’s party that may be demolished, but the entire political order in Europe – and beyond.

It’s tempting to blame the problem on the European Union, and this isn’t a groundless temptation. But the malaise runs deeper than the EU, which isn’t so much the disease as its symptom.

The real infection was spread by the post-war attempt to shove a neo-liberal (in fact, non-liberal) ideology down the collective throat of Europe, which was bound to create a violent reflux sooner or later. A clash has been brewing for decades between the actual reality of people’s lives and the virtual reality of the ideology promoted and enforced by the ruling bureaucracy.

This has nothing to do with the idea of a united Europe in se. Europe was united in the Middle Ages, and there’s no reason it can’t be united again – provided it’s bound together by a proper adhesive. In the Middle ages it was Christianity that acted in that role, and what is its substitute today? Commitment to the free movement of people?

The modern ideology was rotten to begin with, and rot is a process that never ends by itself. Huge holes are appearing in the ideological fabric woven by modernity, and these can only be darned by different hues of political extremism.

People turn to extremes when the centre can no longer hold. In fact, their turning to extremes points to systemic problems with the centre, with the mainstream. The mainstream – however defined – has traditionally been cast as the guardian of political and social stability. When the centre collapses, stability may well follow suit.

Even the US isn’t immune from this problem. That was demonstrated on 6 January, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol Building two months after their ideological leader lost the presidential election.

The polarisation between the anode of the right with the cathode of the left is sharper there than I’ve ever seen, and there’s talk of a possible civil war regardless of who wins this time around. Britain is slightly more moderate, and the feeling at the grassroots is that the two main parties aren’t so different as to turn their supporters violent.

I don’t think many Britons have so far cottoned on that a hard-left government is about to take over on 4 July, and when they do realise that, it’ll be too late to do anything about it for a generation at least. But France is a different story altogether, and so is most of the Continent. Neither Le Pen’s people nor the reconstituted Front poulaire will take defeat lying down.

The political system of the Fifth Republic, with its proportional representation and hence inordinate power vested in the executive branch, isn’t conducive to stability under the best of circumstances. This may explain why the French political bureaucracy is so predominantly pro-EU. Aware of the structural defects of its own system, it seeks strength in a giant supranational Leviathan supposedly capable of swallowing local problems and regurgitating them into Collective Security Mark II.

All of this has more to do with make-believe than with any detectable reality. The reality is that the French are sick of woke diktats, whoever issues them, their own government or the EU. Now they seem to be desperate enough to turn to the radical remedies prescribed by the extreme right and the extreme left. When this happens, it’s moderation that may well fall victim.

The two political extremes in France may have more in common than they, and the people in general, realise. But this commonalty lies deep, whereas the differences are on the surface, and they are likely to produce violent clashes.

If, as expected, RN comes first and Front populaire second, much will depend on whether or not Le Pen gains an absolute majority. If so, Macron, who isn’t going to relinquish the presidency come what may, will have to ask RN to form the next government.

The lefties will then resort to riots, mobilising the resentful masses in France’s ghetto-like banlieues. Some French commentators are warning that these may well go beyond the usual burning of cars and looting of boutiques. The possibility of an all-out civil war is mooted in all seriousness.

Moreover, France’s inordinately huge civil service, some 2.5 million-strong, is threatening to disobey any orders emanating from an RN government and its likely, barely post-pubescent, head Jordan Barella. That’s likely to paralyse any orderly life in the country, making the more macabre prophecies come true.

An economic crisis is likely to ensue: the markets tend to abhor any political extremism even if it’s not all that extreme (Liz Truss’s short-lived tenure in Britain comes to mind). And when the French suffer economically, they tend to take to the streets, torches and cobblestones in hand.

The more likely hung parliament may be even worse. Macron’s presidency will look more like a cooked goose than a lame duck. The National Assembly dominated by the two extremes will be too embroiled in its own squabbles to provide overall stability. The markets will react, the people will rebel… well, I don’t want to repeat myself.

France is only the most immediate illustration of the drift towards the extremes observable throughout the West, but especially in continental Europe. The on-going European war, bigger than any post-1945 conflict, makes matters even worse. Putin’s propagandists aren’t a patch on Willi Münzenberg, but they are doing their worst to plunge Europe, or any parts thereof, into chaos.

All things considered, the temptation to talk about various rivers foaming with blood is strong. This is one kind of prophecy that one hopes won’t come true but fears it may.